What do you mean? Communists didn’t mine minerals and didn’t exploit indigenous people? Lol…
That’s right. For example, Australian communists lived in balance with nature for 60,000 years. Then capitalists came and started breaking stuff.
Aboriginal Elders have told us we are a reflection of the Country: if the land is sick, so are we. If the land is healthy (or punyu), so are we. Wik First Nations scholar Tyson Yunkaporta says our collective wellbeing can only be sustained through a life of communication with a sentient landscape and all things on it.
You wanna go tell Tyson he’s being racist against his own people?
I guess those megafauna who vanished about 59,500 years ago were really messing with the balance.
https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2020/may/mysteries-of-megafauna-extinction-unlocked
the team found that extreme environmental change was the most likely cause of extinction, not humans.
Regardless of megafaunata, just by being in Australia, humans became an invasive species and did all sorts of damage that invasive species do.
Worse, indigenous Australians brought the dingo with them. Two very intelligent predators where two didn’t exist before did a lot of damage. Colonizing Europeans also did a lot of damage and nothing that the indigenous people in Australia did justifies what Europeans (basically just the British, let’s be fair) did, but pretending that indigenous humans aren’t as flawed as all other humans does them a disservice. It does not help indigenous people to put them up on pedestals and treat them as noble savages.
I dont get it either. This is not about capitalism, this is about human nature of mindless expansion and exploitation…
It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
Difference being the colonists of our world left perfectly habitable areas. In avatar the earth isn’t habitable to most and so the colonists are actually kind of sympathetic. The real bad guys never have to leave earth but because it’s Cameron it falls on the poors to play the bad guys
Does this imply communism wouldn’t extract resources?
That’s what I was wondering. Capitalists didn’t invent exploitation of nature, it just so happened that its worldwide adoption coincided with unprecedented technological advances. There’s quite a few examples of historical societies that exploited nature as much as they could and suffered for it.
Businesses under capitalism aren’t required to pay for the externalities of their decisions. In a democratic economy, the people affected by corporate decisions would have a say in those decisions. It’s reasonable to assume that people want to breathe clean air and continue to have food and water, so they’d support policies that do that.
Sure, but none of the economies we actually have (or recently had) work like that.
I’m torn, because there’s an idea that industrial capital only knows how to consume and destroy what it touches. And there’s ample evidence to that effect.
But there’s this other more naive notion that life never changes, species don’t compete for habitat, and doing anything to alter the local ecology is this unforgivable sin. This, despite the fact that everything in the area is itself a product of eons of speciation and evolution and carnivorization.
The impulse to preserve has to be balanced with the expectation for change. The goal should be symbiosis, not stasis.
The issue is that you’re changing the ecosystems and environments so much that all those eons of evolution are simply lost. The only other times this happens is during natural catastrophes. Sure, in the long run this allows new life forms to take the old ones places, but it’s still a massive loss of diversity and evolutionary knowledge - and unnecessary suffering for millions of living beings.
When species compete for a habitat, they rarely destroy it - and those species that do either don’t survive for long, or they wipe out large swaths. We’re actively killing almost anything in our habitats, and destroying them for almost all previous species.