Post: #1

Hey folks. I've really been wondering something lately.

Why is ecological sustainability getting lumped in with feminism/leftism?

I always thought taking care of the environment was a matter of common sense. It's all around us. We depend on it. We can't survive without it. So why not take care of it? Isn't anything less tantamount to suicide?

And let me be clear that I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

I AM *****NOT*****TALKING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

I'm just talking about simple mathematics, like the fact that subtracting indefinitely from a finite quantity will eventually result in zero.

The number of trees on our planet is finite. Right? The amount of land-surface-area that has green stuff growing on it is finite. Right?

So if we keep cutting down trees faster than we plant them, eventually we're going to run out.

And if we keep converting living soil into pavement and buildings, without converting pavement and buildings back into living soil (something which almost never happens), then we are literally - not figuratively, but literally - killing the biosphere, making the Earth look a little bit more like Mars every day.

If you look at Earth from a satellite, you notice that the green keeps shrinking, and the gray keeps expanding.

Simple math, guys. Net subtraction, continued indefinitely, results in zero. I REALLY don't get why this is controversial.

And I REALLY REALLY REALLY don't get why this issue is considered a "leftist" issue. It seems like it should be the opposite. "Conservatives" ought to be all over this like white on rice. What's more conservative than taking care of your foundations? What's more conservative than saying "Alright folks, I know that it's fun to build stuff and make factories and consume a bunch of consumer products, but let's think about the FUTURE. We need an intact biosphere, and this need supersedes our desire for short-term entertainment and diversion."

How the fuck is that considered a "liberal" position???

I thought this was a no-brainer.

"Don't shit where you sleep."

I thought conservatives could at least have THAT in the bag. But apparently, saying that makes you a liberal lefty SJW? Huh?

Believing that we should manage our resources intelligently, and save them for future generations, is LIBERAL?

Recognizing the importance of our foundations, and passing laws to protect them, is LEFTIST?

I must have missed something. How did we surrender this issue to the leftists? HOW?

Post: #2

Oh and one more thing. About the finite numbers and zero thing. It's not like we would even need to REACH zero in order to be fucked. The whole system would collapse LOOOONG before that.

If you lost a billion cells a day from your body, and they were replaced by concrete/asphalt, so that no cells could replace them, eventually your whole system would collapse, and you wouldn't even need to get CLOSE to zero cells before that would happen.

Our species is playing with fire, and playing with fire is called "sensible and conservative", while taking away the matches is called "liberal"?

I want to know how that happened.

Post: #3

Conservation invariably was going to clash with industries that polluted nature or didn't harness it in a responsible way, and since there's a large proportion of people who don't think in the Left or (lacking belief in a God) quasi-zealots devoted to ideals, it was a simple shift from opposition to overindustrialisation of the wilderness to opposition to all industrialisation -- and by extension capitalism as industrialisation's driver.

Now and then the Green movement lets the mask slip, particularly when they're in large numbers and surrounded by each other. Quasi-Communist quasi-dictator Hugo Chavez got a standing ovation at the Copenhagen summit when said socialism was the way to save the world and that capitalism had to be fought.

Post: #4

The whole Left-Right paradigm is a sham but I will use these terms for the sake of clarity.

In usurious capitalist countries, incessant growth is needed to keep the machine going. Industrial power coupled with negative human attributes such as greed means that the ability and motive to destroy nature is there.

However much of the defence of nature as well as the social, economic pillars of sustainability actually comes from what the modern paradigm labels as the 'far right'.

For example:

Quote:JORIAN JENKS was a founder of the Soil Association and Editor of its journal "Mother Earth" and is regarded by many as one of the principle architects of the Green Movement in Britain. He was also a keen and active supporter of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirt organisation, and wrote many articles for the movement's newspapers and journals. He also became a prospective parliamentary candidate for the British Union of Fascists. Jorian Jenks was an advocate of organic farming, a view he shared with Richard Walther Darré, the Third Reich's Food and Farming minister whom he met after the war.

