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How to Save the World

The following isn't related to autism.  It's an edited transcript of my side of a conversation with an AI.  I'm including it here because I think it's important.

It should be pretty easy to arrive at the notion that, if we want to minimize our environmental impact, we should look back at a time when we were making a minimal impact and return to that. But that is not a suggestion anyone is making, and I don't think it's a suggestion anyone is likely to make, wherever these conversations are being had.  The conversation about conservation always begins with the tacit question, "How can we continue breeding unchecked forever, and how can we continue to deplete natural resources indefinitely?"  If you start from the idea that what we are doing now must not be impacted by whatever solution we come up with, then you're not going to come up with a good solution.

This issue seems complex.  I don't think it's actually complex at all, however. I think we make the issue complex because we want to breed. We should be able to say that the only solution for conservation is for there to be fewer humans. This isn't a difficult question that nobody knows how to answer. The answer is right there. There are too many of us, but we make it hard to talk about because we can't get past our gut response to the idea that we should stop breeding, at least for a little bit.

This is a controversial belief.  My beliefs are actually more radical than this, though. I think any human that is outside of Africa is an invasive animal.  I think that the best thing would be for the human population to tank and for humans to return to Africa and live as hunter-gatherers. No agriculture, no permanent settlements, dying at 30, no medicine. This is the way that we are best adapted to live. 

I understand why people would say it's good that we can live longer and that we die of diseases less often. I can understand why an individual would want to live longer, but I don't understand why anybody would look at our current environmental situation and say that the first thing we need to establish in a conversation about how we can best conserve the environment is that human reproduction needs to continue unchecked forever and that we need to keep finding more and more ways for humans to live longer. If the most important thing to establish in that conversation is that humans must exist forever, then we're never going to arrive at a sustainable solution, and sustainability is what we're trying to talk about. This is only a sensitive issue because people are sensitive. The sensitivity comes from the people talking about it and isn't inherent to the issue itself.

Harmony with the natural world has never mattered until now. For four billion years, creatures have lived and died with no consideration of harmony with the natural world. But then we evolved, and we started talking about how to live in harmony with everything else. The only reason we started talking about that is that we want dominion over the natural world, not harmony with it. The conversation has always been, "How can I be part of the world while still mutilating it to my own purposes?" Now, obviously, some people have lived in greater harmony with the natural world than others have. But the very fact that we need to talk about how to live in harmony with the world when nothing else has ever had to consider that in four billion years can tell us something. It might tell us that human intelligence is made out to be more significant in the world than it really is. And it's understandable that the human animal is selfish. Other animals are selfish, too. Selfishness can be advantageous. But I think the fact that we have an unparalleled ability to split philosophical hairs is actually bad for the world, even if it's good for us. It's certainly bad for the conversation we're trying to have. You can look at the fact that we have evolved adaptations that are good for us, but not necessarily good for the environment, and you can see that harmony isn't a concern of evolution. Nothing evolves in respect to harmony with nature. Either you have an advantageous mutation, and you survive when things begin to change, or you don't, and you die. Harmony isn't part of the equation. If we want to live in harmony with the natural world, we need to look back at our past to see when we were most harmonious with the natural world. And we need to stop leveling forests, building with plastic and metal, and we need to stop shooting rockets into space. We actually need to stop progress because there is no human progress that doesn't directly correlate to environmental catastrophe.

I have a problem with thinking of humans as stewards of the natural world.  I think that, rather than being in control of the natural world and monitoring or policing it, we need to allow the world to be our steward.  Nothing has ever been the steward of the natural world before us. If we want to be the stewards of the world, it's only because we know that if we aren't, then we'll destroy it. I believe that the best thing for humans to do is to allow the world to destroy them.

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