Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

[jacob]

... that the loss will simply accelerate if people stop caring [about nature]. Not stopping to care about anything.

[7Wannabe5]

Yes, and? I hypothesize that a lack of exposure to "city" may inhibit or alter human mental development, because "nature" does not provide enough positive feedback to the sort of abstractions the human brain is likely to form, such as "rectangles" or "good/evil"

I agree. I too (bookish nerds with inhalers unite!) was towards the "indoors girl" end of the spectrum during my 1970s suburban childhood, but that was an era when all kids were much more "outdoors kids." The phrase Stay-at-Home-Mom had not yet been invented, so the Housewives who happened to be our mothers felt perfectly justified in banishing us from the premises for much of the day, forget about the Michigan weather ("Poor baby, waah, waah, you're only cold because your mittens are wet, because you came inside where it's warm and started dripping on my new atrium flooring. Put these two socks on your hands, take this old bent tablespoon and go dig yourself some shelter in a snowdrift." ), so that they could maybe do a bit of vacuuming and then relax with a magazine or talk on the phone. OTOH, I didn't pee in the woods until the summer I was 10 and our parents dropped us off to run wild for a month at a Girl Scout camp under the scant supervision of teenage Boomers, but I immediately loved the freedom of the experience. Anyways, whether nature or nurture, I think exposure to both is ideal.

This ties into the Randers2052 argument that it is strategically preferred to focus on [technological-type] abstraction, which is predictably and eventually going to end up comprising most of the world within a few decades (as increasing number of affluent humans take over the last vestiges of natural places), over developing the brain structures, both intellectually and emotionally, that tie into and depend on a rapidly vanishing nature. The alternative seems to be to flee to one of the remaining pockets of nature.

Okay, I just reread Randers on this topic, and beyond my (perhaps mistaken) take that he is being a bit tongue-in-cheek hyperbolic with this bit of advice, what he is expecting to be disappeared by 2052 is a particular definition of "Wilderness"(quote" global land that is (more) than 10 kilometers away from the nearest village, highway, power line, or infrastructure development'), not nature entire. Obviously, the vast majority of "Wilderness" still to be lost will occur in regions such as the Amazon Rain Forest where there still is wilderness to be lost. IOW, the effects of globalization and the expected next/last(?) 2 billion increase in human population, for most of us may be more like what I notice in the National Forest resort realms of my region, which is more affluent bird-watchers and kite-surfers visiting from distant lands and fewer auto-workers affording summer cottages located a few hours from where they work. It will be fucking wholesale tragic, but pretty much every member of this forum is too variety-capital affluent to be completely priced out of paradise by mid-century.

Randers also makes the odd note that humans enjoy being in a deep primordial forest form of wilderness, because that is where we evolved (??). Others would argue that we actually enjoy environments that mimic the open savannah of our ancestral range with something solid at our back for psychological security, thus our obsession with a lawns and walls when we indulge in landscape design. Actually, if "wilderness" is alternatively defined as "nature clearly not under human control" or "offering negative feedback" then it could be argued that human exposure to "wilderness" will rapidly increase over the next 30 years. For instance, I felt a bit in the "wilderness" when I heard the deep sonic rumble-whooosh of the rare February tornado that touched down around 7 miles from my current domicile a couple of weeks ago. Nature vs. Grid? The Rectangle is going to be down on all 4 corners, curled submissive as a footstool under the force of Nature's round-heeled chaos.

[Jean]

I skipped some step in my reasoning.
The reason why you choose to stop caring about nature, is because nature will disapear.
So if this is enough of a reason, it is only logical to stop caring about everything that will disapear.
Everything disapear. And everything is beyond our full grasp.
I think video games (pve) are so attractive, because they offer a world that is set in stone and who has boundaries. It offer a solace from those two sometime painful qualities our world has.

[mathiverse]

(The Integral people have better definition in terms of 'nature', 'Nature', and 'NATURE'. It remains ungoogleable to me. @daylen has previously shared a picture of the appropriate page.)

For our purposes, we offer three definitions, which we label as NATURE, Nature, and nature. NATURE includes the whole Kosmos in all its dimensions, including interiors and exteriors: the Great Nest of Being. Nature (with a capital N) refers to the exterior domains of the Kosmos, the domains that are studied by the natural and some of the social sciences: the Great Web of Life. Finally, nature (lowercase n) means the empirical-sensory world in two different but related uses: the exterior world disclosed by the five senses (and their extensions), and the interior world disclosed by feelings, emotional-sexual impulses, somatic experiences as contrasted with rational mind and with culture: the Great Biosphere.

