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Fooling with Mother Nature

119K views 2K replies 38 participants last post by  Open Book 
#1 ·
We assume our purpose is found in self-perpetuation. But it could be that humanity's purpose is merely as a warning to an alien or a future intelligent race that arises out of our ashes.
Continued from the "worst generation" thread: The UN has completed an 1800-page study of human impact on the environment and it's not a happy picture. The BBC reports on a 40-page summary that was released today:

- One million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction. This is approximately 25% of species in most animal and plant groups studied.
- Natural ecosystems have declined by 47% on average, relative to their earliest estimated states.
- The global biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%. Indicators of vertebrate abundance have declined rapidly since 1970.
- 33% of fish stocks are harvested at unsustainable levels.
- Land use is the major driver of the biodiversity collapse, with 70% of agriculture related to meat production.
- Between 1980 and 2000, 100 million hectares of tropical forest were lost, mainly from cattle ranching in South America and palm oil plantations in South East Asia.
- Only 13% of wetlands present in 1700 were still in existence in the year 2000.
- Soil degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the land surface of the Earth.
- Plastic pollution has increased ten-fold since 1980.
- Every year 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes are dumped into the waters of the world.

So where do you plan to sit this one out?
 
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#2 · (Edited)

So where do you plan to sit this one out?


Behind the wheel of my 2-litre diesel.

Being vaguely serious for a moment, Ken, we are being bombarded with doom and gloom. Too much to take in, and yet I feel I live in a cleaner, healthier world than the one I grew up in. If everyone stuck to one environmental issue to care about, we'd be able to get something done, but not if we're drowned in it.
 
#17 ·
no doubt that England is cleaner now than what it was during the Industrial revolution in the 19th century with all coal industry, when the coal smoke was mixing with London fog to create smog. The problem is that much of the pollution has been moved to other countries that serve production and manufacturing lands. The blood coltan for your cell phone is harvested in Congo, the oil for you candies is harvested in Indonesia etc.
 
#4 ·
The UN report ranks global warming as the third greatest impact, behind changes in land use and direct exploitation of species. This is impact on biodiversity of course; there are certainly other kinds of impact to consider.
 
#5 ·
Maybe now, someone will pay attention. Leaving aside Malthus, humankind's future began to be seriously discussed with the 1954 publication of Harrison Brown's The Challenge of Man's Future, a book praised by Albert Einstein. Science and some courageous scientists have increasingly warned our populations and leaders of the coming catastrophe, but a cadre of ideologues and Panglossian economists have repeatedly told everybody that those crazy scientists were all part of a Socialist Plot to keep people from being happy. And nobody likes a wet blanket. My favorite response is from those who wonder if saving the planet will be "too expensive". Yeah, probably.
 
#6 · (Edited)
I remember an article on the cover of Time Magazine in 1977 warning us that scientists are claiming that we are heading into another ice age. Now the story has changed to global warming, meanwhile it has been unseasonably cool around these parts and apparently the ice sheets on Greenland in places have increased by 50 meters.

That said I'm all for reducing pollution, how about ideas like organic farming, using hemp instead of trees for paper, and releasing technologies that have been suppressed for decades because they will cost the oil cartel too much in profits?

Making the rich richer by creating a carbon tax, sounds like just another retarded idea, in a long line of retarded ideas.
 
#47 ·
I remember an article on the cover of Time Magazine in 1977 warning us that scientists are claiming that we are heading into another ice age. Now the story has changed to global warming, meanwhile it has been unseasonably cool around these parts and apparently the ice sheets on Greenland in places have increased by 50 meters.
Only a small number of scientific papers in the 1970s predicted global cooling, the overwhelming majority of papers predicted global warming. And there haven't been any scientific papers since the late 70s predicting cooling.

Like people who still think socialism is a viable system?
Public education, public health care, unemployment insurance, old age pension, paid family leave and public roads all seem to be working here. Yet I admit, governments do nothing to mitigate global warming, most ideas and innovation come from private industry.

I worry about the future. I think global warming is our biggest threat. And we can't seem to do anything about it. We can't even do the simple things, such as sort our recycling, eat less meat and take public transit occasionally. I have no optimism for the future. I can see us collectively racing toward 800 ppm of CO2 by the end of the century.

The human race will survive, but civilization and nature will be unrecognizable once we pass through the bottle neck of ecological crunch.
 
#7 · (Edited)
This reminds me of John Brunner's 1968 sci-fi novel Stand on Zanzibar. He figured (correctly as it turned out) that the earth would have about 7 billion people in 2010. That many people would fit in an area the size of Zanzibar, standing up of course.

From the previous thread, mostly for TDC:

"Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent. The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds."

