Comments on: The Earth can take care of itself http://futurismic.com/2008/04/22/the-earth-can-take-care-of-itself/ Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001 Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:03:44 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Peter http://futurismic.com/2008/04/22/the-earth-can-take-care-of-itself/comment-page-1/#comment-14177 Peter Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:46:09 +0000 http://futurismic.com/?p=3229#comment-14177 The Earth may be a system attempting to achieve homeostasis, but that does not ensure that it 'can take care of itself', nor is it fair to say that the environmental movement is just about human survival (though it certainly is when limiting the discussion to sustainability). A great deal of environmental effort is aimed at the preservation of natural habitat and at-risk species for their own sake. Moreover, if certain tipping points are reached in terms of global climate change, the massive changes in the Earth's biosphere would leave the planet in a far, far different state than it has ever experienced, with the single greatest die-off in history. While some may say that's just the Earth 'taking care of itself', a better analogy, given that this is an anthropogenic event, would be an experiment in which someone is given a potentially fatal virus and then simply observed to see if he/she survives. Whether the Earth, as a rock floating in space, continues to exist or not isn't the issue. The issue is humanity's responsibility for the damage it is knowingly causing, regardless of whether that damage comes back to haunt us or not. The Earth may be a system attempting to achieve homeostasis, but that does not ensure that it ‘can take care of itself’, nor is it fair to say that the environmental movement is just about human survival (though it certainly is when limiting the discussion to sustainability). A great deal of environmental effort is aimed at the preservation of natural habitat and at-risk species for their own sake. Moreover, if certain tipping points are reached in terms of global climate change, the massive changes in the Earth’s biosphere would leave the planet in a far, far different state than it has ever experienced, with the single greatest die-off in history.

While some may say that’s just the Earth ‘taking care of itself’, a better analogy, given that this is an anthropogenic event, would be an experiment in which someone is given a potentially fatal virus and then simply observed to see if he/she survives. Whether the Earth, as a rock floating in space, continues to exist or not isn’t the issue. The issue is humanity’s responsibility for the damage it is knowingly causing, regardless of whether that damage comes back to haunt us or not.

]]>