[jacob]

Yeah, so to summarize the plan/strategy.

Randers2052 focuses on (lower case) "nature", which is commonly understood as wilderness, that is, places that are undeveloped and (mostly) unoccupied by humans. This is also the dictionary definition. Even if you take "wilderness" to include forest preserves with groomed trails and the likes, there's not much wilderness left (like a place you can sit without hearing or seeing other human activity for, say, an hour). The trend is down due to climate but first and foremost because increasingly more affluent people can afford to visit or buy up these places. As such if you, like many humans, go into "nature" to experience peace and quiet or whatever it is you enjoy by being surrounded by greenery and insects, he suggests coming up with a plan B. Loss of "nature" is also the focus of all the climate grief circles and "rewilding" dreams. He has roughly the same message when it comes to tourism(*). He's already right about that in so many ways. Gone are the days when flying to Europe was an exciting and exotic adventure. These days, those destinations are overrun by tourists to the point where the locals would rather they stay away.

Adjacent to this is "Nature" which is not a good plan A either, mainly due to climate change. This applies to marine biologists, ski instructors, etc. that is people who makes a career or a calling working in/with "Nature". Their vocations are going to be downtrending. As we know from software engineering, working in an uptrending field is a huge tailwind. Working in a downtrending field is a negative sum game. Just ask your local fairer or wagon wheelman.

If you have a kosmic brain and mainly focused on NATURE, then collapse of "nature" and "Nature" probably seems like a wonderful thing to experience. The greatest show on earth and you're here to watch and unite with the emergence of an ocean dominated by jellyfish and who knows what else in terms of evolutionary excitement. In that case, I don't think the Randers2052 advice really applies to you. I'd also note that there are probably other plan B's that running with software which currently seems to be heading in the direction of AI and mixed reality. Perhaps people will come up with a new trend. Key point, though, is not to jump on dying trends---but perhaps that's just Randers's own personality.

(*) I suppose "tourism" can also be defined as tourism, Tourism, and TOURISM.

[7Wannabe5]

As such if you, like many humans, go into "nature" to experience peace and quiet or whatever it is you enjoy by being surrounded by greenery and insects, he suggests coming up with a plan B.

I think most of the humans currently grieving the loss of nature in their locale, probably live in warm places with good jobs. There's still plenty of nature in cold places with crappy jobs, like my current neck-of-the-woods. Obviously, if this is a trend one truly believes in, rather than investing time in video games, one should invest money in northern woods property or rural Japanese villages returning to nature as their old people die off. I could go up to location of my second permaculture project and sit alone in 12 acres of woodlands that no other human has visited in months, and I happen to know that the ROI on that property in the 11 years since Randers wrote his book has been pretty crappy compared to the S&P 500. The median Canadian is currently 42 years old, heading towards 71 in 2052, barring huge waves of climate immigration. It's going to be harder to get a spot in a nursing home with good internet than a camping reservation. There is no uniform future happening everywhere at the same rate and/or incidence of trends.

[zbigi]

@7 I agree. Industrialization and urbanization has already destroyed most of the nature that most people could interact with on the daily basis. For example, my city is surrounded on three sides by moon-like landscapes of slag heaps (on fourth side, there's a nice forest, which has a couple of slag heaps inside). Climate change is not going to change much wrt access to nature for people like me.

[7Wannabe5]

@zbigi:

Yup. My neck of the woods was completely logged, hunted, farmed out by 1900, although it was still almost complete wilderness in 1830. It just took 70 years, utilizing 19th century technology to wipe out "nature." Urbanization and globalization did away with vast majority of hunters and farmers, so "nature" has actually been on upswing in recent years. Since "nature" tourism is far more lucrative than subsistence farming or deer hunting at the 45th parallel, I don't see the trend as likely to change.

[jacob]

I think most of the humans currently grieving the loss of nature in their locale, probably live in warm places with good jobs. There's still plenty of nature in cold places with crappy jobs, like my current neck-of-the-woods. Obviously, if this is a trend one truly believes in, rather than investing time in video games, one should invest money in northern woods property or rural Japanese villages returning to nature as their old people die off.

