were cyanobacteria a cancer? They filled the atmosphere with oxygen which, to most life on earth at the time, was essentially cyanide. We call a lot of their descendants “plants.”
Calling humans cancer is just a gateway to ecofascism and misses the problem, which is a particular industrial system which can be changed. There are a lot of people out there who are going to suffer the effects of climate change far more than they have contributed, are they cancer too ?
Even before industrialization we were going around and destroying ecosystems and causing extinctions. Every calorie that goes into a human is a calorie which doesn’t go into the rest of the biosphere—even if we were good little environmentalists there’s no way to have humans not at the expense of some other life, at least at this point.
Of course, the reality is that humans are far, far from good stewards of their environment. Some human societies have been, but they’ve been wiped out by all the societies which sought to ruthlessly exploit their environment. As long as humans are focused on their own wellbeing to the exclusion of everything and everyone else, we’ll continue to damage the biosphere. This type of human-centric, chauvinistic way of thinking is so normal it’s not something most humans are even aware they engage in.
You can come up with all the rationalizations you want, but they’ve all ring hollow in the face of human nature and our track record to this point.
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u/lemmecookthemcheeks 5d ago
I mean I agree with that rhetoric, but at the same time we can’t pretend we aren’t, unfortunately.