This seems kind of unnecessary. They’ve been pretty reasonable and polite, and after a quick look at their post history I didn’t see any sign that this was asked in bad faith.

I get that anarchists probably get tired of answering questions, but it also seems like an important part of getting people who aren’t already 100% onboard to better understand anarchy?

It may be a lack of imagination on my part, but I had trouble understanding most of the answers they got too, so I guess I sympathize.

Eat off frisbees

Kind of. I’ll have to check out their shredder designs. I bought a filistruder for a local makerspace awhile back, because I wanted to be able to reuse my bad 3d prints and supports etc, but wanted it to be available to a wider community since I wouldn’t use it enough to justify the cost. Unfortunately, at the time, solutions for shredding/granulating solid prints were few and far between (and expensive to make or buy). And if you can’t get the plastic small enough, the extruder on its own isn’t terribly useful. I’d very much like to find a decent solution so I can get this going again.

And the ones from trigun

Ten years is a long time but I appreciate their ambition

The solarpunk genre in general might have some good stuff for you - my favorite so far is Murder in the Tool Library, but the Terraformers might be closer to what you’re looking for.

So I sometimes see the argument that humans are part of nature so anything we do is inherently natural when someone’s arguing that you should be able to do whatever you want and it’s all equivalent as long as it makes you happy. Like clearcutting forests and building walmarts or storing leaking barrels of chemical waste on your land is a human instinct and we’re helpless to do otherwise.

I’m not saying that’s what you believe, but I think this might be a chance for me to understand this worldview better, and maybe get better at talking to those folks.

To me, the fact that humans are part of nature doesn’t seem like a gotcha or an out. I think it’s a kind of pointless distinction. We’re part of nature, yes, but that doesn’t mean that producing Per- and Polyfluorinated Substances is natural, and even if you can slap the label ‘natural’ on it, that still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

We have a capability for reason and an ability to predict outcomes based on past evidence, which reaches way further out than those of other species. Environmentalists have gotten it wrong plenty of times before, but arguing that their efforts are equivalent to drilling for oil in a coral reef because they’re both human behaviors seems disingenuous to me.

Most of the time, what ecologists want is for society to stop changing the habitats that are already there. You say “they’re imposing their own vision of what they believe is natural” but I find it really hard to believe you think there’s no way to know if keeping a native forest is more ‘natural’ than building a shopping mall.

On top of that, most of what we’re doing as a species is incredibly new and we’re changing so much at once, everywhere. We’re completely erasing some habitats, rerouting rivers, introducing entirely new materials/chemicals, changing the weather - when beavers change their habitats, it’s still a fairly small local change, and the rest of the biosphere has had thousands of years to adapt and even use it, there are lots of other species ready to move into that changed environment. Maybe someday all the remaining species will be adapted to living in the margins around humanity. But we’re going to lose a ton of species (and likely a lot of humans to starvation) on the way there.

So I guess I have two questions: Do you believe other species (anything, plant, animals, insect etc) have any intrinsic value? Do other humans have intrinsic value?

If humans have intrinsic value and nonhumans don’t, what’s the difference?

So arguing that species of animals or plants have an intrinsic value and are worth preserving for their own sake is wrong? Or does it have to be couched in their value to humans, maintaining the biosphere that feeds us, air filtration, medicine, or aesthetic value or things like that? Does that apply to other people too? Intrinsic worth vs utility?

I don’t think I can agree that we can’t have any say about what is good for nature. A lot of people devote their whole lives to identifying systems and patterns in the species around us. They can track numbers, identify habitats, tell when something is thriving, declining, and, with some confidence, gone. Often they can identify why. All the fields of scientific study aside, it’s pretty easy at least to identify things we do that are bad for other species. If I buy hundreds of gallons of herbicide and douse some land with it, I don’t think the outcome to nature is going to be unknowable, and I think it’d be hard to argue it’ll be beneficial. Seems like the inverse must be true - we can identify crucial habitats and protect them, identify the characteristics of good habitats and cultivate them on damaged lands to bring them back. This is testable stuff that’s already being done in real life. People devote their lives to conserving habitats.

Sorry if I’m getting side tracked because this is something I’m somewhat involved in. Maybe this is a specific point about a nuance of philosophical discussions I don’t know enough about, and not an argument that humans can do whatever they want to their surroundings because the consequences are somehow unknowable or unimportant.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding - we could wipe out species until there’s nothing left but that bacteria that eats radiation and still reassure ourselves that ‘nature’ still exists. But I don’t think it’s what these folks are talking about when they talk about ecology. Is it fallacious to argue for a society that coexists with the biosphere that supports it?

I never really get this argument - like, yeah life that isn’t humans will 100% persist in some form, but I’m kind of attached to the species and configuration of ecosystems we currently have.

Yeah I read your post and understood you weren’t from the US. But fair enough.

Then I guess just rest assured that trump did a bunch of bonus harm to Americans and the environment, in addition to our standard wars and coups.

There’s absolutely always room to make things worse. I guess with where I am right now , mentally, I can’t understand not wanting to reduce harm.

Had trump lost in 2016 we wouldn’t have gotten multiple new conservative Supreme Court justices. But we did and they immediately stripped women’s rights back decades. We’re already seeing tragic outcomes of that. And because they’re lifetime appointments of relatively young zealots, now we get to see what else they can do in the next few critical decades.

Biden also wouldn’t have shut down or defunded multiple regulatory agencies, or sold off federal land to corporations.

Like, I get that things could be a lot better in so many ways, that’s why I’m here. But we don’t have to go out of our way to make them even worse.