Hi Andrew - Thanks for this article. As an advocate of so-called eco-restoration, I think it raises some interesting points, but I don't see that they're of much consequence. Nature is always in flux, so there's no going back to some presumptive primeval state. The question then is what are we restoring for?
I think the answer lies somewhere along the lines that, like all living creatures, we behave in ways that modify our habitats, presumably but not necessarily to our own advantage. Sometimes those modifications have extraordinary benefits for other living things (the work of beavers in North America, for example) - and sometimes they're a disaster for other living things (the work of humans in civilizations everywhere, unless you're a domesticated plant/animal). The problem that I see in the ethical perspective is that it separates us from nature. It seems to me that the fundamentals are about survival, not ethics. Ethics are a human invention, and they may serve us as a social animal, but there are no ethics in nature at large. Nature does what it does, species come and go, some are around longer than others, but there are no favorites, there is no "preferred" state of existence. We humans, on the other hand, have definite preferences. We want habitats that feed and water us. Our adaptive genius has run amok, and we've expanded planetary carrying capacity for humans to its seams. The question, then, is do we want to wake up tomorrow and eat, or not? And how long do we want the feast to last? At the moment the answer is not very long at all, and we don't like that answer. So we have to do something, and in so doing ethics will take a back seat to biology. High tech? Sorry, not sustainable. Low-tech? Maybe better, seems to have worked for millennia in Amazonia, hard to know for sure. Functioning ecosystems? Best bet - never any guarantees, but I'll go with best bet. The use of ethics: for justice, fairness, equity among humans - of course, we don't do well solo, we have to get along to survive. But our relationship with nature has little to do with ethics and everything to do with dinner. Arguments about geo-engineering also get down to biological basics. As it turns out (funny how things work), the best way to guarantee dinner for the foreseeable future may well be to deal with nature at our ethical best (if/when we figure out what that is, best done with some food in our stomachs). Cheers! Adam On Saturday, September 13, 2014 6:33:31 AM UTC-4, andrewjlockley wrote: > > > http://ciresblogs.colorado.edu/prometheus/2014/09/12/restoration-obligation-and-the-baseline-problem/ > > Attached > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
