Yes, exactly my point. How do you want to fight something that clearly scales with something that doesn't scale?
> We need people to realize they are part of this and it is not some videogame.
Clearly that doesn't happen. Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish. Instead of hoping and arguing for emotional attachment with planting trees, we should be thinking of real solutions, like drones.
Standing in the way of technology is exactly what will kill us, relying on humans has never worked out. Just like with German nuclear power plants (or their lack of, which caused another deforestation in pursuit of coal).
Ok, we're clearly on totally different pages, so let me take another try at this.
> fight something that clearly scales
My point was actually to refute the implied point that something that relies on manual labor doesn't scale. Industrial logging has got nothing on all those centuries of busy little humans. Deforestation scaled without tech. The Vikings had little but axes to deforest Iceland, just time. It's been the same everywhere people have gone, no matter what century or what tech they had available: cut down the trees faster than they can grow back. You can see it everywhere from North America to Easter Island to New Zealand. Same story. Over and over. Nowadays, a lot of deforestation in Africa is literally slash and burn: machetes and fire. We have to stop deforestation, clearly, because it is easier than reforestation.
Reforestation is going to take time, no two ways about it.
> Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish
This is exactly my point. Sitting behind a keyboard and dreaming about billions of trees being planted by drones is the magical thinking. No matter how close you think these drones are to reality, this just simply does not exist, no one is funding this, and no one is building or running this. On the contrary, going out and planting a tree is literally something that you can do today, and people do by the thousands and millions every year. At a time when we need to actually do something, the loudest voices are techno-utopians who are literally telling people to sit down, the drones will take care of it.
> Standing in the way of technology is exactly what will kill us
This is why we are completely different pages. Technology is manifestly what is killing us, from global CO2 to enabling deforestation to overfishing to pesticides. Technology is prima facie the reason this planet is threatened by our existence. Technology is what has allowed humans to multiply from ~1.5 billion people in 1900 to 7.5 billion today and reach into every corner of the planet to exploit every kind of resource that happens to be profitable in the global economy.
And when someone points this out, well, bring on the downvotes.
Tech is like violence. If it's not working, you just need to use more. I know people don't want to process this, but this is where we are. Catastrophic overshoot. And the loudest voices are calling for more tech and more scaling. God forbid someone suggest manual labor, working with our hands, and thinking seriously about how we've seriously, seriously fucked up.
> My point was actually to refute the implied point that something that relies on manual labor doesn't scale.
That was not my point at all. My point was that there is zero economical demand for reforestation, you're not going to convince masses to plant enough trees. There is clear demand for deforestation, be it coal underneath, wood itself or a place to live.
Yes, we need to stop deforestation, I did not say anything against that at all. Let's not see the world as black or white.
> No matter how close you think these drones are to reality, this just simply does not exist, no one is funding this, and no one is building or running this.
That is a problem we should solve, on top of others - like stopping deforestation.
> On the contrary, going out and planting a tree is literally something that you can do today, and people do by the thousands and millions every year.
And yet we're here talking about the problem that it's not nearly enough.
> Technology is prima facie the reason this planet is threatened by our existence.
Definitely. There is a huge demand for the ease of living technology offers. People are never going to let that be and live more frugally, never. That's why we need better technology - technology that can solve problems we've done and technology that is more clean.
> God forbid someone suggest manual labor, working with our hands, and thinking seriously about how we've seriously, seriously fucked up.
I agree with you but this is never going to happen. You're not going to convince masses about this, ever. Almost no one on the global scale is going to happily let go of their easy lives, much less do any significant manual labor. We need a solution that doesn't involve manual labor of tens of millions of people. And, to be honest, I find the expectation that people will think about their mistakes naive - I don't think they will even admit a mistake.
Yes, exactly my point. How do you want to fight something that clearly scales with something that doesn't scale?
> We need people to realize they are part of this and it is not some videogame.
Clearly that doesn't happen. Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish. Instead of hoping and arguing for emotional attachment with planting trees, we should be thinking of real solutions, like drones.
Standing in the way of technology is exactly what will kill us, relying on humans has never worked out. Just like with German nuclear power plants (or their lack of, which caused another deforestation in pursuit of coal).