either way we're fucked.

Look after ourselves, we have even worse over-population.

Don't look after ourselves, we're a bunch of fat, lazy slobs (i.e. now)

And we can't look back to history; I don't think we EVER lived the perfectly natural life except as cavemen, which isn't documented.

lol...the whole 'living in harmony with nature' stuff is a bunch of bullshit.

When we 'lived in harmony with nature', most people died by the time they were 30. Life was all about being hungry and cold and dirty, struggling to get enough food to live, and trying not to get killed by some creature.

Most of the time when you had a kid, either the kid and mother died during childbirth, or the kid died long before growing up. Disease was a reality of life. Peoples teeth rotted and decayed from malnutrition and lack of care.

to sum up, when mankind lived in harmony with nature, mankind's lot in life SUCKED. Go back a couple hundred years, and most people still lived like that. Things are much better now, especially in the first world.

I didn't know there were still people who believe in the "live with nature" bullshit. I though that was typical 19th century.
But if you want to go natural:
Evolution is natural. Evolution is all about kicking other creatures' butt. Humans evolved to have larger brains then other creatures, because that's about the only advantage we have (you can alo count having the body to be able to build things). Now we use thast brain to kick butt. What's the problem?

Natural lives? Laughable. As soon as we became different to other primates (and other homines) in the stone tools and fire and culture department we became unnatural.

lol....we're unnatural. I suddenly got a flash of ghosts and vampires. :p

lol no way im going natural thank you

For us as a race, it'd be a bad idea. For the world, it would probably be good.

I dont think you see the picture. Its possible to "live with nature" and not be living like you did in the stone ages.

well, how do you mean by 'living with nature'? I mean, we can be more 'eco-friendly' if you will, but we're always going to have an impact on nature in some form.

pollution is the most obvious, but there's also the destruction of animal habitats as we build more housing or whatever. That's damn near inevitable. Even harder to stop is other waste products...waste heat and water.

And by waste water I don't just mean polluted water. As people, we use alot of water. Irrigation and such. This makes the humidity around cities go up. If you want a drastic example, check out El Paso. Around the city for many miles, the desert is dying. Because it's too wet. There're green plants and things that shouldn't be there, while the 'desert flora and fauna' are retreating further into the real desert.

Alot of those things are inevitable. Unless we abandon technology entirely, which personally I'm not willing to do.

lol quite so satis.

Unless we give up houses, clothes, chemicals, medicine, we're always gonna affect the world. Even living totally naturally we would, but the point then is we'd affect it like other animals do (kill a few deer for meat, get eaten by big nasty wolf, piss everywhere) as opposed to kill trees for paper, fill the atmosphere with crappy gases, dump nuclear waste, dump normal waste, kill animals just coz 'i dont like them' or 'its fun'... blah blah the list goes on. And even if some of us, heck even half of us did it, it would help, but the other half would happily screw up the planet just as effectively.

Somehow I can't see more than 10 people giving up on what we have right now.

I know its hard to image, but its easy if you try. It almost as hard as imaging a world that doesnt use money. Both are possible and would make the world a better place.

"Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese." -- Mr. Burns



There's a Simpsons quote for every situation.

Man, you're as much a communist as some of these Euros.

"Money! It's a drag! Spend it! Share it, but don't take a slice of my pie!"

To quote the ever popular Pink Floyd.

And something else:
"Money is poverty" from State of the Art by Iain (M) Banks

lol its not hard to imagine at all. Whats hard to imagine is humans giving up anything. We're all selfish bastards as a race, and I can't see ANYONE giving up houses, or chips, or cars. Maybe if we somehow had everything wiped out by a freak of nature, and all our scientists etc got killed it would happen.

World without money would be great. But you're telling me Bill Gates and Richard Branson type people wouldn't find a way to exploit it, and become 'richer' or more powerful than the rest of us? Or even reinvent money in such a clever way we didn't realise?

love the quote ox

if there's no money...how do you get food? How about luxuries? If you get it 'based on need', you have communism, and communsm doesn't work. If you give it 'based on work provided', you just replaced money with barter and stepped back in evolution several thousand years.

I just don't see it as doable.