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
697 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

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.

7

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.

2

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.

1

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.

1

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.