#idk man. massive areas sinking into lithium mines where nothing will grow for centuries.

[ursula-legun]

Call me whatever kind of weirdo political label you like, but it is insane to me how de-emphasized non-human ecocide/genocide/specicde is.

I know that everyone - including myself - has massive anthropocentric bias when it comes to processing death, and the reasons for that make sense in the abstract (even if I think this should be shifted heavily.)

But, like, entire ecosystems are disappearing. Species, and the relationships between them, are literally being eradicated on a daily basis. We are barely even aware of most nonhuman culture, and it's getting destroyed at a rate beyond what we can measure; not only does the loss of life (by any metric - organism count, expected lifespan lost, biomass, etc) massively outstrip anything humans have ever experienced, but the loss of kinds of life or ways of life are being destroyed at, again, a rate beyond what anyone is bothering to quantify right now.

It makes sense to me when people are relatively unconcerned about this because they aren't aware of it. But when somebody has even a fractional understanding of the environmental devastation happening at every moment...even given the (tremendous) relative emotional weight that people place on human life, I don't understand how anybody can know about this but not prioritize it.

And unfortunately, even half-heartedly prioritizing nonhuman life massively shifts so many decisions in both day-to-day life and broad-spectrum politics that it feels like. A completely different set of conversations to be having. As environmental collapse roots deeper into mainstream political discussion, I feel like this is getting to be a more and more stark contrast - the political goals/desires of people who are becoming concerned about environmental collapse, purely for the potential human consequence, are so many steps away from the goals of environment-for-its-own-sake that things become almost untranslateable.

IDK. I think that in some ways I am feigning confusion to myself about this because it's....kind of necessary to do that...to continue having regular interactions with other human beings..................but on other levels, I am genuinely baffled.

The most profound anthropogenic environmental impacts of the last ~400 years were, charitably, mostly inadvertent; they stem from a combination of "acceptable losses," colonial alienation from the environment, and general ignorance as to the effects of various technological processes. At this point the consequences are clearly, and without exaggeration, apocalyptic; but most of the proposed mitigation strategies are about as blind as the initial processes, if not outright known to be inadequate.

There are very obvious actions that can be taken, which would clearly permit the greatest mitigation of the processes that are currently dominating the catastrophe - and there are similarly obvious obstacles to these actions, like, how do you get everyone to coordinate on global degrowth?

But what gets me, what really keeps me up at night, is that this is all entirely off the table for any "serious" discussion. Because large-scale degrowth, spinning down of industry, would lower many life expectancies and disrupt possibly every single human society, it's just...rejected out of hand no matter what. And again, I get it, loss of human life usually just feels worse than loss of nonhuman life, especially when it's your own community, but like...we're not even going to try and talk about this? We're not even going to try and plan out what it would look like?

The best alternative plans boil down to nuclear power, increased urbanization, electric cars, and space-based resource extraction. (Admittedly, while I don't love nuclear power, I would actually massively prefer it to hydro or wind.) But this is the basket into which we are putting the eggs of global food production? The idea of doing something that you know would cause significant human suffering, but massively benefit the entire globe, is so repugnant that you're going to go with....the fucking spacex weirdos??? As though that's not already causing incomprehensible levels of human and nonhuman suffering as we speak????? You think this is actually going to lead to a better average quality of life for humans, let alone all the other organisms, three centuries out??????? Hello???????????????