"A huge amount of evidence exists to show that the overall biomass on land has been massively reduced over the past 3,000 years and increasingly evidence is coming to light in respect of the loss of biomass in the oceans. Loss of biomass on land may well be as great as 50%, loss of biomass in the seas could be as high as 80%."

This is based on a study published by the US National Academy of the Sciences.
 
#9 · (Edited)
Don Marquis was the creator in 1916 of the characters of Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat. Archy would type messages to Marquis at night by jumping onto the various typewriter keys, but he could not simultaneously push Shift and another key at the same time. So his messages were all in lower case and without punctuation, as below. This was one of Archy's most serious reports to Marquis, and shows that environmental concerns were being thought about almost 100 years ago.

what the ants are saying

By Don Marquis, in “The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel", 1927

dear boss i was talking with an ant
the other day
and he handed me a lot of
gossip which ants the world around
are chewing over among themselves

i pass it on to you
in the hope that you may relay it to other
human beings and hurt their feelings with it
no insect likes human beings
and if you think you can see why
the only reason i tolerate you is because
you seem less human to me than most of them
here is what the ants are saying

it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts

we ants remember
and have it all recorded
in our tribal lore
when gobi was a paradise
swarming with men and rich
in human prosperity
it is a desert now and the home
of scorpions ants and centipedes

what man calls civilization
always results in deserts
man is never on the square
he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth
each generation wastes a little more
of the future with greed and lust for riches

north africa was once a garden spot
and then came carthage and rome
and despoiled the storehouse
and now you have sahara
sahara ants and centipedes

toltecs and aztecs had a mighty
civilization on this continent
but they robbed the soil and wasted nature
and now you have deserts scorpions ants and centipedes
and the deserts of the near east
followed egypt and babylon and assyria
and persia and rome and the turk
the ant is the inheritor of tamerlane
and the scorpion succeeds the caesars

america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now
it wont be long
till everything is desert
from the alleghenies to the rockies
the deserts are coming
the deserts are spreading
the springs and streams are drying up
one day the mississippi itself
will be a bed of sand
ants and scorpions and centipedes
shall inherit the earth

men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn

rainfall passing off in flood and freshet
and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests
to withhold the water in the
billion meticulations of the roots

it wont be long now It won’t be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone

dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform

archy
 
G
#11 ·
Don Marquis was the creator in 1916 of the characters of Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat. Archy would type messages to Marquis at night by jumping onto the various typewriter keys, but he could not simultaneously push Shift and another key at the same time. So his messages were all in lower case and without punctuation, as below. This was one of Archy's most serious reports to Marquis, and shows that environmental concerns were being thought about almost 100 years ago.

what the ants are saying

By Don Marquis, in "The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel", 1927

dear boss i was talking with an ant
the other day
and he handed me a lot of
gossip which ants the world around
are chewing over among themselves

i pass it on to you
in the hope that you may relay it to other
human beings and hurt their feelings with it
no insect likes human beings
and if you think you can see why
the only reason i tolerate you is because
you seem less human to me than most of them
here is what the ants are saying

it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts

we ants remember
and have it all recorded
in our tribal lore
when gobi was a paradise
swarming with men and rich
in human prosperity
it is a desert now and the home
of scorpions ants and centipedes

what man calls civilization
always results in deserts
man is never on the square
he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth
each generation wastes a little more
of the future with greed and lust for riches

north africa was once a garden spot
and then came carthage and rome
and despoiled the storehouse
and now you have sahara
sahara ants and centipedes

toltecs and aztecs had a mighty
civilization on this continent
but they robbed the soil and wasted nature
and now you have deserts scorpions ants and centipedes
and the deserts of the near east
followed egypt and babylon and assyria
and persia and rome and the turk
the ant is the inheritor of tamerlane
and the scorpion succeeds the caesars

america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now
it wont be long
till everything is desert
from the alleghenies to the rockies
the deserts are coming
the deserts are spreading
the springs and streams are drying up
one day the mississippi itself
will be a bed of sand
ants and scorpions and centipedes
shall inherit the earth

men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn

rainfall passing off in flood and freshet
and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests
to withhold the water in the
billion meticulations of the roots

it wont be long now It won't be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone

dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform

archy
Mankind created the Gobi desert? I thought it was created by the Tibetan Plateau blocking precipitation coming from the Indian Ocean. And the Romans and Carthaginians created the Sahara? I don't know that I would think of this as a serious consideration of man's impact on the environment.
 
#12 · (Edited)
Ever and always the literalist. Don Marquis was a humorist and satirist who received much of his material from a fictional cockroach. Marquis was not a historian or an ecologist, but he was concerned--as prescient, thinking people sometimes are--with the way things were going, even in the 'teens and twenties. Perhaps he had Shelley's Ozymandias in mind when he passed on Archy's news from the ants.

