Lots of organisms eat wood and cotton. How often does your furniture and clothing just randomly disintegrate? You really cannot imagine a middle ground between these products existing for millions of years vs. your steering wheel falling apart while you're driving?

> furniture and clothing just randomly disintegrate?

Quite frequently, if you have moths . Like it used to be a major problem before the insect apocalypse and we used to kill them with poisob

Ringworld. That's the basic idea of the underlying society wide failure in that book.

Except that bacterium was introduced as a weapon specifically to destroy that society. Weren't they trying to take control of the ring once society collapsed?

Not precisely.

https://larryniven.net/puppeteer/puppol.shtml

>The Puppeteers mistook the City Builders to be the Ringworld's engineers and become suddenly afraid to encounter so powerful a species. The Puppeteers examined the Ringworld's superconductor material and created a technophytic bacterium to seed the Ringworld and destroy the superconductor. The strategy was to follow the probes with trading ships and come to the profitable rescue of the City Builders. However, the Puppeteers soon realized that the City Builders could not possibly have created the Ringworld, and discovered several Pak artifacts. The Puppeteers feared the Pak above nearly all other threats.

>The Conservatives took control of the government and the Ringworld project was abandoned.

Puppeteers don't colonize. They trade, and destroy threats, but the Conservative majority doesn't actually want to own or operate the Ringworld. (Remember, they're flying through space on a rosette of five planets... with over a trillion puppeteers crowded onto just one of them, and the other four covered with automated farms. Elbow room isn't something a herd animal values.)

This is now one of my favorite comments.

Would you do me a kindness and let me know later if sarcasm gets through people who can’t care about the environment a bit more than their own consumption? I’ve tried reason but it never works.

Material security is the best predictor of environmentalist political priorities. Nothing else even comes close.

If you think about it, there are strong evolutionary incentives for people to take from someone/something else rather than reduce their own consumption voluntarily. Hell, it’s what all ecosystems are built on!

I unironically am. Humans are not responsible enough to control a cheap material that doesn't biodegrade; it's everywhere now, including our own blood stream, because we took a material of near-infinite durability and used it for disposable packaging. Madness. We have lost the right to it.

Nature is kinda moving in that direction anyways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organisms_breaking_do...