During WWII he was imprisoned without charge or trial spending some time in the infamous torture centre at Lathchmere House in Surrey. During his later incarceration in Walton gaol he was subject to 23 hour "lock downs". Although born in Britain he spent a considerable time in New Zealand. He saw active service during the First World War. His life long interest was in agriculture and he was himself a farmer in Sussex. He produced a booklet for the British Union of Fascists on the subject entitled "Land and the People". After the war, as a member of Oswald Mosley's post war Union Movement Agricultural Policy Council, he shared authorship with Robert Saunders and Robert Row in a similar booklet entitled "None Need Starve". His other books include "From the Ground Up" and "The Stuff Man's Made Of".

Post: #5

It's important to distinguish between conservation and renewable energy. Both get lumped together under the umbrella of 'sustainability' but are not particularly related.

Actual conservation of energy and resources is paramount to human civilization. Civilizations need to manage their surroundings if they are going to survive. Don't cut down all your trees like the Easter Islanders did back in the day, etc. No brainer.

Renewable energy and green industries are mostly a scam and won't save us from anything, including the need to conserve and manage our resources. The amount of energy and natural resources it takes to make an electric car battery, which will inevitably fail, is not recovered during its useful lifetime. Solar panels on individual homes are worthless due to limited sunlight and the high cost (in energy and resources) for limited benefit.

You can give everyone in America an electric car and it won't make a difference if the power plant is still burning coal.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.

Conservation and proper management of energy and resources is the only serious way to ensure sustainability.

Some good books on the topic are Collapse by Jared Diamond and Green Illusions by Ozzie Zehner

Post: #6

Can't coal be made more safe and clean but environmentalist block new technologies?

Post: #7

(11-26-2015 01:39 PM)kbell Wrote:  Can't coal be made more safe and clean but environmentalist block new technologies?

Shit, man, environmentalists block existing and simple technologies that would bring down the planet's temperature by a full degree (assuming global warming is correct, but let's leave that aside) in favour of taxing or stopping the use of carbon.

Post: #8

I said the same man, here:

/thread-29853-page-4.html

For people on this forum, apparently, caring for the environment is the same as being a SJW. I suspect this is a type of American 'black and white' thinking. I am more of the idea that rich, economically "right" thinking, people can be very left on nature etc. People on this forum do not seem to believe this.

Post: #9

Many conservatives, or reactionaries, reject both modern capitalism and socialism as antithetical to traditionalism. Small scale local production of food and local industry is something many on the right and left may agree on.

Many on the right and left can also agree on globalized mass production as well.

Really gives creedence to the idea that nationalism vs. globalism is more and more the conflict that matters nowadays.

Post: #10

Environmentalism, the worship of the earth, and the cult of sustainability have always been an inseparable part of progressive Year Zero ideology. Their conjunction is no accident, since both spring from the same source: a felt conviction of "meaninglessness" which leads to hatred of the human being, fear and hatred of the future, and above all of progress and growth. I wrote about the connection between them in this post (of which the below is an excerpt):

/thread-37629.html

(06-28-2014 04:00 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  It is not true, however, to say that progressives have replaced religion with the "worship of man" -- far from it. The progressive obsession with "equality" and with the protection of "the weak" and various "victim groups" stems from the feeling that in a world known to be "meaningless" all the way down the line, the pain and suffering experienced by the weak is adding insult to injury -- and that makes it the one thing that cannot be tolerated. Therefore, there is a sacred status accorded to groups in proportion to how far they are removed and shielded from the knowledge of "meaninglessness": thus the obsession with more primitive and "other" cultures that have not yet attained this terrible knowledge; the sacralization of women, children and animals, that are seen as always molested and tortured; and the most logical conclusion of all, the worship of Gaia and the "environment", of things that are entirely inanimate. And therefore too, the special hatred reserved for the white man as the creature that has become aware of "meaninglessness" yet continues to forge ahead with its unseemly and obscene "greed" and hunger for "growth", always adding insult to injury with its relentless forward drive even when it has been "understood" that it can have no possible point -- that all we can do in a "meaningless" world is to protect the "weak" from "torture" and give them the "justice" that is to be our sole consolation.

