Is life hard? | IMDB v2.1

Is life hard? Jan 24, 2018 16:44:53 GMT

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Post by rachelcarson1953 on Jan 24, 2018 16:44:53 GMT

Jan 24, 2018 0:43:50 GMT @miccee said:

Jan 23, 2018 6:05:04 GMT rachelcarson1953 said:

I am very sensitive to the beauty of the world and very conscious of the increasing negative effect that human life has on the beauty of the world.

Back in the seventies, I wanted to move out of the suburbs that I had been raised in. My father had grown up on that piece of land when it was still farmland. By the seventies it was a long-established suburb that had sprung up in the fifties. I wanted to live in the country, with my horse in a pasture behind my house. So I moved miles out of the city to find that.

But over the years, the human developments have diminished that countryside that I loved. Many a natural pasture or woodland has been made into a housing development. Country roads have become six lane highways. Family farms are becoming a thing of the past. Nature is shrinking.

I chose an area that hasn't developed that much, but if people continue to reproduce at the rate they are going, soon there won't be any natural areas left. There won't be any beauty in nature left. If people stop having children, with zero population growth and perhaps a loss of population as a goal, the world could be sustained, and have less suffering for the sentient life already here. As sentient life diminished, living beings might have a better quality if life, and when sentient life ceased, unborn lives would never miss what they never had.

I don't feel any sadness that my unconceived children never got to ride my horse or see the changing colors of the leaves. I do feel glad that they didn't have to experience the dysfunction that runs in my family, a source of suffering for me even now. I also didn't genetically pass on the gene for cancer; my treatment for that was a terrible, miserable ordeal. I got an extended life as a result of the treatment, but made sure no child of mine would have to suffer that way.

It just seems to me that a shrinking population would lessen suffering.

Here in Scotland, our uplands are almost all dreary, barren and treeless because humans cut down all the trees, whereas at one time, long, long ago, the whole of Scotland would have been thickly forested. And in Britain as a whole, you almost never see butterflies any more and there is significantly reduced biodiversity compared to what existed prior to maybe the 1960s. So in every way, the human effect is writ large across our entire landscape. We have a population of 65 million + filling a land area the size of Oregon, so the effect is much worse than even what you're used to. Hardly any ancient woodlands left anywhere in Britain.

I suppose that it could also be said that humans have been beneficial in the sense that there are now a great deal fewer animals around to experience lives fiilled with the brutal horrors of nature, and in that sense our continued presence helps to further antinatalism because we can't seem to help but kill off other species just by being here.

If people stopped having children, there would be suffering associated with that, and of course, there would be nobody to look after the elderly. But then the cycle of harm and imposition would be contained just within the pool of people already alive, rather than being perpetuated eternally.

I am so sad to hear about the trees in Scotland, mic. Something similar happened to the woodlands along our eastern seaboard, and the Appalachian Trail. Several species were harvested to extinction. Trees have been replanted, but the habitat has changed forever.

Though my property is a registered Monarch butterfly waystation, with milkweed purposely grown and maintained for their migration, I see fewer every year. It's been five years since I saw a Monarch emerge from a chrysalis - a magic moment - and it worries me deeply.