Humans no longer seeing themselves as the pawns of nature is nothing to be proud of. We still depend on nature, nothing have changed, only this dependence is now obfuscated. There is a buffer between us and nature, which makes us utterly blind to the consequences of our actions. We are not living in the best of times, we are living the biggest lie ever. Our way of life is utterly unsustainable, and by our way of life I mean us the upper 10% that gets to reap 90% of the benefits.
Robyn E. Blumner did not choose optimism, she choose ignorance, because she is among the priviledged few who can be freely ignorant. Optimism is not a choice in any case. We are biologically inclined to be optimistic, even when we are fatalistic, in which case we are optimistic about a negative outcome. This is a cognitive limitation, not something to be proud of.
Society decided we wanted good things and we took action to get those things.
I am against poverty and not having things such as electricity and clean tap water, abundant food, education, hospital care, sewage treatment and proper waste disposal. I like these things, they are good.
You would be surprised at how sustainable things are by sheer hard work and will. In other words, we get what we cause.
The alternative to these things is worse. To be sustainable (no or renewable electricity, sparse population, no cars, no factories, no meat, land used for growing food) you need to remove the things society wants by sheer will. And I don't think you'll sell anybody on that.
In other words, telling people that they need to give up good things is not enough.
That’s a false dichotomy; we can have all these things without burning down rainforests at a furious pace and filling the oceans with plastic, etc. These things are done out of laziness and carelessness.
I don't think it's false but it might be a dichotomy.
The good things we enjoy are destructive and have externalities.
To offer a solution, if the people who do bad things such as not dispose waste properly or want to cut down rainforests for profit, we need to solve the incentives behind those decisions. Such as universal basic income. Or lowering crime.
Unfortunately poverty is the baseline. In other words you need to expend resources to get resources. I said in my comment things are sustainable by sheer will.
To implement sustainability we need to invest profound amounts of resources and do extreme amounts of work by sheer will to solve the problem. We also need the right people working on these problems. The smartest people from my simple perspective are working on the wrong problems. What we have is an improper allocation of limited resources.
No solution is worse than a flawed solution. There are many ways to make progress that aren’t being tried, like using tax code to dissuade Americans from buying SUVs, but those are the only American made cars people buy so there is no action.
Very "when humans act like gids, the Earth & it's species suffer". Which has been shown again & again & again, no argument there.
Still, I choose optimism too. We have collectively become the stewards of spaceship earth, and nature does have a more minor part from here on out (for a while); anthropocene era is here. It's just a fact. I forget the quote, please help someome, but 'we are all gods now and it's about time we start acting like it', or something to that effect.
It's not just being free from being a pawn of nature is a silly idea, you don't go far enough. Anything that's not built on nature is temporary and is going to fall apart at some point. The people who blind themselves to that fact, are going to have a bad time. Whether you quote the bible or physics to support the fact, the outcome is the same.
Robyn E. Blumner did not choose optimism, she choose ignorance, because she is among the priviledged few who can be freely ignorant. Optimism is not a choice in any case. We are biologically inclined to be optimistic, even when we are fatalistic, in which case we are optimistic about a negative outcome. This is a cognitive limitation, not something to be proud of.