In other words, the progressives' obsession with supposed victim groups -- women, children, animals etc -- and the ostensible injustice done to them by man is of a piece with their obsession with the earth and the inanimate environment and the sins that we have committed against it by exploiting it for our purposes. And the culprit is always the same -- man, and particularly the white man, and his drive for growth and progress, all seen as forms of greed, rapacity and hubris that are the added insult to the injury of "meaninglessness" known all the way to the end.

******************************

As far as the supposed factual underpinnings of the cult of "sustainability", they have always been shown to be completely wrong and divorced from reality. One can have a simplistic idea that "resources" are "finite" and so we'll eventually run out; but in every specific case where this idea has been applied, its predictions of imminent depletion have always been proven utterly wrong. Our ability to extract and locate new resources -- or more of the old ones -- has always outstripped our rate of depletion of existing resources by so much as to make the latter a trivial correction, and render the whole notion of "sustainability" practically meaningless, little more than a cudgel to use against mankind's need for growth and progress. I wrote about that here:

/thread-47249...pid1015542

(05-06-2015 09:04 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

(05-06-2015 08:28 PM)Libertas Wrote:  This has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with present resource availability and rates of consumption. Resources are being depleted fast. Even many of the metals we routinely take for granted will peak in production by the middle of the century, and that isn't even factoring in future consumption, which should naturally grow.

This idea that "resources are depleting fast" has been around forever (since Malthus if not earlier) and it's always wrong. It's been proven wrong again and again and again and yet it keeps coming back like a bad penny.

Wasn't it just 7-8 years ago that "peak oil" was all the rage? Now you never hear about "peak oil", wonder why? Because in less than a decade new discovery and extraction technologies have rendered that idea obsolete. Even the experts now (unwillingly) acknowledge that there is apparently more oil (and gas) out there that we will ever know what to do with, and ever better technologies to exploit vast reservoirs that were previously considered "depleted". Oops.

People talk about the "hubris" of the human being, but what strikes me as the very definition of hubris is the bizarre idea that we can project the future 50 years ahead (let alone 100 years as another poster was saying) and make confident predictions about what "resources" will look like then. The world as it is now is utterly unrecognizable from a mere 20 years ago; no one could have possibly predicted the changes that have occurred, and the technological breakthroughs that were made. Yet we still cling to these dire Malthusian predictions, and it's worth asking why.

******************************

In short, the cult of "sustainability" and "conservation", when examined in an objective light, has as little factual and scientific basis as the "climate change" charade; both are equally devoid of real content. Rather, it is driven by an ideology of nihilism and its hatred of the human being, whose drive for progress and mastery of the material world is seen as particularly offensive in the face of "meaninglessness" known all the way to the end. That is why this cult is an inseparable part of the Year Zero progressive ideology that springs from the same metaphysical source.

And finally, to the extent "reactionary" ideologies of "folk and soil" also place a premium on the earth, its "conservation" and its preservation in some sort of pre-modern state, that is because these ideologies, and the progressive Year Zero ideologies that they seemingly stand in opposition to, are in fact two sides of the same coin.

Post: #11

Is this a serious question?

WIA

Post: #12

The left hijacked 'environmentalism' and I suppose ecological sustainability, to use your term because of it's anti capitalist undertones.

Environmentalism, like feminism and radical multi culturalism are sects, religious denominations, if you will of liberalism/marxism itself.

