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Comment by throwaway4496 | Hacker News Reader

Nature has no feelings, there will be no retribution, things will work out just fine, it will just be tough for us, maybe even wiped out, but nature will prevail. life will find a way, look at places where humans get excluded, everything regenerates.

It is not a crises of nature, it is a crises of habitat for us as species, and a bunch of other like us.

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This is a pretty pointless nitpick. It's akin to saying that a large meteor strike is not the end of the world because the planet will still be here.

I think there is also a reality in which our scope of what we care about is widened beyond just the human species. As a species that has such a powerful impact on other beings, it would be nice to try and reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering and pain that we place on them. While we cannot eliminate it, life takes life yadayada, we can reduce it and try to curb the mass extinction that we are actively causing.

From another angle, it's taken a really long time for evolution to get to this point, what can be experienced from the myriad life forms is quite wide and widening, it would be a shame to return to only the level of a microbe.

Must we take everything else down with us?

You think the scope of what humans can do will surpass the impact of various ice ages? the various volcanism/anoxic events?

"Save the planet? The planet's fine - it's us that are fucked."

-- George Carlin

George Carlin is a comedian. That line is a joke, not an actual serious retort to somebody using the phrase "save the planet" to talk about stopping climate change.

Yes, I always found environmental protection kind of funny, nature does not need protection, it will survive until Earth becomes finally uninhabitable [0], it's us that might not make it that long if we don't take enough care.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

What we call environmentalism is actually 5 different concerns:

- human health, pollution

- preservation of natural resources useful for humans

- preservation of biodiversity, nature in its original state

- concern for animal suffering

- aesthetic concern for human habitat

These things typically overlap, but sometimes they even contradict.

And how many other species will we take down with us?

Most probably, but nature doesn't care. We will probably destabilize many eco systems with our behavior and make them collapse.

Lizzies love high temperatures - it will be the second coming of the Dinosaurs!

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