This is what I ask speciesists.
I am so fucking sick of this!! I am so fucking sick of this beyond belief!!
“WE” are not destroying “the only planet we have”!!!
WHITE PEOPLE ARE DOING SO. BECAUSE THEY FUCKING RUIN EVERYTHING AND BECAUSE IN THEIR USUAL NARCISSISTIC EGOCENTRIC TRIP, THEY TELL TO THEMSELVES DUMB SHIT LIKE “WE ARE THE MOST CLEVER SPECIES EVER TO HAVE LIVED” WHILE DOING SO!
Supremacy over nature is at the very heart of white supremacy and like any supremacy, is destructive!!
Jane Goodall or the typical white hero who went to Africa to save endangered species and indigenous tribes whose livelihood depends on these species.
Spare me this white supremacist shit, please I just woke up!
MCHEEEW
For real though, they destroy shit and then come back later to “fix” things.
Actually, truth be told, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The idea that only white people had intent of dominance over nature and that the other peoples were all “in tune with the natural world” and stuff is complete bullshit, and is a bastardization of white supremacist sentiments of cultural superiority. While bastardization of such to make white people look like the bad guys here is certainly a noble goal, it’s incorrect.
First off, the other civilization builders of Eurasia were hardly nature-loving hippies. China, India, Japan, the Middle East and South-East Asia all had their share of empire-building, all of which necessitated the harvesting of tons of resources, the harnessing of the natural environment so to allow for places where people could live, and the control of nature (or, at least some of it) for the benefit of the populace. China and Japan destroyed ecosystems to make way for rice paddies, which require certain qualities to facilitate growth. In the Middle East, people sure did have a thing for monuments, and needed stone for such. The Sumerians destroyed themselves when they exhausted the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in their overuse of the water. Over in India and South-East Asia, canals and aqueducts were constructed to harness the power of the monsoon rains.
Africa was hardly excused from this, and had their fair share of empires. I lack knowledge on most of them (I know that that’s a bad thing, but I’m trying to improve), but there is certainly one that earns it’s stripes as a world-shaper: Egypt, and they were definitely not white. They plundered the Nile for everything it had, and had no qualms about empire-building along it’s shores.
The old world had it’s share of perfectly technologically advanced empires of all races, and not many were very keen on environmentalism. But, you’d never hear that, because white people tend to assume they are the only group that can actually make civilizations, so they assume all others must be “noble savages”.
But wait. It gets better.
As anthropology and archaeology shows, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were hardly the nature-loving hippies that stereotypes (read: white people) make them out to be.
It is estimated that more than 200 million people lived in the Americas prior to Europeans coming over and fucking everything up. What were those 200 million people doing? Nation-building. Despite the absence of easily accessible metals and livestock, the peoples of the Americas built cities, towns, and empires just as those in the east did. Ever heard of Tenochtitlan, the shining jewel of the Aztec Empire, which was pretty much a floating city? I don’t know about you, but you don’t make a floating city and leave the environment untouched. Or how about Cahokia, a city located where St. Louis stands today, a city that, at it’s height, was more populous than any of Europe’s cities at the time? The pyramids the city was built on, the largest of which was bigger than the Great Pyramid of Freaking Giza, didn’t just appear out of the ground like pimples. Somebody had to shift that dirt. And that was a lot of dirt. Hell, even outside these great cities, the indigenous peoples were getting to work on the landscape. Early European settlers even commented on how neat and orderly the terrain was, as if they were back across the Atlantic - they even compared it to gardens.
That’s right, the natives weren’t just empire building - they were gardening.
And here’s the best part: due to lack of easily accessible metals, the easiest thing to construct empires out of was wood. Obscene amounts of wood were needed to make these cities, these towns, these gardens, replacing the metal that other civilizations would have used. As a result, they needed to chop down a lot of trees. And when I say a lot of trees, I mean a lot of trees. I mean so many trees that they had nearly deforested the entire North American continent by the time the settlers arrived. I mean so many trees that the only reason the ecosystems of North America didn’t collapse was because of earthworms, accidentally shipped across the Atlantic, which pretty much remade the ecosystem.
The Medieval Warming Period, a period of global warming that coincided with the Dark Ages in Europe, is believed to have resulted from this wholesale tree slaughter. And this wasn’t a little rise in temperature - the global average raised about 1 degree celsius, comparable to the environmental damage that’s been done from modern-day use of fossil fuels. The temperature only dropped again when the Europeans began their genocide of the indigenous peoples, as a result of there not being enough people to chop down the trees.
That’s right: the indigenous peoples of North America caused global warming before global warming was a thing.
So no, supremacy over nature is not a strictly white thing. Cultures all over the world have been environmentally destructive since the dawn of time, and almost all of them have been capable of some serious damage. White people don’t have a monopoly on civilization, and they certainly have no monopoly on human supremacy. The only thing that changed that was white people thinking they were the only ones smart enough to build a civilization.
(Source: lmaoatheist)