Specifically, environmentalism is a way for leftists to rail against the "evils" of corporate America. To rail against things like "big oil" and greedy capitalists who plunder and pollute the earth. The left also uses it in their anti-American messages. America, they say, is the biggest rapist and plunderer of the earth (not true, many many other countries have much lower or no environmental laws that they apply to their corporations. The USA has quite stringent ones )

Like most things with liberalism, it's a lie: The leftists aren't so much for a clean environment as they are for the downfall of capitalism, corporate America, big oil, et al. They despise the freedom of capitalism and a free capitalist economic system such as is present in the USA. They despise profit. It isn't fair.

So they use the veil of environmentalism, or "green" this or that to undermine it.

As Lizard of Oz mentions a few posts above, the whole global warming mantra is the holy grail of this whole leftist environmentalist movement. Of course, global warming is just theory and not proven. All of global warming's claims is based on computer models. Not actual temperatures, or verifiable science, but predictions based on computer models. It's quite laughable when you look at the actual science of it.

If it were up to them, the state would run and own everything. Of course, that would be much worse for the environment. Want proof? Look at how atrocious industries in former communist countries were for the environment. Horrible polluters.

Post: #13

Seems like I wasn't clear enough in my question. It's not about how the lefties hijacked environmentalism - it's about why us righties forfeited it.

Yes, I know, the leftists use environmentalism to further some of their ulterior goals. Rich leftists use it to make money, through "Big Green" industry. You're correct there. No argument.

But the only reason they had the opportunity to do this is because the right was MIA on the whole issue for half a century. The right has had nothing to say, despite the fact that environmental consciousness fits WAY more into a conservative worldview than it does in a liberal one.

Conservatism is about saying "Let's not mess with really complex systems we don't understand."

"Especially if those systems are really old and well-established."

Newsflash: The Earth's biosphere is really fucking complex, and really fucking old and well-established.

I find it nothing short of astonishing that the same people who decry the changing of the definition of marriage as "messing with nature" are the first ones to mess with actual nature. There is just something really "off" about complaining about how homos are converting children, while saying nothing about how real-estate developers are converting a 100,000 year-old forest into a parking lot.

And when you consider the fact that most SJW-ism and LGBT-ism flourish in cities, particularly in the asphalt/concrete cores of cities, far removed from forests... haven't you ever stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, the chronic disconnection from biological Nature experienced by city-dwellers might be a contributing factor in how city-dwellers have lost touch with sexual Nature?

Let me explain that again, more simply:

1. People don't live in nature anymore. They live in cities where everything around them is an object of human artifice.
2. City-dwellers have no "reference point" of nature to compare their lifestyles to
3. Their lifestyles become increasingly unnatural
4. They start becoming sexually and morally deviant
5. They don't realize they're deviant because there is nothing natural to compare their deviance with
6. Deviance continues unabated

Just look at where all the deviants live. Right in the middle of the biggest concrete jungles of NYC, LA, Chicago, London, etc. Places with no reference point of nature.

In a way, it might even be karma. Western civilization spearheads the process of converting nature into artifice. Western civilization then bears the brunt of the disintegration of natural sexuality. Decimate nature, have your own nature decimated. From a cosmic perspective, it looks like karmic justice.

I wish the defenders of traditional values would realize where their values come from. They come from God, of course, but God is mainly visible through nature. That's why all of the prophets and mystics go out into the forest or the mountaintop to commune with Him. When was the last time you heard of a sage receiving a divine revelation in the middle of a marketplace?

The less forests we have, the less places there will be to commune with the divine. That means less wisdom, less insight, and more SJW's, more homos, and more cutting down of forests, which leads to even less opportunity to connect with the divine, less wisdom, less insight... it's a vicious cycle.

The Right could have OWNED this issue.

Post: #14

Oh, and did I mention that the world's foremost defender of traditional society - Russia - just happens to have the world's biggest terrestrial forest? Is that just a coincidence?

Siberia is so fucking vast, it utterly dwarfs the Amazon or any other of the more talked-about forests.

