I love nature. I love the wilderness. I love wild animals and plants and trees and running clean water. I’m only asking this question as a purely hypothetical. Why do we need to preserve nature? Couldn’t we grow all the plants and animals we needed and pretty much pave/develop 90% of the surface of the planet or more? Forests are nice but can humans live without them?
I suspect complete deforestation might need to oxygen problems.
yes, kind of an obvious point, how could i have forgotten that?
Maybe this will help you: http://www.ecokids.ca/pub/eco_info/topics/forests/benefits_of_trees.cfm
Or maybe this one:
I don’t know. I am not currently in charge of your brain.
:D:D:D
lots of medicines, materials or mechanisms come from nature.
people are out beating the bush for hidden bits of nature.
We live in nature. We would have to spend a huge amount of resources creating the necessities that we currently harvest from nature. And we can’t just keep the parts of nature that we use and eliminate the rest. Nature’s a complex system and removing parts of it can cause the entire system to collapse.
QFT. And we are neither smart enough, wise enough, nor powerful enough to redesign to planetary ecosystem.
I think rainwater would have a hard time making to the ocean if we paved 90% of the planet…
We’ve been removing parts of it for ages, and we’re fine. There are some bits of nature that we can clearly do without. Does anyone really miss the dodo?
There are really two issues here. The first one is: Should we be careful about messing with systems that may be integral to our own survival and well-being? The answer to that one should really be a no-brainer.
The second one is: Should we really bother with saving the giant panda? I mean, come on. We all pretty much know that the world will go on with or without giant pandas. And the dumb little bastards are doing pretty much nada to help with their own survival anyway, with the whole sexophobia thing.
That one involves some more complicated ethical arguments. It can’t be all about self-interest.
All those people dying of cancer because we never developed the anti-cancer vaccine based on the Dodo’s remarkable resistance might miss it. But we’ll never know.
And that’s kind of the point. We’re not omniscient enough to say which bits of nature we can safely destroy and which we can’t. Nature’s a complex system - Chaos Butterflies everywhere.
Having said that…
Nope. Let the fuckers go.
Peope seem to have forgotten that the economy takes place **inside **the environment. It’s not an optional extra that we try to look after when we have a spare bit of time and money. It’s what made us, and what keeps us alive and breathing.
If they were fuckers, we wouldn’t be running out of them.
Obviously, all our things that we use and consume come from nature. So, we really need to preserve them.
It’s a dangerous game though. Here are the rules.
- If we destroy an important part of nature, it might make it impossible for humans to live.
- We can’t be certain which parts are important and which parts aren’t.
- When we destroy a part, we can’t put it back if we were wrong.
I was trying to answer within the framework the OP established.
We are not really separate from nature, we are part of it. One current example is bees: if we continue to use the pesticide that probably causes colony collapse disorder and the bee population falls below a threshold, large sectors of our food supply would become scarce or non-producing.
Agree with what’s been said so far, but here’s another angle. The bumper sticker version goes like this: “You don’t inherit the Earth from your parents; you take care of it in trust for your children.”
IOW …
Even *if *humans are the only thing that matters on Earth, *we *living today aren’t the only humans. And even *if *we can destroy Nature without ill effect to us, we aren’t the only humans with an interest in it.
When our ancestors killed the last dodo, utterly useless though they almost certainly were, they foreclosed us today, and billions of future humans, from ever experiencing one. Ditto for all the species we’re killing off now, apparently useless or potentially otherwise. When we burn the last coal and oil, we foreclose any future humans from having any. etc. For any resource you care to name.
Businesses use the idea of “net present value” (“NPV”) all the time to decide on investments. You discount the value of future stuff by x% a year to compare values across time. e.g. is getting $125 in 3 years better or worse than getting $136 in 4 years? Makes sense.
But when applied to only slightly longer runs of time, anything much over 100 years, the effect is to devalue the entire future of humanity to zero.
As a WAG, if we invented a device today that could make everyone on Earth $1000 better off tomorrow, but was in effect a time bomb which would absolutely, positively, inevitably blow up the planet *a la *Death Star in 500 years, a pure economic analysis would say “go ahead and turn it on.” The economic value of all the capital on Earth in 2515, plus all that would ever be created thereafter out into the long term future, is dwarfed by $1000 today when discounted at even a moderate interest rate.
Had the folks in Christopher Columbus’ day had the tech and made the calc, we wouldn’t be here today.
So the question becomes, are we simply self-seeking economic robots, or are we humans with enough moral ethical sense to recognize our future descendants as real people deserving of real consideration? Or are your great-great[sup]15[/sup] grandkids simply a different flavor of “them” in the ever-present [us vs. them] dichotomy which drives so much of the dreary side of human behavior?
The bit about forests producing oxygen is overstated and misunderstood. A mature, stable forest neither produces nor consumes oxygen. Whenever the amount of plant biomass increases, the amount of oxygen in the air increases proportionately, and whenever the amount of plant biomass decreases, the oxygen content likewise decreases. If we burned down all of the forests, then the oxygen in the air would decrease by the amount needed to react with the wood, and then stay there. The plants that we’re raising for our food are also producing the amount of oxygen that we consume, and presumably, even if we massively deforested the planet, we’d still be growing crops.
Save the plague, man. 