Quote:
Originally Posted by Hippie3  you want to try life without society
have someone drop you off, naked, deep in some national forest
and come back in a few years-
odds are all they will find is your bones. |
I know a few people who would be just fine, but for the vast majority (including myself at this point) that is a true statement. But, it's true partly because the so-called national forests are not the same forests/ecosystems that sustained large populations of people who got here before the Europeans. They are fundamentally different ecosystems now. Humans aren't forest dwellers by nature anyway; we evolved in a savannah environment- that's why we like our parks to be grass interspersed w/ few trees, we feel more comfortable in that environment- but those environments are all dominated by civilization and so we instead think of tree farms as 'wilderness' but really we need expansive grasslands.
I think what bothers a lot of people is the fact that civilization is so
mandatory. There is nowhere I can go to get away from it that is suitable for human habitation. There is no chance to explore an alternative or think "outside the box" because this box covers everything. It's not that I want to be permanently free of society and reject it's comforts, rather I just want the option to visit places not controlled or altered or destroyed by humans (I am referring to human-friendly places, not the "rocks and ice" parks that are pretty to look at but useless for sustaining much life) . I don't see this as an "all or nothing" problem; we can have modern medicine and technology without paving every freakin' square foot of earth or fundamentally changing complex natural processes before gaining an understanding of those processes (like damming rivers, or burning oil and coal as fast as it can be extracted, or engaging in intense chemically-based non-sustainable agriculture). Or, maybe we can't.
The things we humans have done to provide ourselves the advantages of modern society might ultimately turn out to be the things that deprive us of those advantages to the extent that we might have been better off not having developed them at all. Time will tell.