I believe that if we acted today, that there could be salvation. Institute massive taxes against plastic use. Ban it for take-out food and other single-use instances. Start heavily taxing other wasteful areas. Heavily encourage if not enforce composting and recycling.
Immediately start restoring mowed lawns with native plants. Ban the use of chemical fertilizers.
It could be done, but we won't. Salvation is at our fingertips, but we close our fists.
We can't design a solution for the problem of 'too many humans devouring Earth's resources'. Locusts can't make plans. Galaxies cannot deviate from collision. I don't understand why we harbor fantasies about being anything other than a natural process that will simply run its course.
That's an interesting perspective. In many ways, it seems to me that evolution did not or cannot account for technological development. I have been trying to read more about what makes life go, and it seems it's highly related to thermodynamics and information theory.
Are you proposing that any life will eventually discover technology (namely the ability to access and manipulate stored energy and also computation)? If so, it's possible that life is accounting for it in ways we don't understand yet.
Whatever we call technology is as natural a process as everything else systems in our Universe cobble together. I see no difference between termite mounds and the Internet. All is bound by the laws of physics. The same processes created complex monkey brains create datacenters. Physics is very clear: only things that are thermodinamically downhill can happen. Human civilization is just a natural, 4D phenomenon we get to see unfold. All in all it won't amount to more then any passing geological pattern on any planet before or since.
That's just because humans have not yet acted coherently yet as a species. There are all kinds of scenarios likely and unlikely that can unfold and none of us know what they are. Nature may be indifferent but she does seem to give us every chance.
By the way, I think you're in a tiny minority if you believe there is no distinction between things that evolve and things that are designed.
I wouldn't me making this argument if I thought everyone thought like me. We have a great capacity for understanding and changing nature, yes. And also the need to believe we are apart and special. But we're not. High rise buildings and fiber optic cables are as natural as anything else that grows on the planet. Drawing a line and calling "artificial" or "designed" on this side is completely arbitrary.
I think your take is very interesting and I agree with the sentiment in general. But humans are different sociobiologically from other animals. As far as I know, we are the only ones that cook our food, which caused drastic changes in the guts of hominids, because the energy required to process food was farmed out to the cooking process and literally to the grass-eating animals we ate. Every since fire and further technological developments, humans have gone against nature and evolution.
I get what you're saying and agree in spirit, but I think it is zooming out a little too far to say that technological development is just another natural process. Yes, it is in a way, but things like computation are truly different beasts. No, humans are not special in terms of our importance, language, meaning, or even intelligence, but my thoughts are that technology is a separate process from natural processes. It is distinct from evolutionary processes.
If you have some interesting reading, I'd love to know it. I haven't necessarily considered the question of technological processes being an extension of natural processes.
As a practical matter I just don't think it's useful to lose the distinction between artificial and natural, even if I cannot define precisely when something is one or the other. In the same way it's not useful to lose the distinction between "selfish" and "selfless" which is a good enough reason to reject psychological egoism.
I think it's okay to accept something is true in an "ultimate sense", but not in a practical sense. e.g. that all technology is a natural process since the causal chain that led to it happened or rather was allowed by physics. To wit, plastics really are natural because humans evolved to be able to make plastics. If you argue against plastics being natural, then you might argue that anything "made" by an individual organism is artificial, which is clearly absurd.
No super interested in finding a resolution here, since I don't think the common meanings are problematic.
I get what you're saying, and I actually like it. I myself have called Life a singular phenomena that describes a (very) complex 4D shape of which we humans are all just a part (and as a group are currently only about as impactful as a large asteroid!). But if you follow this to far you get some nasty results, mostly around a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness, which I honestly don't think has a rational basis. The world is strange and even one good idea, one chance, could turn things around for Life in general, and humans in particular. It certainly needs to be a big change, something like a "phase shift" in human affairs. We certainly cannot bring our traditional values into the future, which were predicated on living in a world that would push back against our ambitions. Nowadays, the ONLY thing restraining humans is humans, and yet self-restraint has never been so out-of-fashion.
