Man is one viscious parasite...

Great article, Tea. It supports my position to some extent and opposes to some as well. Meaning I need to write a better response - for which I will get to soon, but cannot right now.

The devastation question is easier. We are talking about devastation by humans right? The comment that mankind can make the planet unlivable for us, but we would be hard pressed to destroy the biosphere completely. We on the same page on the question?

If so then your question would be how much damage can we do? Far as I know the most severe devastation that mankind is capable of at present would be all out thermonuclear war. Russia and the U.S. unleash all their nuclear arsenals and kill damn near ever living thing. Even that drastic an event will not kill the biosphere. There are some critters that are immune to radiation. Cockroaches for example. More importantly those little guys that inhabit every glass of water we drink, tardigrades, which can survive the vacuum and intense radiation of deep space.

So yes we can kill the planet of most everything, and it will take millennia for the radiation to return to normal levels. Eventually though, it will. And there are enough critters still living to build the entire biosphere back up. Certainly something radically different from what the planet looks like today. But rebuild it will.

More later.
 
A Cup Of Tea said:
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My kinda Gaia!
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The article seems to be man trying to justify his f'ing uo the world......the i am part of nature, therefore anything i do is natural...

Yet we act as am accelerant to an arsonist....maybe someday the building will burn down...but we doused it with fuel and we struck the match
 
wil said:
the i am part of nature, therefore anything i do is natural...
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I don't think that was the message, it is more, what is nature and natural? Like the first thing I said, your idea what is natural is romantic to me, there is an ever ending cycle of resources and consumers.

If gazelles move into a new are where there is a lot to eat they will multiply there, they will upset the "balance" that was there before by decimating the naturally growing grass. A lot of animals need grass growing just so, be it rodents, birds, insects or reptiles. But new species will move into the new conditions. With a healthy population of gazelles predators will move in, like lions for example. With time they will be healthy to and a "balance" between predator and pray may settle. But there's only a matter of time before there is a drought, disease, too many gazelles eating the grass or too many lions. It's entirely possible that a whole herd dies out and something else will take it's place.

I know, very basic, but we can't point to any specific time here and say balance, because it's ever changing, it always has, always will with or without us. So looking at it like this, then we are not part of what is natural because there is no such thing. BUT, there are still consequences for all our actions. Just like every individual make up a collective ecosystem we undeniably make a very big imprint on Gaia. We can of course change this if we wanted to, but our economy is built on consumption, corporation measure success though profit and nations value GDP. It doesn't have to be this what but change is slow and a lot of people aren't aware of this system as a whole.
 
Devils' Advocate said:
Great article, Tea. It supports my position to some extent and opposes to some as well. Meaning I need to write a better response - for which I will get to soon, but cannot right now.
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Looking forward to it!
Devils' Advocate said:
The devastation question is easier. We are talking about devastation by humans right? The comment that mankind can make the planet unlivable for us, but we would be hard pressed to destroy the biosphere completely. We on the same page on the question?
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I was thinking 'devastation' more generally but I think you sorted it out well. What I'm thinking here is that nothing stops any organism from making their own habitat inhabitable. If everything edible is consumed faster than it can regrow or repopulate the consumer will starve. The animals or plants don't plan or cooperate to avoid devastation, the chips fall where they may.

So the difference I see is the size of the imprint each individual make, because of our tools, not something that is inherent in our nature.
 
A Cup Of Tea said:
So the difference I see is the size of the imprint each individual make, because of our tools, not something that is inherent in our nature.
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And so back to the article you linked, and my assertion about balance in nature.

From the article:
Ecologists have traditionally operated on the assumption that the normal condition of nature is a state of equilibrium, in which organisms compete and coexist in an ecological system whose workings are essentially stable.

I agree this is a false assumption. The issue with this concept is the idea of 'equilibrium'. Equilibrium is not possible in a world of never ending change. My assertion is that the natural world strives for balance, which is not the same thing at all. Balance is what nature strives to achieve amidst the never ending change that is the natural world. In other words no matter what happens to an ecosystem, the default for nature is to try and stabilize it again.

Predator/prey populations left to their own typically strike a balance. Predators who overkill their prey will end up having a large die off until there are enough predators to survive on the prey population. Prey who overeat their resources suffer a die off until there is a balance between prey species and the resources they eat. In a closed system the natural world would work like this.

But nature is not a closed system. Environmental changes, short term or long term will disrupt the balance. A new species that is introduced can survive better than an existing species, and the balance is destroyed. For a time. Eventually some kind of balance returns. It may not look anything like the old balance (i.e. there is no equilibrium) but a balance is achieved.

Time frame is important to my understanding of how nature works. Short time frames are not condusive to understanding how nature strives to balance itself. Long time frames bring the picture more into focus. Not so long as a geological timeframe. But hundreds of thousands of years is good. Again referencing the dinosaurs. They survived for 65 million years. Was there ever equilibrium in all that time. No, of course not. Species came, species went extinct, the environment changed multiple times from warm and humid to cooler affecting the types of foliage, affecting species survival. Land forms moved and changed causing weather patterns to change, again giving certain species better survival chances, and destroying survival chances for others.

