Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Why Japan Isn't Cutting Down Enough of its Trees" video.
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@glebkoshelev I don't completely disagree with you on this, perhaps because you used a perspective of the extremes, but just to talk about some points in your arguments.
I don't think we need to protect to the point of our non-existence, but perhaps we have already exploited natural reserves more than we should and it's better we stop now, and start studying it properly so that we can make our situation better.
To be clear, my arguments are all anthropocentric. This is all for our benefit, not because I think we should disappear and let nature recover. I'm not really worried about the planet itself, it has gone through worst things than mankind.
The problem is that this allowance we have for making mistakes, developing and becoming better with time is running out. The amount of exploitation natural reserves can take before things start going south is finite. Not for the planet, but for the sustainability of our own species.
Permaculture is a good example of us doing it right, or at the very least trying to do it intelligently, but unfortunately it's both rare, and hard to implement at large scales. You have small farms that do it, but the industrial farming operations that have most of the land is just not using it.
What we have mostly done so far is exploitive, monoculture, and at most crop rotation. None of which are conducive to sustainable rich environments. Some of it can be sustainable as in keeping growing the same stuff without ruining the soil, but it's not comparable to a full fledged rich environment like a rainforest.
So preservation is needed not because I think we can't get better, but because we need preservation in order to get there.
We need what is left so that we can study it, understand it, and then do it ourselves at some point.
We haven't explored or understood enough of it to let it go, and if we lose it we won't be able to do it anymore.
Until we haven't fully understood and started making on our own, rich and diverse forest environments, we cannot afford to lose the blueprints of it.
I also think it's a very bad idea to become too full of ourselves. The so called miracles of modern science and engineering might look grandiose for us in our own perspective, but it's nothing in comparison to millions of years of natural evolution.
The reason why we are in the current situation, which I mean man made climate change, is because we multiple times thought that we understood nature and how to deal with it. We were wrong. We need to step back a bit, understand where we are wrong, and try to correct things.
I can't explain everything in a single comment, but I highly suggest watching a documentary called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". One of the episodes explains how the term "ecosystem" came to be, how we thought it worked, and how wrong we were.
It's also why I am categorically against stuff like geoengineering. We don't know enough to start messing with things like that. If we can't appreciate and see the value of millions of years of natural evolution, which led to us being here in the first place, we might just not make it.
Just remember. Yes, we are part of all this. But we did not get here on our own. From the planet's perspective, we're but tiny babies. We've been here just a fraction of time other extinct species were. If we mean to be here longer than dinosaurs, for instance, we will need all the help to do it, and a whole lot of it will come from the nature that surrounds us, as it has always been. We can't afford to keep destroying it. A whole bunch of the tech we developed over the years, these advanced marvelous technologies that looks very distant from natural sources, were mostly inspired by natural processes.
So I think that it's better if we start seeing ourselves as a mutualistic or at least commensalistic species rather than a parasitic one in relation to our planet.
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