Comic Strips

Nature doesn't have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It's just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.

That's not really to advocate, you know, for climate change, or what have you, but I also don't really believe that this is going to be the thing that takes people out, weirdly? I mean, certainly, the holocene extinction is going to be a thing, and it's going to cause mass human and animal suffering and extinction on a scale that is only precedented by meteors and the like. That's looking pretty inevitable, at this point, to me. The thing is, I don't think the species as a whole, the human species, really needs or relies on nature to survive, at this point. Pollinators, maybe, but aren't we at a point where corn and other crops upon which we rely for a good, like, 50% of our mass produced highly processed food is really reliant on a lot of "natural" things. Or, isn't reliant on like, nature, as a whole. It's all as a result of discrete resources which are highly individualized and pretty isolated. Maybe large amounts of the land becomes non-arable, I dunno.

I think more broadly though, what I find to be slightly more probable than that as a counterargument is frankly that I can kind of imagine the end of the world, without the end of capitalism. Most people say it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right, but they still imagine the end of the world as being kind of mutually inclusive to the end of capitalism. No, I think capitalism, I think capitalists, our plutocrats, our idiots in charge, would probably rather keep the planet on a tenuous kind of life support, where you don't really have non-globalized, local ecology, environmental variation, the like. I think they would rather prevent the apocalypse by whatever margin is most deemed most profitable. We have schemes for cloud-seeding to block out more UV light, which would probably kill a bunch of plants and mess up a ton of ecosystems from geographically irregular and potentially unpredictable irrigation. We have schemes for dumping huge amounts of iron oxide into the ocean to kickstart massive algae blooms that can sequester carbon dioxide and probably increase ocean acidification. We have schemes for genetically modifying human and food supply-threatening viruses and invasive species to start to self-terminate after the genes propagate to like, the seventh generation. Hell, there's even some level by which people might argue that invasive species are good, because they provide an inherent surplus population sourced from natural ecology that humans could kind of skim the top off. When those things end up going sideways, or otherwise threatening the bottom line, we'll probably start seeing people just implement more short term solutions, that kick the can five years down the road, while mass ecological and human extinctions are constantly ongoing and potential quality of life plummets for the general population. Apocalypse as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular event.

Thinking that an ecological apocalypse would be the end of it, that humans are that easily crushed and nature can/will just go on totally unbothered, I think that's a rather optimistic viewpoint. It also missess the mass amounts of suffering which are currently ongoing by looking to some theoretical future, much like AI tech evangelists do with the singularity, idiot leftists tend to do with "the revolution", evangelicals do with the rapture. We need to, uhh, maybe figure out a better structure and approach, here.

You think Gaia would embrace me in those tig ol'bitties