Reply To: The recent "discovery" of Dark Matter

[Rezwan]

Warwick wrote: CO2 is the tip of the iceberg as regards environmental destruction going on right now … For instance the oceans are rapidly becoming full of tiny bits of plastic, dumped from Chinese factories, which are probably going to destroy marine ecosystems worldwide once they have been whittled small enough.

I don’t understand that. Why would small bits of plastic be a problem? They seem pretty benign. Do they react with anything? Isn’t there a lot of debris in nature? If an animal swallows a bit of plastic, wouldn’t they just poop it out?

I think plastic debris is more of an aesthetic annoyance – people see it, and it reminds them of other people – which we all tend to dislike a bit.

Check out “Life after people“. If people disappear – like the rapture comes or a unique to humans virus – and there’s no one around to maintain things, all our artifacts and impacts will just get swallowed back by nature. Most of this happens in 500 years, and, except for deserts where things don’t rot, by a few thousand years (which is NOTHING in geological time, or even natural history time) there won’t be a trace of us.

And then the sun will rise, and set, over and over, on the natural world, all those critters leading their short, intense, violent lives, escaping predators, competing for resources, eating and being eaten. Until asteroids hit or the sun blows up or whatever.

Or… with us out of the picture, I suspect something else would evolve along to take another shot at the tool/consciousness/language thing and see if they couldn’t come up with a more satisfying balance of consciousness and nature.

I think we flatter ourselves about our impact. As long as we’re here and active, of course, we constantly see the signs of our stress and excretions.

But it’s not about how “bad” we are to the environment, this pristine, pure thing – how corrupt and tainted we are. It’s more about how to balance two very different systems. The natural system is, ironically, a market system. Completely spontaneously developed. No regulation, creatures just eat and react and poop, and it all finds a resource maximising equilibrium.

People, on the other hand, have come in with tools and organizations, and can cheat the system, and selectively maximize – without understanding the whole system. So they inject a simplifying disiquilibrium that is really ugly in its over simplification. People are more like central planners, trying to optimize one or two things (profits! crop yeild!) in a reductive way.

Oh, and ironically, people also come in with morals and guilt, which animals don’t worry about. The killers in the animal world are actually key elements to making the system work. But with humans, we are suddenly self-conscious. Frankly, I think a lot of animals, if they could, would like our lifestyle. Animals in the wild – would many of them not prefer to live in a cushy house and get meals out of a can? Indoor cats can live an average of 12 years, while outdoor cats average 3.

In sum, the environmental lobby would be more interesting to me if the conversation was about how to overlay the natural system with the human/self-conscious one, and if it would explore values frankly, and not just keep framing it as victims (nature) and guilt. It’s hard to produce a vision out of the latter approach.