That's basically the refugee-solution. This is already happening in, I presume less crappy destinations, with more affluent (money and/or initiative) people buying out long-term residents further up north, thereby making "the rent too damn high". Individuals can front-run this curve where this hasn't happened yet, but once enough do it, it changes the area.

[jacob]

I will once again reiterate that the point is that humans won't miss what they never had or never learned to enjoy in the first place. Therefore the strategy is to avoid acquiring a taste for anything that will eventually and predictably be lost. Even better, acquire a taste for something that will eventually and possibly become even better with time. Doing both makes it possible to play life on easy-mode. Doing neither and it'll be on hard-mode. Since I never acquired a taste for nature, I'm already half way there.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Yes, but global population is now expected to peak at around 9.6 billion around 2064, so the question is whether the crappier, colder areas of "nature" will be gentry-class-touristed out prior to the global population receding. The "ERE" city survey tending strongly towards "someplace warm" makes me think this is unlikely. Humans are still buying retirement homes in Florida. Maybe the "trick" will be to learn to enjoy "nature" in Alabama in July and Canada in January, if you want to avoid the crowds.

[AxelHeyst]

I think my initial aversion to Rander's point comes down to a concern that following his advice will lead to a further loss of understanding of how the non-human world works and how it is foundational to everything humans have. My understanding of the world is that a lack of ecological literacy is one of the major contributing factors to the mess we're in, and so I'm generally favorable towards anything that would tend to increase people's ecological literacy (and hell with their feeeeelings about it, we've got a species to pull back from the brink).

I sort of fuzzily connect 'people who spend time in nature' with 'people who possess basic ecological literacy', and so when I read 'people should probably spend less time in nature' a red flag goes off and I think 'oh no! that would result in even worse ecological literacy which would only exacerbate the mess we're in! danger!'. We don't need any more "it's what plants crave" levels of ecological literacy in the world.

Upon reflection,

1) I'm getting that Randers is more just saying "hey, if your idea of a good time is to be in the Wilderness, access is going to get more and more difficult so maybe you wanna rethink that", which I agree with for multiple reasons, chief among them that "Wilderness" was a dumb and dangerous idea from the start.

2) My association between 'people who spend time in nature' and 'people who possess ecological literacy' might be pretty shaky. Plenty of people spend time in nature and would be totally mystified by e.g. JMGs tiers of economies (primary = natural resources, secondary = product of human labor on natural resources, tertiary = financial abstraction), and vice versa. You don't have to be a backpacker/outdoorsperson to grok ecology, even though those often go together.

..

I'll just reiterate my concern that we don't need more people in the world who grok how the human-world works but don't grok how the non-human world works. If you lack the latter you are more likely to make decisions about the former that lead to negative emergent consequences. e.g in the human-world you can throw things away. In the non-human world there's no such thing as away.

Insofar as we (as society) finally integrate our understanding of the human-world as a component/sub-ecology of the more-than-human world, then I'm for all of this. It's the this-or-that either/or division that I'm against, and I think it's very easy for people to misunderstand Randers' point, which is why I always chime in with the same 2c every time this comes up.

ETA: In other words, I'm worried about the emergent effects of a system where most agents lack ecological literacy, and I'm worried that advice to give up on nature will contribute to declining ecological literacy.

[7Wannabe5]

You don't have to be a backpacker/outdoorsperson to grok ecology, even though those often go together.

Yup, you also don't have to like sex much to grok how/why to use a condom. I think maybe there is just something in the eNTP nature that when warned of scarcities, tends towards becoming even more determined to find even more old guys willing to contract with her for eco-sexual encounters in the world of the future, even though she can always fall back on library books and cookies.

[jacob]

2) My association between 'people who spend time in nature' and 'people who possess ecological literacy' might be pretty shaky. Plenty of people spend time in nature and would be totally mystified by e.g. JMGs tiers of economies (primary = natural resources, secondary = product of human labor on natural resources, tertiary = financial abstraction), and vice versa. You don't have to be a backpacker/outdoorsperson to grok ecology, even though those often go together.

