Topic: What is environmentalism, really? - page 3. (Read 7932 times)

You yourself recently stated the difficulty in buying up large tracts of land (I believe it was in this thread). Try not to be more consistent in your statements, as everyone can see you talk outside both sides of your mouth. A lot of us try and remain consistent and truthful in what we say and we don't have time to defend our arguments against the likes of you. That's about three times in 24 hours that your statements have been called out by me alone*. Please, there exists the possibility for intelligent discussion here, but it gets watered down and polluted with a lot of your dumb tactics.

* 1. Beavers and technology. 2. Malignment of case 3 regarding the harvesting of resources. 3. Contradictory statements about the ease of buying up land.

If you're concerned, protect the lands. Buy them up.


Only if you're a polluter. (or otherwise end up on the wrong side of an arbitration)

Not necessarily. Most people aren't aware of what they lost. Class action lawsuits can bring it to their attention though. Your proposed system sounds like a great system for lawyers. Instead of taxes and regulations, we'll be subjected to paying lawyer fees.

Population growth, logging towns, resorts, non-protected lands receiving proposals for new highways, which brings in gas stations, etc. Land is then parceled, and it never stops. This of course, is the classic case of edge effects pushing out native species, which has an effect on trophic cascades, and an ever spiraling progression towards a weaker environment. And as history shows, it never gets reverted back to true wilderness.

That is the history of the world, essentially.

And if you negatively affect other people's quality of life or property values, you can be held liable for the damages you've incurred.

True enough, but what forces would drive sprawl into the redwoods?

Las Vegas is an example of a city in the middle of nowhere. Also Dubai.

It starts with the suburbs, which are outlying areas of wilderness purchased by developers. And it just creeps outward from there.

Could you show me some evidence or discussion of this somewhere? I don't see why it shouldn't scale with the advent of the internet. You could do all of your voting in five minutes every day, and only on issues that are important to you.

Why? Cities are placed where they are for reasons. It's highly unlikely that a city would be placed in the middle of nowhere, simply because there was land available.

There's too many people on the planet as well. I really don't see anything but globally respected laws and regulations to prevent a spiral cascade from destroying everything. It's called creep. Put down your defenses and the destruction just slowly creeps onward.

In many places of the world, land is extremely cheap. Right now China, Western Europe, the US -- basically the rich countries of the world are buying up farmland in Africa, Ukraine East Asia -- basically the poor places. Private hedge funds are buying up large chunks as well. See this. So some people will control large amounts of land - and even today land is distributed very unequally. I don't see how one can dispute this.

The reason why land is more analogous to bitcoin mining rather than to bitcoins, is that through controlling mining, you can affect the entire bitcoin community. If you just have a lot of bitcoins, you could play with the price to some extent, but you cannot cancel people's transactions. However when you control land, you have a very direct control over many other peoples' lives. You could poison their water supply for example. Sure people could go live somewhere else, and if land had an infinite supply then my argument would be bunk, but the earth is limited and we all have to share it. Your actions on your piece of land affect the community at large. Spending your privately owned bitcoins is not the same.

If you have ever shared a small house with a number of people, you would see where Libertarianism breaks down. Your argument about providing incentives to maintain land value is IMO not very strong. What if I can make more profit from destroying the land than maintaining it? What if I am old and I have no children and I don't care about it? What if I am just a psychopathic person who likes destroying things? What if I am just selfish and don't care about others or the future? There are many reasons why someone could choose to destroy a piece of land. Wasting money in some irrrational way is not the same.

Communes are unsustainable as we know them now. Perhaps in the future, that will change.

I think every human should have the opportunity to live in a forest for a while, so they can appreciate how important they are. And I mean live in one, not participate in commercialized, noisy camping grounds.

Fractured ownership, different values, different agendas, different levels of understanding, etc. lead to a checkerboard effect, which really devalues everything. Best to have commonly designated areas as being treated uniformly.

As an example, Los Angeles can stay the concrete jungle it is. Change it if you want. Improve it if you want. Rebuild if if you want. But don't go create a new Los Angeles in Oregon old growth forests. It seems almost inevitable, and one has to recognize the possibility and understand the importance of such things happening, and be aware that such things happen in a creeping almost invisible way.

Exactly.

Though, your process is off. Communes are also unsustainable as we know them. It will be a form that is yet undiscovered that will replace capitalism.

I'll just leave a quote here:
This was 1899.

And when and if it does, those small communes will take up more and more of the people, and capitalism will die a slow, peaceful death. I don't care how people organize their society, so long as it's voluntary.

Beautiful now, but not centuries later when people shift their beliefs. Capitalism is just a concept, and it can wane just as quickly as monarchy.

Well, that's the beauty of AnCap. As long as they don't hurt anyone, they're welcome to share and share alike among themselves as much as they want.

I don't mind it, but it is unfair because of that. Probably only a insignificant minority will think it is unfair, which is why it's such a good choice now. But the same was said about Monarchy back then: everyone thought it was great (or, was forced to think it was great). AnCap is excellent for today, but would not suffice for decades to centuries in the future.

Think about it this way: all governments were invented, and we haven't invented all of them yet. From chaos came despots, and then monarchs. Then came direct democracy, then capital, then representative democracy and republics, then socialism. What next? Clearly, we haven't discovered it yet.