Throughout the entire United Kingdom, the only species that have survived into the modern era are those that are able to coexist with human domination of the land: others, from beavers to wolves, have been extirpated entirely.

EXTIRPATE! EXTIRPATE!

/learned a new word today

No matter, if we do it wrong, we just die.


Problem solved for the Earth (or God...)

RandomAxe: It's not about saving the damned planet. Stupid activists have been using the wrong rhetoric for decades and undermining their own position. The planet is tough.

It's about not shiatting where you eat, and where your kids and grandkids will eat. Not letting other people do that where your kids and grandkids will eat. Not letting a tiny number of people grab enormous amounts of natural wealth for themselves just because they were the first bastards on the scene with enough gall and money to do it.

Destroying the planet is difficult. Turning it into a shiathole is easy. Getting people active in preventing the former is difficult. Getting them excited about preventing the latter is much easier. If the right wing promises the average person more money and job opportunities, but the left wing says it will hurt some random owl somewhere, the left loses, even if the right is going to pocket that money. But when the left says, oh, hey, they're going to poison the spot where your house is, they get more traction.

But they learn nothing, because leftists tend to have trouble with pragmatism. Even when it comes to propaganda.

And that pretty much sums it up....

RandomAxe: It's not about saving the damned planet. Stupid activists have been using the wrong rhetoric for decades and undermining their own position. The planet is tough.

It's about not shiatting where you eat, and where your kids and grandkids will eat. Not letting other people do that where your kids and grandkids will eat. Not letting a tiny number of people grab enormous amounts of natural wealth for themselves just because they were the first bastards on the scene with enough gall and money to do it.

Destroying the planet is difficult. Turning it into a shiathole is easy. Getting people active in preventing the former is difficult. Getting them excited about preventing the latter is much easier. If the right wing promises the average person more money and job opportunities, but the left wing says it will hurt some random owl somewhere, the left loses, even if the right is going to pocket that money. But when the left says, oh, hey, they're going to poison the spot where your house is, they get more traction.

But they learn nothing, because leftists tend to have trouble with pragmatism. Even when it comes to propaganda.

What about those people who can not be classified as "left" and "right"?
You know, the vast majority of people?

Begoggle:
What about those people who can not be classified as "left" and "right"?
You know, the vast majority of people?
Most people are ignorant and apathetic about most issues most of the time. That's why they gravitate to convenient labels that let vocal morons and con artists pick their positions for them, well, that and Duverger's law.

namatad: why do we assume that our extinctions would be any different than the mass extinctions from the past?
life will recover trivially

That sentiment is absurd and a pathetic misunderstanding of ecosystems, historical geology and reality as we know it. Life took millions of farking years to grow back after past mass extinctions. Yes, some life forms are incredibly resilient, but many, like us, are highly reliant on fragile interdependencies. Also, the only goddamn reason we're here is because things turned out lucky enough for life to survive long enough and under the right, very random and perhaps vanishingly rare conditions to favor complex ecosystems that somehow developed into self-analytical Farkers. There is a darned good chance that climate is completely unstable over the long haul and the only reason we live in an existence where the climate has continued to revert to liquid-water conditions rather than succumb to freezing, drying or runaway greenhouse is that nature was on a high-rolling streak just long enough for us to be able to start making comments about it. (though it could be any planet this size with the right general the bulk composition and insolation and volcanism and lunar tides would tend to stay wet...)

In any case we only really have this one incredibly biased data point from which to draw conclusions. Everything that is anything of note is here on this planet, part of human society. Why? Because these words are human. If you care about anything, you care about preventing extinction, of humanity in particular, regardless of what you profess on behalf of some supraplanetary pseudomoral viewpoint that you're echoing from your libtard friends who think they hate humanity.

(I've noticed a widespread sentiment among well-educated 20-somethings, that they would never have children of their own, that it's selfish, that at best they'd adopt. The reality of it is, if kids were more affordable and there wasn't this mythology floating around about how horrible humanity is to the planet, many would be happy to reproduce. It's messed up that we've built this society that tells its members their core biological drive is wrong; it's a new-age form of secular puritanism that just hasn't generally gotten called out as such. - not LDS)

Regardless, billions of years' evolution is at stake - finely tuned interspecies solutions to chemical conundrums of all sorts, and unimaginably complex interactions that we'll never fully appreciate. To brush that aside by saying "life will recover trivially" is to be ignorant of what's developed so far and what's likely to develop in the future in any meaningful time frame. If we go out, you can be sure we will be collapsing ecosystems and destroying a significant chunk of that heritage (and thenceforth unrealized potential) along with us.

In the end it's entirely chaotic, and whatever the hell we do to try and control the land is going to end up doing something completely unpredictable. That said, dry dead rock is more predictable (it's gonna sit there, maybe eroding here and there for billions of years) than a planet of thriving, perhaps self-balancing ecosystems. We have destroyed most of the old growth forests, losing untold wealth of genetic diversity (not to mention the individual lives) in the process. We're not even really sure what we've done to the oceans. We can kill it all. Can we keep it going?