How come the other countries were allowed to benefit from logging and destroying their own primeval forests, but because Poland was the last one they're being called out? If the UN or EU were serious about this, they'd offer to buy out the forest at whatever the market rate is for this wood, and Poland would use that money the retrain the forest workers.
Because they, too, know better? I get your reasoning, but with equal position one could argue that in the clear retrospective light of our failures, theirs would be a larger one, by both proportion, and foreknowledge of its effects. Its a sticky wicket because nobody has good economic incentive to save it right now.
The conclusion of "old things must be preserved" leads to a sticky wicket as you call it. Maybe it is the wrong conclusion. What if we started instead with a question: "What is the best use for this land" and then work out from there.
"When the sage points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger".
The argument is most assuredly not that "all old things must be preserved". Rather it's that this old thing should be preserved.
The fact that the forrest is old is incidental. It's only relevant because it explains that we can't just pull a new primeval forrest out of our asses.
While I understand what you are aiming at, I don't think it is that simple. Should someone pay me for not having slaves and not being able to profit from exploiting them because I am a century or two late and missed the good old time when it was not yet an unacceptable practice?
I don't think I would agree with that, it actually seems somewhat more reasonable to me that one would have to pay compensations to the slaves. But that was not my point anyway.
In the past having slaves was acceptable, now it no longer is. Nobody owes me any compensation just because exploiting slaves is no longer an option available to me. In the past it was acceptable to exploit forest without many considerations, but when we now decide that this is no longer the case, then it is at least not obvious that anyone owes you any compensation.
You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". The Nazis could pass a law saying that the Holocaust was legal, but the rest of the world felt free to disregard that law, and put the Nazis on trial. Some laws are not legal, that is the whole entire point of the West's 2,400 year old liberal tradition. Likewise, some claims of ownership are not legal, and not binding. You can pay good money for a slave, but you still don't own the slave, because no law can make it legal to own another human being. And this was true for all of the thousands of years that slavery was legal: none of those laws were ever legitimate, and none of those ownership claims were ever legitimate.
> You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal".
There's no such thing as fundamental rights. Those were won by sweat and blood.
Up until the enlightenment and humanist eras there was not even the idea that such a thing as rights even exists. Some inkling of rights existed for royalty in the codes of conduct and such things, but they were freedoms given by right of birth and power of ancestor's sword.
For peasants, no such luck. They were property even though they weren't slaves per se.
The understanding that rights aren't somehow magical or special, and are just liberties we've decided we like especially well, is surprisingly uncommon, at least among Americans. I blame founder/constitution-veneration and all the just-so fables produced by enlightenment political philosophers (I'm looking at you John Locke).
> are just liberties we've decided we like especially well
Why do we like them? Why wouldn't we prefer to be slaves? Where do our modern intuitions about rights come from? Whatever the origin of the "like especially well" that you mention, that origin seems fundamental. If you study all the peasant revolts, going back thousands of years, you'll note how naturally people invent the language of rights -- it seems to arise spontaneously during each revolt.
And why do people revolt? You can't simply assume that they don't like being raped and enslaved -- you have to explain why they don't like being raped and enslaved. And whatever your explanation is of their feelings, that is the origin of rights.
Relative deprivation certainly seems a better explanation than requiring some mysterious "fundamental universal rights" that people never knew they had until 18th Century Westerners discovered them. Maybe they're a bit like "souls" for atheists?
Well, fundamental human rights were, by the 18th century "discoverers", usually attributed to endowment by a Divine Creator, so maybe not particularly "for atheists".
But, yeah, they are certainly non-physical non-demonstrable entities that are presumed to exist based on faith alone.
Until the Arabs came up with the concept of zero, no human had any idea about zero, nor did mathematicians use the zero. Nevertheless, zero has always existed. Just because humans didn't know about it doesn't mean zero didn't matter. Likewise, all human beings have always had fundamental rights, and that was true during the era when people did not spend much time talking about rights. You assume this when you write "Those were won by sweat and blood." The point is, why did people fight for them? Why did people think they had any right to fight for them?
More so, you are wrong that the discussion of rights has only happened in the modern era. Elaine Pagels, a historian of early Christianity, has studied why women and slaves were often the strongest supporters of early Christianity -- part of the answer is the Christian church fought for their rights. Pagels offers, as an example, a priest in North Africa who felt that slave owners should be punished if they raped their slaves. At the time, the idea was counter to Roman law, but of course the millions of slaves in the Empire were supportive of such ideas.
People fought and bled and died for the right to own slaves too.
The point is that there's no such thing as a universal right. There are only rights some individual believes should be universal rights. If enough individuals band together, they can get those rights enshrined by whatever authority has the ability to grant and recognize rights for those people, but as long as that authority refuses them, they don't have that right. They just should have that right, according to you or me or whoever.
Yes, but they lost because ultimately they couldn't explain why one person should own slaves and another should be enslaved, other than luck. Rights are indeed what people assert, but to argue they have no conceptual existence is to confuse them with power relations.
