Discussion [Poll] Ecology and Conservation

In the spirit of Earth Day, I put my tree-hugger hat on and started wondering whether ecology and conservation was ever considered in any Asian webnovels out there

EVERY novel seems to be about dominating the local ecology.
CN novels are about enslaving beasts and killing them for materials.
JP novels are about isekai-ing to a new world and enslaving local humans for materials
KR novels are about finding innocent "monsters" in a dungeon and farming them for materials.

With this attitude being so pervasive, I'm convinced Nuffians have been brainwashed to be exploitative.
So I figured it's a good time for you greedy buggers to genuflect and think about where you stand on the totem pole of tree huggers.



Ok, it was hard to make distinct categories, so you can stand in more than one place on the totem pole.

But shame on you if you don't know who's who and thought Gi was Japanese. She's KOREAN, who speaks Japanese!!
Don't worry, I got you covered. For the uninitiated / those born after 1995 ...
https://captainplanet.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Characters

 

Ecology and Conservation doesn't work unless everyone is on board.

Most people have no means to control the means of production; the best they can do is boycott a product, or the like. A majority of people may be on board with the "idea" of conservation, but would likely oppose its implementation, because not many are willing to give up a part of their own lifestyle.

It's ultimately up to the companies that produce waste on whether they want to reduce production or not. But it's not like them reducing their output would reduce consumer demand either.

So basically, the average person has practically no say, and the masses will not say anything because they don't want to change. A leader of a company may have greater control, but not enough to enforce their own decision onto the public or other companies.

EDIT: For those unaware, the three R's of conservation are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and specifically in that order because it's from most effective to least. To put it simply, recycling isn't very good at all because of the sheer logistical power needed to even effectively implement it.

 

Well, I have always been against the wanton destruction of wildlife so common in cultivation novels. Humans would happily fight among themselves given the slightest chance, so why make monsters or beasts the bad guys?

Who Moved My Mountain and Environment Protection After Rebirth have environment protection as themes despite being CNs.

 

I vaguely remember a scene in the Battle Through The Heavens manhua where the MC only takes half of a rare resource with a claim about some kind of "conservation" and "not be greedy," if that's worth anything.

But in all honesty, the average cultivation world will probably not have to worry about resource scarcity. For one, land and resources are practically magnitudes more abundant and various than on Earth. Depending on the novel, there could be other planets and galaxies as well as higher and lower realms. Two, a cultivator has far greater powers than an average Earthling and may be able to freely use his cultivation powers to cultivate the natural land. Three, I've never seen any kind of "Industrialization Era" within a cultivation novel, and it is very unlikely for any cultivator to globalize mass production because there does not seem to be a need for mass production. Qi/spiritual power, their "renewable" resource, is their fuel for transportation in the form of arrays, flying swords, and talismans. At a high enough cultivation, I'm pretty sure they don't actually have to eat either.

Essentially, the world practically has an indefinite amount of land and resources, the residents there have greater capabilities to solve any possible conservation problem, and their generation of natural resources seems to already be enough for their current rate of consumption.

Now that I think about it, cultivation novels might actually advocate conservation if you look at it this way: quality of an ingredient correlates with its age. There are only demands for 1,000 year, 10,000 year, 100,000 year old spiritual herbs, and no demand whatsoever for 1 year old ones. Mass production is practically out of the question unless you can somehow cultivate wild herbs en masse and are willing to spend that long to invest.
Also, extensively destroying the planet would likely generate horrific karma and incite heavenly wrath/lightning, so there's that too. I have yet to be made aware of a factory owner who gets struck by lightning every time they plan to expand production.

 

While most CN xianxia novels have vast realms, they've also been harvested for millennia (as in millions of years, not thousands). At some point, resources are going to be depleted and entire species hunted to extinction. Their fights are usually at the scale of city/country/planet/realm, leveling entire mountains, destroying seas ... seems like the epitome of ecological destruction

I've read those random events where the MC chooses not to over-harvest, but always seems like a token action compared to the scale of humanity. I haven't actually seen any sustainable practices. In almost all CN xianxia novels you have:
-- Clans/schools sending students out into dangerous areas to obtain resources/hunt beasts, and are given points for kills (literally trophy hunting)
-- Man-made medicine gardens are nourished by plundering other resources (the "fertilizer" comes from killing some other exotic animal or looting some other resource)
-- Spirit rain to nourish the plants/spirit rice is created by extracting qi from the environment and infusing it into the water (*cough cough* OIL extraction). And Qi isn't some free resource produced by a larger celestial body like the sun, but clearly a finite resource from a planet/realm itself. Otherwise why would there be realms with weak Qi and strong Qi?
Think there were some novels that actually joked about Qi depletion due to their ancestors being Qi hogs
-- Spirit veins which form naturally, are harvested and often depleted. Never any mention of sustainable harvesting.
-- Used medicinal herbs/dregs are just trashed, not composted!