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Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to maximize profits over everything

Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to maximize profits over everything else. When you can generate profits by destroying stuff, you destroy and rejoice. Note that a business usually care about both its income statement and its balance sheet. Society now optimizes everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is that those who force government to mostly care about profits will pretend they want society to be managed like a business (they're dishonest, they don't care about society but their individual means).

giantg2 5y ago
I think it's similar and deeper that. If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work. For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.
goatlover 5y ago
Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)
- genericone 5y ago
  Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
  - Retric 5y ago
    That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
- simonsarris 5y ago
  minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Yeah, I was being conservative. There's some archeological evidence that civilization is a lot older than generally thought. And humans seem to have some of the characteristics of domestication. As in our hominid ancestors self-domesticated.
dcolkitt 5y ago
Realistically, there's very little in the economy that depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly replaced by tourism to places like Vegas). But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.
- amelius 5y ago
  Sorry, but I very much question that. This might not be a gradual thing, but it could be exponential at some point.
- kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago
  You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap and transition to a completely different mode of functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after another.
  - fooker 5y ago
    And we could get wiped out by a gamma ray burst at any point. So what?
    - ljp_206 5y ago
      Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can do nothing about isn't helpful.
- DeRock 5y ago
  This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps we overvalue the purely economic contribution of biodiversity. But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.
brobdingnagians 5y ago
One solution is to eliminate corporations. People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care. It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors. Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Eliminating corporations is more than a few steps outside the Overton window.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  Eliminating corporations is like eliminating feudal lords during feudalism. The only way is to kill enough of them in wars and replace them with an entity with even more centralized power.
jtolmar 5y ago
Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are controlled by people who primarily care about profits and growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders who do prioritize growth. I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
- nahuel0x 5y ago
  Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis of religion postulated humans first imagined God but then we "forgot" we are the creators of God, so the idea of God became a force controlling the behavior of humans (yes, you can relate this to Dawkins memes, but Feuerbach lived 100 years before Dawkins) Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital. This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.

giantg2 5y ago

I think it's similar and deeper that. If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work. For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.

goatlover 5y ago

Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.

8ytecoder 5y ago
We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)
genericone 5y ago
Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
- Retric 5y ago
  That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
simonsarris 5y ago
minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
- goatlover 5y ago
  Yeah, I was being conservative. There's some archeological evidence that civilization is a lot older than generally thought. And humans seem to have some of the characteristics of domestication. As in our hominid ancestors self-domesticated.

dcolkitt 5y ago

Realistically, there's very little in the economy that depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly replaced by tourism to places like Vegas). But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.

amelius 5y ago
Sorry, but I very much question that. This might not be a gradual thing, but it could be exponential at some point.
kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago
You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap and transition to a completely different mode of functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after another.
- fooker 5y ago
  And we could get wiped out by a gamma ray burst at any point. So what?
  - ljp_206 5y ago
    Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can do nothing about isn't helpful.
DeRock 5y ago
This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps we overvalue the purely economic contribution of biodiversity. But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.

brobdingnagians 5y ago

One solution is to eliminate corporations. People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care. It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors. Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.

germinalphrase 5y ago
Eliminating corporations is more than a few steps outside the Overton window.
ativzzz 5y ago
Eliminating corporations is like eliminating feudal lords during feudalism. The only way is to kill enough of them in wars and replace them with an entity with even more centralized power.

jtolmar 5y ago

Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are controlled by people who primarily care about profits and growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders who do prioritize growth. I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.

nahuel0x 5y ago
Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis of religion postulated humans first imagined God but then we "forgot" we are the creators of God, so the idea of God became a force controlling the behavior of humans (yes, you can relate this to Dawkins memes, but Feuerbach lived 100 years before Dawkins) Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital. This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.