The original post: /r/television by /u/Carol_Sturka on 2025-12-06 17:54:28+00:00.
I work in horticulture, like my family has for 3 generations, and last episode was the straw on that broke the camel’s back for me. It simply doesn’t make sense, to the point that it makes me angry because if they only talked to any consultant they would have found it stupid. At this point the only explanation would be a sort of instinct brought by the virus that would make the hive mind unreasonable.
Firstly, picking up fruits from trees doesn’t harm them if you do it correctly, if they don’t want to use machines then they can simply have human bodies carefully pickign them up one by one like we used to centuries ago. Secondly trees will suffer more from being destructed by brutal plucking, scatching and insects that will swarm them quickly and massively without human populations in the area. Thirdly letting the fruits rot on a tree raises the risk of fungal dicease for the ree. At last, most leguminous species are annual, they are very nutrishing (lentils, soy, peanuts, beans, etc…), picking up the fruits from them as they die doesn’t harm them at all (they are programmed to fall into the ground for the seeds to sprouts 6 month later) and it enables to perpetuate the species by ensuring the germinations.
Philosophically, this concept doesn’t make any sense neither because firstly if you don’t want to harm any organism you can’t even eat the nutrient paste since it contains micro organisms, and you can’t sterilize it neither because it would kill bacterias, secondly many of those currently existing species exist just to feed us, animals and vegetables alike, by letting them get massacred in the wild or even go extinct you are letting more violence happens than if you had done something. Non violence in buddhism is not being passive to the suffering of the world, but to bear it, which is why in times of war, monks would have rather killed their enemy than let their enemy kill a thousand innocents.