World events

Isn't that just nature? It's just that we've managed to do them all extremely well?

Why wouldn't they use something from a company they had stock in?

Let's check our conspiracy badges at the door, shall we?

It's a terrible accident, which increasingly likely seems due to personnel not following regulation and safety procedures. But for those too young to remember, I am in mind of the Exxon Valdez disaster in the late eighties, which environmentalists predicted would be worst oil-related disaster in histroy, with an impact for decades to come.

In fact, within five years the spill had been cleared and wildlife is teeming as never before.

If we stop pointing fingers and hanging our heads in gloom and doom we'll fix this one as well.
It's been done before. We'll do it again.

Yeah. We were all going to die of food shortages by the seventies.

Strangely, that didn't happen.

Then by the eighties it was air pollution and acid rain.

Oddly we're still here.

Then in the nineties all the water was running out.

And again, we're doing fine.

This "we don't deserve out beautiful planet" crap gets right up my nose.
It's all a matter of balance. ANd that balance is dynamic. No such thing as a static equilibrium in nature: things die out, and disasters happen, and guess what: more often than not we have nothing to do with it!

If we by and large take our responsibility the planet can take care of itself.

Will it look different in ten thousand years?
Sure.
Would it have looked different in ten thousand years without any human intervention?
Sure.

We are grossly overestimating our capability for destruction: we're not doing anything that nature won't balance out. Short of us exploding a dozen or three hydrogen bombs in the upper atmosphere, we'll survive, so will the planet, and so will nature.

I never said it was the end of the world. Or the epitome of man's inhuman lust for annihilation.

We don't go out and deliberately kill our environment; it's the extent to which we use the resources of the planet that's got it in for us. And a lot of what we are doing is accelerating natural processes.

Something like locusts destroy their environment by consuming all their food. But they can move on to the next field...and the next...and then the next. Given enough of them then they would exhaust all the the resources, destroying their environment.

It's all a matter of degree. As Martijn says, it's a balance. If you tip the balance too much then things go awry. Until the balance is again achieved. It may be a different balance and one that doesn't feature us. But it's a balance.

Martijn, i am no hippie or anything, i am just trying to look at it all from the outside, as much as possible. As top of the food chain, we serve no other purpose than to satisfy our own selves in burden of the nature around us. We haven't ever created anything for anyone else other than our own selves. Civilization you say? Yeah, of course, but that's only useful and understandable to us alone. I am not catastrophologist either and i am not suggesting that the world is going to end tomorrow, but we really are hurting the planet. TO what degree? I don't know, but we surely are; just take a look at those pictures and that's just a minor example.

Errr....what?

Point well missed, Demetris.

Read Martijn's post again, or just wait for Martijn's reply... I really can't be arsed to expla-- ah fuck it.

First of all, it's all about the balance. The universe, and as an extension our planet, is always trying to reach a state of equilibrium (and yet constantly progressing towards a state of greater entropy). Hence we get volcanoes, earthquakes, bad weather, good weather, evolution, gas escaping from your coke bottle, you name it. (Second of all, volcanoes and other natural events effect -and often hurt- not just humans, but all forms of life too.) Though it may effect us in a negative way now and in the near future, in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter - life lives on. The planet will survive. (That is until the day the earth reaches its end, engulfed by the sun having turned into a red giant a few billion years from now most likely, or at least close enough to it to be scorched so badly that nothing will survive.)

Thirdly, life on this planet has survived far worse and greater influences than mankind has ever and perhaps ever will cause; life has hit the reset button on numerous occasions. If it hadn't, we probably wouldn't be here to talk about it. So it's not the planet we should worry about, it's us we should worry about. Our future, and perhaps the future of other species we deem worthy of our empathy. But life will go on regardless and the planet doesn't give a shit whether we drive or walk to work.

So be it volcanoes or us, it doesn't matter. In the end, it all just leeds to new balance. (The thing is whether that balance is one that suits our needs as a species.)

Yep, for a few reasons. As is the case with many things, if it wasn't for volcanoes we wouldn't be here!

And Raqeul Welch's bikini.

You guys just keep cracking me up...

No, we just shouldn't drop everything, or worry and work us to the bone to achieve reparation (rather unfeasible in nature anyway) under the misnomer of ecological or natural balance.

If we mess up, obviously we should clean up (oil spills included).
But to suggest that every single change in the current balance is not only evil but due to human interaction alone is counter-productive and stagnating. Change happens all the time, and nature has proven for the last four billion years it can pretty much take care of its own.

So yes, mankind, by all means keep on going, but in the words of a famous eighties' police series character: "let's be careful out there".

The Roman empire were a cause of mass deforestation centuries ago. But yeah, a lot of species will be exterminated without ever being discovered at this rate.