Guest post: Still in that instant before the explosion
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on This time it’s global.*
We humans see species being lost in huge numbers, but nothing catastrophic happening as a result. So we shrug and call environmental scientists alarmists, infuriating iknklast in particular. But obviously this is only sustainable for a little while and when climate change and habitat loss reach such a level that key species disappear and damage begins to propagate exponentially… well, we’re certainly going to notice then.
The short human lifespan (and even shorter business and election cycles) offer a poor basis for judging the results of our environmental perturbations. Our timescales are not well attuned to slow changes in our surroundings. Even outside of human activity, the Northern hemisphere is still undergoing post-glacial isostatic rebound after the most recent retreat of the great ice sheets. We even have a hard time noticing changes from events orders of magnitude faster, assuming we’re interested in paying attention to them in the first place. In Harold Edgerton’s high speed photographs of bullets passing through balloons, the punctured ballons retain their prior form for a brief instant before exploding and collapsing into a shapeless mess. When it comes to evaluating our impact on the environment we’re still in that instant before the explosion and resultant shapeless mess.
In the West the concept of extinction itself is barely 200 years old. Just looking at our destruction of a few species of birds, it’s only been about a thousand years since the extinction of Madagascar’s Aepyornis, about 600 years since the demise of Moa species in New Zealand, 350 since the death of the Dodo and just over 200 years since the functional extinction of the Great Auk. The passenger pigeon has been gone for just over a century. On top of the extirpation of these birds, we also cleared land, planted crops, and introduced other species, both wanted and unwanted, into most of their former haunts. In the waters where Auks once lived, we mined cod to the point of collapse. So we piled change upon change in rapid succession, heedless of the results of the initial destruction, ignorant of unintended conseqences, barely cognisant of what we actually did do.
An ecosystem which has suffered the extinction of one or more of its constituent species can never “return” to its previous “balance”. It must find a new shape. Given our continued disruption of so much of Earth’s environments, that new shape and balance, the accomodation to the imposed new order, is still being worked out, in many cases without the courtesy of our notice or concern until that new configuration and functionality has some unfortunate, unforeseen impact on our interests, comfort, or profits.
We’re living in the midst of a massive, multi-generational, uncontrolled and unrepeatable experiment on the entire biosphere of the only planet in the universe known to support life. Poorly designed, and launched without any ethical review, carried out with little or no follow-up, this experiment, thousands of years into its run, is only now stirring concerns about its effects and morality. Well, better late than never, I guess.
*Which is his own post. It feels faintly absurd to guest post a comment on the guest poster’s own guest post, but it can’t be helped.
In order to forestall additional, absurd recursivity, I will endeavour to refrain from writing anything of interest or value in the replies to this post.
Hahaha you’d better! You might end up causing the universe to turn inside out or something.
There is room for it to get a lot worse. As many an Australian who is involved in agriculture, like say, myself, can testify.
I read some time ago an interesting definition of ‘agriculture’ in a widely read Australian rural journal The Land. “Agriculture: that process by which land is used in order to turn petroleum into food.” That has implications.
Australian soils, like many others around the world, are generally deficient in three chemical elements of the ten or so essential for plant growth. These are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK for short.) They have to be added to the soils by those growing crops or pastures on them.
The world production of potassium ores is about 50 million tonnes per year, (not all of it useful in fertilisers, but global reserves are vast, at more than 10 billion tonnes.) Phosphorus is mainly found in nature as mineralised bird manure (guano) on oceanic islands such as Nauru in the Pacific. Marine plants extract the phosphorus from the sea water around them, and pass it into the food chain, ultimately involving all marine species. Sea birds eat the marine animals and then obligingly defecate what they cannot use, including much of the included phosphorus, where they come to roost on land. In time, much of that bird dung becomes phosphate rock; steadily depleting, because the rate at which it is mined (by machines using petroleum for fuel) is much greater than the rate of its deposition.
Nitrogen is found as nitrate deposits (KNO3; saltpetre, nitre) but only in very dry locations, such as are found in in the Atacama desert of Northern Chile. Nitrogen can also be extracted from the atmosphere, and then used in the synthesis of ammonia (NH3) by the Haber process, with the hydrogen component coming not from water (by say electrolysis) but rather and cheaper from the oil and gas wells: which also has implications.
In time and the course of the relentless onward march of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, comments found on blogs such as this one may be all we have left to recycle; everything else having gone down the sewer or into thin air.
Hardly bears thinking about.