Yes, People Are Bad. They Should Become Less Bad.

So apparently there's some group trying to argue that the rise of humanity is somehow good for the rest of the planet. Or at least they're saying stuff like that (under the hashtag #GoodAnthropocene, apparently) in the context of a political document seemingly arguing in favor of increased reliance on natural gas and nuclear power (and maybe also solar), and also some stuff about using urbanization and various other supposedly modern/postmodern trends to keep human civilization thriving while reducing the "footprint" of said civilization on the environment. The headline of the Slate article in the link above describes the group as being against "people are bad" environmentalism; certainly their hashtag supports that description. But, like, if they think they're arguing that people haven't been bad, they don't really seem to be. According to the Slate article, they trumpet, basically, the awesomeness of human civilization in itself (for humans that is): "[l]ife expectancy is on the rise, infectious disease risk has plummeted, natural disasters kill fewer people, and abject poverty is on the decline." But they also acknowledge that "those gains have not come without sacrifice: We’re losing species at an incredible rate, and climate change could add ever more stress on human and natural systems." Which sounds like it adds up to, human civilization has been pretty sweet for the humans and pretty terrible for everyone else. Which is about my view, and also sounds exactly like the "people are bad" view. I mean I guess you could distinguish between people who think it was worth it and people who think it wasn't, but that's kind of a boring issue, being just about how we characterize the past rather than what we do going forward.

And on that front, isn't the answer obvious? We're not going to tear down human civilization. Maybe that's regrettable, maybe it's not, but there's nothing to be done about it. So all we can do is our level best to mitigate the damage that human civilization inflicts upon the rest of the world. Or, to put it another way, people should become less bad, as much less bad as they can manage. Maybe as these people seem to suggest, we'll be able to make human civilization genuinely harmonious with nature, or maybe we'll only be able to make it very slightly less bad. Maybe, that is to say, people are incurably bad, or maybe they're not. But surely we must try, whether or not we will eventually fail, and whether or not at the outset of the attempt we think we will fail. What's the alternative? Throw up our hands in despair? Abandon caring about the non-human part of the world, and the horrors inflicted upon it by human civilization? Abandon human civilization, which, as noted above, ain't gonna happen? There is no alternative. If we're doomed to be bad for the world, we must at the very least struggle against that doom to the utmost.

Oh, and if we're gonna try to make human civilization more harmoniously compatible with nature and our fellow species, maaybe we should stop torturing and slaughtering billions upon billions of animals per year just because we think their flesh tastes nice? Just a thought.