Balance of nature: importance of ecosystems (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, February 08, 2021, 15:57 (1384 days ago) @ David Turell

A book review of a book describing human damage to nature:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/under-white-sky-kolbert-book-save-nature-ecosystems

"In 1900, the city of Chicago completed a 45-kilometer-long canal that altered the hydrology of two-thirds of the United States.

"That wasn’t the intention, of course. The plan was to reverse the flow of the Chicago River to divert waste away from the city’s source of drinking water: Lake Michigan. The engineering feat worked, but it also connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins, two of the world’s largest — and until then, isolated — freshwater ecosystems, allowing invasive species to pour through the opening and wreak ecological havoc.

"Elizabeth Kolbert opens Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future with this parable of humans’ hubristic attempts to control nature. We’ve put our minds toward damming or diverting most of the planet’s rivers, replacing vast tracts of natural ecosystems with crops, and burning so much fossil fuel that 1 in 3 molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide came from human action, she writes. We’ve warmed the atmosphere, raised sea levels, erased countless species and forged an uncertain future for humankind and the planet.

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"Kolbert takes a firsthand look at many of these interventions. She begins on a boat, traveling up the Chicago canal to inspect electric barriers meant to keep invasive Asian carp from forever altering the Great Lakes. Asian carp were introduced to the Mississippi River basin in the 1960s as a biological Weedwacker to control invasive plants. But the carp have swum amok throughout the basin and are now knocking at the door of Lake Michigan. Simply closing the canal would protect the lakes, but that’s largely dismissed as being too disruptive to the city. Instead, humans innovate. “First you reverse a river,” Kolbert writes. “Then you electrify it.”

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"Saving larger ecosystems may require more powerful tools. In Australia, we meet researchers trying to genetically engineer less toxic cane toads, an invasive species that’s poisoning untold numbers of native animals. Gene drive technology, which loads the dice of inheritance to propel certain mutations through a population (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16), could make all cane toads safer to eat within generations. Other scientists are considering the possibility of using gene drives to eliminate invasive rodents from islands like New Zealand.

Such power could prove difficult to wield, and many worry it would backfire. Mouse-eliminating gene drives might escape an island and spread across the globe.

***

"...we’ve kicked the can down the road for too long. Gene editing species or geoengineering may be entirely crazy and disconcerting, Kolbert writes, but if they can pull us from the hole we’ve dug for ourselves, don’t we have to at least consider them? Whether such technologies can save us and the planet, or only further muck it up, Kolbert cannot say.

Comment: human stupidity or hubris? We not smart enough to leave alone the structure God have us to start with. With this evidence of stupidity and poor analysis of consequences who are we to judge God's works critically?