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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I think that the main reason is that human population is unusually huge, humans live in the huge dense groups. So there's just too many fecals and environment struggles to process them.

Just to compare: there's an estimation that there are around 300 000 gorillas in the entire world. There are over 20 000 humans for every gorilla.

Though I think that "environment" is too vague. Planet doesn't care. Some bacteria probably would think that it's pretty nice environment. It's more about human waste making environment bad for humans themselves.

There are just too many of us, so we need artificial ways to produce food, artificial ways to protect from cold and heat. And also artificial ways to safely dispose of our waste.

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Yes, this is a key thing to clarify anytime these conversations take place.

The reason we want to preserve the environment, biodiversity, all that jazz is FOR US. It’s for our own comfort and survival that we should care about not polluting, stopping climate change, etc.

The planet and life on it will be just fine, it made it through many extinction events and will make it through many more.

Wow, that is very insightful - all these years hearing and thinking about environment problems and I’d never looked at it that way.

But everyone should look at it that way.

It's true, but I'm not sure it's some great "hack" to get people to start caring. You have to remember many people can't even make decision that will benefit themselves even a few short hours later (see delayed gratification).

> It's true, but I'm not sure it's some great "hack" to get people to start caring.

Ha. I actually think it's going to make people potentially care even less? "Why would I need to preserve anything if nature and life is going to be fine no matter what?"

Some even argue to better speed it up, so we don't destroy too many other species in our own downfall.

We also tend to congregate in high concentrations, since we have communication (and now social media!) to show all the best places. If everyone was dispersed camping on BLM land, somehow equally distributed regardless of distance from the road, it would probably be less of a problem, but when everyone wants to do ~the same extra special hikes and camp in the sameish spots, the concentration would get pretty high.

Also, animal shit can be bad for the local environment. There's a lovely lake near us, and a nice big tree with a sign on it from the municipal parks department saying "Cormorants are using this tree to nest. Eventually, their droppings with kill the tree."

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