No, they lost because their military power wasn't sufficient to impose their view of "rights" onto those they were fighting.
Again, we all likely agree that there is a moral imperative in play here that slavery should not be tolerated. And had the South won, I'm sure the guy being whipped against a post would be super comforted by us sitting around talking about his universal human rights. He could think about them to take his mind off the lashings.
I'm not arguing that rights have no conceptual existence. I'm arguing that conceptual existence isn't the existence that really matters. It's all lovely for me to say that anyone has the right to draw whatever cartoons they want, but there are 30 million people in Saudi Arabia who would rightly call me an idiot. The actual existence of the right is not some airy concept that I just get to define because it pleases me. It's a very practical thing that affects people's daily lives, and I don't get to declare otherwise just because it suits me.
That's certainly true once you get to the kinetic stage of war with people actually battling, but I'd back up and look at the political breakdowns that led to that outcome. It does feel like we basically agree though, and are just describing the same thing from somewhat different perspectives, so I don't want to be pedantic about it.
Here's a counter argument: Every single peasant revolt in history failed and resulted in the peasants often having even fewer rights. At the very least everyone involved in the revolt received extreme sanctions.
Revolts only started working during the enlightenment era when the idea of rights started being supported by the nobles as well. Conceptually at least. That's where we got the French Revolution, worker's rights in the 19th century, and stuff like that.
Think about it, until the 1st world war or thereabouts, we as commoners didn't even have the right to free time.
I'm inclined to agree, but I'd like to look back over more world history - not to dispute your class argument, but to point to wars of independence that function as a proxy by expanding national rights. I'm thinking of China's wars of unification and with their various neighbors, but I don't know the subject well enough to think of specific examples offhand.
> Until the Arabs came up with the concept of zero, no human had any idea about zero, nor did mathematicians use the zero.
Babylon had a 0 symbol (𒑊, I think) by 300 BC. The Olmecs and/or Maya had the Long Count (and presumably a 0 symbol) by at least 100 BC, although the first known contemporary long count date with a 0 by around 357 AD.
There are such things, and they are won by sweat and blood. You're alleging that rights have no conceptual existence and equating them with power distributions in society. Just because the concept of rights was inchoately articulated prior to the enlightenment does not mean they did not exist, just as the notions of virtue and democracy originated in ancient Greece, notwithstanding the narrowness of the concept back then, it being inclusive of slavery and so on.
The Middle Ages most certainly had rights and liberties, but they were given or withheld based on the kind of person you were: a slave had almost no rights, a serf only a few (serfs and slaves both existed in this period); a nobleman, especially a peer of the realm, had almost all the rights; and everyone in the middle had an unpredictable grab-bag of them.
A commoner couldn't sue a knight; a knight couldn't invest in a business; only Jews could loan money, but they couldn't use the proceeds to buy land. Two people could commit the same crime under the same circumstances and get completely different punishments, because one of them was a citizen of the city where the crime occurred and the other wasn't.
The Enlightenment's key innovation was to give everyone the same rights -- rejecting some rights (like immunity from lawsuit) as intrinsically unjust, and granting the rest to everyone.
While I agree with the result of your statement the justification seems quite weak.
You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights.
Where do those fundamental rights come from?
I also wanted to attack a couple more of your statements but I have no formal education in philosophy or law and I would probably mess up the [subtle] differences between moral, legal, lawful, and so on. But I am nonetheless pretty sure that many of your points are at least not entirely true or need additional backing by certain philosophy frameworks.
> You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal".
It really wasn't. We would like it to have been, but at the risk of stating the obvious, it's not an inalienable, fundamental right if someone can take it from you without fear of repercussion. Slavery was legal -- the scare quotes add nothing. The difference between legal and "legal" here is just personal ethics.
Now, we can of course decide to proceed today as though the laws were never legitimate, and offer reparations, for example. Or in the case of the Nazis, as you mention, to try them for crimes committed in the past. It's worth noting though that the Nuremberg trials were very controversial for exactly that reason -- many people sympathetic with the desire to punish the Nazis were extremely uncomfortable with the idea of trying people for violating international laws that didn't exist at the time of the offenses (or only existed in treaties the Germans never signed). We did it anyway because, well, they deserved it, but it's far from the truth to say that it was a routine application of some tradition in which there are some laws that are so fundamental they need not be stated anywhere. And as a matter of constitutional law, we strictly prohibit doing that in our own legal systems.
Yes, it is an inalienable fundamental right. Your argument is that if it's possible to violate a right, then it doesn't exist, but that's nonsense. People violate others' rights all the time. The concept of a right is not a thing that is self-actuating, but that you can feel morally free to retaliate if your rights are violated.
Rights are what you assert for yourself. You can, of course, assert that you have dominion over others, but you'll have to persuade those others to agree with your if you hope to exercise that, which is unlikely but not impossible - churches are full of people who want to be relieved of the burden of freedom qua moral decision-making, and are thus fertile recruiting grounds.
