this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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I love when people reinvent ethnic essentialism. Every single culture that had the means and the opportunity to rape the land for profit has done it. The ones that didn't simply couldn't.
South American natives fight mining companies, but if they had the right to exploit the land themselves, do you think they would be any different from the North American natives who found oil on their lands and are happily fracking for it?
I agree, we gotta address the root of the problem: Extractivism, colonialism and infinite growth economies are just human by-products.
i dunno, the indus valley civilization did minimal ecological damage compared to all the other civilizations
It's not ethnic essentialism to acknowledge that there are cultures that long knew of the dangers of exploiting the land too much and put more emphasis on sustainability in their usage of the land. Extractivism, colonialism and infinite growth are parts of our culture and culture can change as a result of conscious decisions. Indigenous cultures can be part of the motivation to do so at all and be inspiration for where to go instead.
This is wildly inaccurate and borderline racist. Your culture revolving around resource extraction doesn’t mean everyone’s does, and it doesn’t mean that’s a cope they have because they’re too stupid to figure out how to do it.
As a single example, the Menominee developed commercial forestry practices in the 19th century that allowed them to perpetually harvest from a sustainable old growth forest instead of clear cutting everything. After decades of battling the US government over control of their forest, today it still stands. Anyone who thinks that they’re incapable of renting and operating a chainsaw and cutting everything down is just a racist. They don’t do it not because they can’t, they don’t do it because they don’t want to.
This story isn’t unique, indigenous groups all over the world do what they can through legal systems and direct action to protect the environment. This isn’t to say every indigenous person is morally pure or has these politics, it’s just that if you deny it’s a trend that exists you’re closing your eyes to reality.
To add onto this the Klamath peoples were notoriously individualistic and "industrious" in comparison to their neighbors and during the reservation period they did, comparitively, exceptionally well as there were similar cultural virtues around "profit". Thanks, in part, to both location and pre-contact culture they build a thriving lumber industry and by 1950 were one of the wealthiest tribes within the US and were the only tribes in the United States that paid for all federal, state and private services used by their members.
Obviously a 'worst case' for "raping the land for profit" right?
No. By 1950 the reservation has turned the "undesirable woodland" into a highly productive, healthy and sustainable forest and pastureland with by far the largest remaining stand of ponderosa pine in the west.
This, of course, could not stand and so the 1954 Klamath termination act was enacted. Originally the plan was to sell it all to private industry like Crown-Zellerbach, however the "lumber industry's concern with how the increase in Klamath Forest timber would saturate the industry" resulted instead in creating the Winema and Fremont National Forests. Which of course have been heavily logged and largely mismanaged, but not nearly as bad as the plan was and certainly worse than when humans were more active in helping to maintain it.
Thank you for sharing this info! I’ll have to look up more about the Klamath and their history, it sounds really interesting
Hang on I thought we were implying a very specific subset of humans were responsible for killing and raping everyone, is that not racism or is it only racist when it's towards the people I have no ill will for?
CEO of a mega corporation is not a race. There is no history of nations depriving CEOs of their land and then destroying it, rendering them incapable of basic subsistence level survival.
Ah ok sometimes these posts are referring to "europeans" or "white people".
I mean, history occurred as it occurred. We still live with the effects of European colonization, it’s not an accident that you have to go through over $2 trillion of wealth on Forbes’ billionaire list before anyone who isn’t European descent pops up. That doesn’t mean anything about all white people, the vast majority being nowhere near as wealthy. But their ethnicity is far less important than the culture of exploitation and consumerism that is foisted on everyone else in order to make them money.
How did you come to this conclusion? From my perspective there is no way to demonstrate a culture had the means to exploit the land for profit unless they did it. I'd be interested in knowing if I missed something.
Possible counterpoints would be the existence of sustainable foraging practices and taboos around greed, or practices like potlatch. These exist in various forms around the world today.
Ethnicity is a tricky concept to apply here but I think you are getting at the concept of idealizing "primitive" cultures. I don't think that's what was going on in the OP. I think they are saying humanity has a choice, the choice that is being made is to allow these behaviors to continue.
this ain't it, fam
Weird way of deflecting the consequences of the industrial revolution to millennia of subsistence farmers.
Someone desperately needs to read Graeber and abandon this misanthropic mentality.
Can't build anarchy on misanthropy.