The people who live in Siberia are obviously deeply connected with nature, living in the most vast forest on Earth. Does that perhaps have something to do with why they support traditional values, and keep electing Putin, who also supports traditional values?

Post: #15

I'm all for being green and I was actively trying to reduce my consumption back in the 90s way before it was in vogue to be green.

However, what the left are encouraging is taxing people like you and me while using Goldman Sachs as a market maker for some convoluted tax carbon credit system.

Much like healthcare what the left says is altruistic, when it's put into practice well. It leaves you and me much less power while the bleeding hearts in Scarsdale, Bel Air, and Chestnut Hill Ma will be pleased knowing they won't have extra competition from some little people like us.

Once you're rich, all of these "solutions" the left proposes becomes meaningless. You're ultimately not going to need to pay for it.

Post: #16

You don't seem to understand that "The Right" is a mix of people, all with different interests and concerns. The only thing that unifies the Right is hatred of the left. (The only thing that unifies the Left is hatred of the Right.)

The Koch Brothers are major forces on the right - and they're in the resource extraction business. They take things out of the earth and they don't care too much about what happens in the process.

Meanwhile, you have Hunters who are a part of the NRA. They could give two shits for a hippie, but if you destroy the wild they can't go shoot some deer.

Who has more power to decide what the policy of the right is?

WIA

(11-28-2015 02:53 AM)thegreenman Wrote:  Seems like I wasn't clear enough in my question. It's not about how the lefties hijacked environmentalism - it's about why us righties forfeited it.

Yes, I know, the leftists use environmentalism to further some of their ulterior goals. Rich leftists use it to make money, through "Big Green" industry. You're correct there. No argument.

But the only reason they had the opportunity to do this is because the right was MIA on the whole issue for half a century. The right has had nothing to say, despite the fact that environmental consciousness fits WAY more into a conservative worldview than it does in a liberal one.

Conservatism is about saying "Let's not mess with really complex systems we don't understand."

"Especially if those systems are really old and well-established."

Newsflash: The Earth's biosphere is really fucking complex, and really fucking old and well-established.

I find it nothing short of astonishing that the same people who decry the changing of the definition of marriage as "messing with nature" are the first ones to mess with actual nature. There is just something really "off" about complaining about how homos are converting children, while saying nothing about how real-estate developers are converting a 100,000 year-old forest into a parking lot.

And when you consider the fact that most SJW-ism and LGBT-ism flourish in cities, particularly in the asphalt/concrete cores of cities, far removed from forests... haven't you ever stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, the chronic disconnection from biological Nature experienced by city-dwellers might be a contributing factor in how city-dwellers have lost touch with sexual Nature?

Let me explain that again, more simply:

1. People don't live in nature anymore. They live in cities where everything around them is an object of human artifice.
2. City-dwellers have no "reference point" of nature to compare their lifestyles to
3. Their lifestyles become increasingly unnatural
4. They start becoming sexually and morally deviant
5. They don't realize they're deviant because there is nothing natural to compare their deviance with
6. Deviance continues unabated

Just look at where all the deviants live. Right in the middle of the biggest concrete jungles of NYC, LA, Chicago, London, etc. Places with no reference point of nature.

In a way, it might even be karma. Western civilization spearheads the process of converting nature into artifice. Western civilization then bears the brunt of the disintegration of natural sexuality. Decimate nature, have your own nature decimated. From a cosmic perspective, it looks like karmic justice.

I wish the defenders of traditional values would realize where their values come from. They come from God, of course, but God is mainly visible through nature. That's why all of the prophets and mystics go out into the forest or the mountaintop to commune with Him. When was the last time you heard of a sage receiving a divine revelation in the middle of a marketplace?

The less forests we have, the less places there will be to commune with the divine. That means less wisdom, less insight, and more SJW's, more homos, and more cutting down of forests, which leads to even less opportunity to connect with the divine, less wisdom, less insight... it's a vicious cycle.

