Trying to save one species by eradicating another is worse than a zero-sum.

Discourses around civilisation often miss that the installation and abolishment of civilisation cannot differentiate adverse outcomes, assumingly because civilisation is too complex too grasp or control.

When a drug is tested and it is found out that the illness it tries to cure has different types and the types are not really distinguishable, apart from the response to the drug; when it is found out that one part of the ill people gets cured by the drug, while another significant part gets killed by the drug, many ethical frameworks would question the drug.

I don't really know if diabetes and civilisation are related in any way, but counting who gets killed where is not enough.

Once I made quick calculation here about veganism, which is not as threatening as diabetes, where I estimated that some 80-100 tons of cobalt are needed for B12 every year if every person globally was vegan. Holding the position of abolishing mining could lead to abolishing artificial B12 by a 'short-sighted' logic. Mining of cobalt now is in the scale of several hundred thousand tons of cobalt per year though, so incomparable. B12-'mining' and battery-grid-scale cobalt mining are completely different categories.

What I get from that is that we cannot use these formalised flags (anti-civ, civ etc.) to refer to complex issues.

Nevertheless, here are some buzzwords:

a) Large scale mining / chemical production causes death and suffering.

b) Not treating illnesses produces preventable deaths and suffering.

c) Treating some illnesses might sometimes require large scale extraction and processing.

d) Not doing a) or b) does not necessarily cancel the outcomes of the respective other one out, i.e. 'preventable-suffering-anti-civ' and 'suffering-pro-civ' may not have the solutions to each others problems.¹

e) Solving problems might not look like trench warfare with clear polarisation, i.e. it might not matter when spaces are defended and it might not matter to profiteurs of each POV who resists them.²

¹I assume this is because of the 'future-facing' problem conception of both POV.

²Fuck querfront though, so this is incomplete.