A new view of mass extinctions... (Endings)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, July 03, 2009, 22:37 (5620 days ago) @ David Turell

Dr. Turell, - Interesting. Though I do not think conservation can be successful in its ultimate goal. The coming climate change (whether one wants to debate it being man-made or not is pointless) guarantees an irrevocable change in how life will exist on this earth. If all countries agreed to carbon caps it would still take several hundred years for those efforts to bear fruit. Essentially, it is too late. I know this sounds defeatist, but conservation means you're putting out fires instead solving oncoming problems. Man should let this extinction take its course and plan for how we will exist if 90% of all species dies. - This means we should create a metric for how much energy (in terms of both food and power/gas etc.) would be the minimum acceptable value, and we will have to modify our energy consumption structures to be in line with it. - Part of why I say this is the fact that consumerism is not going to disappear. The kind of change that some environmentalists call for would require nations to completely switch to a different paradigm, and while I AM a futurist, I've also spent alot of time studying change management (my undergrad degree is on applying technology to problems) and I can tell you that some changes require a social paradigm shift. The way to change course in something like this is in a grass roots movement... but these are necessarily slow because it relies entirely upon cultural diffusion. - So to me, this means that the solution is going to have to be one of human engineering.