Extreme conservation: Is it too radical?

Honey, sweetheart, apple of my eye .. this is smoke & mirrors .. the country wants to be green (not knowing exactly what it means) and Obama just dumped a boatload of money on it. They literally go under the cover of 'extreme conservation' now, this action-inaction talk goes in meaningless circles, some of them well-paid.

And in the end...will it really matter...???

nothings to extreme to help!

I think that “managed relocation” can be a dangerous game. Environment is very sensitive about that kind of intervention.

We already mess up with the world, don’t make it worse.

"We already mess up with the world, don't make it worse."

That's the thing, that we ALREADY have done so many "unnatural" things to disturb the environment- these scientists are looking to correct those follies, but it's a tricky situation, and hard to see if it would be worse to intervene at a radical level or do nothing.

"And in the end...will it really matter...???" The end of what- your life, my life, the world, the universe? Matter to whom- you, me, the world, the universe? Your question is a bit too subjective to answer, methinks.

"The country wants to be green (not knowing exactly what it means)" There is a big difference between people jumping on a "green bandwagon" and scientists who spend their whole lives researching these subjects. It would be foolish to label everything "smoke and mirrors"...and it begs the larger question, smoke and mirrors to distract from what?

this is ridiculous, animals adapt and new species are created, but people are too in love with the current species to let them die out and have new ones take their place. There will always be some sort of furry animal that looks cute that will be on the bridge of extinction, and there will always be new ones being discovered. This is a waste of time and money.

Yeah, I'm a bit concerned that people with good intentions may overcorrect and end up causing a different type of damage.

It won't happen in a slap-chop (sorry to disappoint the lovers of instant gratification out there), but the ecosystem is probably better off if it's allowed to heal itself instead of us human meddling under moderately good intentions. I want the planet to thrive as much as any other inhabitant, and I want my nephew to grow up knowing what a coral reef is. Planting trees is fine... but let's not go cloning massive quantities of endangered species to "help" them from becoming extinct or something like that. It may just tip the food chain in another wrong direction.

No touching the ecosystem. Bad human! (hand slap)

Its called overpopulation. When food and water become energy intensive enough even the so call rich nations will falter and population will finally begin to fall. Whether earth survives depends on if it happens soon enough and that we dont finally nuke the world out of existence.

oh shit i hope that guy holding the Earth doesn't make a fist or drop us!

No, that guy holding the Earth is Atlas...and he only shrugged......

I hope he starts to squeeze real fucking hard.

Fertilize the ocean?? Haven't we dumped enough shit in it already???

http://www.dancingrabbit.org

We need to stop attempting to adapt the planet to our piddling wants and find a niche that won't continuously disrupt the entire biosphere.

There are much less extreme and much more effective ways to go about conserving the planet.

Why all these fancy fixes when we just need to control population and pollution?

How does anyone connect the terms "extreme" and "conservation" and not warrant "certification"?

Are we proposing anorexia environmenta? Is Newton's Third Law too politically radical?

This political nonsense has been ongoing at least since 1968 when Paul Erlich first published "The Population Bomb."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

Erlich's pre-neo-con pessimism was followed by The Club Of Rome, founded in 1968, and their "Limits to Growth" agenda. A slick package which espoused the same dim view of life, and which proposed a "need" to downsize offshore affluence, while delicately preserving certain acceptable exceptions among prominent members..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome

"The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. It was founded in April 1968 and raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report The Limits to Growth.

In 1993, it published a followup called The First Global Revolution. According to this book, "It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose....

The common enemy of humanity is man....Democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead" and "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine etc., would fit the bill."

So now you know. You, yes, SPECIFICALLY YOU, are the problem., Controlling you is the answer. To the point of shunting you elsewhere as in "managed relocation." and ""assisted migration," involves manually moving species into more accommodating habitats where they are not currently found.

That's the solution. Hence, "The common enemy of humanity is man!"

But this is not an appeal to "conservation," meaning a conscientious policy to promote reduction of use. It is a simple anti-democratic power grab hiding behind a sophistry of carefully distorted spin – Bow down to us! We're the saviors of Humanity!

Sixty years ago this would have been pitched as Stalinist Communism. "Comrades! we are moving you to Siberia and other places impossible to inhabit! It is for The Good Of The People! Get lost or we shoot you!"

And so forth, and so on....

I thought regular Conservation was to radical...

Why can't we just LET IT GO? So, one species dies...another ten will spring up somewhere else. This is what we call evolution people. I know, some species are sooo damn cute, but their extinction is the price we pay for being the parasitic species that we are. We consume and consume and consume and populate and populate shit all over the place.

smugglingpornstars tells us,

"I know, some species are sooo damn cute, but their extinction is the price we pay for being the parasitic species that we are. We consume and consume and consume and populate and populate shit all over the place."

Why so optimistic?

Is it time to change reading habits?

Hmmmm. My wife and I have two children. As I type this, I am watching them play a game together on my son's laptop before I take them to school -- two giggling, blond-haired, blue-eyed heads somehow managing not to clunk together while watching the same small screen. I really am trying to tie them to the concept of "populating shit all over the place," as a previous poster so delicately put it, but I am not quite getting there for some reason...

They are not at fault, of course, for the current climate change. But they will be in the thick of it far more than I. If I am fortunate enough to get the proverbial three score and ten, I have a little over 22 years left. I think the polar ice caps will hold out that long, although perhaps not much longer than that.

I have not looked at a great deal of data but based on the couple of dozen climate change articles I have read recently in periodicals like Scientific American, Discover, National Geographic and the like, I would opine that it is still a bit early to be moving people around the planet. The costs of doing so properly so that the necessary infrastructure is in place to handle things like clean drinking water, shelter, waste removal, healthcare, security, etc are, conservatively stated, astronomical. We can't afford to move half a million people only to discover that if we had waited another year or two we would have realized that they needed to be 200 miles further in one direction or the other.

On the other hand, I think it is high time that subject matter experts begin discussing how large populations can best be moved in the future. There is simply no way that we are going to be able to move everybody who needs to be moved in a calm and orderly fashion. The financial and other resources just aren't there. But we can at least start figuring out how to relocate people as quickly and efficiently as possible because the time IS coming when we will need to do so.

In fact, there is a very good interview in either the May or June edition of Discover magazine with four scientists from different fields about the current status of the "climate change debate." One of them has actually been testifying to Congress on this issue since the late 1970s. Together, they made a pretty good case for the position that the debate is effectively over in the sense that the only scientists who still doubt the existence of global warming have been relegated to the category known as "cracked pots." As one of the scientists noted, it is one thing for the odds of a particular observed phenomenon occurring in the absence of global warming being, for example, 1 in 4.

If that were the only observed phenomenon, you might say that the odds are only 75% that global warming is occurring, and we should take that risk. But when there are SEVENTEEN observed phenomena or TWENTY-SEVEN observed phenomena, each of which has a one in four chance of occurring in the absence of global warming, there really just isn't any question anymore.