Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Tall Midget wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Tall Midget wrote:
The concept of an invasive species is both ecosystem-centric and anthropocentric.
If that's all you have to say, I'll take it as a victory.
I'm not sure what you mean. Surely you above all others here appreciate the need to manage ecosystems so that we continue to reap the benefits from them that allow MANY to maintain their standard of living. Sustaining ecosystem function is central to this where forests are concerned.
I was just fucking with you.
But seriously, I do consider myself an environmentalist who cares about the only planet we have. That's vastly different than being a proponent of Climate Change which I see as a pseudoscientific quasi-religious movement to enrich a few and impoverish many,
It seems to me that most Climate Change proponents believe man himself is an invasive species and that The Planet would be much better off without him. That's why so many of them promote the idea of refusing to procreate. In that case, for whom are they "saving" The Planet? Future generations of dung beetles?
I think we should be much more concerned with plastic bottles and surgical masks choking our waterways than worried about what type of vehicle SUV Rick is driving.
And as far as "managing ecosystems" is concerned, it seems man fucks that up as often as not, e.g. the introduction of cane toads to Australia and the creation of Bill Gates's GMO mosquitoes.
Well, if your answer is to "do nothing" in the face of threats like invasive insects and plants or diseases, then you are effectively arguing for the same approach as the "pseudoscientific" environmentalists who hate humanity. Like you, they see natural resource management as a questionable endeavor that yields limited, if any, benefits. It's certainly true that management efforts across the globe have a checkered history. In the 1930s and 40s, for instance, Roosevelt's Conservation Corps ditched New England salt marshes--vital habitats for all kinds of important fish/wildlife and remarkably effective buffers against sea level rise--to drain them and control mosquito populations. While this strategy was effective, it also killed off vast swaths of marsh land due to the pooling and interior rot it caused. Today, though, wetland managers have discovered that a variation on a ditching technique called runneling can actually be used both to control mosquitos AND revitalize degraded marsh areas, thereby reversing the environmental damage caused by ditching and sea level rise.
So yeah, it's true that human management has caused unintended problems in many areas, including natural resources. But it's also true that a managed approach can lead to important breakthroughs at times when we need them most. You can side with the cynical and cowardly do-nothing fatalists if you like, an approach that is guaranteed to result in an accelerated depletion of natural resources (and will thereby yield negative economic impacts such as fishery degradation and declining timber production in the case of forests). I prefer a different approach. It may be flawed, but at least it's not giving up.
_________________
Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
