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Comment by bestouff | Hacker News Reader

That seems like a generalized gospel in the US : the environment will sort this out. The free market will sort this out. No worries, god's hand will sort this out. I'm genuinely curious, are you taught this at some point ?

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As an environmental engineer, albeit one educated in the US, this is generally a pretty true statement provided you stop doing whatever it is that wrecked the environment to begin with.

I have seen some of the worst environmental atrocities caused by people with good intentions of "fixing it". Let it be, it's often halfway to sorting itself out if you'll just leave it alone long enough.

Even Chernobyl pretty much sorted itself out.

For a very specific and narrow definition of "sorted itself out" (I presume you mean that some wildlife has returned and some species flourish in the no-go zones) - there was a substantial amount of effort involved in minimising the ongoing harm, and people literally died as a result of the cleanup operations

To say that Chernobyl sorted itself out is to completely fail to understand what happened and what was done in the decades following it.

It would still sort itself out eventually, one way or the other. We can speed up the recovery and try to minimize the impact, but even if there's no humans left life would probably continue in some form. If some species are destroyed, others would evolve into the empty niche. That's how nature works. That's literally how we and all other life got to exist on this planet in a first place, as a replacement for someone else less lucky/efficient.

In order to save time and energy, sometimes every detail isn’t spelled out. “Sort itself out” presumably has a condition of not causing substantial harm to humans.

It’s obvious the world will keep on spinning with or without humans, or maybe not, and it’ll get eaten by the sun. But that possibility doesn’t need to be addressed every time.

For a complete and total failure of an industrial facility a death toll on par with a bad bus crash is far below the threshold of "substantial harm to humans"

Normally when something containing substances hazardous to human health and/or containing a lot of energy goes pop like that it's a lot worse. Strictly by the numbers the Chernobyl is not worthy of being called a disaster. We only hear about it because it is the worst case in its particular niche.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_industrial_disasters

> Even Chernobyl pretty much sorted itself out.

I must admit that I almost cry when the bunnys, blue-tits, bears and deer all together started pouring concrete and building the sarcophagous whereas singing heigh-ho.

You can't fix loss of biodiversity.

Of course you can. Nature has done it multiple times before at scale. It’s pretty horrible but we always mean revert.

Sometimes it takes a hundred million years though.

Like I said, it can be pretty horrible.

The thing is, we don't want that, in general. Most of us are keen for humanity to survive not just for a biodiverse Earth.

Yeah, the argument I see most about climate change is "Do something to tackle climate change". And I wish I saw more of "Stop doing that to tackle climate change".

Both are fine, but definitely the latter is my preferred choice. Many unintended consequences can arise from adding more action on top of bad action, even if they come with good intentions.

Do you have a specific criticism of his post or do you just fully the hate the idea that there are systems structured such that for some set perturbations, they regain a stable equilibrium??

I hate the idea that people think the environment is a stable system. It very clearly isn't. There are literally tens of thousands of papers and studies demonstrating that it's changing and not returning to its prior state.

To argue that some change (eg sea urchin population) will return to its previous level in the face of that is stupid. I'm not saying it won't, but no one should state with confidence that it will, because we don't know.

We do know in many cases, here is an example of stable succession of forest systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession#Types

The attitude of "we can break it as much as we want because it will fix itself (in a few million years)" is so disturbing.

The environment will sort itself out, just not always in our favour.

It might be worth considering in this discussion that there are different levels of what we refer to as an environment and levels of cause & effect.

Variations in local climate, populations booms & busts, freak weather events: these are all things that happen regardless of any global level climate change. A population fall or damage to a localised ecosystem can recover naturally. Nature is resilient and it is sometimes accurate to say that nature to return to what's typically normal for a localised ecosystem (reverting to mean).

The concern with climate change is that these events are more common and "normal" is harder/longer to return to due to a long term change in environmental variables. More storms means less time to recover; higher temperatures mean some species won't thrive where they used to. In this article there does not appear to be a strong claim that this bloom is directly casued by climate change, but the long term climate change might be making it harder for the ecosystem here to recover.

Just as a cold winter doesn't mean global warming is a myth, a localised ecological event doesn't mean that effect is permanant or signifier of how things will be elsewhere. A local view point (from the poster above) is useful in understanding this situation. For a global view, you need experts to take long term views at much lager scales than this article covers.

Americans are very religious. They believe in god or in the free market, or in both.

Very religious compared to what country? Africa and South/Central America have us beat by a decent percentage.[1] Ireland, Poland, and a few of smaller European countries are 10% higher as well.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance#Attendance...

There is a difference between having an "official religion" and being religious. Most people in South America go to church, but are very irreligious. God for us is just something abstract that you accept for convenience. If you asked people if they believe that god requires them to do something, they will mostly tell that each one should care of their own life and religion should get out of their business. In the US, a good part of the population believes that religion should dictate social laws.

I think he's just echoing ecological boom-bust cycles (as I was taught in ecological modelling lectures at Uni, in UK)?

Think of it as allowing nature to take it's course.

No, it's called paying attention and forming judgments from copious amounts of personal empirical data and drawing conclusions from that. I was pretty concerned when the kelp disappeared and the urchin barrens arrived, but it's pretty remarkable to see firsthand how the system has returned to the previous equilibrium so quickly.

Why am I the only person in this thread who has firsthand experience about this phenomena yet everyone wants to talk about it as a jumping off point for their straw-boogeymen about America, capitalism, and religiosity?

First, I appreciate the comment you made, which is fortunately at the top of the thread right now.

I don't understand why HN hasn't banned the America Bad comments by now given their prevalence in so many threads. It would not be tolerated if it were directed at most any other nation (China still gets a lot of that type of nation-level ad hominem commenting). Such low quality comments never contribute positively to a thread. People seem to throw them in as a cheap excuse to attack the US via tangents that are usually only connected to the discussion at a bare minimum level. And simultaneously they seem to often directly or indirectly insult the OP they're responding to in the process.

You seriously want to ban comments about limitations in America? Because america is really great or something? I read your comment and I think it's serious, please elaborate why comments about the us should be treated differently.

The moderation comments we post against nationalistic flamebait and slurs are the same for all countries. I've posted many such comments in response to comments talking about the US, India, China, Russia, South Africa, you name it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you see a comment that hasn't been moderated that should have been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't (can't) read everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging it and, in egregious cases, emailing us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com.

Maybe it's a cultural side effect of high religiosity?

For high religiosity you should go to Spain or Italy, not California.

According to [1] and [2], Spain and California seem to have very similar levels of religious observance. Italy is substantially more religious, though.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Spain

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California#Rel...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Italy

I don't have to go anywhere. I live in Poland where religion is apparently even more important than in Italy. At least according to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

US as a whole doesn't seem to be far behind Italy though and it matters more where you grew up not that you currently live in California. As I understand people in US move a lot especially to more modern, richer areas like California bringing their upbringing with them.

Although I must admit religiosity might have different flavor in different countries. Polish flavor is less denying evolution, at least up to a human level, virtually no denying of age of earth and less feeling that God will take care of us somehow (probably influenced by our history).

Spain is not very religious.Even what look like religious manifestations from afar, are simply rooted in traditions/seen as culture. Very different from Italy, as far as I know.

For comparison, although I am not sure how well these reflect reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Spain

EDIT: I see others also replied in a similar vein.

There's some interesting work in considering blind faith in ideology as a kind of religion itself.

As opposite to European belief that nothing can be solved without at least one government's committee discussing it for a few years first. I'm European, but in practice I'd say Americans got it closer to the truth. Most of the things get sorted out and heal on their own just if us humans leave it alone long enough.

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