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Comment by jpcom | Hacker News Reader

Covid was a great example of how the natural world returns to harmony when human antagonism via noise/sound pollution and so forth is suddenly halted. I think a lot of dolphins in the sea rejoiced.

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The article actually argues that the idea that nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way is not correct. A lot of what we view as stable ecosystems are stable because of our management and influence over millennia. Nature on it's own is not a thing, there are no checks and balances, no intention, no morality. The quote from the article is that nature does not organise it's self into neat parables.

This is called the "baseline" problem among conservationists.

Why is it a problem? It's not like people are somehow special. We eat and shit like every other mammal but without us the water and land would not be full of synthetic chemicals and plastics. Seems very obvious to me that human industries change the baseline to a polluted state vs what it would have been without industrial activities. But even without industrial activity the historical record is very clear on the effect that human populations have on the surrounding flora and fauna.

Well, if you want to be optimistic, I think we got coal from lignin/wood being uneatable for hundreds of millions of years (I think).

So wood would stack up, not rot, get covered by dirt and turned into coal due to physical processes, not biological ones.

So coal deposits of the existing magnitudes couldn't be created now.

I am very optimistic. I don't remember where I read it but whatever remains after the current industrial civilization will not have access to the energy resources necessary for reindustrialization. Might have been Derrick Jensen but I can't remember which book exactly.

I have no idea what book might have first explored this idea, but it's a very common theme online whenever this type of discussion comes up: someone will inevitably point out that any post-human-extinction civilization that might evolve on Earth won't have such easy access to energy as we've had.

It's obvious once you think about what enables our current industrial activity: millions of years of biological growth and sedimentation. But it's all equivalent to solar radiation that was incident on the planet over millions of years which we have burned up in less than a few hundred. Once you understand this basic reality the logical conclusion is very clear and obvious: the current rate of consumption is unsustainable. The obvious next question is what can be done about it but no one wants to think about it so it never gets addressed. Presumably someone higher up the political and economic hierarchy is thinking about it and they will manage things as best as possible but based on how people reacted to COVID lockdowns I'm not sure they know what they're doing.

I think you are missing the point. The "problem" is the question of what you baseline you want humans to restore it to and then actively maintain.

Many people want to restore nature, but the natural state is usually one of flux which is deeply unsatisfying to many advocates of it's restoration.

It is an interesting question.

Nature is much too complex to fit into people's anthropocentric perspective. Either we dial back the production of industrial poisons or the natural world will continue withering from our consumption of natural resources. The fundamental problem is that industrial activity is unsustainable but it's neither politically nor economically expedient to actually address the root causes of why that's the case.

Sure, but that a complete tangent from the problem/challenge the parent post was talking about and you were attempting to critique.

Your tangent does not negate the point, as it has practical applications for public policy and managing interest groups.

One of my favorite examples to illustrate the challenge is restoration efforts around the Salton Sea. The lake is drying, causing dust, and there is a major environmental movement to restore it. The challenge comes in that the entire lake was created by accident in 1905, so the benchmark for restoration is critical. Restoring it to the dry lakebed of 1904 would not help with fish life and dust reduction. Dial the clock back to 1700, and it was a enormous lake again, but we would have to reroute the entire Colorado River from the current path along the Arizona boarder, because the Colorado river has shifted 200 miles east 300 years ago.

In any event, good luck with whatever plans you think will restore natural balance. I've made my points as clear as possible.

troll alert

yep, or someone engaging with enough bad faith that the distinction makes no difference. I usually give folks the benefit of the doubt once and then move on.

All my responses are always of utmost sincerity.

So I get the sense that we can be considered part of nature, and however much or little influence we exert is a part of the overall system. It can balance to an extent with our presence and will do so without it.

The article doesn't claim that 'nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way'. It says

>> Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists.

...

>> To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough

In the 1960s there was a long overdue correction to the Australian constitution because the preamble mentioned the continent's "flora and fauna" in a way that implied Aborigines were part of the "fauna." The wording was grossly racist, and had to be changed because of the politics, but from an ecological standpoint, there was some truth to it. Australia's ecosystems were stable because of how Aborigines interacted with them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_and_Fauna_Act_myth

I stand corrected.

Learning about logistic map, phase spaces and attractors helped a lot with understanding the fundamentals of natural evolution. It doesn’t really answer any question (akin to Newton laws don’t really answer how to build Ford). But it makes you grasp the whole model. It’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor all the way down.

Tldr, things get stable until they aren’t and then they may remain unstable for a while, and you never know how, why and how long in general, unless it’s something really obvious and measurable.

We are part of the natural world and your natural world is a place of constant savagery.

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