Of course you may also assert rights but find them denied by law for one reason or another. In which case you can choose to give up your rights or fight for them at risk to your person. Laws are merely the product of political process, which may or may not be corrupt. If you feel a law is unjust, you're off to a good start because ultimately law is merely the servant of justice, and if you wish to rebel against an unjust law or practice you'll often find many supporters.
Rights have a significant moral dimension as well as a legal one, so just because someone denies the existence of your rights doesn't mean you have to obey them. You can defy or subvert their authority, and if your intentions are pure then you should. By pure I mean not being a hypocrite; the broadening of your individual rights is not predicated on the shrinkage of someone else's.
Rights can be violated, of course, but the key is that there has to be some potential punishment for doing so. If you're in Saudi Arabia and they decide to execute atheists, and they do so with the full approval of the state, then those people did not have the freedom to practice religion as they saw fit.
On the other hand, if you steal from someone and they arrest you, then that person had the right to be free from your theft of their property.
You can assert whatever rights you want, but they aren't rights until other people agree that you have them and collectively decide that no attempt at punishment will follow you exercising them.
What do you mean, they don't help anyone? Your moral consciousness is an extremely powerful thing, which is why repressive governments employ censorship so assiduously.
If we consider society in terms of game theory, law provides the rules, but the object of the game is to rewrite the rules through the exercise of power, for which you must employ strategy. The assertion of moral rights is a strategic objective.
Where do you (and who are you to tell) put the treshold of number of people who have to agree with someone's right? If some mob me on the street, and I'm outnumbered, do I loose my rights in this kind of "vote"? What about when police does it? What about police state? Or maybe "when the president does it it's not illegal"?
I have to say I'm astonished by HN lately. I havae not seen so many badly rationalized apoloegtic arguments on slavery in my long life nor in 10 years at HN as these past three months.
In my mind, I'm making a distinction for a very real reason -- to say that, e.g., freedom of speech is a universal human right explicitly whitewashes over the fact that a tremendous number of people are deprived of that right.
What I want to make very explicit in the language I use is the idea that you have only the rights that you can reasonably pursue your daily life comfortably exercising. I find slavery abhorrent, as does pretty much everyone. Which is why I don't want to pretend like the problem just doesn't exist anymore, because after all, everyone unambiguously has the right to an existence free from slavery. They absolutely don't. There are plenty of people who can point to that idea as a travesty.
There's no specific number of people they need to convince otherwise to gain that right. They need to exist in a governmental, societal, political system that demands that that right be conferred on them. Until that happens, they don't have it and we shouldn't be saying otherwise.
I think we're arguing at cross purposes because you're talking about legal rights while I'm talking about the philosophical concept. Even if my rights are universally denied, I can still assert their existence, and insist on exercising them, as long as I'm willing to pay the price of fines, incarceration, or life - and there are many examples of this in history.
For context, I also hold the position that while being incarcerated obviously limits your physical liberty and maybe others, true liberty is a a state of mind; if you both take responsibility for acting on your authority and consider your incarceration unjust, your psychic liberty is intact and can't be mechanically confiscated from you. This might seem like a meaningless distinction, but the consciousness of one's fundamental freedom is what sustains many political prisoners, and conversely what authoritarians most fear and work to suppress.
It sounds like you're saying that the Nuremberg trials amounted to lynching; this isn't true. Western jurisprudence has always recognized rights and obligations that arise from the natural law, and take precedence over any written law. This was the case even in Roman times -- think of the unwritten "jus gentium" in the international context.
(China, by the way, also had the same understanding -- although the state was stronger in China, and so was more often able to defy the natural law and get away with it. Look at the long history of Chinese censors, who risked torture and death to remind the emperors of their duties.)
And as for "laws that are so obvious they need not be stated anywhere," what's common law if not that?
"And as a matter of constitutional law, we strictly prohibit doing that in our own legal systems."
If you are talking about the USA, this is fairly common, at least in so far as civil cases. Any time the Supreme Court recognizes a new right, it opens the door to new lawsuits based on those rights, which can be retroactively applied. Consider the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, when the Court expanded rights at a rapid rate. Thousands and thousands of lawsuits were retroactively filed based on those new rights. People who had been victims of racial and sexual discrimination sued to gain justice for decades of abuse. Once the Court recognizes a new right, the assumption is that the right had always been there, since the beginning of time.
Morally speaking, yes. The people who benefited from past exploitation and locked in that economic advantage were morally bad people, and there's no particular reason they should be able to hang on to their wealth if there's an opportunity to take it away from them. They've just got used to having it.
Even better. The EU should purchase that entire property and pay the market price for wooded land, pay annual property taxes to Poland and hire Polish workers to maintain and preserve the land for as long as they value preservation over the cost of preservation.
I Agree with your general point, however Poland nominated the land for UNESCO natural world heritage site status, not the UN, or the EU, and such things are protected by international treaties (ie the Geneva Convention).
