Ireland has the climate to support the entire island covered in Atlantic rain-forests. People already agree Ireland is a pretty country, can you imagine how glorious it would be to have rolling hills covered in trees.

As for central Europe, yes they need to reforest their own countries before they go flying all around the world screaming about the Amazon, while drinking the finest champagne.

In China, the one child policy, for better or worse, was instituted to ensure that gains from industrialization were not eaten up immediately, leaving no surplus for quality of life and reinvestment.

malthus had a point but it is not destiny and the real world reflects that. his was an avoidable trap

now if we can gain control over capitalism we can save the earth

Human population growth is not exponential. That’s so obvious that it’s hard to take anything about this argument seriously.

Biology isn’t a good proxy for society-scale economic changes.

That'll only be feasible for so long, since birth rates are dropping pretty much everywhere.

You mean the nuclear waste that we banned companies from using as nuclear fuel for modern reactors? I think you will find that regulation actually stopped us from solving this problem.

> It's not working for corals either.

Imagine if we had much more nuclear power so we didn't produce enormous amounts of CO2! The corals would be in a much better position.

The "environmental movement" has been an anti-nuclear power movement that doesn't care about the environment since the beginning sadly. They've managed to harm the environment more than all nuclear accidents by several orders of magnitude.

- when we have an estimate of how many hundreds of billions it costs to rebuild after a hurricane that would not have happened but for climate change, existing economic processes generate that number

- when insurers raise rates throughout a region, this reflects an expectation on the cost of damage, and the change over time reflects the increase in risk we've created

- when a heatwave kills a bunch of people, we already have a range of ways of estimating a monetary value for those lives from insurance, healthcare and liability litigation.

Further ... suppose your elderly relative left you a bunch of jewelry. You don't know how much it's worth and getting it appraised can actually be a bit complicated and doesn't give you complete certainty over value. But it would be _bonkers_ to continually take unappraised jewelry out into the marketplace, liquidate it, and pretend that the whole sales price was _earnings_. After the transaction, you don't have a thing you had before. You didn't know what it was worth initially but that doesn't mean that it was worthless, and you probably got scammed. Yes, measuring the full environmental impact of all our industries is hard, but pretending it's 0 is silly.

You'd have to price the conversion of it to that management strategy.

They’re measuring money generated for shareholders, they’re measuring tax base.

Total productivity of the world is number_of_people * productivity_of_human. There's growth whenever these terms grow. People want to produce at least as much as they want to consume. So, growth is caused by more people being born, or people adopting more efficient methods of production, up to a limit where their all needs are met.

But, after observing society over the last few years, I've come to think that people who _whine_ about virtue signaling are so full of vice that they cannot possibly believe someone _else_ isn't also as base as they are.

Its all such a shame. It seems like society has no ability to have reasonable, sensible conversation. I really wonder how the enlightenment even _happened_.

I agree, you're absolutely right.

I'm just kind of old, tired, grumpy and sad about the state of the world and my low capacity to influence the general direction or even small local things.

they will go down in history as the worst generation in modern history, 100% certain of that.

I didn't write that to shame anyone. I happen to like my life in the city with all the negatives.

But sometimes I think about this - is all this 'comfort' worth the destruction of nature ?

There are so many things to consider. It's a fascinating topic. For example, if you give up access to restaurants in order to live simply, how does that impact your approach to food in general?

How about losing access to a hospital? What changes do you make to prepare for, or respond to, health crises?

The questions I ask above are from one direction, and only a sample. I think they're demonstrative of the kind of wide context a decision like this has, though.

In reality, the laser-leveled, fully-automated, county-scale factory farm is the only reason anyone on this forum has ever experienced the phenomenon known as "free time".

Yeah, there are more places to enjoy yourself and have fun, more entertainment.

I'm passionate about going out to clubs, electronic music events, concerts, restaurants, flying around on a plane or driving my car on the endless roads.

All of this is great, but according to TFA and my own experience, we're absolutely shitting on the natural world to have our nice drink or exotic food which will be gone from our system in 12h.

We've 'borrowed' from the future generations to have our fun and I'm not sure it's all worth the price.

There are birds in cities too, and they are annoying, but they are thankfully drowned out by the cars.

I think that's apples to oranges. If we didn't have cities, we also wouldn't have eight billion people in the world.

A better question for the parent is how do you enforce that vision of everyone living on their 20 acres in harmony with nature? This is not something that capitalism or some other -ism does to us. Your neighbor will have children, these children will have children, and before long, you have a settlement of 50 people on these 20 acres, most certainly no longer living in harmony with nature. At that point, they must build infrastructure. That infrastructure may be feasible to build if they pool their resources with the neighbors. Boom, you have a village, then a town, then a city.