As far as I see the overlap is rather small. The average person sees "nature" (lower case) as place to visit for 'parks and recreation'. They hike trails, take pretty pictures, race MTBs, and drive their ATVs and snow mobiles around. Hunters, fishermen, and foragers are probably the ones who come closest to being interested in "Nature", but this interest seems quite limited to the species they're out harvesting. Some are interested in primitive skills and bush craft, but I think the motivation there is more about "learning how to survive" should they somehow find themselves surrounded by NATURE with nothing on them but a $300 fixed-blade knife made out of 80CRV2 steel and a goodie bag of other gadgets, perhaps as part of a nationally syndicated TV show. The subset who is out communing with trees or observing a 1x1 patch of ground with deep interest is rather small relative to the rest... also, it's not like they inspire the rest to trade in their ATVs for a looking glass and a field book, right?

Ecology in the sense of grokking how things fit together in a complex web (MHC12) is beyond the vast majority of people. In other words, people tend to be very good at compartmentalizing. After a relaxing day in nature, they go home and spray their garden with roundup to protect the lawn, which they park their pontoon boat on, from dandelions and other "weeds".

One of my favorite quotes ever is:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

I might have internalized this too much. It's my experience that "education" and "raising awareness" is wasted effort on the majority of people. And in the few cases where it's not, an ecological education is downright depressing.

[daylen]

Near future potential for change: Fake meat becomes as good as real meat but healthier and possibly cheaper. A significant number of people adopt the fake meat. 75%+ of farmland is freed up for alternative energy sources, nature preserves, and remote villages.

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural ... ty-crucial

[Jean]

I think a lot of the call of nature, is because we still need to feel how much a part of NATURE we are.
At least for me, hunting will be about experiencing existence how NATURE made us experience it for the last million years.
Learning about Nature is just a mean to this end.
Technology freeing up space for Nature is a great hope we can have.
To come back to the subject, asmongold recently talked about how the unpenetrable barrier beetween life and video games was one of its main appeal. And i think he was onto something.

[daylen]

To come back to the subject, asmongold recently talked about how the unpenetrable barrier beetween life and video games was one of its main appeal. And i think he was onto something.

Totally agree. I think this is a great thing because if simulation can never replace reality, then science will forever be an expanding frontier that clever engineering can push forward. Infinite progress for as long as there is energy to compute with.

[AxelHeyst]

As far as I see the overlap is rather small. ...

I think you are right. I do think 'most people with ecological literacy spend a fair amount of time out of doors' is true, but the inverse is not. "Get people outdoors so they'll care about it" has been a drumbeat solution of old school conservation efforts since forever and I think it's internalized and not critically thought about very often.

[7Wannabe5]

And in the few cases where it's not, an ecological education is downright depressing.

I think maybe an ecological education is somewhat less depressing if your path to that education was through gardening. If you start out as a Naturalist, or just somebody who enjoys being in untouched nature, as Leopold did in his boyhood (in the same region as my second permaculture project!), all you can see is loss. The philosophy and practice offered in Carold Deppe's "The Resilient Gardener" or Robin Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass", which offers respect for ancient human horticultural practice as well as scientific analysis and sensory'/aesthetic appreciation, will tend towards landing you in a more optimistic place in which you can once again see yourself as possessing some degree of agency. It's not a coincidence that Leopold chose to take on the regeneration of a blasted-to-desert farm as a mid-life project.

When you begin as a gardener, or the sort of gardener who also reads piles of essays on gardening, you are also aware of all the human-created varieties of plants that have been lost to history, and the Jekyll/Hyde proclivities of "weeds" and "invasives." You intuit how the evolution of our species is intimately bound up in the the war between the grasses and the trees, because you have participated in it with profound inefficiency.

https://www.nhbs.com/the-war-between-tr ... asses-book

[daylen]

You intuit how the evolution of our species is intimately bound up in the the war between the grasses and the trees, because you have participated in it with profound inefficiency.

A similar intuition across a range of different "battle" lines can be developed in gaming when not aiming for a particular objective but rather chaotically bumping up against the constraints of the game. Like in Civ 6 there are various biomes that your civilization can develop upon. Jungles, forests, and marshes requiring more work to develop and more travel time. Grasslands, deserts, and tundra requiring less work to develop and less travel time. Hills and forests offer defensive bonuses. In Cities skylines there is a continuous struggle between an accessible city and traffic congestion as well as between boxy grids and curvy roads that follow natural contours. I wish there were more ecologically oriented sims that didn't empathize a particular set of objectives or goals but instead doubled down on a semi-organized, regenerative world that is predictably unpredictable. Economies are pervasive in gaming, but the combination of ecologies and economies could greatly diversify player role-play and strategy.