Reply To: The recent "discovery" of Dark Matter

[Rezwan]

Human beings have a lot of power on this planet. We can change our environment. And many human beings have a religious streak, or some kind of ethical or logical conceit going on. I think the urge to make sweeping decisions about the way “humanity” should be is a common one.

The way this urge manifests itself in me is the fantasy of a future in which people, voluntarily (that being the key word) perceive themselves as noble. And this manifests itself in the pursuit of a positive footprint (rather than zero or negative). Like, we decide since we’re so clever and all powerful compared to animals, that we’ll make our infrastructure a bit more friendly to them. Pedestrian friendly, habitat friendly. Of course, we’ll zone them out in a lot of areas. You get ticks out in nature, you don’t want them in malls. But really, human land needs are not that great. Once you get skyscraper farms – you can leave a lot of land to heirloom plants, forests, diversity, or whatever.

I think this will only happen large scale when more people become affluent. Then, rather than using eminent domain, people will just join to create more natural areas and market forces will prevail, people will all want to live adjacent to spectacular grounds and build in ways that make that work. It won’t be “natural”, though. Being people, there will probably be more gardening and landscape manipulation going on. And houses and structures that stand out like trophies and assertions of human ego.

I don’t have a problem with that. I love built stuff. But I also get a thrill looking at all these new eco-city ideas. A lot of them are practical and no harm done to the environment. Also, I think you can have both a cool human infrastructure and actually enhance biodiversity. That “Gardener’s of Eden” book has always been a favorite.

I think, as affluence and power increase, we will do things like set up millenium long treasure hunts, burying treasures for people to find and puzzle over centuries from now. Build giant whimsical works of architecture – statues that can be blown up centuries from now when Taliban-esque folks rise up.

Anyway, the upshot is that, the outrage over the “environmental lobby” and its proposals that I sense here might be related to the sense that the lobby is misanthropic. That whole zero sum thing where it’s people against nature.

It’s like they’re more interested in punishing people than finding a blend of nature with human power/consciousness. A lot of guilt and control.

That aside, I do want to live in a world where we transition easily from sleek urban areas with the option of jumping in a supersonic chopper to hawaii, or hopping on a horse and riding all day to the next town…

I mean, this corporate American western civilization is a bit boring. I’d like to see more anachronism and greater expanses of wild land where that could happen.

So, I have a number of fantasies of alternative futures and landscapes. None of these is very viable in the current limited resources paradigm where everyone’s struggling to make ends meet and being all miserly with each other.