This!

In my experience, most people agree that ecology is _one of_ the priorities, but people who define themselves as ecologists tend to think to ecology as _the_ priority. In the end, while they think they advocate for a nicer world, they tend to alienate other people from the green path beacuse of their extremism.

The problem is our (as in the human's) environment and not exploiting it to the point where we kill ourselves out of existence. A bit of beer is okay, a lot of beer can cause a nasty hangover, too much beer and you kill yourself.

It wasn't even the primary reason in the modern america nature movement (and by modern I mean starting with the John Muir/Teddy roosevelt era, when some of these large dams started being built).

It was about keeping these places available to be enjoyed by everyone, not exploited for profits and destroyed for the benefit of the few. It's a public good and public resource.

Of course, let's not forget that John Muir was the primary opponent of the O'Shaughnessy Dam (Hetch Hetchy), which is a public resource (water supply for San Francisco).

Obviously, there are examples of protecting nature against private encroachment as well...but even if you set those aside, the core tension exists: we always have to prioritize between competing goals. Folks like Muir prioritize nature for nature's sake. Others prioritize giving water to millions of people. Neither group is wrong.

Not really. Muir argued that nature provided "spiritual nourishment" to people. Like I said in another comment, the argument was that nature was a public resource, so should be preserved so everyone could benefit and use the resource. Preserving "nature for natures sake" is a much more modern argument.

>Others prioritize giving water to millions of people. Neither group is wrong.

Given that the discussion has moved from "Is it worthwhile to protect nature from exploitation so all can enjoy it?" to include "Are we going to destroy the climate and with it our society", I think it's safe to say one group was wrong.

Sure, fine. I'm not trying to re-characterize Muir's beliefs for the sake of an argument. I'm agreeing that he had a reason to think nature itself was a public good. But then, so is the water supply. There's an inherent tension. Attempts to ignore this tension are over-simplifying the problem.

> Given that the discussion has moved from "Is it worthwhile to protect nature from exploitation so all can enjoy it?" to include "Are we going to destroy the climate and with it our society", I think it's safe to say one group was wrong.

Maybe. It doesn't change the question of whether or not Hetch Hetchy should exist, or if cattle should graze on public lands, or any of a thousand other issues of the same shape that have existed forever.

Also, frankly, there are plenty of folks who think the benefits of mitigating global warming are not worth the costs: if you believe that there's any limit on what we might do to stop the phenomenon, then you're one of them. It's a continuum, and absolutist positions on either side of the issue are more heat than light.

As per usual, we will end up in some middle ground as a society that satisfies nobody completely.

Protecting nature is both protecting ourselves and our interests. Sometimes extreme environmental harm comes with minimal benefit to anyone. Other times it’s the reverse where minimal harm results in vast benefits such as with the GPS network, generally it’s more balanced.

If anything the environmental argument is nature is extremely valuable, be sure the trade off is a net win for society.

While that's true, that's not a reason to ignore nature -- "nature" evolved over thousands of years to stay in balance. When man makes significant changes (like draining wetlands to turn into agriculture), then that balance is broken, and you can end up with catastrophic floods in developed areas.

Nature doesn't really care if new areas get flooded, that's just a new state of nature. But all of the people that were flooded out of their town care that the flood patterns changed due to the wetland loss.

Rather than creating a better-than-emergency solution up front, they could've created a more temporary solution with the intent of replacing it with a long term maintainable solution.

Consider as an analogous project temporary bridges which are built until construction of long lasting maintainable bridges are completed.

edit: I originally said "they should've", as if I were speaking from a place of authority, which I am absolutely not.

Yes, as they should. The issue is not doing environmental impact studies, but how long they take, how expensive they are, and how opaque the process is. The assumptions, methods and data should be as public as possible so objections can be made and dealt with logically.

As an example, my parents live in a relatively conservative location and the public utility decided that they were going to replace all their coal power plants with wind power. There was a huge uproar and their response was “here is our model and our data, please find plausible scenarios where wind power isn’t cheaper than coal.” The opposition died away because it was obvious that the switch was the best move.

Of course many geoengineering projects likely are way more beneficial over their lifetime, but the analysis must be done to look beyond immediate benefits to ensure we don't destabilize the future in the process. To do things right we have to be better at making calls on which technologies are needed yesterday or today versus tomorrow or never.

Sustainability now is far more important than in times past, as we are now reaching the ceiling of earth's carrying capacity. When we exceed that we risk generations of (or permanent) suffering. As our technology gets better, carrying capacity increases, but our sustainable capacity is far lower than the temporary capacity certain sugar rush solutions provide. These minimal to negative LTV solutions are foolish, not virtuous.

I agree that message is hard to deliver to people, hopefully our species gets wiser so that we won't need to ever have conversations like that in the future. But the only way to reach that point is to break the cycle of unsustainable growth.

So much water is controlled and diverted on the Colorado that it is rare that it reaches the Gulf of California, yet we rarely talk about the havoc that has wreaked on the communities in Mexico downstream from the dams.

The death of the Aral Sea is a more well known environmental disaster.

> Sustainability at all costs has its own costs

You know what else has its own costs? Choosing to live in a place with flooding and without electricity. Same as following poor farming practices.

You can't take bad decisions from others and use shuffle the responsibility onto the environment. "Oh looks like we can't do the sustainable thing because then we'd have to deal with the consequences of our own actions."

Choosing only to settle in places without flooding (or any other natural disaster) and with infrastructure already built out is what some might characterize as unreasonably limiting.