Re-Wilding the Earth

Efforts to restore the ecology in many parts of the planet would require significant levels of geoengineering.

I’m still unsure what this “nature” is supposed to be that we’re going back to.  Is this driven by fans of medieval metaphysics, wherein humans hold a special place below God as stewards of the Earth?  Where “free will” makes humans special and so distinct from the otherwise-perfect “natural” actions of other animals?

Why reverse the effects of humans on the environment, and not other animals?  What is the actual goal being served by this “re-wilding”?

Actually, it could be accomplished without geo-engineering via very high levels of land value taxation. Of course, doing so would mean faster economic productivity too, even though the efficiency of land use would improve… so think of it as a non-primitivist form of rewilding.

http://embraceunity.com/sustainability/value-capture-and-ecology/

However, I must caution when you say we ought to actually “restore” the monstrosity that is “the wild.” It is an enormous and needless nightmare of perpetual carnage and misery.

If we want to do anything aesthetically similar, let’s instead follow David Pearce’s advice and construct a pan-species welfare state.

Since getting to the technological stage where we can do some of the things Pearce talks about is of vital importance, I am not keen on ending the misery in the wild in the near term. I want to see faster progress of a sustainable sort, so I take the position that we should fully recapture land values to promote the most efficient use of land.

That sounds about right, though I’m skeptical geoengineering projects as well as the construction of nature as nonhuman and inherently desirable.

This is an important essay in my view. The fact is that there are very good reasons to want to maintain and/or restore so-called “natural” (i.e. pre-human) aspects of our environment, namely that this is the environment where humans tend, with our stone age brains, to feel most comfortable. Of course we want all the facilities and security that comes (at least for some of us) with modernity, but we also (again, some of us more than others admittedly) crave the spiritual refreshment that comes from “getting out in nature”. And that is difficult to do if there is no “nature” to get out in. Furthermore, the self-hatred and Luddism of misanthropic environmentalists is one of the things that prevents us from deploying technology to do this. And Jamais is right: without some pretty radical technology, we can forget it.

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