Most people don't benefit from the logging and destroying the primeval forests in the country they live in. Quite to the contrary.
The rest of Europe has to work with a Polish government right now that is anti-ecology, reactionary and anti-EU. The destruction of trees both in cities and forests is just collateral damage to those in power in Poland.
Accident of history, I suppose; most of the other primeval forest would have gone a long time ago. The remaining patches in the UK, for example, are tiny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_woodland
E.g. in 1773 Samuel Johnson’s famous tour of Scotland he complains about the lack of trees in the country. As far as I understand this was due to resource depletion for construction and fuel.
WW2 also caused both direct destruction of woodland and huge resource pressure across most of Europe.
That's a good point. It's also worth considering this: isn't there a difference between having 90% of a forest left and 5% of a forest?
I know that it's not exactly fair, but that is more-or-less the situation we have now. There were once vast swaths or virgin forest, and now there is very little left. Are the situations the same? Should people behave the same now as they did then?
Ultimately everyone needs to decide for themselves.
Or alternatively Poland could be kicked out of the EU and UN for failing to abide by the laws and conventions that they signed up to when they joined. I think that would be fairer.
Some Polish politicians and publicists believe this is actually what the ruling Law&Justice party is trying aiming for! If Poland is kicked out of EU, they will spin that as "EU is bad, EU is harassing us for no reason". Law&Justice faces a lot of opposition from pro-EU citizens of Poland. If they manage to vilify EU and create turmoil, they can remain in power by blaming everything on external enemies.
Law&Justice is using divide&conquer strategy, except they divide their own country and fuel internal conflicts.
Absolutely. Same thing with Brexit and numerous other phenomena. Nationalists hate supranational and globalist institutions because globalism is totalizing, ie it offers a complete worldview. Nationalism is implicitly predicated on the idea that there's enough for everyone else, this bit is ours, and that what we do here doesn't affect anyone else. Ultimatey, it's an anti-scientific philosophy.
You are totally out of your depth, you don't even understand what you are talking about and you are making a ridiculous argument in defence of destroying an invaluable ecological heritage.
This is PRIMEVAL forest. You in Poland DON'T have more protected areas than most of other EU countries already, you just happen to have a small one (relative to other EU countries) that has the special status of being primeval and you still think it's ok to destroy it for some quick profit while the rest of EU is trying to rebuild their own forest (although unfortunately it just can't be primeval again).
Poland has been continuously inhabited by wood cutting cultures for thousands of years. That point... sorta doesn't work.
You seem to be implying that Poland missed the industrial revolution somehow (it didn't), and/or that the industrial revolution was driven in some significant way by wood products (nope). Or maybe you think Poland during its half-century of artificially stunted development was somehow... not cutting down trees because communism?
It's... wood. Communists knew how to build stuff out of it too.
The Hacker News headline is misleading. The article calls it the "last major primeval forest in Europe" which is more accurate. Białowieża forest is around 40 000 hectares, while very few of the other ones left is bigger than 2000 hectares.
The other "primeval" forests are relatively small patches, they're not proper self-sustaining forests, Białowieża is the only one remaining. The biggest "primeval" forest in France is 25sqkm, Pyhä-Häkki in Finland is 13, Perućica is 14, Puzzlewood could be called pocketwood.
Białowieża is 3000 sq km, the World Heritage Site portion is 1400sq km.
I've been casually investigating hemp as a carbon fixer, as a hobby. I think paired with bamboo it could provide both sustainable materials for much of life's needs along with a terrific ability to fix atmospheric carbon. If nothing else the plant material can be bio-charred upon post-harvest and processing.
Also been looking at bamboo and hemp for things like water/soil/air purification, though it's all very casual.
We can also use hemp for nutrition, clothing, building materials, paper among many other things. Yes, grow this plant on an industrial scale all over the planet.
This is basically the same process as the logging of the rainforest; it's nominally protected, but a combination of poverty, greed and weak law enforcement means the protection is ineffective.
As an aside, some hunters work to preserve the natural area, viewing hunting and nature appreciation as something both enjoyable and to be passed down to future generations.
Since we've eliminated so many predators, hunting is necessary to control populations. I would however prefer it if we reintroduced natural predators instead.
Szyszko is not that kind of hunter. His most famous hunt was when 500 pheasants were released from cages right in front of hunters with rifles. This is even against Polish law: the birds never lived free, never had opportunity to learn flying. Hunting laws apply to animals living freely, and according to lawyers that "hunt" was an illegal slaughter in all but name. Animals slaughtered in Poland are required to be knocked unconscious.
The regulation and penalties were very draconian. If you had an old oak on your land, you had make an analys and get a permit. If it's positive you have dig around it and move it. Enormous cost and time delay for an investment. The problem is they've jumped from one extreme to another.
> Works hard to protect coal mine industry.
Every government in the world is protective of coal industry. Historically, Thatcher is a fluctuation.
