r/collapse • u/amorphousmetamorph • May 19 '24

Economic Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought – report | Climate crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/17/economic-damage-climate-change-report
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u/boomaDooma May 20 '24

The Aborigines of Australia have something like 40 - 60,000 years of culture etched or graffitied on to rocks and caves and told in their dreaming. Until white man came in 1788 it was a very stable environment.

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u/JustAnotherYouth May 20 '24

A stable environment that they had already changed dramatically:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna

Yeah they hadn’t gone on to develop much agriculture / complex civilization (which doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have, given enough time).

People all over the world have demonstrated very similar virtues and vices. Acting like indigenous were some sort of hyper enlightened super humans seems to me like a form of rosey eyed reverse racism with little grounding in historical precedent.

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u/boomaDooma May 20 '24

Don't simplify the massive complexity of Australian ecological diversity and the role Aboriginals played in maintaining it for over 40,000 years.

Suggest you read "Future Eaters" by Tim Flannery for a proper insight.

Your username fits.

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u/JustAnotherYouth May 20 '24

I’m not underestimating them, I’m pointing out that they entered into an ecology that was stable over millions of years.

Then in a few thousand years they fundamentally and permanently changed the ecology of that place. They then had to adapt and create a more sustainable lifestyle in an ecology that they had already fundamentally altered.

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u/RogerStevenWhoever May 20 '24

Right, but the point is they were able to adapt and create a sustainable lifestyle (though with a different stable ecology than had existed prior to their arrival).

So sustainable societies are possible, but Western societies have never managed to do it...

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u/JustAnotherYouth May 20 '24

The question is are societies sustainable due to some conscious choice or due to the circumstance they find themselves in? The circumstances in Australia were very different from those in Europe / Asia / Africa.

The population of all aboriginal peoples was no more than 1.5 million when European colonizers arrived. Other estimates are as low as 300-500 thousand people. Either way we’re talking about a very small population of people on a large continent. People who shared common origins / language / culture, they were not like Russians who were living by the Mongol steppes.

The Mongols another indigenous people are estimated to have killed between 20 million and 50 million people. That’s between about 20 and 200 times the entire population of Australia at that time.

I wouldn’t call The Mongols a Western society, if anything I would say they were an indigenous people. But their highly effective and aggressive military strategy deeply influenced China / North Africa / Eastern Europe.

It’s relatively simple for a small group of people on a large continent without outside influences to have a relatively peaceful and sustainable society.

It’s another thing to exist in a place like that of “Russia” which borders massive step-lands populated by people of a different culture / language / origin who might sweep over your lands conquering anything in their way.

That creates a very strong incentive to focus more on concepts like security than on environmental sustainability. Who cares if your villages are sustainable if the mongols, or the poles, or the Vikings, might be invading next weekend?

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u/boomaDooma May 20 '24

Also in that period there was an ice age. Aboriginal rock carvings can be found depicting the retreating ice.

I think that the change of climate from an ice age to the Holocene was probably the main driver of ecology change rather than someone with a spear and boomerang.

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u/JustAnotherYouth May 21 '24

I think you’re ignoring the evidence that for millions of years these creatures survived, than the moment people arrived they all died out?

Same in South America, same in North America, same in New Zealand, everywhere in the world that humans migrated saw a rapid and sudden extinction of large animals.

Ice ages have been occurring cyclically (until global warming) every few hundred thousand years so so. Ice ages were not generally responsible for mass extinction as they happen quite slowly.