So what's the solution here? Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children? What's the anti-growth strategy we're actually advocating for?

The city I live in, this can be 20 different variations on onions and garlic, and cabbage passes as salad.

Albeit I feel like OP was right on something else: his grandparents weren't heavy consumers, but that transcends city vs rural debates.

I see us modern people, except very old folks being extremely heavy consumers.

Sometime I pay attention to my friends and relatives and how much do they consume.

E.g. I spent 5 days with my mother in December at my grandmas and I've noticed that she just bought stuff non-stop, but her metric is money, not "stuff".

So, e.g., she bought a new pillow for my grandma even though my grandma didn't need/want one (she doesn't use it), bought plenty of plastic toys for her own dog, bought a set of new dishes just because the old ones were old, changed her worn phone leather case for a new one, bought plenty of Christmas lights because she didn't want to dig for the old ones she couldn't quickly find, bought some kind of table hook for purses for herself and her friends, etc, etc.

At the end of the week she didn't even spend 250 euros (her metric), so she doesn't realizes, yet, the amount of borderline useless stuff she bought was major and her ecological impact quite huge, especially for how little to none the payoff or utility is.

I had colleagues in my office, back when I was in the office, that just had Amazon packages coming every single day...And here's a smartphone holder, here's some gadget that keeps your mouse cord, here's a yet a new pedal for the drums, here's a set of pens, here's a rubber duck to talk to when debugging, etc, etc.

I mean, I have even a difficult time pointing out that there's something wrong with any of those items per se in isolation, but when it's a lifestyle of non-stop consistent consumerism I think the trend is worrying.

There's so many things that are so cheap nowadays that it's hard to say "why not?", yet they feed into this endless life style that's toxic for the planet but feeds this neverending more more and more.

But there was something that happened later:

> For those countries with long-run data in this chart, we can see three distinct periods: From 1870 to 1913 there was a relatively slow decline; then from 1913 to 1938 the decline in hours steepened in the midst of the powerful sociopolitical, technological, and economic changes that took shape with World War I, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II; and then after an uptick in hours during and just after World War II, the decline in hours continued for many countries, albeit at a slower pace and with large differences between countries.

The god knows what “sociopolitical changes” could have been about.

2 of these aren't bad things.

1 is a complete non-sequitur

1 is a good recipe for staying active/healthy and non-obese if done in moderation. Farming equipment is an option - you don't have to till 2-3 acres just by hand.

The one thing you neglected to mention (that is a pretty important blocker) is that with farming/country-side living it's pretty hard to leave your kids a legacy outside of leaving them the farm itself, and locking them into the same lifestyle.

Also, hugely increased risks in the 21st century due to global warming.

But this comfort has a price, described in the article. It's huge. It's also not static, it's growing and accelerating. Our children will have to pay these bills in one way or another.

What I do with my life (or you with yours) has zero consequence on this, the process can't be stopped. But it will one day, because math.

Revealed preference wins all the time.

See also the massive rural to urban migration in literally every country since 18th century Britain to present day Asia.

Cheap land is cheap for a reason, even in the middle of nowhere. We aren't in the old days of homesteading. Good chance that cheap land has no utility access and it will cost 10s of thousands to bring it in. Another really good chance you don't own the rights to the water beneath it, and spending $30k+ to dig a well that may not even hit a viable aquifer. The land could be cheap because its rocky, acidic, or maybe its prone to flooding.

What OP is also probably missing is that it's extremely difficult to grow enough calories to sustain a human life for a year. Most "homesteaders" actually still buy most of their calories at the store. Fine so long as your new farm (assuming you even can farm on the cheap land) can turn a profit for you, but now you've just traded one rat race for another.

Point being, the rat race is survival, and there is no escaping it. Happiness has to come from within, moving to the middle of nowhere and starting a farm isn't going to magically make your life better. It will probably actually make it worse.

So many people, potentially desparate people, concentrated in one place, utterly dependent on supplies being shipped in from elsewhere.

And we can't have everyone living ever-smaller lives in ever-more-dense cities anyway, as you need all the food production, manufacturing, energy production, and resource extraction to keep those cities alive. And for now, that still requires a lot of human labour (far too much of it overseas, given increasing geopolitical instability)

The stop isn't made at the species level, but at the intelligence gap. The gap between Tao and a random uneducated, malnourished human is nothing compared to that between the latter and any other animal known to science, or of course to the stones and flame occupying the rest of space.