And so on and so on. Nothing was stable, but over the long haul balance was lost and it was regained over and over again.

My point, and the relevance to this thread, is that the creation of humans has lead to the first species that knowingly and consistently destroys the balance with no regard for the consequences. It is not just a matter that we have better tools to destroy the balance. It is a choice to destroy.

No animal kills all the prey it can find because a certain portion of the prey is more desired. Such as man and ivory for example. Animals kill prey when they need to eat. When they are full they don't kill anymore and won't hunt until they are hungry again. Nor do they overkill just because they can. Animals do not go out on a killing frenzy for chuckles. They kill what they need to survive.

No animal purposefully destroys its own ecosystem, like clear cutting the rain forests. No animals make war on their own kind. Or on a different species for that matter. Battles for mating superiority rarely are to the death. A battle is fought until dominance is proven. And the loser goes away to maybe try their skill another time.

Of all the species that have ever lived, only man does all the above, and much more. A vicious parasite? More like a virulent disease that lays waste to everything where ever it goes. Looked at from a natural perspective, humans are far from the pinnacle of evolution. They may be one of the worst species to ever evolve.
 
Devils' Advocate said:
And so back to the article you linked, and my assertion about balance in nature.

From the article:
Ecologists have traditionally operated on the assumption that the normal condition of nature is a state of equilibrium, in which organisms compete and coexist in an ecological system whose workings are essentially stable.

I agree this is a false assumption. The issue with this concept is the idea of 'equilibrium'. Equilibrium is not possible in a world of never ending change. My assertion is that the natural world strives for balance, which is not the same thing at all. Balance is what nature strives to achieve amidst the never ending change that is the natural world. In other words no matter what happens to an ecosystem, the default for nature is to try and stabilize it again.

Predator/prey populations left to their own typically strike a balance. Predators who overkill their prey will end up having a large die off until there are enough predators to survive on the prey population. Prey who overeat their resources suffer a die off until there is a balance between prey species and the resources they eat. In a closed system the natural world would work like this.

But nature is not a closed system. Environmental changes, short term or long term will disrupt the balance. A new species that is introduced can survive better than an existing species, and the balance is destroyed. For a time. Eventually some kind of balance returns. It may not look anything like the old balance (i.e. there is no equilibrium) but a balance is achieved.

Time frame is important to my understanding of how nature works. Short time frames are not condusive to understanding how nature strives to balance itself. Long time frames bring the picture more into focus. Not so long as a geological timeframe. But hundreds of thousands of years is good. Again referencing the dinosaurs. They survived for 65 million years. Was there ever equilibrium in all that time. No, of course not. Species came, species went extinct, the environment changed multiple times from warm and humid to cooler affecting the types of foliage, affecting species survival. Land forms moved and changed causing weather patterns to change, again giving certain species better survival chances, and destroying survival chances for others.

And so on and so on. Nothing was stable, but over the long haul balance was lost and it was regained over and over again.

My point, and the relevance to this thread, is that the creation of humans has lead to the first species that knowingly and consistently destroys the balance with no regard for the consequences. It is not just a matter that we have better tools to destroy the balance. It is a choice to destroy.

No animal kills all the prey it can find because a certain portion of the prey is more desired. Such as man and ivory for example. Animals kill prey when they need to eat. When they are full they don't kill anymore and won't hunt until they are hungry again. Nor do they overkill just because they can. Animals do not go out on a killing frenzy for chuckles. They kill what they need to survive.

No animal purposefully destroys its own ecosystem, like clear cutting the rain forests. No animals make war on their own kind. Or on a different species for that matter. Battles for mating superiority rarely are to the death. A battle is fought until dominance is proven. And the loser goes away to maybe try their skill another time.

Of all the species that have ever lived, only man does all the above, and much more. A vicious parasite? More like a virulent disease that lays waste to everything where ever it goes. Looked at from a natural perspective, humans are far from the pinnacle of evolution. They may be one of the worst species to ever evolve.
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You choose to use the word "strive" and "try" which to me implies intent. I don't know if that is part of your deist perspective but I don't see a consciousness behind nature. I don't think water strives to solve salt, it's the result of every molecule reacting according to it's nature.

The dinosaurs is also an interesting example because you see it as them 'surviving for 65 million years'. I don't really look at that group of organisms and see them as a distinct whole, but a collective name for a great variety of life that evolved during those 65 million years. Some of these animals was more akin to the animals that came before and others where more akin to the animals that walk the the earth today. I don't know if you see the distinction here but to me it illustrates the lack of balance. But I'm not sure this is relevant to the overarching discussion we are having here.
As a side note: I wikied organism and according to it's page 99% of all species that has lived has gone extinct, that sort of goes into my idea of an unbalanced nature.

