Ecological issues

[NikolaiI]

I never feel stupid anymore, for finding out about something that seems so astounding, so incredible that I should have known about it long before. The universe - the world - is so vast that there will always be new things for us to learn, that will break through our previous understanding like any of the previous revelations.

Like recently I learned that a over the past 3 decades India has lost 98-99% of their Vulture raptor population. It occurred because of a drug, being used as an anti-inflammatory agent in livestock, but it was completely deadly to vultures - sadly enough, as they are able to digest smallpox, anthrax, cholera, salmonella, and others, without catching the disease, or spreading them.

Since vultures are the primary 'clean-up crew' of nature, when they became almost entire absent, carcasses were left rotting for all the other animals. The two that seem to have benefited the most are rats and wild dogs - both of which carry many of the diseases that weren't an issue with vultures around, so a lot of these diseases have increased a great deal, especially rabies among and the size of the wild dog populations.

Work's being done to stop using the drug completely, and use a safer replacement, and some to restore the vulture populations, but I'm sure any help we could give them would be good. The more vultures, the less all those diseases and what not.

This is just one that I wanted to start out with since I recently learned it, but there are a lot of different things to talk about. I don't know all that much about the bee population crises in north america, for example, although I've heard a few things. If you have some definitive knowledge, or even interesting questions, or a general feeling about the environment..!

Any discussion is welcome - there's not any level of knowledge you have to be at to start learning and helping others learn.


I really appreciate this view of ecology and its mother site - world population balance.org - partly because I had come to a lot of the same conclusions independently of them.


A couple months ago I also found out about the extinction crises. we may be going through right now.

Above all I don't want to spread worry, only awareness of the need for action and change. I believe if we all speak up about this, and act for the solution of it in the best way we know how, then we will be successful in our mission.

In other words, share the message, through any media and means necessary - art, poetry, music, television, writing letters to your congress people.

Or marching in the street or engaging in passive resistance.. to the production and selling of guns, and to any excess expansion of humanity into nature's domain - or drilling of her resources, etc.

The sooner we reverse the trend, the better off we will be, and if we solve these problems early on, a ton of suffering can be prevented.

Forgive me for going on about the big picture a little while - I think there are plenty of more localized issues we can talk about to help our knowledge of the world's ecosystem as a whole and in its parts, so that we can best help it.

Above all, being aware of humanity's exponential growth to 7.3 billion, and further, and all the drain of resources - fresh water, trees, and the like, and habitat destruction -

Every day we have fewer forests. Every day we have fewer species. Every day we are poorer.

But one thing we should never be is sad about the past - if anything I say matters much, then act on it. . all I believe we should do is act for the good - and then be happy about what good we have done.

The sooner we can turn our lives around - collectively - the better; and the only way for it to happen is for it to happen individually - for individuals are what the collective is made of.

We can still save so many species, and so much land - and every act, every word, everything we say and do and believe affects it - all the words and deeds we do are real steps - though they are one person, they inspire others to make the journey, and they make the journey more understandable.

What? Go into nature? Leave everything and live completely independent of destruction? Do it, and write a book, and promote that book. Then you have taken a footstep that forever moves us forward to salvation, even if only one small foot, and only one short distance. It's a distance that the collective - all of us - dances once step closer to being free for good.

Buddha warns us "don't underestimate evil" but also says "don't underestimate good. The bucket fills up one drop at a time. . ."


Don't ever give up hope, happiness, or trust in the truth of victory one day to come. The only way to inspire hope and happiness is to reach that inspiration oneself. We can't share love if we don't know love, so really more than half of the battle is just to know love; once it's there it will automatically shine into all spheres of one's life.

In all spheres of every life, the more hope there is in that life, the more strength they have - this is simply a law, that can't be denied - it's not a moral judgement of any kind, or anything at all except a fairly basic law that seems to be followed everywhere.

Therefore you strove to give hope to the allies you consider friends, and you try to take hope away from those you consider your enemy -

or if you decide to have no enemies, you will likely strive for the goal of not having enmity for anyone - this is a good way to go.

But this also lets you know that anything that takes hope away from you, well .. I don't want to make a pronouncement of something that's totally bad - but I can't really seem to think of a time that it's good.

Even my enemies I wish to be hopeful, because the more so they are, the more likely they are to one day become no longer my enemies.

Sorry for rambling on. . . honestly I do that a lot.

[desiresjab]

Are you looking for a message of hope? There is none. I do not want to spread worry, either. I want people to know it is over. The industrialists are not going to stop. The people will not stop driving ten miles when they get a hankering for ice cream at night. Why worry now?

Ninety miles per hour toward a cliff. There is a point beyond which it does no good to apply the brakes. We passed that point. CO2 buildup is only first gear of our problem. As the temperature rises, methane from the world's waters and beneath the melting tundra bubbles forth into the atmosphere. Methane is 25 times the greenhouse gas CO2 is.

It is over, my friend. A very reduced version of humanity may survive. I will give you one guess whether it includes you. Only the global elite have the resources necessary to survive. The human race has backed up many times before. The Law of Quadratic Reciprocity had been known in three or four cultures previously to Euler rediscovering it in the 18th century and Gauss proving it a few decades later. We will do that again. Goodbye, calculus. Goodbye, quantum mechanics.

What is my advice? I wish there were some to give, but the game is already over.

[togre]

You want some hope? Read the forgotten literature of previous generations. See the scares about the limited supply of oil in the late 1800's, about the new ice age in the 1970's, about the looming Y2K apocalypse, the hole in the ozone layer, bird flue, etc. Then look at the doomsayers of this generations. Oh the hubris to think we puny humans have the power to wreck the world.


It's not an excuse for being wasteful/polluters/bad stewards. But the foolish predictions never come true. I'll make a bet--$10,000 says the world will still be isn't normal dysfunctional self in 50 years.