Here's Wikipedia on the Gobi recently:

"The Gobi Desert is expanding at an alarming rate, in a process known as desertification. The expansion is particularly rapid on the southern edge into China, which has seen 3,600 km2 (1,390 sq mi) of grassland overtaken every year by the Gobi Desert. Dust storms, which used to occur regularly in China, have increased in frequency in the past 20 years, mainly due to desertification. They have caused further damage to China's agriculture economy....

The expansion of the Gobi is attributed mostly to human activities, notably deforestation, overgrazing, and depletion of water resources. China has tried various plans to slow the expansion of the desert, which have met with some small degree of success, but no major effects."

Maybe Archy had a crystal ball.
 
#13 ·
Feeling as though the world is cleaner and healthier doesn't make it so. And as far as addressing one problem at a time even if we had time doesn't seem to be happening. Take plastic for example. Very little is being done about it. Thousands of products are still packaged in plastic that goes right in the garbage after unpacking. What's being done in the US to improve public transport and reduce the number of personal vehicles on the road? Not much as far as I've been reading. Meat consumption is another huge problem and I don't see this changing anytime soon. And the millions of fast food outlets consuming and discarding once used paper and plastic utensils is another ridiculous waste that is not being addressed.

And there is the very important issue of the dwindling supply of uncontaminated fresh water. When I get reading in to the industrial waste, toxic coal sludge, and fracking issues here in the Eastern part of the country it gets very depressing. This combined with the current administration in Washington that is enabling more environmental destruction doesn't paint a sunny picture for the future. There'll be no sitting this one out unless you're dead or extremely lucky.
 
#22 ·
Good old fusion power! At any given year in the past 30-40-50 years we have been told that clean, inexhaustible fusion power is "30 years away". I am delighted that it is now 5 years away. Let's agree to revisit fusion right here in 2024. But certainly renewable energy is key to weaning the globe from oxidizing the buried carbon that has taken hundreds of millions of years to accumulate but only a few centuries to release. I'd appreciate some references we can examine on the Finns turning electricity into food; also the conversion of carbon dioxide into coal. Seeds on the moon--not sure how that fits in. The big problem, of course, is stabilizing and then reversing global human populations so that we remain well within Earth's carrying capacity, and striving meanwhile to retain as many of our non-human fellow passengers/species on our increasingly soiled planet so that they can also live out their destinies. Our grandkids will appreciate that.
 
#23 ·
Unfortunately, infinite growth is built into our economic and social DNA. If our government doesn’t make that GDP grow smartly, wham! We turn the scoundrels out of office and find somebody who can.

Two words are commonly used for a lack of growth: recession and depression.
 
#24 ·
Unfortunately, infinite growth is built into our economic and social DNA. If our government doesn't make that GDP grow smartly, wham! We turn the scoundrels out of office and find somebody who can.

Two words are commonly used for a lack of growth: recession and depression.
Very true. Two words that are commonly used for a lack of growth and even shrinkage in treatment of cancers are: remission and cure. Cancer is one of the several metaphors/analogies that are most often evoked by clear-eyed observers of our current condition in an endlessly growing population and materials use/pollution cycle.
 
#25 ·
The fossil fuel driven economy has created a new milestone this month surpassing 413.52 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere. And yes it varies slightly throughout the year with higher readings in spring, but it's up a hundred ppm since 1960.
 
G
#29 ·
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with thousands of social and cultural elites flying around the world in private Jets to environmental conferences to lecture the rest of us on saving the planet from our grocery bags and straws.
 
#31 · (Edited)
How about the governmental and scientific "elites"? How are they supposed to get to environmental conferences; walk on the water? We see that Mike Pompeo, no friend of the environment, has made sure that the longstanding Arctic protection treaty has been scuttled--I guess he walked on the water to that conference--by killing language saying that Global Warming was a bad thing. He thinks it's a Good Thing for the Arctic--all that nasty cold and ice! Now shipping, probably mostly tankers, will be able to cruise regularly through the Northwest Passage as the Arctic ice melts away. Such puerility!

Here's the Mike Pompeo/Trump answer to Arctic warming:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48185793
 
G
#32 ·
Teleconferencing? Or Videoconferencing? That is about as carbon neutral as it gets. Would save a lot of money too, not having to put all the governmental officials and all their retinue up in fancy hotels (nothing low-brow) paid for with tax dollars, and healthy per diems to go eat better than the average person on the taxpayers' dimes.

At any rate, I spoke of the societal and cultural elites - the Al Gores and Leo Dicaprios and every other non-expert who thinks they have something important to say on the matter, but only end up filling the atmosphere with more carbon and hot air. I doubt I will contribute as much carbon to the environment in my entire life as either of these two do in a single year.
 
