as a lifelong dinosaur enthusiast who moved towards interest in ecology in recent years what you said about paleontology being very holistic is very interesting to me. can you list, like, some examples of how that is? and if you think the same could be said of ecology as a field? especially if ecology n evobio share the disproving capitalistic ideology thing
Anonymous askedall three are 100%
capitalism operates on a misunderstanding of nature and has an implicitly impossible objective
“infinite growth” in a universe with finite resources is not possible. the end.
and one thing we see throughout the fossil record, and in modern ecology, is how the limitation of resources leads to major changes, thus demonstrating that said limitation exists
furthermore, none really make money. the people who buy dinosaur crap are not that many. the fossils don’t lead to profitable technologies or franchises (I’m excluding fossil fuels from this conversation, which are the Exception, but every inherently anticapitalist field has *some* Exception) and most paleontologists are ridiculously broke, and even our top paleontologists don’t really get far beyond 100k in terms of salary (which is depressingly low compared to other academics in geology and biology)
it also demonstrates the interconnectedness of all life and how our history is the history of the world, not just the history of humans or even mammals
how much our evolution isn’t just dependent on our genetics, but on our ecology, the things that live with us and shape us through life
disproving bioessentialism, the inherent assumption of many other destructive ideologies such as racism and transphobia
how even the rocks have importance far beyond what we give them as they are the primary recorders of our planet’s history
how small humans are and how little right we have to bleed the planet dry like we’re currently doing
and how, like all species that specialize too quickly and too largely, we are careening towards our own destruction in the process of the planet needing to heal.
I hope that last sentence isn’t true, but the fact that we know this at all is thanks to paleontology and environmental science.
All of these fields poke back against the capitalistic, white-supremacist world. So it’s hard to get into them, it’s hard to stay in them, and it’s hard to make a living in them.
Ftr, this is why I study paleoecology specifically, but I think paleoecology should be in common parlance as equivalent to brain surgery or rocket science bc I think I’m breaking my brain
Mostly just Bionicle and Art content here. be excelent to each other. I'm a phil major, and love to get philosophical, hmu if you ever want to talk about free will, fractals & religion, or the nature or reality.