These suggestions sound like a classic "central planners know better" attitude.
Would taxing/banning plastic actually reduce waste/pollution? or would the shift to more expensive replacements (paper/wood/etc) actually increase pollution and waste?
Banning chemical fertilisers would almost immediately cause a massive famine, enormous drops in agricultural productivity, etc. People consuming "organic" foods that don't use fertiliser can only do so from the position of privilege wherin chemically-fertilised crops are feeding 95%+ of the population. We even have a real example of the consequences! See Sri Lanka recently :(.
It's times like this I can't help but see why some people are so keen to keep the government away from things.
I should have clarified in my original comment, although I already mentioned this elsewhere prior to your comment. Chemical fertilizers, to my knowledge, serve no actual purpose other than vanity for residential applications. Thus, they should be banned for those purposes. For commercial agriculture, a more long-term approach is clearly needed, but an actual approach should be realized instead of doomsdaying.
Plastics are a nightmare and there is no going back from them. We have inundated ourselves and our environments with micro plastics, and they will not just go away. Paper and wood do not have this problem on the disposal side unless they've been treated with chemicals. I'm not sure where paper and wood come into a discussion with plastics and fertilizers, but I would also support using less wood.
Thank you for the polite response - I realise I was a bit harsh.
I don’t see an issue with chemical fertilisers, personally - I don’t think non commercial users of them are significant enough to be worth any consideration compared ro conventional agriculture.
I can’t say how consequential microplastics are - however banning them for use as packaging etc can have huge negative consequences because they are a very cheap (both in price and energy) packaging compared to most alternatives. I think that if microplastics are a concern, car tires and clothing are much more significant than “single use” instances as good packaging (which I would guess is actually usually disposed of properly most of the time).
I brought up paper because it’s a common substitute packaging (eg cardboard and the like), but is significantly pricier than plastics and more energy intensive to produce.
It’s not an easy Robles to solve, the more so because we use these things because they work so well. I just took exception to singling these things out because they are either critical to modern civilisation (fertiliser) or extremely useful (plastic packaging)
The existence of prior extinction events does not negate the fact that humans are extremely destructive to the planet.
Even in your link to the Permian–Triassic extinction event, one of the most probable causes of loss of marine life was hypercapnia. Several of our modern-day coastal waters are highly hypoxic, enough to cause drastic changes in macro behavior of fish and even whales, and the hypoxic waters are directly caused by human actions.
Humans, in the last century alone, caused half of the total forest loss in the past 10,000 years, and we were directly responsible for a large portion of the other half.
If we go by co2, the guess is that something between 1,000 - 1,500 ppm is required to tip us into a greenhouse phase.
Our current levels are well under 500 ppm.
Humanity will have to work very hard to force the planet out of its current icehouse.
We are definitely having an impact, and could well drive ourselves extinct, but I still see us as unable to implement drastic change, especially as some extinction events have required thousands of years to come to pass.
If we ban chemical fertilizers (what does this include, btw?), will we be able to grow enough food to feed everyone? What else would have to change to make that possible?
Permaculture is soil- and insect-friendly and can be productive and resilient, but it requires more manual labor and setting up a permaculture system takes a lot of knowledge and I think it takes years before it is producing competitively, depending on the soil conditions.
If we ban synthetic fertilizers (and more importantly herbicides/pesticides) abruptly before having established organic methods at scale, that will most likely cause food insecurity like it did in Sri Lanka.
Slowly phasing them out to a level that is not killing us in the long run seems more sensible to me.
I was thinking of banning them for residential use and then re-evaluating their use in commercial agriculture industries. There's no reason that I can think of that they should be used in residential applications. All they do is keep grass artificially green and destroy soil health.
Immediately start restoring mowed lawns with native plants. Ban the use of chemical fertilizers.
It could be done, but we won't. Salvation is at our fingertips, but we close our fists.