Humans are not parasites on the world.
One thing that I think a lot of Environmentalists in America really overlook is that humans are supposed to be part of an ecosystem. Humans are part of the food web; we fill an environmental niche, just as much as beavers and wolves do.
We are SUPPOSED to interact with the environment- the problem arises when we begin interacting with the environment in UNSUSTAINABLE ways. This idea that we should try to “return” the environment to the way it was “before” humans so so so often ignores the way that Indigenous people all over the world were (and are) an important part of their environments- and trying to “preserve” those places without people filling their ecological niche can cause harm in super weird ways.
You know how its shitty for deer populations if you take out all of the wolves? It’s just as bad if you stop all human hunting too. Humans hunting deer has been an important part of the food web for thousands and thousands of years! Deer populations NEED hunters- human, wolf, cougar- to stay healthy.
Yes- massive clear cutting of forests and strip mining is bad. HOWEVER, not allowing Indigenous people to practice traditional controlled burns of grass lands? Not only makes wildfires worse, but ALSO fucks up the bio-diversity of those grasslands. Totally unmanaged “pristine” grasslands without humans are actually less healthy than grasslands that are sustainably managed by people.
Mono-crop super farms are not good- but humans have been farming for thousands of years- tending for plants and increasing their yield, monitoring the soil, in ways that benefit those plants and the other animals that eat them, and the other plants that use that soil, and the insects that make their home there. Sustainable, diversified farming isn’t bad.
Laying out acres and acres of asphalt and oil pipelines? Bad. But digging natural cisterns in the dessert that catches rainwater for grazing animals to use? Benefits the entire ecosystem and all the animals in it.
We are part of the environment. We belong here. And the ecosystems that human beings evolved in and lived in need us just as much as we need them. We aren’t parasites on the planet, we are a part of it. It’s just that global capitalism has thrown us terribly out of balance. Colonialism and profit-seeking are the problem- not human beings existing.
The goal of environmentalism should not be to protect nature by keeping humans totally separate from it, but rather to restore balance with our interactions with nature, for sustainable practices that help us coexist with the ecosystems that we are part of. That we have been a part of forever. And that is hard with billions of people on the planet, yes, and we will need to be clever and resourceful and thoughtful to find ways of restoring that balance, it will take a lot of people working together to find those answers- but humans’ greatest trait has always been our cleverness and our ability to work together.
People in the notes who are like “I agree with this- EXCEPT FOR HUNTING” are missing the point. We are part of the food web, guys. We always have been and always will be. Saying that humans shouldn’t hunt for meat, like we have since before we were even technically human only makes us more reliant on unsustainable factory farming AND really really really fucks with Indigenous people.
Again- human beings belong here. We are supposed to be part of the ecosystem. We have done a lot of harm and taken far too much because of global capitalism. We need to scale back and change a lot of things to bring ourselves back into balance. But sustainable levels of subsistence hunting white tailed deer populations? Not really one of those problems.
Exacly. I think the problem is when we literally make giant animal farms to feed an unreasonable expectation of how much meat people are supposed to consume. Like, indigenous people hunting for meat is the same thing as a wolf hunting for food too. But something that no other animals do is actually massively reproduce, torture and kill animals and make their sole purpose in life to die. That is messing up the environment, not just generaly hunting to eat.
Totally. There are a lot of issues with modern Western food culture. The amount and frequency of meat consumption, portion sizes, the prevalence of refined sugars, etc, etc. Addressing the sustainability (and health impacts) of our food culture is a major place for environmentalism. And it’s not an easy problem to solve- we have a LOT of people feed, after all!
Finding ways of producing food more efficiently, with less environmental impact is SUPER important. And yeah, big factory meat production is a HUGE part of that. The 5-deer-a-season hunting limit on White Tailed deer in Texas is not.
