We think with our weak technologies and chemistries that we can play God.
However, it is so far from the truth - in an attempt to create more vegetation we have decreased a critical component needed to help said vegetation grow.
Technology should be used carefully when in the environment of the unknown. Trials and observations should be conducted in limited capacity with a long window of study. Only then can we know of the consequences for our actions of disrupting naturally evolved and perfected equilibriums - be it that of the Earth or man’s immune system.
Not even limited trials with a long window of study (how long?) will prevent this. Science itself is a non-holistic way of looking at the world, blind to what is not measured. Concerning this example, it seems like a predictable effect of pesticides and global trade -- not unexpected, though perhaps not hoped for. Instead, the principle of caution must be applied when using technology. Pesticides that increase yield or decrease risk by only 10% may not be necessary at all.
Any industrial action will disrupt Earth's equilibriums given the high level of consumption those in the developed world currently enjoy.
> Science itself is a non-holistic way of looking at the world, blind to what is not measured.
This is unfortunately a broad class of error; qualitative metrics which are difficult to measure and quantify get brushed aside by people who want to make rational data-driven decisions. Robert McNamara became infamous for this; the 'data driven' way he tried to manage the Vietnam War focused on hard quantitative metrics, like bodycounts, and de-emphasized or ignored qualitative metrics like popular opinion in Vietnam and America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
In the software industry, those that would rely on instrumentation and telemetry to guide product development often repeat the same mistakes. Many times I've seen user feedback ignored, derided, and demeaned. "Users are dumb, they don't know what they want. Ask users what they want and they'll ask for a faster horse." These ostensibly rational data-driven designers are ironically irrational because they ignore the well established limitations of their data-driven approach.
> Technology should be used carefully when in the environment of the unknown. Trials and observations should be conducted in limited capacity with a long window of study
A laudable goal.
And yet, without the agricultural revolution of the 1960s, we wouldn't have grocery stores today with well-stocked shelves.
> And yet, without the agricultural revolution of the 1960s, we wouldn't have grocery stores today with well-stocked shelves.
It's not that we wouldn't have well-stocked shelves: it's that we wouldn't be alive. We can feed as many people as we do because of the incredible advances we've made in agricultural sciences. Without those, there just wouldn't be enough calories to go around. Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture? All this invective against technology is sophomoric, short-sighted, and fundamentally unserious, and if we followed the recommendations of people to whom science is a bad thing, just "playing god", then a huge number of us would simply cease to exist.
> Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture?
The thing about that is that the story isn't over yet. Yes, billions of people owe their lives to the Haber–Bosch process (et. al., I'm obviously simplifying here) but if billions of people die due to ecological and economic collapse, is it really all worth it?
As a concrete counter-example to modern mass agriculture there are ecological systems of food production that result in high yields while increasing fertility, biodiversity, and biomass (such as Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc.) So we can have our both well-stocked grocery shelves and healthy ecosystems.
Do you have any references for these statements? I have never even heard that things were apparently so dire in the 60s.
Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did?
My current understanding is that the U.S. overproduces what it needs, exports the excess at dirt cheap prices, killing off developing countries’ farmer livelihoods. So in the U.S., there’s multiple birds killed with one stone.
The green revolution was a big increase in the carrying capacity of the Earth.
> Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did?
Of course it does. Listen to yourself here. You're saying that it'd have been better for billions of people to simply not have lived at all and for growth to be capped for all time. Would you go back in time, prevent the green revolution, and erase all those billions of people from history?
Christ, I think you would.
Limiting growth means billions, if not trillions, of people will simply never exist at all. All those moments of hope and joy and rest and relief: never existed, all on your say-so. We have a word for that: genocide.
We don't need to limit humanity's growth. We need to go to the stars.
During WWII, 40% of the US food supply came from private gardens.
Today, gardens amongst the general population basically don’t exist (are so few/small that they don’t represent a measurable fraction of food supply or available arable private land).
So, it’s difficult to know whether or not we would cease to exist.
A population at 60's level would be much easier on the planet, and the countless species we've since lost forever.
To me that easily outweighs the sum of all those joys; temporary and impermanent, unlike the extinctions of species and glories the planet will never see again. And, I'll remind you that we still have more than enough starvation, despite the ability to feed all.
Your reading of the arguments here as "against science" are a straw man.
> Your reading of the arguments here as "against science" are a straw man.
You're right. The arguments I'm reading here are not "against science". That's too specific. The arguments I'm reading here are actually against humanity.
As I mentioned in another post, suggesting that it would have been a good thing that the population not have grown over the past century is the same as wishing to wipe billions of people, along with their minds, memories, and experiences, out of history.
And for what would you erase these billions of lives? So some fish? A few trees? A few rocks? A toad spotted in some special way? None of these things can sing, feel hope, dream, or even suffer. Humans can. The desire to limit human growth on ecological grounds is monstrous and anti-human and there's no word for it other than "evil".
