Think of all the parking lots we could have!
forests hold a lot of carbon. that stuff has to go somewhere.
Wildlife expert Chris Packham says let the pandas die. His point is that we expend too many resources saving them while less cute species are dying off and the resources could be better expended.
So much ego from the homo-sapiens 
Look nature has been around millions of years and will do fine without homo-sapiens. The preserving thought is only for humans to have a livable earth for future. Nature is going is do fine whether we preserve it or not, we will not.
You can do things like transport bees around to pollinate monoculture crops, to get around some of the problems that come up in converting large areas to monocultures. It’s harder than just letting wild bees do the work. That means it is costing somebody, somewhere.
Nature is, of course, a complex system. That means it’s hard to predict what happens if a particular species is introduced or eradicated.
If we develop the whole planet, the species that will remain are likely to be the ones that can do well in an environment where they interact with humans. Trouble is, the species that do this rarely do it by staying out of humans’ way. They do things like nest in people’s houses, spray people or their pets with noxious odors, prey on people’s pets, overturn garbage cans, run onto roadways and get killed, and the like. They might injure people if cornered. Some of them go further and prey on humans (an example would be mosquitoes). If you eliminate all the open space, you’re selecting against the benign animals that want to leave people alone and live far away from people, and for the ones that survive by making nuisances of themselves. You’re also selecting for behaviors that interfere with humans- squirrels need to make nests, if there are fewer trees they’re going to do that in people’s attics. Bears need to eat- if they can’t find wild food in forests or salmon runs, food scavenged from cars in parking lots will do. Bears aren’t particularly neat about it when they break into a car, and they don’t tend to have car insurance.
It’s not trivial to eliminate animals that are being a nuisance. I’ve dealt with squirrels and carpenter ants invading my house. I’d much prefer it if squirrels and carpenter ants lived in a forest somewhere and left my house alone. Theoretically, you could deal with the problem by making them extinct (I’m in favor of this course of action for carpenter ants, bloody nuisances), but that’s not easy. It’s a problem even if you have a species that has to interact with humans to survive, and is fairly easily foiled, like the guinea worm. There aren’t a lot of ethical concerns about eradicating the guinea worm, and you can do it with water filtration. But things like civil wars make eradication campaigns difficult. Sometimes a method of killing unwanted species will work for a while, then the target species evolves resistance and it becomes less effective (DDT and malaria mosquitoes are an example of this, as are myxomatosis and rabbits in Australia). Sometimes we find out that chemicals we’re using against a particular nuisance species are hazardous to humans.
If you want to pave everywhere, you presumably don’t live in an area where potholes are a problem. Here in Pittsburgh, we’re not keeping up with maintaining the pavement that we have. More pavement means that either we’ll have to divert resources from something else to maintaining it, or the same resources will be stretched thinner.
Then there’s this take on things: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not all that can be counted counts. IOW, there is inherent value in “nature.” What we see, hear, feel, smell, taste and experience is in many ways what life is all about - not the economy, not the percentage of growth or profit, not the number of this, that or the other features, etc. You might as well ask what would life be like if we didn’t have life. Some things are inherently good, regardless of the various quantifying factors. (Hijacking note: in great measure, and on many levels, our society has moved to a numbers-based mode. I take this as an outgrowth of the impulses of the 80’s, but that’s another story. As only one example, see the way that students, schools and teachers are now assessed and evaluated - almost exclusively numerically.)
I wonder what the ideal human population of the planet would be. I think I heard Bill Gates say he favors having it at half a billion, which would be a pretty decent life for most people (if we were to cage up the sociopaths who push for endless growth). I believe the range of half to one-and-a-half billion would leave plenty of room for nature to sustain humanity, but ten billion would just be untenable: there would be such a fine balancing act to keep nature viable that one mistake could lead to major ecosystem collapse.
As opposed to those who want to cut it by 6 1/2 billion, for example? “…I think I heard Bill Gates say he favors having it at half a billion, which would be a pretty decent life for most people…”
I do not believe that seven billion is sustainable. There are seven billion acres of arable land on earth, it takes almost an acre to feed one person, that is skating really close to the edge. Those six or seven billion people will go, one way or another, the planet cannot support them indefinitely. It would be much better if the decline could be handled in an orderly fashion (attrition, sub-replacement breeding) rather than catastrophically, but that seems pretty unlikely.