Trees grow back, and so do forests. Let's focus on the plasticization of the oceans instead of the trees which grow in the ground. The Earth is mostly ocean and it's actually a good thing to cut down forests, it creates new opportunities for new organisms to move in and pioneer the land. North Carolina used to be a large portion of prairie called Piedmont. But the dense farming of the NC piedmont resulted in the new growth forests springing up when people moved westward and farms died. Forests grow so quickly we forget that "old growth" is like a hundred year old tree. Deforestation and reforestation is a natural cycle and it's actually not as bad as say a giant miasma of microplastic or a giant toxic algae bloom caused by agricultural run off.
It isn't necessarily required to plant trees back. It depends on the type of management and cutting being done.
One strategy is to remove the highest value trees from time to time, as they tend to be larger and removing them creates space for smaller trees to grow larger. Such harvests will also remove smaller trees that are unlikely to increase in value (often sold as paper pulp or wood chips, not necessarily discarded). This creates space for new trees to grow.
At the extreme you do have companies cutting down everything and using herbicide cocktails to prepare the ground for planting.
I suggest you walk through a recent clearcut, and a clearcut that's had 5, 10, 15, 20 years to "recover". Yes, some trees and plants can grow back. But the actual forest takes centuries to recover.
I live in southeast Alaska, which has a rich history of clearcutting. If you walk through an old-growth forest or a forest that's been selectively logged, you see a variety of trees. You see spruce, hemlock, cedar, and alder. There's space between the trees for a variety of plants and animals to thrive.
When you walk through an area that's been clearcut, it's an absolute mess and there's no diversity. Plants and alder grow back very quickly, but they grow back very densely. In about 20 years, the fastest growing trees shade out everything else. Everything else dies, but they stay in place. It's really difficult to walk through an old clearcut because there are dead standing trunks everywhere. Humans don't like old clearcuts, but neither do other plants or animals. It takes centuries for truly mature trees to grow, and for the dead initial growth to decompose and open spaces to develop again.
In some places, the initial clearcut removes the only protection the soil had from being washed away. Where the soil is a relatively thin layer over, say, a limestone bedrock, the soil gets washed away before the process of regeneration can even begin. In those places, it will take millenia for a new forest to grow.
It's not as simple as "Trees grow back, and so do forests."
That's partially true, but 'this isn't so important, let's talk about my favorite issue instead' is counter-productive to discussion, not to mention being rude. Plasticization of the oceans is a serious problem and I'd be happy to discuss...if you post a worthwhile article about it as its own topic, instead of trying hijack this one.
Belovezhskaya Pushcha is one of the oldest official natural reserves in Europe. I can't give the sources right now but it was already protected area 600 hundred years ago. It had a special status since the early times of Russian Empire. Even Nazi Germany during its invasion to USSR recognized the importance of the forest and didn't sent the army through it and kept it intact. Also it is a home to bisons which were extinct in North America and recently some animals were transfered from it for repopulation.
Belovezhskaya Pushcha - are you referring to the Belorussian part?
Nazi Germans were cutting the forest quite happily, USSR did some heavy damages by draining whatever they could and European bison is quite different than the American one.
good luck Polish government for destroying one if the three reasons I am considering visit of Poland (other two would be sand dunes on the beach and Osviecim)
I spent two weeks in Poland last summer. Might I recommend Zakopane, hell, the entire Tatra Mountains region while we're at it? Absolutely spectacular.
Thank you for that link. Well worth reading as it is both funny and informative:
The principal large mammals in Białowieża are
the bison, moose, wolf, boar, bobcat, and graduate
student. The last spends a lengthy juvenile period
studying forest theory in Western Europe before
migrating in to do field work and possibly mate.
"In western North America, the current outbreak of the mountain pine beetle and its microbial associates has destroyed wide areas of lodgepole pine forest, including more than 16 million of the 55 million hectares of forest in British Columbia. The current outbreak in the Rocky Mountain National Park began in 1996 and has caused the destruction of millions of acres of ponderosa and lodgepole pine trees. According to an annual assessment by the state's forest service, 264,000 acres of trees in Colorado were infested by the mountain pine beetle at the beginning of 2013. This was much smaller than the 1.15 million acres that were affected in 2008 because the beetle has already killed off most of the vulnerable trees"
Of course something similar cannot happen in Poland.
European spruce bark beetle [1] infected a large number of trees. That's a fact. Foresters are obliged to protected the forest and do try to this by eliminating infected trees. The first such action was conducted 100 years ago.
Some experts disagree with that method of stopping the beetle plague, and think that the forest should heal itself. Other experts don't want just to watch dying forest and try to do something. Hence the argument.
Because experts are divided, this is a great opportunity to attack the government. Unfortunately there is no substantive discussion, even here on HN.
Try to guess if current Polish government is left or right wing.