The environment has a limited capacity to sustain human life.
Temporarily taking more from the environment than is sustainsble brings temporary human happiness, followed by great human suffering when the environment we rely on collapses.
Civilizations throughout history have collapsed for this reason. Our civilization is not so powerful as to be immune.
We've been hearing about this inevitable collapse since Malthus, yet is never comes. And yet, like the brainwashed follows of a doomsday cult leader, anti-human environmentalist types keep up the faith even as the predictions keep failing. It's embarrassing.
There is no particular reason to believe that we've overshot the planet's carrying capacity, that our technological ability to deliver prosperity will break down, or that some kind of collapse is about to come.
This belief in imminent ecological collapse is just a rebranding of eschatology, the idea that the end of the world is coming and that when it does, the good and bad will be separated and judged. It's an aesthetic judgement --- you start with the premise that industrial civilization is bad, understand that bad things must be punished, and hope for Gaia to be the instrument of that punishment.
I don't subscribe to this kind of thinking. I don't see any limits to human ingenuity. There's no need to limit growth, and anyone attempting to do it is committing a crime against the future.
Buddy the consequences of 7 billion people living beyond the planet's means aren't just visible. They're a fucking rocket flare in the darkness on a clear night. How are you not seeing this?
Our water sources are polluted. Our oceans are acidifying. We've strip mined our topsoil. Our rainforests are at a tipping point, on the verge of catastrophic loss. Did you see those fires in Australia last year? Disastrous weather events are up 83% in only twenty years. Top strategists and CEOs are preparing for water wars and refugee crises.
And you're here telling us there's no need to limit growth, that doing so is criminal, that the environmentalist cult predictions are failing? In the comments of an article about how there's no American Bumblebees in eight states, which was predicted 20 years ago? WTF Broseph.
> Our water sources are polluted. Our oceans are acidifying. We've strip mined our topsoil. Our rainforests are at a tipping point, on the verge of catastrophic loss. Did you see those fires in Australia last year? Disastrous weather events are up 83% in only twenty years. Top strategists and CEOs are preparing for water wars and refugee crises
Every single generation points to things going wrong now and thinks the end of nigh. It's been that way since at least the invention of writing. All you've done is present a list of problems. You have done nothing to build an actual case that the engine of human innovation is breaking down. What makes you think we won't overcome the problems you mention just as we've overcome all our previous problems?
> And you're here telling us there's no need to limit growth, that doing so is criminal, that the environmentalist cult predictions are failing?
Yes, I am. Because those predictions are failing, and they are failing because they imagine that we exist in a bizarre alternative world where we don't invent technology to solve problems but instead just breed, like deer or something, until we collapse. Wrong model, thus wrong predictions.
Did you know forest cover has actually increased over the past 100 years? Under your theory, we should have chopped down the last tree ages ago.
Our rivers don't catch on fire anymore either. Under your theory, we should all be drinking turpentine by now.
Turns out we can live in a clean world without arbitrary and murderously limiting growth or capping the number of people who can exist.
> In the comments of an article about how there's no American Bumblebees in eight states, which was predicted 20 years ago?
Well, yeah. Doing something about the neoniconoid pesticides causing the bee problem is probably wise. That's not the object of my objection.
The object of my objection is this idea that bees are suffering because humanity arrogantly tries to "play god" with technology and that we should stop and go back to the trees or something. That's an absurd and destructive worldview, and one that's embarrassingly common among comfortable tech types.
Sure, in the same way that your argument "reduces" to chicken little. Isn't this a fun game, creating ridiculous strawmen justifying it with this word "reduces"?
What you seem to not be getting is that the damage to the environment is HERE. Hundreds of thousands of all kinds of species are DEAD and NOT COMING BACK. Water sources are DEPLETED and TOXIC, NOW. Etc. Plastic is on Everest and the Mariana Trench.
That's not Chicken Little, that's the denouement of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Except in this case, the boy had decades of charts and photos and graphs showing that a whole pack of wolves were on their way.
It’s totally true. I’ve always liked the advice that you should mostly walk around the perimeter of the store, and only go into the middle part (aisles) when you have some specific need (canned veggies, beans, pasta).
It obviously depends a bit on your store’s layout, but I’ve found the advice to be almost universal. The aisles contain all of the junk (an unbelievable amount of junk), and the good fresh ingredients — fruit, veggies, dairy, breads, meats — are around the outside.
The Reddit link is irrelevant without knowing the size of the operation and the normal amounts of waste. If people think they can design systems that can predict demand perfectly and result in no errors, perhaps they should get a job at a grocery store or start their own.