The Right could have OWNED this issue.

Post: #17

The speaker is Slovenian at an early stage of his English speaking career. So bear with his thick Eastern European accent and bumpy English.




Zizek is an interesting thinker. He is not your typical leftist academics. I have been keeping track of his thought for a long time. We don't have to agree with all of his points to reflect upon and benefit from his insights.

Post: #18

Because when each side has a monopoly on separate, good ideas, then the populace cannot unite.

You want gun rights? Then no healthcare for you.

You want environmental sustainability? Then you better support Islam and open borders.

It's all bullshit to keep people signaling about what side they're on instead of actually trying to solve our problems as part of the same team.

Post: #19

In it's simplest form you can boil it down to this.

The Right promotes liberty and individual responsibility.

The Left promotes centralised governmental control.

For the Left the environment is a wonderful opportunity to demand centralised control on the grounds that without it the environment will be catastrophically wrecked.

It has nothing to do with the environment. It is simply a vehicle for the expansion of centralised government control.

Post: #20

(06-18-2016 10:34 PM)JacksonRev Wrote:  Because when each side has a monopoly on separate, good ideas, then the populace cannot unite.

You want gun rights? Then no healthcare for you.

You want environmental sustainability? Then you better support Islam and open borders.

It's all bullshit to keep people signaling about what side they're on instead of actually trying to solve our problems as part of the same team.

Well put, in the same vein as what I was saying here the other day:

/thread-48360...pid1326266

The powers that be want a divided populace. Where do we go from here

Post: #21

It doesn't make sense indeed that ecology is supposed a leftist issue and not the other way round. It's not a law of science. And it is true that there were (and are) some rightists who are very much pro-ecology.

But for some reason, the ecological movement got hijacked by radical feminists, homosexuals and freaks in general.

Post: #22

As of just a few years ago, support within the US environmental movement for mass immigration was lukewarm. In the Sierra Club, many outright lobbied against it, citing a lack of environmental ethos / culture of stewardship and casual attitudes towards habitat, overpopulation, polluting and pollution in Latin American immigrant cultures. It was shocking to hear aging hippies expressing such thoughtcrimes in public.

This wing was eventually shamed, drummed out and/or silenced.

As a current resident of Latin America, I can confirm that environmental ideas have not yet fully entered the general consciousness here, for both cultural and economic reasons. People here routinely throw fast food trash out of their car window, leave garbage in the street (out of laziness or to avoid paying $0.10 USD to the garbagemen), use toxic cleaning products and pay bribes to get their polluting old car to pass the emissions check, among other transgressions.

Post: #23

I love hearing the media in Oz warn us about all the ecological disasters that are current, like drought, pollution, top soil loss, global warming, energy needs, struggling infrastructure etc.

Then a minute later they are lobbying to import 250,000 humans to come and make it all worse.

Post: #24

(06-19-2016 01:44 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  It has nothing to do with the environment. It is simply a vehicle for the expansion of centralised government control.

I think this is the case.

There are a tremendous amount of goofball regulations the fishing business has to deal with.

I always wonder if those doing the regulation realize that the biggest companies in the biz want fish to be around forever.

Its as if there was no regulation the fishing companies would take all the fish from everywhere and then just close their doors.

The regulators are the short sighted ones.

Aloha!

Post: #25

Although I'm not so very fond of Rural living unless it's in small doses. Preserving forests and the bounty of nature in some format not so much for "saving the world", but as an artistic representation of the wonders of the world is a must.

Art to me is an expression of beauty applied.

Natural forests are beautiful.

The landscape of the Earth is awe inspiring.

I would prefer to keep it around.

Some of my most precious memories were in such landscapes around the world sitting underneath the stars as a little kid. I would prefer tax dollars to be used there, rather than on art grants to some dumb shit modern artist who wants to paint their body red as some example of "rebellion against mediocrity".

Fuck that noise.