this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Yes, who can forget the famous Babylonian mountains of plastic, or the chemical spills of 300BC. Ancient Greece was never the same after that.
Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment. It's just a fact that snark won't change, or who owns the means of production.
Like, that's just how mining works. You take stuff out of the ground and it doesn't grow back, and, spoilers, mine tailings were some toxic shit even in antiquity.
Logging at least has the option of reforestation but that requires humans to stop building on the clear cut land.
Even industrial pollution isn't a new concern. The scale might be, but traditional tanneries and smitheries would poison the rivers and land of cities.
Your comment is a good example of two of the classic global warming denial tactics.
You're claim about industrial productivity causing unavoidable damage to the environment is setting up a binary in order to pretend the badness is unavoidable. In reality, different industrial procedures have vastly varying effects on the environment. One procedure might have an incredibly small effect relative to another, but if we listen to your claim, we would lump them all together and shrug our shoulders because it's necessary to have industry in modern society.
And then there's the scale argument. Well, the scale argument is another kind of deflection. I think the background assumption is that because human beings have done things on a small scale for the past few hundred years, we shouldn't worry that things have been ramped up in the last half century. Of course that doesn't make sense because the world population has risen massively, and the effects of increased climate change end up causing irreversible damage, damage that wasn't even close to being caused a hundred years ago.
And finally, the fatalistic tone itself is a deflection tactic. In fact we have created a lot of legislation to fix problems created by pollution. We have successfully regulated a ton of environmental problems away. So if we're trying to use history as a measure of how to create the future, let's get even more regulation into place.
It’s also setting up the fallacy that capitalism is completely unregulated. We have tons of regulations setting up the marketplace that capital works within, and that should certainly include societal goals like “clean up after yourself”. You don’t get to abdicate your responsibility, then blame it on capitalism
Talk about deflection, lol
There's no industrial productivity that comes from sustainability. You can only harvest to exhaustion. And you can never give back any more than you take.
This is the nature of industry and not at all the nature of profit chasing.
No mining but strip mining.
An unsolvable concern. Certainly not one that industrial recycling and waste mitigation can address.
https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ?si=K5HPcmjtur5utD2i
There's actually a popular theory that ancient Greek civilization collapsed due to deforestation.
More recent and concrete examples: The Aral Sea, victim of the infamously capitalist Soviet Union. The Great Chinese Famine, precipitated by the notoriously capitalistic excesses of the Chinese Communist Party.
Pointing out the devastating results of communism attempts in the past is usually met with outright denial or disclaimers about those not being true attempts at communism, which probably has some validity. However the unfortunate part is that real, true communism simply can't work because of how selfish and tribal humans are, how easily they create enemies of others, in groups and out groups. Communism inevitably devolves into an authoritarian regime, which is an utter failure of the principle of Communism. People in this thread want to bash conservatives for being stupid and not understanding communism, but the reality is that most conservatives simply don't believe that it works. These irreconcilable views are all the evidence you need that communism simply isn't viable unless there is a fundamental change in how humans work.