Re:Beluga whales adopt lost narwhal in St. Lawrence River
by tomxor on Friday September 14, 2018 @09:54AM
(#17987166)
> I don't think so, on any long time scale. We just think it's in perfect harmonious balance because we've only been observing it for a the blink of a gnat's eye
I didn't say it was perfect, on the contrary all of the models used to describe ecological systems exhibit some degree of chaos, but the important part is they are periodic, they all oscillate in some way and eventually recover one way or another - I suppose you could argue humans just haven't reached some tipping point yet, we haven't completed "one period", but unlike other species we keep inventing ways to escape that. This is the difference I'm pointing out, I thought it was pretty obvious.
> The view that nature is somehow wise and benevolent is only possible for us at all because we've won the game so thoroughly that nature, almost never happens /to/ us.
I realise that by mentioning tribes and forests I seem to have tripped some "save the world" alarms, to clarify that is what I intended to imply - i'm not an environmentalist. Your statement is not my view, I don't think nature is benevolent, nature is nature its neutral and of course we are part of it, but it's not exactly hard to argue that humans stick out like a sore thumb from the rest, we are in the position of resource depletion in classic models but we really take it up a few orders of magnitude in severity because we have so many tricks to exploit the system.
I didn't say it was perfect, on the contrary all of the models used to describe ecological systems exhibit some degree of chaos, but the important part is they are periodic, they all oscillate in some way and eventually recover one way or another - I suppose you could argue humans just haven't reached some tipping point yet, we haven't completed "one period", but unlike other species we keep inventing ways to escape that. This is the difference I'm pointing out, I thought it was pretty obvious.
> The view that nature is somehow wise and benevolent is only possible for us at all because we've won the game so thoroughly that nature, almost never happens /to/ us.
I realise that by mentioning tribes and forests I seem to have tripped some "save the world" alarms, to clarify that is what I intended to imply - i'm not an environmentalist. Your statement is not my view, I don't think nature is benevolent, nature is nature its neutral and of course we are part of it, but it's not exactly hard to argue that humans stick out like a sore thumb from the rest, we are in the position of resource depletion in classic models but we really take it up a few orders of magnitude in severity because we have so many tricks to exploit the system.