Re:Why We Wish for Wilderness
by throwanem on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @03:05PM
(#22741203)
It's not a issue of semantics, but of semiosis. It's exactly that breadth of reasonable interpretations, and the necessarily consequent ambiguity, that I'm arguing we'd do better to avoid.
By the same token, "cohabitate" wasn't the best choice of word. What I mean by it is to direct our modification of the environment so that it doesn't benefit us to the active detriment of other life. One example, as mentioned by another commenter here, is to design roads so that they don't block migration routes or access to resources. Granted that that's more expensive, but it's also not without tangible human benefits alongside those of avoiding ecological derangement, like fewer citybound deer eating everybody's gardens and posing a dangerous obstacle to traffic - granted in turn that the mechanism here is higher cull rates through human hunting that doesn't happen in the city because high population density doesn't mix well with .308 rounds flying all over the place, and that's rough on some individual deer, but it also improves population dynamics and quality of life for the deer that don't get shot because they're closer to the carrying capacity of the local environment, and we have to fill that maintenance role anyway because our ancestors extirpated the large predators which previously did so.
That's one example of the larger idea, which is to recognize that an ecosystem is a system, with its own internal logic and feedback loops, and engineer our environment modifications to function as part of that system - instead of kicking the whole thing apart and then trying to figure out after the fact what to do as the pieces of what we've so blithely broken fall hard atop our heads.
Like with climate change. Or kudzu, or starlings, or zebra mussels, bison, banana fungus, novel coronaviruses...
(And anyway - between our effect on the atmosphere, and the arguable mass extinction event we've caused, is there any place on the planet which can accurately be called in your usage "pristine"?)
By the same token, "cohabitate" wasn't the best choice of word. What I mean by it is to direct our modification of the environment so that it doesn't benefit us to the active detriment of other life. One example, as mentioned by another commenter here, is to design roads so that they don't block migration routes or access to resources. Granted that that's more expensive, but it's also not without tangible human benefits alongside those of avoiding ecological derangement, like fewer citybound deer eating everybody's gardens and posing a dangerous obstacle to traffic - granted in turn that the mechanism here is higher cull rates through human hunting that doesn't happen in the city because high population density doesn't mix well with .308 rounds flying all over the place, and that's rough on some individual deer, but it also improves population dynamics and quality of life for the deer that don't get shot because they're closer to the carrying capacity of the local environment, and we have to fill that maintenance role anyway because our ancestors extirpated the large predators which previously did so.
That's one example of the larger idea, which is to recognize that an ecosystem is a system, with its own internal logic and feedback loops, and engineer our environment modifications to function as part of that system - instead of kicking the whole thing apart and then trying to figure out after the fact what to do as the pieces of what we've so blithely broken fall hard atop our heads.
Like with climate change. Or kudzu, or starlings, or zebra mussels, bison, banana fungus, novel coronaviruses...
(And anyway - between our effect on the atmosphere, and the arguable mass extinction event we've caused, is there any place on the planet which can accurately be called in your usage "pristine"?)