[pl90087]

Or exactly the other way around.

Without "engineering society" we'd still live in tribes killing each other at first sight. We have reduced that substantially. Some societies are a bit behind (like allowing lethal military-grade weapons at home), some are further advanced. Overall, it seems a good idea to use our intellect to advance societies and we've come a long way from the dark ages.

Our earth engineering has come so far that with the exception of a few national parks and reserves, we've used every little corner to cut off and kill everything that existed on it and turned it into less-and-less usable farmland. A few areas are cities or golf courses or transportation highways, the rest are terrible monocultures or their next stage: deserts. We've extinguished more species than we know and of those that we have not, we have brought lots to close to it. 95% of all fish are dead. Sea levels are rising rapidly. Large areas have water shortages. We need less "earth engineering", not more of it.

[erulabs]

All of the problems you listed sound to me like earth-engineering problems, except for the "problem" of private property. I strongly disagree with the premise that social engineering raised us from tribal groups. It was agriculture and domestication and fire. The data suggests global farmland is reducing [1] and becoming more and more productive [2].

It is funny that we see things exactly opposite!

1. https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/article/2021/0....

2. https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields