Oh, I certainly disagree with people who put the environment above humans. But usually I just discount such people - they "are not serious people."
> my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities.
Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it easy to reason about the end of a species in the abstraction, not when it is their friends and family who either die or cannot have children because the world is in such shambles.
Agreed, I suspect we are closer to being on the same page than it originally seemed.
I’ve seen it fairly broad and wide, not just city kids but there is a concentration there.
It’s most apparent to me in the debates downstream of the “whole earth” movement. The eco movements of the previous few decades seemed to be fairly unified because tech wasn’t at a place where we could reasonably attempt to fix some of the problems humans had manifested.
Now that this tech is starting to shake out as viable, we are seeing a hard split in the eco movement.
One faction is advocating for humans to “just stop.”
The other is advocating for humans to try and solve the problems.
You see this in the de-extinction movement where eco-advocates are trying to bring back extinct keystone species that humans drove to extinction, in an attempt to restore the ecosystems we disrupted. You see serious eco-advocates shake out of the woodwork fighting the de-extinction movement on anti-human grounds.
To be fair, there are valid arguments against the de-extinction movement; but these aren’t the arguments I see most frequently.
You see the same arguments shake out for carbon capture, green energy, rocketry, colonizing other planets, etc.
I think the core of this split is that there were two currents of thought in the eco-movement that were so similar folks didn’t realize they disagreed until recently when “bringing extinct species back” became viable. One current of thought was that what humans did was bad. The other was that humans were bad.
It's just stupid Nihilism in an attempt to seem cool. It's putting lipstick on the pig of just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the problem. There's a lot of money in ignoring the problem, so a lot of pressure by certain groups to do so.
> my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities.
Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it easy to reason about the end of a species in the abstraction, not when it is their friends and family who either die or cannot have children because the world is in such shambles.