The OP (who works at that shop and knows the demand and supply), explained in the post that they have a massive freezer that's mostly empty they could throw this stuff into for a day or so until it's picked up by soup kitchens.
The choice to discard perfectly good food is a diabolic one.
It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing.
You can choose to think that there are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger. Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason (aka probability and cost of liability is too high compared to throwing it away).
Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them, and it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business.
> It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing
There are other evil people out there so this is ok? Is that your argument?
> There are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger
What are they, if not evil, because that's exactly what they're doing... throwing good food away while people in the neighbourhood go hungry.
> Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason
But I have investigated the reason, and it isn't a good one. This food is thrown out BEFORE expiry date. This means that at the moment of destruction, it was completely legal to sell the food. If it was legal to sell, it was legal to give away. And I'm not saying that they should let dumpster divers just come and take what they want. I'm saying that there are organisations (soup kitchens, etc) that you can have legal agreements with that leave Amazon free of liability, just as if they'd be free of liability if they sold the food.
To not do this is evil.
> Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them
Selling food before it's best-before/expiry date is legal and is the core function of every retail business. They could sell this food for a $0.01 to a food kitchen and it would be no more a misstep or risk than if they sold it to any other customer.
> it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business
I said nothing of the sort. They know exactly how to run their own business. But they're evil people who are letting starving people suffer while they throw out perfectly good, FDA approved, non-expired, healthy food.
Honestly, we are really pretty good at playing god. Killing off a species of bee is sad and may have some unintended consequences but it hasn't put a dent in our ability to engineer the earth to suit our needs. The problem is motives and objectives. We have created the incentives to extract resources and not to protect organisms. So that's what we do.
> We think with our weak technologies and chemistries that we can play God.
We can play God, do play God, and will continue play God. People used to think of electricity as the rage of an angry God. Now you're raging against progress on a device that harnesses lightning at a quantum scale in ways unthinkable even 50 years ago. Do you have no appreciation whatsoever for how much good it does to expand humanity's capabilities? Can you see only the downsides? The people complaining about technology and progress should propose actual fixes for the problems that appear instead of braying from the sidelines about how nobody should ever do anything.
We live in a truly remarkable universe and Science is our best method of repeatable, measurable progress. But Science is a method in service of our desires, and incentives drive our economic systems. Science has been put in service of extracting maximum profit and maximum growth. One small part of that is efficiency in production. That efficiency has given rise to the broad material wealth that we enjoy today.
But Science has not been put in service of understanding what is good for humans psychologically, spiritually, or even biologically. To the extent that it has, we are overwhelmed and outmatched by powerful economic forces in service of the profit motive. A profit motive that has locked us into dreams of perpetual exponential growth of a fundamental anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production that has us first harvesting and then paving the biosphere for profit.
And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted. Comments trying to stir up more shouting and polarization and finger pointing. In pursuit of that cathartic polarization, your comment is really just support of an absurd, extremist viewpoint that must have as a starting point a staggering ignorance about what humanity is currently smashing to pieces in its pursuit of material wealth, coupled with a willful ignorance to reflect on it. The cost we exact on our planet is enormous.
> Science has been put in service of extracting maximum profit and maximum growth. One small part of that is efficiency in production. That efficiency has given rise to the broad material wealth that we enjoy today.
But Science has not been put in service of understanding what is good for humans psychologically, spiritually, or even biologically
What is profitable is what is good. That's the beautiful thing about markets and prices: they force people to be honest about their preferences. When someone pays money for something, that means that what he's getting in exchange is good for him. Who are you to argue otherwise? Why should your aesthetic ideals of humanity's future override the actual preferences of real people as expressed through their market behavior? This idea that we can distinguish what is right from what is profitable is moralistic arrogance.
> anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production
When I say that a certain strain of environmentalist is anti-human, I'm talking about people who would write about roads and electricity as if they were grand mistakes and should be undone. That's absurd. People who think this way can never be allowed to have power. If they got it, they'd ruin billions of lives.
> And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted.
If your ideas can be supported only by censoring those who disagree, your ideas are weak and deserve to fail.
> The cost we exact on our planet is enormous.
The planet is there for us. We have no obligation not to impose costs on "the planet" any more than we have an obligation not to inconvenience the air we breathe or the dirt we stand on. This idea that we need to trade off interests of "the planet" against those of people is absurd. Ecological preservation might be justified in some cases in the interest of people, but we are under no obligation whatsoever to negotiate with Gaia for human welfare.
However, it is so far from the truth - in an attempt to create more vegetation we have decreased a critical component needed to help said vegetation grow.
Technology should be used carefully when in the environment of the unknown. Trials and observations should be conducted in limited capacity with a long window of study. Only then can we know of the consequences for our actions of disrupting naturally evolved and perfected equilibriums - be it that of the Earth or man’s immune system.