solarpunk memes

Fun fact: I've been doing a lot of reading about indigenous peoples, and one of the constant themes is how those peoples' traditional life ways were net positives for the environment. In California, for instance, Native American agriculture involved controlled burns every twenty years or so - keeping the soil fertile and encouraging a healthy mix of the "wild" species they cared for. They had been doing that for maybe 20,000 years. So when "environmentalists" in the early 20th century decided native lifeways were primitive and bad for the environment, and established enormous national parks where natives were no longer permitted to hunt or gather and fires were stamped out immediately, those national parks turned into tinder boxes - instead of the controlled burns the plants had evolved to take advantage of, we ended up with decades of fuel building up in the undergrowth, turning into massive uncontrolled burns that killed everything, and then invasive species rolled up and finished off the native plants.

"But untouched pristine wilderness"... No. That never existed. That's a racist trope spread by white colonists who wanted to think of Native Americans as enemies of nature in order to justify genocide. It's the opposite of the noble savage myth and equally racist. Fuck John Muir.

Over and over again, when you compare areas where indigenous people had lived in their traditional lifeways to areas where the people were killed or exiled but the environment was left untouched, the areas where humans were genocided have less species diversity, less fertility, and less healthy environments overall.

And if we, 21st century humanity, can use our science and technology to rediscover the old knowledge, we can take up our previous role and manage the environment around us for the benefit of all. Hell, in a lot of environments we have a duty to do so - we brought the rabbits to Australia, who's going to get rid of them if not for us?

And all that rant is to say, humans aren't the problem. Capitalism is the problem. Greed is the problem. Humans have lived as beneficial parts of the environment for approximately 150,000 years and we can do so again.