Specifically billionaires/unchecked capitalists
The easy scapegoat oversimplifies the problem, which goes beyond & predates capitalism. Though exterminating all of humanity is one way to achieve sustainability, it doesn’t necessarily require it. So far, however, humanity has reached living standards beyond subsistence only by consuming resources at unsustainable levels faster than the planet can replenish, and that has been true regardless of economic system. Even when living at subsistence levels, humanity has likely caused mass extinction events.
From a comment to a similar post
People here tend to fixate on their pet theories that scapegoat capitalism for everything including that humanity’s drain on ecological resources exceeds Earth’s rate of regeneration without acknowledging that their alternatives don’t address the problem, either.
Although governments are far more able than individuals and firms acting singly to take action to protect the environment, they often fail to do so. The centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, where governments controlled production, had a particularly poor record on pollution control. Per capita mortality from air pollution in Eastern Europe (outside the EU) and China remains high relative to the EU and North America.
In particular, the Soviet economy—with constitutional guarantees to continuously improve living standards & steadily grow productive forces—caused disproportionately worse ecological damage than the US’s. All economic systems have the same capacity to degrade the environment & deplete stocks of natural resources. Without adequate policies to protect the environment, improving & maintaining living standards with the continuous economic growth necessary to do that threatens the environment.
Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning
may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats
More recently, they killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.
Until humanity starts living sustainably, they are the problem.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There were fewer humans a century ago. and there were no human caused ecological crisis back then.
it isn’t the number of people really, but the exploitative economic system they use.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No human caused ecological crises during the height of industrialization? Sure bud.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
sorry. I’ll take all the responsibility of forgetting the “/s”.
thought it was clearly sarcasm, because duh.
carry on.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sarcasm is dead and .ml killed it.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Ha ha you got me in the first half there
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There were also infinitely fewer people concerned about humans’ ecological impact and no effective way to change that. Now we have millions and millions of people all over the world worried about it and we are all interconnected via the internet. We caused a mass extinction with a million of us in disparate tribes, just imagine what we could accomplish if all 8 billion of us actually worked together toward changing the world for the better! Unfortunately we’re still stuck in stupid tribes, and the most powerful tribe that controls every aspect of life in every other tribe is obsessed with destroying the Earth at a never-ending, ever-increasing pace. Here in America, our ruling class is literally trying to bring about the apocalypse. But naw, getting rid of them couldn’t possibly lead to any kind of benefit, we better get let them burn it all down in the name of line-go-up 🙄🙄🙄