I think we all realize that there are numerous tangible and intangible benefits of ‘the environment’, but as a thought experiment, could we construct a habitable planet without ‘nature’?
I guess you could take Earth out of the equation and think about creating an artificial planet separate from Earth. I think we could do that. We’d still need plants, but I think we’d most likely go vegetarian or maybe eat insects instead of meat. We’d need water and various nutrients. Anyway, there’s probably things I’m missing, but we have lived in an artificial world (space stations) for years.
And if we could do that, we could recreate Earth via totally artificial means. I’m not arguing that such a situation is preferable or even laudable, but I think an argument could be made that we don’t NEED to preserve nature per se.
Yeah, well, I think they do not make their own food on the ISS, they get stores from shore-side, so there is no “artificial world” aspect to it. At all.
Actually the opposite, and that’s not good. Water runs easily off hard surfaces such as pavement and roofs, collects in gutters and sewers and all too quickly gets discharged into rivers.
If the land is covered with soil and plants, it instead soaks into the soil and stays around for a while to provide liquid for those plants and the animals that live there.
First of all, I think you should start getting warnings for purposefully never capitalizing, ever. Fucking annoying. There should be a rule…
Secondly, wha?? I think I was able to parse that but now I can’t get the image of a stringbean-ish young boy running out back behind the bush in his country home, so that he’d be hidden while he beat on his little bits until nature took it’s course. :eek: :mad:
Are you not familiar with the ordinary English idiom “beating the bush”?
It means about what it says: exhaustively searching an area (usually natural) looking for some specific things. e.g. “The police fanned out across the swamp beating the bush for the fugitives.”
johnpost’s assertion that there are searchers out methodically exploring the whole world looking for valuable minerals, plants, biochemicals, etc., is 100% correct. The world is a big place, and although most of the landmass is mapped and characterized, only comparatively small fractions of it have been fine-tooth combed yet.
Although I agree that failure to capitalize & punctuate is almost reason enough to block someone from view.
Beyond that aspect, the presence or absence of forests has a huge impact on climate and terrain. Slash a forest here, you cause a mudslide there and the people over there suddenly have their crops freeze.
And because climate is a very complex, interconnected system and we can’t really predict what happens when more than a few variables in that system change at the same time, there’s a strong incentive not to mess with it too much. And do note that fauna is part of that, and plays a role in the spread (and biodiversity) of flora.
[QUOTE=am77494]
Look nature has been around millions of years and will do fine without homo-sapiens. The preserving thought is only for humans to have a livable earth for future. Nature is going is do fine whether we preserve it or not, we will not.
[/QUOTE]
Oh yes. The planet is fine. The *people *are fucked.
Really? They generate energy. They DO grow food (Yes, in tiny quantities). They do produce their own atmosphere. They do live in a society. It’s an imperfect system, but there are absolutely some aspects of an ‘artificial world’. To not see that is to lack any imagination.
They do live in a society, but the society they live in is the same society that includes billions of other people.
The space-station is way far short of being able to sustain itself. If there was a major war earthside causing the space programs to fail completely, the space-station astronauts would eventually run out of food and starve to death without the supply from the Earth. That is nothing at all like creating artificial worlds we could live in. They tried to do it in the Biosphere domes in Arizona and had mixed results.
The reason we need to preserve nature is obvious to me: Nature enabled us to get where we are, the way it is. Why fuck with it?
Or, to paraphrase my man Lemmy, when asked about the notion of mankind destroying the earth, he replied: The Earth is made of volcanos. We aren’t going to destroy the Earth. We’re just going to destroy that bit of it that we need.
I think we keep talking past each other. Let me try to phrase my thinking into a couple of questions:
-
“Can we live without nature right now?”
The answer is no. I don’t argue that even one bit. -
“Is there a possible future where we could live without nature as we know it on Earth?”
The answer there is at least a maybe.
Now, there are a million questions embedded in that second one - not the least of which is “What is nature?” If we live in some massive space station that exists in space (which is arguably ‘nature’) and we grow massive amounts of plants and insects in artificial greenhouses and bring water and nutrients from Earth or other planets are we really living ‘without nature’? Arguably not. But, I don’t think it’s ‘nature’ as we currently define it. There would be no animals, no ‘wilderness’, nothing there that wasn’t chosen by humans.
Can you concede that such a thought experiment is conceivably true?