Your argument is I think from their playbook. They claim the same with their constitution. We hear it is being violated. Government asserts there is in fact a debate amongst experts on whehter this really happens. Then we look into that and there indeed is a handful of professors arguing for the government versus whole faculties of law issuing condemnations together with every bar association and the judges.
In this case I've heard that major opinion for the government was prepared by an forestry expert whose lifelong expertise is in chainsaw mechanics with no standing in biology community, whereas Nature regularly publishes alarmed letters from experts in actual ecology of outbreaks.
That's what the Ministry of Environment is claiming. This does not automatically make it true, but at least for me, it is a more reputable source than Guardian and European Commission which both attacked Polish government on numerous other occasions.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadThe argument is most assuredly not that "all old things must be preserved". Rather it's that this old thing should be preserved.
The fact that the forrest is old is incidental. It's only relevant because it explains that we can't just pull a new primeval forrest out of our asses.
But you knew this.
In the past having slaves was acceptable, now it no longer is. Nobody owes me any compensation just because exploiting slaves is no longer an option available to me. In the past it was acceptable to exploit forest without many considerations, but when we now decide that this is no longer the case, then it is at least not obvious that anyone owes you any compensation.
There's no such thing as fundamental rights. Those were won by sweat and blood.
Up until the enlightenment and humanist eras there was not even the idea that such a thing as rights even exists. Some inkling of rights existed for royalty in the codes of conduct and such things, but they were freedoms given by right of birth and power of ancestor's sword.
For peasants, no such luck. They were property even though they weren't slaves per se.
Why do we like them? Why wouldn't we prefer to be slaves? Where do our modern intuitions about rights come from? Whatever the origin of the "like especially well" that you mention, that origin seems fundamental. If you study all the peasant revolts, going back thousands of years, you'll note how naturally people invent the language of rights -- it seems to arise spontaneously during each revolt.
And why do people revolt? You can't simply assume that they don't like being raped and enslaved -- you have to explain why they don't like being raped and enslaved. And whatever your explanation is of their feelings, that is the origin of rights.
Relative deprivation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_deprivation
But, yeah, they are certainly non-physical non-demonstrable entities that are presumed to exist based on faith alone.
More so, you are wrong that the discussion of rights has only happened in the modern era. Elaine Pagels, a historian of early Christianity, has studied why women and slaves were often the strongest supporters of early Christianity -- part of the answer is the Christian church fought for their rights. Pagels offers, as an example, a priest in North Africa who felt that slave owners should be punished if they raped their slaves. At the time, the idea was counter to Roman law, but of course the millions of slaves in the Empire were supportive of such ideas.
The mathematical anti-realist would disagree.
Likewise, all human beings have always had fundamental rights [...]
Where do they come from? How did we discover them?
The point is that there's no such thing as a universal right. There are only rights some individual believes should be universal rights. If enough individuals band together, they can get those rights enshrined by whatever authority has the ability to grant and recognize rights for those people, but as long as that authority refuses them, they don't have that right. They just should have that right, according to you or me or whoever.
Again, we all likely agree that there is a moral imperative in play here that slavery should not be tolerated. And had the South won, I'm sure the guy being whipped against a post would be super comforted by us sitting around talking about his universal human rights. He could think about them to take his mind off the lashings.
I'm not arguing that rights have no conceptual existence. I'm arguing that conceptual existence isn't the existence that really matters. It's all lovely for me to say that anyone has the right to draw whatever cartoons they want, but there are 30 million people in Saudi Arabia who would rightly call me an idiot. The actual existence of the right is not some airy concept that I just get to define because it pleases me. It's a very practical thing that affects people's daily lives, and I don't get to declare otherwise just because it suits me.
Revolts only started working during the enlightenment era when the idea of rights started being supported by the nobles as well. Conceptually at least. That's where we got the French Revolution, worker's rights in the 19th century, and stuff like that.
Think about it, until the 1st world war or thereabouts, we as commoners didn't even have the right to free time.
Babylon had a 0 symbol (𒑊, I think) by 300 BC. The Olmecs and/or Maya had the Long Count (and presumably a 0 symbol) by at least 100 BC, although the first known contemporary long count date with a 0 by around 357 AD.
In principle all these three statements are completely wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0#History).
A commoner couldn't sue a knight; a knight couldn't invest in a business; only Jews could loan money, but they couldn't use the proceeds to buy land. Two people could commit the same crime under the same circumstances and get completely different punishments, because one of them was a citizen of the city where the crime occurred and the other wasn't.
The Enlightenment's key innovation was to give everyone the same rights -- rejecting some rights (like immunity from lawsuit) as intrinsically unjust, and granting the rest to everyone.
I stand corrected.
You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights.
Where do those fundamental rights come from?
I also wanted to attack a couple more of your statements but I have no formal education in philosophy or law and I would probably mess up the [subtle] differences between moral, legal, lawful, and so on. But I am nonetheless pretty sure that many of your points are at least not entirely true or need additional backing by certain philosophy frameworks.
