alt Hacker NewsThe Himalayan country of Bhutan has seen 6% of its population emigrate since 2020. People enjoy the preservation of nature, but they also enjoy having more and better stuff, and a healthy society can't just tell people the second impulse is wrong and they need to give it up.
"People" and their "wants" or "enjoyments" are manufactured by culture (which is in turn now dominated by corporate propaganda). They are not fixed by nature. Any examination of the range of 'wants' in human history will inevitably conclude that, beyond a few corporeal basics, they are endlessly plastic. This is hard to see from the centres of Empire (especially highly mediated ones) where local and highly propagandised 'desires' are seen as 'natural'.
Agricultural societies are machines for creating large numbers of humans. In any democracy (or sufficiently responsive government) the kinds of persons that are created is a powerful determinant of what subsequently happens. Corporations choose to make consumer-humans. Many other types have existed, so ipso facto are possible.