I think the elephant in the room here is that when you argue against progress, you argue for the same irrational and dangerous establishment approach that has historically painted us into so many corners with unsustainable modernity, global destruction of our biosphere, and repeated breathless adoption of dangerous environmental exposure to consumers (or just people living their lives nearby) of myriad harms and evitable risks in the pursuit of blind irrational profit.
What do you seriously propose be done today about human overpopulation, destruction of natural habitat, global climate change, human malaise from high-margin markets of malnutrition and junk diets. Don’t you get tired of seeing the same harmful mistakes and hubris repeat endlessly, the uninspired beating of dead horses in the irrational hope and magical thinking that, somehow, this time, it won’t all go wrong? How do you advocate for the overdue progress we’re all owed while attacking everything that doesn’t reinforce establishment status quo? Are you down with regulatory capture and electoral corruption? Should the atmosphere and our waterways be open sewers? Should our populations be experimental targets for high-fructose diets grown on sterile soil with as many chemicals as sufficient to make unnatural agriculture viable just one more season, even as the herbicide-resistant weeds close in and the honeybees die off?
I just don’t know why you seem to be so dead set against any alternative to the madness that will likely wipe out civilization as we know it from the face of this planet it within a century or two if left to continue in its ways. I feel as if your attitude only gives moral support to the bad guys, even if you feel you’re striking back for rationality and skepticism, strategically, you’re standing with the guys who just don’t believe in applying science objectively when it conflicts with profits, don’t want to see progress for mankind if it makes mankind shrewd to their scams and able to take a dim view of the magical thinking that moves contrary to life and biology itself. But hey, the next quarter should be profitable, at least! Never mind the smoke and fires, diminished potentials, and shortened lives. At least somebody’s making a killing?
It’s not enough to wait for incontrovertible evidence of harm when entire markets and lines of business are sustained only by ensuring that the ‘science’ is pointedly looking the other way where such harm exists. That’s why our global atmospheric CO2 is now over 400 PPM, that’s why our water is choked with secondhand pharmaceuticals and heavy metals, and why, over these past two decades, the volume of applied toxic chemicals to agricultural crops and soils forms upward asymptotic lines. It’s demagoguery to argue “there’s no problem here, move along, citizen.”
I’m trying to cage some of this with “I feel” or “it seems,” because I don’t comprehend your purpose, nor the purpose of any skeptic who argues energetically against the only people whose priorities seem straight and justifiable on basic existential issues of our day, but I feel as if it’s a disservice to mock them, and it energizes me to respond again and again, here. If they’re wrong, don’t tear them down when their hearts are in the right place. Instead, displace their environmental health and safety arguments with your own stronger ones, demonstrate what is right where they are wrong.
Environmental safety nihilism won’t save the planet or prevent harm and destruction. It simply clears a path for the same wrongfulness that knocked our world out of balance to continue doing what it does best: debasing the destiny of everyone and everything worthwhile in this fragile shared world. People need to stop shitting in the punchbowl of life.
