Is technology and environmentalism compatible? Is technology neutral?

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

All of those are important, but what's important is individuality and choice.

Yeah, you made that clear the first time.And yes, I think these are important as well

I wouldn't write off innovation so quickly. If all society was desstroyed, but humans survived, even if they were reduced to feral creatures, given time a new civilisation would arise. It might be better, it might be worse

Well maybe that is true and maybe it will be better if the cycle is repeated long enough - also a kind of evolution I suppose - those ways of life that are unsustainable collapse. It is a bit doubtful if industrialized civilization will occure again in the same way. Any future civilization will not have coal or oil. They will have only the trash heaps of this civilization as metal sources and much of the land will not be suitable for agriculture anymore (due to land degradation, erosion and climate catastrophe). If a new civilization arises, it would have from the beginning to do so with renewable energy sources and limited resource availability. Maybe this would indeed lead to a civilization that is very much aware of the balance they have to take into account? But this is distant future fiction now...

If you want to live without any comforts because you think it's better, then do it, but let everyone else live their own lives - while they should still actually be careful about the environment, there is no need to place it above all else.

It is not really my intention or desire to "live without all comforts". There are some, that have negative effects, yes, but for most parts, I am just not willing to let the planet go blip just because of cellphones and air conditioners.

Not in time. That's a very big difference. Based on past estimates of the future, 99% of major advances would never have happened.
Yes, I value wellbeing and quality of live above the environment, both are important and can easily be balanced (and the entire point ism, if you don't want such things, you don't have to take advantage of them), but they are not mutually exclusive.

So what - you are building the future on hope alone? On hope, that a miracle will happen just in time that "saves us all and the planet"??? Isn't that a bit salvationist?
How do you want to balance them really? To run a car, you need fuel, to build a car, you need materials, to make an electric car, you need different materials, so feed more people, you need more land,...

Regressing can be equally unsustainable, if not more so. If humanity regressed even a century or two from current levels, 90-95% of the population would probably be killed.

I'll ignore that you again talk about regression, but yes indeed, to live on this planet sustainably, population will have to be reduced. You make it sound like I would like to kill off 90% of them in some insane blast, but I never said that and in fact, a few posts back you was the one who said, that a lower population would be a prerequisite to have "sustainable development" - keeping and improving the "standard of living" without destroying the planet. Was that not so?

[species extinction 150/day]Not all of them are even caused by actions of others. Species DO die out, it's called natural selection.... As it is, many common species today would have likely gone extinct without human actions.

That is simply wrong. Natural extinction rates are several orders of magnitude below current rates. There is plenty of studies about that. Some species yes - a frog species living in some pond only will be gone if the next ice age swallows it, but what is happening now is crazy. At current rates, some estimates say that at the end of the century, 50% of the species will be gone. Land degradation leads to a yearly loss of 1% in agricultural viable land (despite adding new one by deforestation), this will lead to a decrease by 50% in 2050. Don't tell me, that the current way of life is not destroying the planet.

I don't quite get the difference. It is perfectly possible to utilise existing resources to last for as long as the Earth will.

How?

[critizising civ while beein in it]And nobody stops you, but it's easy to criticise something while still benefiting from it. It's a lot harder to still see only the negatives when you realise how difficult survival otherwise is.

It is not easy really - to wrap the head around this. But it is theoretical, yes, it is philosophical and admittedly my main focus in the debates here are to show the reasons for the dilemma and the need for it to stop. Collapse is one way to stop it. What other ways are in sight? Remember it has to happen soon, because the longer we wait, the worse it gets. Some ideas that have been proposed have shown signs of not beeing real long term solutions (pumping water from the ground onto fields in desert areas), others are not even proven to be applicable to the problem - certainly not within the timescale required (cheap nuclear fusion, asteroid mining).
So I am a bit negative here - talking mostly about what is going wrong and that it has to stop and not giving you a bright alternative you like (as you disregard anything that reminds you of "regression" as inadequade). But so far, the solutions I have heard from anyone in here to solve the problem otherwise are either ineffective (change lightbulbs, write your government, buy green products) or "potential future technologies" (bascially meaning that we do not know if, how and when they will exist).
A quote of one of the people in the political landscape of the country I live in said it nicely in respect to nuclear power: We are flying a plane without having an airport to land it.

I wouldn't put it in such black and white t erms myself, but if you insist, then yes. Both are important, and ignoring one on favour of the other is as bad as the other. We may not be the only species, but we are also a species. We don't have any special responsibility, just like nonsentient animals don't worry about animals they hunt to extinction, they just avoid causing destruction for its own sake.

This is not coherent - you state a bit above, that "Humans are capable of adapting, which is their only true strength, but means they are capable of much greater success than other species, in addition to sentience." - If that is the way humans differe from other animals, if that is the characteristic that justifies humans to exploit the planet and consume 40% of its photosynthetic capacity, how can you then say, that despite this, they do not have any special responsability???
Also, "ignoring one in favour of the other is as bad as the other" is not true. The world can go on very well without cellphones and cars, actually it will probably do better, while humans and cell phones do depend on the world around them. Without cellphones and cars, people in 1000 or 10.000 years will still be able to live in Spain and breathe air and drink water and eat plants there. If that goes away (climate change is going to turn many areas into a desert, water is polluted, nuclear waste is endangering the storage sites...), humans will not live in comfort anymore. In fact, this would probably kill 95% of the people with the remaining ones fighting over a few remaining liveable spots.

See - one of the two things can exist without the other, the other cannot. So if you really do favour that choice towards a higher "quality of life" over the environment, and that IS what you have said above - I really wonder how you can say of yourself, that you feel close to the NA'Vi. For them, the choice would be utterly clear.