Church
I wonder if he was vegan
Eating meat is very much a part of nature, if you’re implying he would be a hypocrite for eating meat
There’s nothing natural about our food production, specially meat production.
What is natural? There’s animals that dig into other animals brains and eat them slowly. There’s animals that paralyze their victims and eat them slowly. There’s parasites that infect their host and force them to get eaten by controlling them and removing their fear center. There’s animals that eat their own young. There animals that only eat the young of others.
This notion that nature isn’t cruel and unforgiving is just a fairytale.
The amazing thing about humans is that we can actually feel compassion for others, even other species and strive to reduce their suffering as much as possible. I’m really getting tired of people being so negative all the damn time.
Our food production needs to do better and be better but it will only do so because of us, not because we “listen to nature” or whether else people love to spew out trying to sound enlightened.
What is natural?
There are certain ecological balances that develop over time, as species fill individual niches and create symbiotic bonds. The capacity for the given biome to support life is predicated on a certain cyclical exchange. And when that cycle is broken, you typically see a die-off caused by the imbalances.
This notion that nature isn’t cruel and unforgiving is just a fairytale.
The question isn’t of cruelty but sustainability. The mouse eats the corn. The snake eats the mouse. The bird eats the snake. The parasite eats the bird. The corn eats the corpses.
But if you go through with a weed wacker and kill all the snakes, you get population spikes on one end of the food chain and collapses on others, in a way that ultimately reduces the amount of life the area can support.
We saw this across the American Great Plains with the extermination of buffaloes and passenger pigeons. What was once lush and bountiful became barren and inhospitable, as industrial scale destruction of natural resources rendered territory uninhabitable. Reckless industrial development produces waste faster than the natural ecological conditions can process it. And this same development siphons off the natural bounty faster than it can be replaced.
Our food production needs to do better and be better but it will only do so because of us, not because we “listen to nature”
If we do not understand why certain natural cycles exist or how certain minerals and molecules are naturally derived and regenerated or what energy sources are available and at what rates, we risk exhausting the existing biological landscape and destroying the capacity for a particular piece of territory to sustain new life in future generations.
This is as simple as looking at the Great Lakes or the Ogallala Aquifer or the Mississippi River and asking “Is there going to be enough water in these places in another 100 years to maintain our productive rate of agricultural development?” And at the current rate we’re exhausting these resources, the answer is no.
If we hadn’t brought in so many thirsty commercial scale animal and plant species or attempted to generate such large surpluses that we could export them overseas at enormous profits or raised the temperature of the Earth such that we evaporated off too much surface water, we would not be in this situation.
trying to sound enlightened
You don’t need to be a guru to look at the Earth and look at Mars, then say to yourself “Maybe we keep the Earth-style ecology going a little longer”.
Eating meat is very much a part of nature
Trying to explain this to the guy getting chewed on by a tiger, but he’s too busy screaming and thrashing and bleeding everywhere.
What?
Tigers eat meat. Its part of nature.
But people don’t like being eaten. So they complain about tigers and try to get rid of them.
This is why I get so mad when people say “we don’t have an overpopulation problem, we have a resource allocation problem”.
No. There are not supposed to be this many fucking humans. Where the fuck are the animals supposed to live???
We need to return to preindustrial population levels so the animals can too
If you had half as many humans in the world, but they all lived in suburbs, it would be much worse for the environment than having twice as many humans but they all live in cities.
Compare America to India. If Americans lived the way Indians do, the population would be absolutely fine. So if you want to solve overpopulation problems, stop the American style suburbs before you worry about the actual population.
Sure but all those humans need an insane amount of farmland that dwarfs the amount of land they need for housing. And that’s ignoring meat consumption.
With a huge population, beef consumption is insane and is destroying the world.
With a small population, it isn’t a big deal.
That amount of farmland is a lot less if you’re not raising livestock and throwing out perfectly good food because it isn’t profitable. A vegan socialist society has a much higher population ceiling than a carnist capitalist society.