#35 · (Edited)
so what solutions to the problems are you proposing?
https://www.dw.com/en/five-of-the-worlds-biggest-environmental-problems/a-35915705
you don't seem to even recognize the problems. Even if we admit that global warming is controversial and nobody know how severe threat it is, the other problems are undeniable - massive deforestation, overpopulation, biodiversity loss, plastics pollution . We produced all this plastic pollution in just 60 years and all you are capable of is making jokes about plastic straws. .
 
G
#36 ·
I want to live in a nuclear energy nirvana. Replace all coal-burning power plants with nuclear power plants.
Apart from that:
Ban all oil production. Carpet the landscape with windmills and solar panels (what effect, I wonder, will that have on biodiversity?). Banish all plastics. All people will work until the age of 60, will retire for 5 years, and then, at the age of 65, report to centers where they will be turned into soylent green to feed the rest of us. Allow couples only one child, and institute forced abortions for all violations of the one child rule. Everybody will be issued a water reclamation suit, that will recycle all their bodily fluids, and this will be their primary source of drinking water. All humanity will be forced into ultra dense urban zones, depopulating all other regions and allowing it to return to nature. All personal automobiles other than bicycles will be eliminated. Everybody will be issued one set of recycled aluminum eating utensils at birth. There will be no paper or plastic items. Diets will be restricted to what Michelle Obama decides based on her backyard garden.
And we'll all live happily every after.

Or we'll just continue with progress and come up with better, cleaner ways to do things.
 
G
#40 ·
Isn't that the way all life has proceeded? We are already bankrupting them with all the social programs we want for ourselves - why not let them solve all our other problems as well? Why do they only have to pay for our healthcare and retirement? Why not our plastics?
 
#41 · (Edited)
Some truth there! "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." -Alexis De Tocqueville, ca 1830

But Congress is even cleverer than Alexis figured. It bribes the public with the still-unearned wealth of the public's own children and grandchildren.

 
G
#42 ·
The children of the WWI generation figured out how to solve the problems left behind by their parents. The children and grandchildren of the WWII generation finally figured out how to end the Cold War left to them. And while the children of the Sexual Revolution left us with new problems to overcome (HIV/AIDS, in particular), we have come a long way in treating that, although we are not quite there yet. The point is that every generation ends up, to some extent, cleaning up the problems of previous ones, in addition to dealing with their own. Humans always leave behind problems they couldn't solve or didn't get around to. It will always be that way, because, more often than not, we simply don't have the tools available to accomplish what we wish to accomplish. The technology may not yet exist, and what tools we have are inadequate to the task. But there are not a lot of problems that ultimately last for multiple generations. Some do, to be sure. Some may always be with us. But thus far, no dystopian stories ever written have come to fruition. Some have come close.
 
#55 ·
The children of the WWI generation figured out how to solve the problems left behind by their parents.
The result? World War II

The children and grandchildren of the WWII generation finally figured out how to end the Cold War left to them.
The result of World War II was the Cold War; after that was fixed, the result was Vladimir Putin and Jihadist Islam.

The point is that every generation ends up, to some extent, cleaning up the problems of previous ones, in addition to dealing with their own. Humans always leave behind problems they couldn't solve or didn't get around to.
The problem left behind now, unprecedented in either human or planetary history, is a monster global population, now of almost 8 billions, crowding out almost all other species and filling almost all of Earth's environments, while threatening to double in size.

It will always be that way, because, more often than not, we simply don't have the tools available to accomplish what we wish to accomplish. The technology may not yet exist, and what tools we have are inadequate to the task.
We do actually have the tools because we have the necessary knowledge of the problem. But employing the tools presents such challenges to people's everyday thinking and to powerful ideologies that block rational thought, that, as we witness here in this thread, we have denial and paralysis.

But there are not a lot of problems that ultimately last for multiple generations.
But this is one of them and it's a biggie!

Some do, to be sure. Some may always be with us. But thus far, no dystopian stories ever written have come to fruition. Some have come close.
Actually, many dystopian stories have come to fruition (the Irish potato famine; the great Bengali and Ukrainian famines; the recurring famines in Africa). True, these have been "local", only involving millions, and could have been either prevented or mitigated. But they weren't--that's the point. What we are witnessing today is "the dance of the dream-led masses down the dark mountain". Look for an uptick in dystopian stories, even if we finally begin to act on a massive scale to reverse the assault on the biosphere.
 
#43 ·
The most mind-boggling thing is when folk are warned of impending problems and they keep on doing exactly the same things that are causing them or scuppering attempts to fix them because they think the 'solutions' are all a leftist plot to undermine 'Murica.
 
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