It really wasn't. We would like it to have been, but at the risk of stating the obvious, it's not an inalienable, fundamental right if someone can take it from you without fear of repercussion. Slavery was legal -- the scare quotes add nothing. The difference between legal and "legal" here is just personal ethics.
Now, we can of course decide to proceed today as though the laws were never legitimate, and offer reparations, for example. Or in the case of the Nazis, as you mention, to try them for crimes committed in the past. It's worth noting though that the Nuremberg trials were very controversial for exactly that reason -- many people sympathetic with the desire to punish the Nazis were extremely uncomfortable with the idea of trying people for violating international laws that didn't exist at the time of the offenses (or only existed in treaties the Germans never signed). We did it anyway because, well, they deserved it, but it's far from the truth to say that it was a routine application of some tradition in which there are some laws that are so fundamental they need not be stated anywhere. And as a matter of constitutional law, we strictly prohibit doing that in our own legal systems.
Rights are what you assert for yourself. You can, of course, assert that you have dominion over others, but you'll have to persuade those others to agree with your if you hope to exercise that, which is unlikely but not impossible - churches are full of people who want to be relieved of the burden of freedom qua moral decision-making, and are thus fertile recruiting grounds.
Of course you may also assert rights but find them denied by law for one reason or another. In which case you can choose to give up your rights or fight for them at risk to your person. Laws are merely the product of political process, which may or may not be corrupt. If you feel a law is unjust, you're off to a good start because ultimately law is merely the servant of justice, and if you wish to rebel against an unjust law or practice you'll often find many supporters.
Rights have a significant moral dimension as well as a legal one, so just because someone denies the existence of your rights doesn't mean you have to obey them. You can defy or subvert their authority, and if your intentions are pure then you should. By pure I mean not being a hypocrite; the broadening of your individual rights is not predicated on the shrinkage of someone else's.
On the other hand, if you steal from someone and they arrest you, then that person had the right to be free from your theft of their property.
You can assert whatever rights you want, but they aren't rights until other people agree that you have them and collectively decide that no attempt at punishment will follow you exercising them.
If we consider society in terms of game theory, law provides the rules, but the object of the game is to rewrite the rules through the exercise of power, for which you must employ strategy. The assertion of moral rights is a strategic objective.
I have to say I'm astonished by HN lately. I havae not seen so many badly rationalized apoloegtic arguments on slavery in my long life nor in 10 years at HN as these past three months.
In my mind, I'm making a distinction for a very real reason -- to say that, e.g., freedom of speech is a universal human right explicitly whitewashes over the fact that a tremendous number of people are deprived of that right.
What I want to make very explicit in the language I use is the idea that you have only the rights that you can reasonably pursue your daily life comfortably exercising. I find slavery abhorrent, as does pretty much everyone. Which is why I don't want to pretend like the problem just doesn't exist anymore, because after all, everyone unambiguously has the right to an existence free from slavery. They absolutely don't. There are plenty of people who can point to that idea as a travesty.
There's no specific number of people they need to convince otherwise to gain that right. They need to exist in a governmental, societal, political system that demands that that right be conferred on them. Until that happens, they don't have it and we shouldn't be saying otherwise.
Distinction you posit is in fact between a priviledge and a right. Priviledges are bestowed by a form of governance, rights exist regardless.
For context, I also hold the position that while being incarcerated obviously limits your physical liberty and maybe others, true liberty is a a state of mind; if you both take responsibility for acting on your authority and consider your incarceration unjust, your psychic liberty is intact and can't be mechanically confiscated from you. This might seem like a meaningless distinction, but the consciousness of one's fundamental freedom is what sustains many political prisoners, and conversely what authoritarians most fear and work to suppress.
(China, by the way, also had the same understanding -- although the state was stronger in China, and so was more often able to defy the natural law and get away with it. Look at the long history of Chinese censors, who risked torture and death to remind the emperors of their duties.)
And as for "laws that are so obvious they need not be stated anywhere," what's common law if not that?
"And as a matter of constitutional law, we strictly prohibit doing that in our own legal systems."
If you are talking about the USA, this is fairly common, at least in so far as civil cases. Any time the Supreme Court recognizes a new right, it opens the door to new lawsuits based on those rights, which can be retroactively applied. Consider the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, when the Court expanded rights at a rapid rate. Thousands and thousands of lawsuits were retroactively filed based on those new rights. People who had been victims of racial and sexual discrimination sued to gain justice for decades of abuse. Once the Court recognizes a new right, the assumption is that the right had always been there, since the beginning of time.
Britain certainly had no problem importing and millions of pounds of cotton and sugar picked by slaves, even after the ban.
The rest of Europe has to work with a Polish government right now that is anti-ecology, reactionary and anti-EU. The destruction of trees both in cities and forests is just collateral damage to those in power in Poland.
E.g. in 1773 Samuel Johnson’s famous tour of Scotland he complains about the lack of trees in the country. As far as I understand this was due to resource depletion for construction and fuel.
