Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

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Really? I can't believe that they invented the vacuous hipster lifestyle.

Well, not for lack of trying. Unfortunately, nature has built in to every organism the will to live, and a natural revulsion towards suicide. Most people who aim to take their lives fail for this reason. One has to be pretty seriously mentally ill to succeed. This is so nature itself can do the weeding out, and not the individual.

As for me, I was vaccinated, but I would say that at 2 months of age there isn't much choice in the matter for the baby. I do not have children, and will not. When I got a thorn in my foot at age 13, my mom got sick of seeing me in pain so she dragged me to the doctor. I've always been the type to let a sickness run its course rather than seek help, unless it gets so bad that I have no choice. I have to take psychiatric medication because without it I can't function. I originally wanted to finish college, and couldn't do it without drugs, but once I did I found the withdrawal symptoms too severe to quit.

If there was no medical attention available, then I would not seek it, unfortunately our culture demands the use of doctors despite cost, because they are so readily available. I have enough problems operating in society without bucking THAT expectation. I'm reminded of a girl in a college class I took who refused to get treated for a bronchial infection until it became asthma, then refused to use her asthma medication. After nearly dying two or three times, she was forcibly treated in a psychiatric hospital until she agreed to seek treatment for her asthma. After she told me her sob story, I decided to go with the flow, because I don't want to go back to the loony bin.

Our society considers those who deny its "conveniences" to be mentally ill, which reminds me of the circular logic used by the Soviets to force crude psychiatric treatment on dissidents. The USSR was paradise, and who could disagree with paradise, so if you DID disagree you were bonkers and needed to be locked up for the safety of others. Of course, the idea that "workers paradise" was anything but was not on the table. I currently do not have the resources to buck the system.

How 'bout we just pound the human race into dust. That solution seems to be the most expedient. We'll need technology to do so, however, and lots of it.

Yeah, I like Seattle. He was cool. He was right about this, as white people tend to want to bend nature to their will to make money. There were many tribes among the Native Americans, by the way, and Seattle was the chief of the Ducamish (sp?) people, -amish being a suffix meaning "people", like -umne among the Miwoks of California. I like to use a variant of this argument among Americans who are obsessed with collecting gold coins as a hedge against catastrophe: I'll grow food and you buy gold, and then we'll see who is starving and who is not.

Ah, but technology's evil, remember?

Think about it this way:

The circumference of the earth is 24859 miles. Going at 3 miles an hour, ignoring waters, how long would it take to traverse this distance? Answer: 8286 hours or 345 days or 49 weeks or less than a year's time. And that's only walking. Factor in horses which can go 30 miles an hour, along with a pony express system, you could reduce that time by a factor of ten.

Not to mention Arabs, Indians, Chinese, sub-Saharan Africans and indeed anyone else who farms or uses technology

Never mind that; mean old corpulent white men who chomp cigars and count little piles of gold coins all day are responsible for all of the world's problems

Carry on

Considering it took thousands of years for human populations to spread over a continent, you may be assured that going au naturale you won't be getting around as far as ye may be able in principle to go.

1.) You are ignoring difficulties due to terrain.
2.) You assume constant travel, while most people need to eat and sleep on occasion. More than 10-12 hours a day of walking is probably too much.
3.) What will they eat during this journey? Will people have to carry a month's worth of food on their back every time they want to visit relatives in the next state over?
4.) Horses are expensive to maintain and have other drawbacks as well.
5.) What about the elderly, the disabled, and young children? Those people can't exactly take long hikes to get places.

Horse-riding might work

e.g., Persian empire couriers

Still this is silly and pointless

"No travel more than a few miles because there are no cars or roads."

What I said is still valid compared to your assessment.

Complaints 4 and 5 still work. And I was also referencing a lack of roads, which makes it more difficult

I was referring to the text in "", but as to the numbered ones:

4. They worked just fine for 3000+ years of recorded history.

5. Wagons for them.

I haven't a clue what the OP said, but I'm for roads and physics and chemistry and whatnot. You don't need to spend money on a car to have all of those items.

People know that we have to protect the environment. That's why we have National Parks. They're an invention that followed on from industrial society. That doesn't mean industrial society is environmentally friendly - of course it's not. And yet it has made a lot of improvements recently. Cars don't emit as much carbon dioxide lately and energy efficiecy measures are being adopted in many industries and homes. Insulating homes better is reducing the amount of fossil fuels required to heat them.

In Vancouver the mayor is protecting land by encouraging and supporting the building of high rise apartments. These are all models for the future. I think in the future we will live in smaller cities that are built higher, that are more insulated, more energy efficient and with more harmonius natural elements incorporated into them like gardens, parks, lakes and other natural beauty.

Even when someone just plants flowers in their garden they are showing care for the environment and a connection and love for nature. It's just a lot of people are ignorant about the wider picture. As soon as things get really terrible people will wake up and we'll do a better job of supporting both our own development and the protection and also advancement of other natural forces as well.

Of course these people are hypocrites - how many of them move to the least developed parts of the world? How many actually stop using modern products? People have voted with their feet in favour of modern technology.
Several civilisations have been destroyed at least partly by environmental degradation - all of them were preindustrial.




QFT.



So, by your own admission, modern medicine works. So much for the evils of modernity. If that girl wants to die so badly, there are effective means around. You claim that you would willingly die of plague, yet yourself admit that you use modern medicine even for non-lethal conditions.



As do people of all skin colours. You should try living among non-whites some time, then perhaps you'll discover that we can be pretty money-crazed, too.



If civilisation collapses, those with guns will get both the food and the gold.

What do we need it for?


Im a hippie and im all for believing manipulating the natural world is wrong.. so sue me