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Comment by WhiteNoiz3 | Hacker News Reader

If fires go down because forests are now developed areas, is that necessarily a good thing? To me that kinda says that we're running out of forests.

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According to the article, fires have gone down because people aren't burning grasslands and shrubs. They are still burning forests and the article doesn't say whether more or less.

I mean, people are part of nature too no matter how much they try to escape it. It's entirely subjective as to whether the world should have more or less forests vs savannas vs apartment buildings.

The 'humans are nature, therefore everything humans do is OK' argument is incredibly naive. Humans need to eat, for example, and there are complex global systems that our food supply depends on (e.g. pollinators), and that we do not fully understand. Turning all forests into apartment buildings is a great way to crash these global systems that we depend on to live.

Naturally, but our population is kept in check by the same laws that govern nature, just as you say, we can't mow it all down. And that's part of the reason the population growth is slowing.

Are we running up against a wall, famine is forcing the population down? Rather the growth is slowing because we have it pretty OK, don't you think?

It depends on your beliefs. I believe that people should have genuine freedom, and that requires that they have agency, if all types of environment apart from urban landscapes are destroyed then no one will have any choice about how they live - or what they experience - for the rest of time.

I rate that as a massive crime. If you don't believe in freedom or the rights of our children, and their children then I expect you disagree with me.

Exactly - it becomes more clear if you say that an individual's (or society's) freedoms needs to be compared to those of the coming generation (according to the Iriquois nations - from where the ideals of the US Constitution were inspired [1]).

[1] https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/how-t...

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