This isn't the most recent Ecosophia entry anymore, but it's worth reading and rereading. I do like learning that the wolves that have moved onto the land once occupied by the Chernobyl reactor are living and doing their thing without showing the cancerous effects of the radiation that so many expected. You never know with life.
As for Yuval Noah Harari, sheesh, I dunno. His much quoted provocation about how human rights are a fiction isn't as bad as it sounds when looked at in context, but I don't think it stands for anything good either. At the end of the day he seems to be in the business of assuring the managerial class that they can and should control their fellow humans. As someone who would prefer to evade control I'm not really down with that.
2 comments:
I too enjoyed JMG's take on the wolves of Chernobyl - when he talks about the resilience of life it makes me feel a lot better about things in general. Besides the wolves there are also a number of old people living in the exclusion zone - a movie called the Babushkas of Chernobyl was made about them. Yep, life is a magnificent tapestry, isn't it? It was good to read his story about Acension Island - plus, there are some who believe (not without evidence) that the Amazon basin was heavily populated long before Columbus.
I don't see Yuval Harari as standing for anything good either, no good can come of being a willing evil henchman of Klaus Schwab. My impression of Harari is that his ideas are simplistic, repetitive, unrealistic and very biased toward technology. I particularly Greer's description:
This, in turn, is most of why Yuval Noah Harari is shrieking like an overwrought six-year-old. The world isn’t just refusing to follow the abstract models he brings to it, it’s refusing to follow any abstract models at all. Raised and educated to think of the world as a passive medium that privileged intellectuals can shape at will, he’s being confronted with the terrifying discovery that the world literally couldn’t care less about him, his credentials, or his ideas.
It is a hard lesson for many that we can't control everything. When it comes to life this is a good thing, in that there needs to be more than what we are able to order. Plus life can adapt to things we didn't predict. And of course humans didn't predict Chernobyl even if they caused it. The Amazon River Basin may well have had a dense population before Europeans arrived. Just think of all the population changes that have happened in Europe, Asia, and Africa over the past couple of millennia.
You occasionally hear or read some insane opinion along the lines of how we should plan for AI to take over for us after humanity's extinction. This wouldn't be a good thing for us to do, human intentions will mean nothing when there are no humans left, and it's largely a waste of brainpower. I don't know that Harari is that far gone but he, Schwab, and the whole WEF scene are the kind of people who see technologization as an end rather than a means. Of course they're also the kind of people who expect to see themselves in charge of this rationalist paradise.
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