Billionaires are the virus.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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This is the "noble savage myth" dressed up for modern times as the "ecologically noble savage myth".
Colonialism is bad, yes.
But indigenous people didn't "live in balance with nature". Consider e.g. the massive ecological changes wrought by indigenous Australians, Easter Island, NZ Maori, etc. Megafauna extinction, massive deforestation, etc.
Human beings are human beings, regardless of their level of technological progress.
It's just racism someone dressed up real pretty so they can pat themselves on the back for how enlightened they are.
Terrible take on many levels, this assumes those indigenous populations would never have undergone their own industrial revolutions.
For reasons ranging from ‘noble savage’ to racist implications that they couldn’t if they tried.
from ‘noble savage’ to racist implications that they couldn’t if they tried
They're the same picture.
To accuse the first nations led Lakota Law Project of racism against themselves is a an actual terrible take.
This is such a gross misreading of the post lol
It literally says "Indigenous people have shown" and not something about them having some innate characteristics that result in their living in balance with the earth. It should be obvious that their idologiy and culture is meant by the post, as it is exactly that what other can actually learn from many indigenous peoples and it is alao exactly what colonialism is actively destroying
Absolutely not, without colonialism and given enough time Indigenous peoples will always industrialise to the greatest extent possible given the circumstances.
Industrialisation is in direct opposition to this idealised ‘harmonious’ living with the land.
You’re falling afoul of the noble savage fallacy in assuming that these people would not have changed their culture over time, given enough time, and have industrialised themselves.
You really like to misunderstand the point , dont you? Like of course ideology and culture can change, that was my whole point...
Just because I support the statement "Indigenous people have shown that is possible to live in balance with nature", I dont think this is / was true for every group of indigenous people and that it would stay always like that. Its litetally just a statement that show cases an example of a way of living that humans can have a different role in nature, one that actually strives to keep the balance on earth.
And me believeing that has nothing to do with the idea of the noble savage, its just an assesment of a way of living that can be studied and maybe even emulated.
You can rephrase it as many times as you want, I understood what you said and I’ve already replied to it.
https://ruthlesscriticism.com/environmentalism.htm is a banger article that talks about this, you can bet that whoever says "humanity is responsible for environmental destruction!!" without any care in the world for the existence of classes and their relations as being a secret hitlerite deep in the narratives
Also, to say how tribal primitive societies and its inhabitants were actually "ones with nature" is unhelpful. Not only is the idea veering dangerously close to racism/eugenics, implication being that indigenous were somehow genetically natural and primitive/backwards while peoples of the civilization are naturally cultural, civilized but destructive (in reality it being just a matter of current mode of production and historical development), but there's also evidence to the contrary given their lack in knowledge and/or limits in their actual interests of preservation.
I do take issue with this. Indigenous hunting practices are not really all that sustainable as a rule. We have the opportunity to use technology to live more sustainably in our environment; corpos just don't want to invest in that.
Not to mention that "indigenous" hunting practices was the cause of extinction of numerous species like the mammoth and similar big mammals.
It is idealisation of primitivism, which is not the answer to our problems in any way.
It may not solve our problems, but have you considered the benefits of feeling smug as hell?
not to mention there was a TON of variety in hunting practices as indigenous populations vary widely.
here is an interesting book about the subject (on my to read list) https://archive.org/details/ecologicalindian0000krec
This is so condescending
It's also bullshit. There are plenty of examples of indigenous people destroying ecosystems
It's humans.
All humans.
Not here to argue, but I would like those examples. That's not something that comes up often.
I know one is Easter Island. Dudes destroyed the ecosystem of the island and, predictably, starved to death.
Indigenous Australians hunting megafauna to extinction is one that immediately comes to mind
The Maori wiped out huge numbers of species in New Zealand when they settled there about a thousand years ago
Australian megafauna died out due to climate change. Humans did not help, but they were already on the way out due to food shortages.
Mounting evidence points to the loss of most species before the peopling of Sahul (circa 50–45 ka) and a significant role for climate change in the disappearance of the continent’s megafauna.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1302698110
A study of the fossil teeth of megafauna from Cuddie Springs in NSW suggests that climate change had a significant impact on the diets of these giant animals and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction.
Easter island is a popular example.
Is that what happened to all the egg laying rabbits?
I believe the land sloth likely went extinct because of humans
When people spread across the globe, we hunted or out-competed so much shit to extinction. Mammoths, giant sloths, wooly rhinos, American cheetahs, American Lions, etc. IIRC the average is forty percent of all land animals above 100 pounds went extinct when we showed up someplace new.
Also, a lot of archeologists will tell you most of the work is sifting through trash, like ancient people's actual trash.
I'm not an expert on this, but I have a theory that the English are the dark souls style try hards of history.
English has a cold and dreary environment that's relatively hostile prior to literally terraforming it, every single edible plant in the isles comes from somewhere else, there are centuries worth of plagues that came out of the squalid living conditions, it's history is a revolving door of groups coming in to kill and pillage, and don't even get me started on the wolves.
It's basically centuries of playing on maximum hard mode. Then when you look at the people they colonized, India and the Americas were halcyonic in comparison. We're finding out that all the "wasted land" the colonials knocked over for fields in the US were massive, curated foraging gardens that could feed thousands for generations. They didn't realize they were knocking over the native equivalent to a free grocery store because they only ever used tree for murdering each other.
Now everyone is miserable because we let the guy that only plays regionally ranked mortal combat decide the rules we all have to play by when literally everyone else in the building wants to play animal crossing.
I say this as someone who has logged hundreds of hours in several games.
Please widen you sources of information, and, please, you need to go outside more.
This is incredibly dismissive of not only native cultures that wiped themselves out (or at least wiped out large animal species) but also of the other European and Asian cultures that had their own imperialist expansion, some nearly to the same degree as the English.
This is a very fun but also anglocentric and supremacist story.
This made too much sense to me.
I don't care for it. I wish to go back to my previous levels of understanding.
Didn’t indigenous people fight over land and attack each other to take land?
Yes? What's your point? Was the land irreversibly damaged by their fighting over land? Surely you can't be trying to compare the ecological impacts tribal warfare to modern industry?
The argument is not that they chose not to harm the land, but that they simply couldn't significantly harm the land, and there usually wasn't any incentive to, because they couldn't get at anything under the land anyway.
About the only option was intentionally setting first/grass fires, and that happened plenty.
Part of reconciliation ought to be us begging for help restoring balance to nature, and letting indigenous people benefit the most financially from green energy/ecological initiatives.
It's extra good because the begging part will infuriate the far right, and the watching non whites get rich off green energy will probably just explode their heads. It's a win-win-win.
We need to do away with the financial part entirely, it’s what is killing us.
Everybody's digging it, the indigenous are digging it too. Plenty of money to be dug up.
a 'unicorn event' in mining
'a treasure chest of all sorts of critical minerals,'
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/norway-house-magnesium-mining-9.6985096