As does every other life form, given the chance. We are the only one, that we know of, which even has a concept of conservation. We have the power to consciously regulate our behavior.
In the end, my point is that either life is valuable for its own sake, including humans, or it isn’t, including the rest of the ecosystem. Any philosophy which posits that the existence of other life forms is more valid than that of humans is foundationally inconsistent. I’m certainly not saying that human life is more valid than others, but either life is valid or out isn’t. Humans aren’t special one way or the other.
And not enough wolves causes an unchecked increase in prey which is bad for the rest of the environment. As I said, harmonious coexistence is best. We have the knowledge and tools to live harmoniously. My problem is with the trend of un-nuanced universal anti-natalism.
I’d guess that having children, in the long run is more environmentally harmful than you eating meat the rest of your life.
This just strikes me as silly. What is the “environment” but children of various species? Obviously an environmentally harmonious life is best, but life isn’t just what the environment is for, it’s what the environment is. This is the same mindset as people who have a couch that no one’s allowed to sit on.
Try to regularly imagine yourself on your death bed, looking back on life. I find that inspires the optimal blend. You don’t want to look back on a life of mindless work, or of fruitless sloth. If old-you would look back happily on a decision, it’s probably the right one.
“Element” is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use “states of matter”, it’s not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object “wanting” to get to its “natural” place also isn’t terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do “want” to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do “want” to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.
Capitalism isn’t about freedom, it’s about exploitation. The “freedom” it prioritizes is the freedom of individuals to lay private claim to the value of public resources (land, natural resources, etc), then use their control of those resources to lay claim to the value of the labor of others (the employee/employer relationship). It’s literally parasitism.
Capitalism is the “freedom” to extract profit. Profit is the difference between the price you sell something for, and the cost to produce it. It naturally results in paying employees less than the value of their labor, and/or charging the customer more than the value of a product. It is fundamentally a grift, profiting by skimming off value as a middleman. The freedom of the capitalist comes fundamentally at the restriction of freedom of everyone else, the majority “averages down”, that’s just a mathematical truth.
The longer capitalism exists, the more “freedom” is siphoned into generational wealth, and the more extreme inequality becomes. Capitalists gain the freedom to live a luxurious life without actually doing any work, while everyone else loses the freedom to use land and natural resources. It’s literally just “dibs” metastasized.