WW2 also caused both direct destruction of woodland and huge resource pressure across most of Europe.
I know that it's not exactly fair, but that is more-or-less the situation we have now. There were once vast swaths or virgin forest, and now there is very little left. Are the situations the same? Should people behave the same now as they did then? Ultimately everyone needs to decide for themselves.
What a sorry idea to still see afloat in 2017, that even the last remnants of special natural habitats should be allowed to be destroyed for "benefit"
Law&Justice is using divide&conquer strategy, except they divide their own country and fuel internal conflicts.
This is PRIMEVAL forest. You in Poland DON'T have more protected areas than most of other EU countries already, you just happen to have a small one (relative to other EU countries) that has the special status of being primeval and you still think it's ok to destroy it for some quick profit while the rest of EU is trying to rebuild their own forest (although unfortunately it just can't be primeval again).
Whether or not the rest of the EU are hypocrites does nothing to change the fact that this is wrong and alarming.
You seem to be implying that Poland missed the industrial revolution somehow (it didn't), and/or that the industrial revolution was driven in some significant way by wood products (nope). Or maybe you think Poland during its half-century of artificially stunted development was somehow... not cutting down trees because communism?
It's... wood. Communists knew how to build stuff out of it too.
Białowieża is 3000 sq km, the World Heritage Site portion is 1400sq km.
Also been looking at bamboo and hemp for things like water/soil/air purification, though it's all very casual.
Just one example environment minister: Jan Szyszko
1. Approves logging near national park on massive scale.
2. Lax regulation for cutting down trees everywhere.
3. Claims it is highly uncertain if global warming is due to human activity.
4. Hunter, shoot to animals a lot while being environment minister.
5. Works hard to protect coal mine industry.
For example, Ducks Unlimited http://www.ducks.org/ .
Backcountry Hunters and Anglers www.backcountryhunters.org Trout Unlimited www.tu.org/
Not the one I saw but very similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
More serious article:
http://www.yellowstonepark.com/wolf-reintroduction-changes-e...
> Works hard to protect coal mine industry.
Every government in the world is protective of coal industry. Historically, Thatcher is a fluctuation.
One strategy is to remove the highest value trees from time to time, as they tend to be larger and removing them creates space for smaller trees to grow larger. Such harvests will also remove smaller trees that are unlikely to increase in value (often sold as paper pulp or wood chips, not necessarily discarded). This creates space for new trees to grow.
At the extreme you do have companies cutting down everything and using herbicide cocktails to prepare the ground for planting.
In any case, we have the ressources to address both pollution and the destruction of forests, there is no need to decide between the two.
I live in southeast Alaska, which has a rich history of clearcutting. If you walk through an old-growth forest or a forest that's been selectively logged, you see a variety of trees. You see spruce, hemlock, cedar, and alder. There's space between the trees for a variety of plants and animals to thrive.
When you walk through an area that's been clearcut, it's an absolute mess and there's no diversity. Plants and alder grow back very quickly, but they grow back very densely. In about 20 years, the fastest growing trees shade out everything else. Everything else dies, but they stay in place. It's really difficult to walk through an old clearcut because there are dead standing trunks everywhere. Humans don't like old clearcuts, but neither do other plants or animals. It takes centuries for truly mature trees to grow, and for the dead initial growth to decompose and open spaces to develop again.
In some places, the initial clearcut removes the only protection the soil had from being washed away. Where the soil is a relatively thin layer over, say, a limestone bedrock, the soil gets washed away before the process of regeneration can even begin. In those places, it will take millenia for a new forest to grow.
It's not as simple as "Trees grow back, and so do forests."
http://www.idlewords.com/2012/02/bia%C5%82owie%C5%BCa_forest...
"In western North America, the current outbreak of the mountain pine beetle and its microbial associates has destroyed wide areas of lodgepole pine forest, including more than 16 million of the 55 million hectares of forest in British Columbia. The current outbreak in the Rocky Mountain National Park began in 1996 and has caused the destruction of millions of acres of ponderosa and lodgepole pine trees. According to an annual assessment by the state's forest service, 264,000 acres of trees in Colorado were infested by the mountain pine beetle at the beginning of 2013. This was much smaller than the 1.15 million acres that were affected in 2008 because the beetle has already killed off most of the vulnerable trees"
Of course something similar cannot happen in Poland.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle
If so, where's the evidence that this is the case?
Some experts disagree with that method of stopping the beetle plague, and think that the forest should heal itself. Other experts don't want just to watch dying forest and try to do something. Hence the argument.
Because experts are divided, this is a great opportunity to attack the government. Unfortunately there is no substantive discussion, even here on HN.
Try to guess if current Polish government is left or right wing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_spruce_bark_beetle
In this case I've heard that major opinion for the government was prepared by an forestry expert whose lifelong expertise is in chainsaw mechanics with no standing in biology community, whereas Nature regularly publishes alarmed letters from experts in actual ecology of outbreaks.
Prima facie, this does not reduce their credibility.