• batmaniam@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’m having fun with this. We’re capable of more than any monkeys ever have been. Let’s get weird. “we are not fixing lead pipes but by mandate all municipal drinking water has a minimum Ayahuasca requirement.”

      • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I think I’ve honestly struck upon something. There’s something interesting in the distance between ideas. By connecting disparate ideologies, you’re bound to generate policy that would even make Lyndon LaRouche gasp.

          • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Do you ever think about how in ancient Greece, voting used to be a religious act? They actually believed that the election was a way of finding out which candidate had the divine right to rule. The idea that rule of law should even be the predominant consideration of a democracy existed by then, but it was by no means the consensus.

            The only constant in human history is how poorly we understand the consequences of our actions. Don’t you find?

            • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              I think like a lot of things, they got it mostly but not totally right. I think a complex society that doesn’t look our for it’s individuals is doomed to collapse. It’s the reason I’m a libertarian “with a little l”. We need to what we can, but we also have a terrible track record.

              Maybe to much for a meme post, and again I don’t actually think we’re at the point of accelerationist stuff. Just… You know… Fucking feed people. We’ll sort the rest out together. But it does truly need to be together. Not “basket of deplorables”, not “build the wall”.

              We know so, so much. We could glass the entire damn planet. It’s all so fragile and we also know that. But here we are with the ratcheting up the keys to said glassing around what two or more consenting adults decide to do with their time?

              … At least Greece could claim ignorance.

  • dariusj18@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Well, his conservationism was all based around keeping rare animals around so he could kill more of them.

    • geekwithsoul@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Hardly. Teddy was complex and a product of his time and upbringing. He however was quite clear on why conservation was important to him:

      “Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.”

      And…

      “Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘the game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people.

      The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”

    • Throw_away_migrator@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I mean, that view is not uncommon today within hunting/fishing communities. Conservation/Preservation is an important part of ensuring that others can continue to enjoy the activity. It seems like a net win to me. Anything that gets people out into nature and encourages the protection of that nature, even if the motivations are (arguably) selfish seems like a good thing.

      • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Also the ecology of maintaining specific populations is important, deer being the most visible example. Any state environmental authority would tell you they depend on hunters. We influence our environment, and some species are better equipped to deal with that than others. If we want to maintain a diverse ecosystem, that means controlling some population numbers as habitat shrinks.

        The best solution would be to not shrink the habitat, but that’s gets into a lot of human factors I’m not really equipped to talk about.

    • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Shooting and stuffing animals was seen as “conservation” back then. It seems wild to us, but in a time before it was truly fathomable you could wipe an animal from the planet, having a stuffed specimen for study was seen as laudable.

      And the more rare it was, the more information could be gained by studying it’s body. Again, it seems ass backwards now, but to put it into context Mendal (the guy with the peas) lived around the same period.

      • Ajen
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        4 months ago

        Hunting invasive species is still seen as “conservation” because it helps the native and sometimes endangered species.

        • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          It very much is. And it’s important but it’s a consistent conversation in the hunting community they’re still animals doing what animals do. There’s a responsibility to harvest them as humanly as possible. I know there are many vegans who would say that’s not possible in the first place, and I get it, but I think we can all agree seeing people shoot boars from helicopters is… Not quite right.