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> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. This is just wi

• Quarrelsome 6mo ago
  > This is just wildly incorrect. from an global perspective it isn't. Some places sure, like Western Europe, who in some cases had completed enclosure, but remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point. Just google maps the north part of South America, even today there are large swathes of undeveloped land across it and back then it was considerably less exploited. At that time it would have appeared infinite, especially to the European industrialists.
  • squigz 6mo ago
    > remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point. By White people*
    • Quarrelsome 6mo ago
      we're talking about the fucking industrial revolution, of course this defaults to the European perspective. Unless you wanna spit some new bars about Aztec foundries and train lines connecting meso-america in the 19th century, then the point stands. At that time, the world appeared to the industrialists of the industrial revolution to be infinite. Nor had humanity discovered the terrible side effects of fossil fuels on the atmosphere. Why are you weirdly making this about race?
      • squigz 6mo ago
        Sure, of course it's convenient to ignore the native peoples and pretend that prior to the Industrial Revolution the rest of the world outside of Europe was some untapped well of resources that Europeans had a natural right to. Who might be swept underfoot in this "Information Revolution", I wonder?
        • Quarrelsome 6mo ago
          Yes, just the other day I saw someone make a comment about write performance in SQLite without considering the plight of the Baltic peoples in the Northern Crusades. It was really convenient of them to do that, fucking typical.
          • squigz 6mo ago
            Sure, because working on a database plugin is the same as, for example, working on mass surveillance tech. This sort of handwashing is exactly why the natives were treated the way they were.
            • Quarrelsome 6mo ago
              How do you think they're enabling the mass surveillance tech? SQLite got reach bruv. Your continued erasure of the Baltic people's continues to cut deep into my heart, and your callous candour to their plight, as you discard any chance to mention them, continues to shock me.
        • dTal 6mo ago
          Nobody said anything about Europeans having a "natural right". Bad enough to derail a conversation with irrelevant political nitpicking, unforgiveable to use a strawman to do so. Boo.
          • squigz 6mo ago
            It's not irrelevant. GP made a comparison between what we're going through and the Industrial Revolution. Ignoring the negatives of that revolution - like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea.
• felipeerias 6mo ago
  People had been hunting whales for centuries, but industrialisation gave them the means and the motivation to do so until near extinction.
  • d1l 6mo ago
    Read Moby Dick some time my friend.
    • bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
      The industrial revolution is generally understood to have started somewhere around 1760, Moby Dick took place in approximately 1830, about 10 years before what some historians mark as the end of the agrarian to Industrial shift that is generally termed the Industrial revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution I get sort of wishy-washy from 1830 on, because lots of people put the end of the Industrial revolution as being 1900, but 1840 is a defensible and commonly held position.
      • eru 6mo ago
        > The industrial revolution is generally understood to have started somewhere around 1760, In Britain. Moby Dick ain't set in Britain.
      • felipeerias 6mo ago
        That’s besides the point because most whales were killed in the XX century.
  • mayama 6mo ago
    Most of humanity survived on agriculture and sometimes hunting-gathering for last 10k years. People that survived on hunting whales is minuscule. Comparing those two is nonsensical.
    • tartoran 6mo ago
• jtbaker 6mo ago
  the Stepchange show went fairly deep on this topic in their first episode (listened to it recently). https://www.stepchange.show/coal-part-i https://www.stepchange.show/coal-part-i
• hammock 6mo ago
  The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally. There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artificial fertilizer. Etc. A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground. Not possible today. That’s not a push and pull played out over thousands of years, that’s a one-way trend.
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  • ambicapter 6mo ago
    > The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally. GP is saying it is not, and you're just reiterating what OP said as fact.
    • jychang 6mo ago
      It's sort of the exception that proves the rule. This is where STEM people are weak- a lack of knowledge on history. In another forum, someone would have chipped in that England's virgin forests were fully deforested by 1150. And someone else would have pointed out that this deforestation produced the economic demand for coal that drove the Industrial Revolution in the first place. Still, that kind of underscores OP's point. Yes, natural resources were not completely unlimited prior to the Industrial Revolution; Jonathan Swift predated Watt's steam engine, after all. Still... Neither were information resources 10 years ago. Intellectual property laws did exist prior to AI, of course. The legal systems in place are not completely ignorant of the reality. However, there's an immense difference in scale between post-industrial strip mining of resources, and preindustrial resource extraction powered solely by human muscle (and not coal or nitrogylcerin etc). Similarly, there's a massive difference in information extraction enabled by AI, vs a person in 1980 poring over the microfilm in their local library. The legal system and social systems in place prior to the Industrial Revolution proved unsuitable for an industrial world. It stands to reason that the legal system and social systems in today's society would be forced to evolve when exposed to the technological shift caused by AI.
• bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  I believe running out of trees was always a local issue - there weren't enough trees where you were at because getting trees had to be gotten locally, you didn't go get trees from far away. So yes that was in constant tension, the thing is that the problem of having enough trees turned from a local problem to a global problem, with the side effects of not having enough trees globally that the world needed to maintain the environment humanity first conquered. I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description, resource depletion was always local before mass industrialization. Being able to exploit the world as opposed to just your local area is also a mark of efficiency.
  • Retric 6mo ago
    By local you mean over 5 thousand of miles? Because yes moving wood was always in competition with growing it locally. But pine forests in the far north were untouched because of the low quality of the lumber they produce not the distances involved. All of Africa Europe and Asia ran out of the most valuable natural lumber a fucking long time ago. > I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description Very little of the world’s woodland was untouched at the time of the Industrial Revolution and forests in the Americas survived as long as they did largely due to disease drastically reducing native populations. But American forests were on the clock independent from industrial development. I’m not sure exactly your counter argument even is here. We still can’t reasonably extract most resources from the ocean bottom. That’s ~70% of the world’s mineral wealth just off the table. So sure we are very slightly better at extracting resources but on the absolute scale it really isn’t that significant pre vs post Industrial Revolution compared to the sum total of human history.
    • bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
      >By local you mean over 5 thousand of miles? maybe, "local" is a function of a lot of things, it is only fairly recently in human history that the "global" functions the way that "local" did centuries ago, meaning that it is cheap enough to source things from across the world that it does not need to be made in the next village. >> I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description >Very little of the world’s woodland was untouched at the time of the Industrial Revolution and forests in the Americas survived as long as they did largely due to disease drastically reducing native populations. things seemed appeared abundant prior to one event, soon after that event the thing no longer appears abundant, there's a correlation is the point, not a causation, but >American forests were on the clock independent from industrial development. sure, the Native Americans would have used up their forests if they had kept growing and not been killed off by disease brought by Europeans. Nonetheless they had been killed off, the world appeared infinite, because all you needed to do when you ran out of wood in one place is go to another place to source it, hurray, but now that is no longer the case. We have ran out of places to go get more wood. As noted I said I felt the phrase "the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant" uttered by the original poster in this subthread is a reasonable description, and I mean obviously that is dependent on the impressions of the people of the time, and from my readings it seems like this was more the feeling than oh noes, we are running out of wood. Although we got into a side track on wood, because that is what the first response to the OP was, that wood was always a problem, which that some natural resources were constrained still does not really disprove the phrase "the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant" since the word nearly can be seen as a cheat, and really what it means is that the world felt infinitely abundant at one time now it does not. >We still can’t reasonably extract most resources from the ocean bottom. That’s ~70% of the world’s mineral wealth just off the table. see, it sounds like you still feel like it is closer to infinitely abundant than dangerously used up. All we need to do is up our extraction game, at least were minerals are concerned. NOTE: I think maybe the world feeling infinitely abundant thing is actually an American thing, this has been remarked by others in the past, that the first European settlers felt this was a world that had not been touched because in comparison to Europe it was under-exploited in many areas, it was big and had everything, and there is a whole part of American frontier myth that as soon as one area got settled and used up all you had to do was to pack up your stuff and move west and get a bunch of resources to use up, like locusts, or maybe just colonizers. In this case the OP's idea of writing this up is that really what they are dealing with is not how the world was - infinitely abundant - but how it felt to people coming from one overly exploited area to an under-exploited one. They believe there is a narrative of economic constraints and results playing out, and that the two situations were analogous, but the source of the analogy - the world before the industrial revolution - was perhaps not as the analogy would have it but really how a memetic framework of exploration and conquest had interpreted the world. Sorry my note went overly long, but that sometimes happens when I write what I think just as I'm thinking it.
• thinking_cactus 6mo ago
  I agree. Although in this specific point, I would say we always had depletion (since the most basic microorganisms, after all otherwise life would replicate until it faces depletion limits; all the way to our close primate relatives and throughout human history; food depletes locally which drives competition), but rarely faced degradation or permanent depletion. I'd say degradation involves a lasting depletion or lasting damage (potentially permanent until restoration efforts happen) to the environment's output and ability to support life. Permanent depletion is what can happen to e.g. shallow mines and fossil fuel deposits. I think I'd agree the legal system was created mostly for the former, depletion, and only recently had to contend with degradation and permanent depletion. I feel like we still struggle collectively to coming to gripes with permanent depletion. Permanent depletion is also usually the result of shortsightedness or a competition gone awry. Famous case where nobody wants the ultimate results but people may selfishly march towards it (tragedy of the commons).
• cmrdporcupine 6mo ago
  This, and going back further, people literally would brutally massacre neighbouring tribal groupings over control of fishing and hunting and gathering grounds. The rapid dispersal of our species over literally the entire planet (minus Antarctica) likely also has a lot to do with constantly moving on to new opportunities further away from rivals. That said, starting in about the 18th century we ran out of new places for that. And intensification truly began.
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