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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

The three P's: powerdown, permaculture, population control. Industrial civilization and reproducing too quickly must be made taboo. The only way humanity survives is as small pockets of preindustrial, agrarian societies, and in far fewer numbers than exist today. We can -- and humans have -- endured for millennia this way. Industrial civilization has less than a century on its rapidly ticking clock.

" If you believe the myths of science, the Tolowa lived in this region for at least 12,500 years. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time." --Derrick Jensen

Oh, and uh, forget about going to space.

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Alright, let‘s make a deal then. We will do some horse trading in the UN and purchase one or more islands for all you degrowth enthusiasts. We will even give you all the support we can in returning the soil and ocean to a healthier state.

In return anyone leaving the island stays gone and can never publicly talk about degrowth and their dreams of ending civilization. Also, you must tell your children the truth about all the accomplishments of industrial society.

I agree that our prehistoric ancestors were the most stable populations when looking at them from very far away. You seem to actually want to return to their brutal and ignorant lives. Well go ahead, put some skin in the game before publicly advocating for the death of billions.

>The only way humanity survives is as small pockets of preindustrial, agrarian societies, and in far fewer numbers than exist today.

Aside from the complete practical and moral wrongness of all the nonsense you just said, there's the hypocrisy.

You state the above while using either a desktop device or phone to comment on a site like HN (and presumably interact with many other sites on the web), with all of these and your device being pinnacle product results of a mass industrial modern society. Not to mention your lament that billions don't die to have "far fewer numbers", while obviously keeping yourself alive despite this regret about all those others.

Or, we could invest in environmental remediation, which drives economic growth, and doesn’t make literally everything worse for everyone.

This worked great in the past, and we already have proven out the technology that we need for the next 50-100 years.

The main problem I see is political corruption, and greed / laziness from vested interests.

Edit: Concretely, we know how to make gasoline carbon negative for $1/gallon. Permaculture sounds good, but the yield per acre (and man hour) is way worse than comparably good conventional techniques like no-till, which we should have moved to 30 years ago.

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