this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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'Balance' is a human concept. The planet will get by fine. The only relevant question is whether humans will.
Balance is absolutely not a human concept.
'Balance' in the meaning you intend is absolutely a human concept. Life doesn't give a F about 'balance', it just adjusts to the current situation. Conditions change? A few species here and there go extinct, and new ones appear to fill the space. It's humans who have come up with the concept of 'balance'. And we're not wrong! If we want to avoid going extinct, we need to not throw the environment totally out of whack like it's going right now. But if we mess it up? 'Balance' goes out the window, humanity goes extinct, and life on Earth goes on without us. 'Balance' matters to nobody but humans.
you speak with the confident wrongness of someone who has no scientific understanding of natural cycles, equilibriiums, self-limiting reproductive rates, ecology, or biology. have you heard of chemistry? equilibriums?
you are confusing a linguistic object , the word "balance" (like from an Oxford dictionary) with empirically observable, falsifiable hypotheses which are well established in environmental science. humans are late arrivals to the millennia of life systems on earth, and the first thing they did was begin destroying balanced ecosystems to grow surplus foods, exert population pressures on other species, reshape rivers and lakes, clearcut forests, and general terraform the shit out of everything, other creatures be damned.
your comment suggests a stunningly anthropocentric hubris and a total ignorance to eons of geological time preceding homo sapiens which humans came along and completely fucked by rapidly terra forming the planet. go tell a black rhino or a dodo that only humans care about balance.
humans cause imbalance in nature, it's literally our whole thing we do. transform the environment by whatever means possible, dominate other life forms to extinction if we feel like it, overcome natural limits or push others to extreme boundaries.
You're both using different definitions of that word. But also, you're anthropomorphizing the biosphere, which seems to be what the other person is mainly talking about. Yeah, it obviously is affected by human activity, but to say that it "cares" doesn't make sense for an idea like the entire biosphere.
Great, you missed my entire point.
me missing your point doesn't make your arguments correct. you are factually mistaken in your framing.
Yeah, no. Fuck off with your condescending bullshit. I'm not getting into a discussion with somebody who opens with insults and can't remain civil.