Yeah but they do them for the wrong reasons. If you were a slave and your master gave u food, clothe and housing would you think "wow what a wonderful master, I'm gonna work extra hard for them"? Well its like that but with the plants. They are enslaving us and we can't just let them get away with it. /s
Another Sapiens reader. Look, I don't care how uppity those maize are -- there's no way they trained us into cultivating them, we slaughtered their brothers and sisters and kept only the tamer, weaker, fatter renditions that we could use for our own means. If that benefits them, then they're psychopaths.
Corn is not sentient, and I will die on this hill!
if they compete for sunlight and happily smother their brethren in this fruitful pursuit, then they're no better than us at chucking each other under the bus in the name of this so called collective 'progress'
that was an edgy idea in the book, but stuff like that happens in ecological systems all the time. I read the book around the time of the election, and it read like a manifesto to justify oligarchic takeover as the next phase of human development (see the part how societal rules where assigned to the government and how the internet will take it back)
Yep. We feed cats, they kill pests which would otherwise give us disease and spoil our foods.
Makes you think that domestication is maybe the wrong paradigm, neither or us domesticated each other (or we both did) but truly it’s a mutually beneficial partnership, something that is actually common in nature.
This is part one of "the botany of desire", exploring how four plants, apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes have adapted to human desires, which in turn has made them some of the most successful plant species around the world. The rest of the parts are on Dailymotion too for those interested.
This is my tune, not only biocentric, but also a very healthy dose of anti-anthropocentric. A species traitor, if you allow me to be as bold.
I really don't think that talk about humans being the god on earth, center of the universe, with a metaphysical excuse to exploit everything around us is doing wonders to our health nor long term survival... And obviously the "sapiens" of our epithet is only there because we gave it ourselves chef's kiss
It's also a very Buddhist outlook. Not because of anything specifically antihuman or pro ecology but simply because we as humans are part of a cycle that lives and dies. We don't have a say.
You could say our karma is that we will be too proud and be too exceptionalist and end it all earlier than expected because we couldn't come together and take care of the earth.
It sucks but the earth will go on for a few more billion years without us.
Oh yeah, I believe nature, the planet, will carry on, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot. I just feel for the part of it that won't survive our stay.
Sometimes I make this joke about all currently living higher primates, including us, sitting at a table, and we are yeeting our way around the room, and the other primates look at eachother and go "wait, that's the sapient one?? :D
I think we as a species took a very nasty turn in our evolution, either biological or social, that allowed us to "break away" from nature, so to speak, and create that duality Man/ Nature that in my opinion really didn't work that well. I'm pretty sure other animals have a consciousness too, so probably being conscious and self aware is by itself not the culprit. But something makes us feel so far removed from the rest of life that I find really unsetling, and it also only makes dealing with being that much more complicated, for example, not being able to accept death like you said. In that aspect, some religions are definitely better than others to mitigate that damage. Either way, I'm just here doing my best and hoping for the best!
Eukaryotes likely evolved during The Great Oxidation Event which saw oxygen levels rise to levels that were toxic to the Cyanobacteria (which use photosynthesis). We evolved to save them!