"humans...knowingly and consistently destroys" and "No animal purposefully destroys its own ecosystem", these are the hard parts. Intent and awareness, to me this distinction aren't so easy. We both agree that humans "destroy" ecosystems and I think we both agree that animals also "destroy" ecosystems (lets take the beavers and their damns). If that is the case I think we also agree that beavers don't intend to "destroy" the ecosystem, so do humans intend to "destroy" the ecosystems or are we using/working/cultivating areas for our own needs, just as animals do.

I agree that humans do things that animals do not, like killing for ivory, but I want to go into why we do and animals do not. I think it's only recently that humans have had the ability to spend their time and resources on non-essentials, perhaps a couple of thousand years. And the number of individuals who can do just this have drastically increased exponentially though time, now including almost all of West. So humans haven't always done this and the difference is that we can do this. Extremely few organisms have it as good as we have it so it's hard to estimate what some animals would do under these circumstances. I agree that ants probably wouldn't act any different either way. But social pack animals? How does a house cat act when it sees something move across the floor? Does it pick and choose between it's toys?

I think the differences you point out are matters of degree, all life is hard-wired to consume and populate. So sure, humans are like a virulent disease, just like all life.
 
Some clarification. When I stated that nature strives or tries to reach a balance, I did not mean there is any Gaia superconsciousness that is at work here. So I agree there is no consciousness behind nature. I don't think there needs to be a consciousness.

Life exists for what reason? To procreate and continue its existence. What causes life to do that. I would say it is embedded in the DNA of all living things. If there is any guidance to be found it is at the DNA level, and this is all a natural process unguided by any entity.

The dinosaurs are a distinct whole, AND they are also a collective name for a huge variety of creatures that constantly evolved over that 65 million year period. The dinosaur as a creature is markedly different from the majority of creatures that came before them, and the kinds that came after them. It's why we call those three periods in Earth history the Age of Dinosaurs.

Yes 99% of all species on the planet have gone extinct. You see that as nature unbalanced. I perceive it more as a matter of perspective. The constantly changing life forms over the ages shows that the earth and its environments are indeed unfixed. The planet evolves, sometimes slowly over eons, sometimes very rapidly over a month or two. It is the uncertainty of the environment that has caused this mass extinction. Very often the existing creatures can not adapt quickly enough to survive and they go extinct. But new lifeforms almost always come along to replace what was there is the proof that nature strives to recreate a balance. The natural world is always striving to rebalance the biosphere, all driven by completely natural processes.

We are not in agreement that animals destroy ecosystems. Your beaver example, in which a tiny slice of wilderness is damaged has no conceivable parallel to clear cutting half the rain forests around the planet. I agree beavers have no intent to destroy the ecosystem, they are bending a little piece of it for their benefit. Neither are they capable of understanding what damage to their local environment building their home causes. Humans on the other hand are perfectly aware of the damage they are doing and the consequence of their actions. We know the consequences of over grazing and we do so anyway. We know the damage to the biosphere by destroying the rain forests, but we do it anyway. We know (even if some fools are in denial) that global warming has very serious consequences for the planet, and we continue flooding the atmosphere with CO2 and methane anyway.

So your final statement is false. Of all species on the planet only one destroys the only home we have, and does so on purpose with the knowledge of the consequences of our actions.
 
wil said:
Interesting answer.... So what do you think God thinks of his penultimate creation and how well a stewards we were of this big blue ball he spenta few days creating?
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As far as I knew and according to the Bible, heaven and earth were created during or prior to the 1st earth age, but the duration of that age isn't specified. The 6 day bit refers to the time it took to repair the damage done to the earth following Satan's rebellion and the end of the 1st age. Heaven and Earth had already been created at that point.
 
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Aussie Thoughts said:
As far as I knew and according to the Bible, heaven and earth were created during or prior to the 1st earth age, but the duration of that age isn't specified. The 6 day bit refers to the time it took to repair the damage done to the earth following Satan's rebellion and the end of the 1st age. Heaven and Earth had already been created at that point.
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Is that the Shepherd's Chapel doctrine beloved of creationists?

A dubious thesis surely, bearing in mind there was no concept of 'Satan's rebellion' when the text was written, that's a Christian concept that the Jews insist we got wrong, although Islam has fleshed it out a bit more with a back-story.
 
Aussie Thoughts said:
As far as I knew and according to the Bible, heaven and earth were created during or prior to the 1st earth age, but the duration of that age isn't specified. The 6 day bit refers to the time it took to repair the damage done to the earth following Satan's rebellion and the end of the 1st age. Heaven and Earth had already been created at that point.
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I have trouble explaining it as some of the details are a bit muddled for me, but that's basically how I read the scripture as well.
 
Which days, ages, aeons were was not the question...

If man was given dominion over earth...if man is the greatest creation...

What do you think G!d thinks of our stewardship?
 
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