The myth of a wilderness without humans

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

30 points·greenie_beans··4 comments

As I understand from the article, the author argues that designation of national parks and reserves distracts people from the main problem, which is unsustainable everyday life. I disagree, because preservation of the most valuable landscapes is an immediate action that is relatively easy to do. It is way easier to ban building factories in certain area than to ban factories altogether. Without national parks being established in twentieth century, these places would be destroyed.

The only way for people to live in perfect harmony with nature would be to abandon all economical growth and that's unlikely to happen. The easiest thing to do is to preserve and reduce our influence.

> The only way for people to live in perfect harmony with nature would be to abandon all economical growth

This is a sweeping generalization. We don't need to abandon all economic growth to have effective conservation of diversity and stop deforestation. The economy and its growth is not chained to the activity of real estate developers.

It will be hard to grow an economy when there is a housing crisis which we make worse by not harvesting trees and not wanting to use oil based products. We cannot achieve balance with nature while having huge cities. Only people that work the land and live off of it understand what harmony with nature is.

aren't there already enough houses for everybody? people are just hoarding them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com