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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

After watching "Pumped Dry: The global crisis of vanishing groundwater", I think future conflicts will be over water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q

I think the West will eventually we faced with a decision: either learn to live sustainably or get used to living in an irreversibly ruined environment.

Reduce and reuse come before recycling.

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We're already living in an irreversibly ruined environment. You don't notice because you didn't live to see it in its prior state. You never saw half a billion ducks take flight over North America. You never saw, and you will never see, a seasonal salmon migration on the San Joaquin river that can support a fishery catching 11 million pounds per year. My kids have never seen a Sierra Nevada conifer forest that wasn't sterile and dead, and they think forests just look that way. Our society does not have the facility to remember the ecosystems of the past. We just forget and adapt to the new one.

That happens when you replace a population that lives sustainably (Native Americans) with a population that does not care about sustainability (Modern Americans).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_sk...

Converting material wealth with an intrinsic value (a healthy environment, biodiversity) into abstract wealth without an intrinsic value (a number in a bank account) is really the dumbest thing to do.

Once we are done converting every resource into a money, the resulting balance will surely be very useful to satisfy our needs.

"When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money."

Honestly, you need to level up your argumentation. No material is (except in form of waste) converted to anything abstract without an intrinsic value. Capitalism generally reduces waste. What happens though, is that material is turned into products which a lot of people find useful/desirable. This problem is a problem, but it is a much harder problem to 'solve' than the one you are claiming.

Thank you for commenting. I haven't looked into the groundwater issue -- perhaps a consequence of living in rainy countries to date.

On your second point, I think the big problem is that status is increasingly linked with consumption -- having a large house, relatively new car, frequently travelling, and so on. This link has always been there, but perhaps non-material ways of obtaining status have declined (religious vocations, public service, etc.)

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