Dear Reader,
The idealization, romanticization and anthropomorphisation of nature have grown over the last 5 decades. It is clearly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and has now become a moral issue. Humans are seen as destroying ‘the planet’ and if you disagree you’re a bad person.
‘Save the planet’ is a vague, meaningless statement, anthropomorphizing a sphere of life, rock, and water, giving it feelings as if it is an entity. Incidentally, and ironically, the only species that cares about other species and ‘the planet’ is the human species.
'The environment’ is a vague and meaningless concept, anthropomorphising this place that we find ourselves living in. The environment extends all the way to the end of the universe after all. The earth doesn’t care for living things and doesn’t protect or nurture anything. In all of nature, humans are the only entities which protect and care for anything other than the very young.
People have created a haven out of an inhospitable sphere. We live in comfort, and provide comfort to the animals and plants we love, by transforming our environment to suit our needs. Without this transformation, the human species cannot survive.
We do not extract resources from the Earth: a resource is only a resource with the right knowledge. Silicon existed for thousands of years before we realized we could use it to transform the world. As long as we keep solving problems and growing our knowledge we will never run out of resources.
The only way we will run out of resources is if we live in the environmentalist’s fantasy: in a hut made out of banana leaves, by the light of the stars, while wild animals occupy larger and larger tracts of land till humans are reduced to pre-Neanderthal population levels. That is the extent of humanity with which they are comfortable: Pristine air, crystal clear waters, 80 per cent child mortality rate.
Living in the wild, at the mercy of it’s lawless, immoral, cruel brutality.
Speaking of living in the wild: Jane ‘Thanos-Malthus’ Goodall has been idolized because she went and spent some years with a bunch of monkeys. It is clear from all she has said since that she actually prefers chimpanzees to humans. (Why didn’t she stay there? Maybe she needed medical attention or she was tired of eating termites? Who knows.) Anyway, there’s an interview where she says the world would be better off if all the people who had existed for the last 500 years hadn’t existed at all:
It’s true, she’s not advocating genocide. But look at what she’s saying: every human who lived in the last 500 years, their families, their children, their hopes, their little joys, their achievements, entire communities - all these are meaningless and would rather have never existed because she’s worried about some species of moss in the rainforest going extinct because the AQI is unsuitable for its growth? Or some rare species of tree that is being cut by farmers who want to make a living by planting crops, or some animal that is going extinct because its habitat is too close to expanding human settlements?
And what she’s actually saying if we didn’t exist - you, your parents or children, your best friend, your doctor, the uncle you say hi to in the park every morning, the neighbour’s 4-year-old son who smiles shyly at you and hides behind his proud parent’s legs, the elderly couple down the street who walk to the temple every morning at 5 a.m. and talk to you as if you were their own child, the young woman who climbed to the top of her company despite all the challenges and is now CEO, the intense jogger, the lonely artist who keeps to himself, the young family who just moved in next door and were excited about buying their daughter a new cycle, the troubled, dishevelled young man who is trying to better his life by doing yoga every morning and quitting smoking - the planet would have far fewer problems and would be better off. This is monstrous. This is anti-human. This is wanting a world which has so few humans that we have zero impact on the environment. And even these few must live with zero waste, zero energy consumption, zero footprint - they should live like animals, like her beloved chimpanzees.
And what problems would this world not have if we didn’t exist?
Species extinction? But even without human intervention, 99.99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. We are the only species that cares about other species. Or the environment. Or the planet.
Pollution? The only reason this is a problem is because it affects people and the things that people care for. To solve this problem we need to come up with solutions, not throttle and control human activity. Technologies that clean the air are the way to go: not banning diesel cars. Because:
Global warming? Again, we can solve global warming using technology not banning and throttling existing technologies, especially technologies such as cheap transportation and cheap energy that the poor depend on.
Clearly, this can only be the worldview of someone who hates people. And not individual people - I’m sure she has loved ones who are human - but people as a whole. She genuinely does not see value in people. So to answer the question ‘Is Jane Goodall evil?’ - No. She’s not evil. Just ignorant. Ignorant about how amazing people can be, ignorant about the range and scale of problems we can solve, ignorant about knowledge and what makes us unique, ignorant about our capacity to solve any problem, ignorant about creativity, ignorant about epistemology, ignorant about physics, ignorant about evolution and its mindless cruelty. In her ignorant mind - ‘people bad, nature good. Less people, more nature, good.’ Maybe this is what the chimps taught her.
Her worldview combines the naturalistic fallacy - all that is natural is good - with the fixed-pie fallacy - there is a fixed amount of wealth and resources that we must distribute.
But the opposite is true. People are the solution. Every human being has the capacity to create wealth, to preserve what they care about, and to find solutions to problems which affect them. ‘Overpopulation’ is a Malthusian, anti-human, barbaric concept that implies a perverse and dangerous hatred of the lives of people. If Jane Goodall is so concerned with over-population why doesn’t she start by taking herself and all her loved one’s off this planet? But no. Other people are the problem. Not esteemed UN Messengers of Peace of course. They are the important ones, telling all of us how unimportant we are.
This kind of worldview leads to anti-humanism, self-hate, guilt, and stultifying pessimism among people, authoritarian economic policies that shrink wealth, and authoritarianism in general (‘people are bad so we must control them’).
To counter this rotten pessimism remember three things:
People are amazing.
All problems are soluble, given the right knowledge.
Culture > Nature
Proceed from here and you will come across greener pastures, much greener than anything Jane Goodall has ever imagined with her tiny set of sad ideas.
Let’s not saw off the branch one is sitting.
There are millions and millions of species on this planet earth. Many end up competing for the same resources. There are different types of relationships such as mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, competition etc.
What the clown fish have with sea anemone is a mutualistic relationship. Both species benefits, the clown fish has evolved over the period to thrive the toxins produced by the nematocysts of sea anemone.
Every organism on this earth is evolving including the human being. The spectrum of this evolution is quite evident in the human population. Some carry those animalistic characteristics still with them while some have evolved to epitomize the human qualities. Every link in this evolution is important it’s not one is better than the other.
Sometimes it’s good to come out of the ivory thrones to the jungles with other creatures. To break the patterns of a ‘machine’ man to evolve to the human being in all aspects.
Yep.