Guest post: The air and water departments were on different floors
Originally a comment by iknklast on Hamlet’s gotta eat.
I try to make all of this manageable for my students in Environmental Science, but they have always left the class stunned at the end of the semester. Every unit, they come up with solutions that previous units should have told them wouldn’t work. It’s difficult to carry so many interlocking things in our head at a time, and it’s natural for us to try to reduce it down to one more important thing that we can deal with. Unfortunately, we never deal with one problem before we move to another.
Save the whales? That used to be a big thing. The whales are not saved, but we’ve moved on. Ozone depletion? I almost never hear about it anymore, except by people who claim it’s over. We did a good job, but there is still a large area of depletion over Antarctica, and it isn’t likely to recover for some time. Litter? Get real. Too much focus on litter during the 70s; much of it was planned as a deliberate distraction that people could wrap their heads around and ignore larger looming problems.
This cannot be solved by focusing on doing just that one thing and then moving on. It’s like a sweater; if you unravel this thread, a lot of threads come out with it, until you are naked and there is a pile of yarn on the floor beside you. Everything (including us) is connected.
Also, something that works in one context won’t work in another. We introduced plants to solve problems a long way from where they grew as natives; gee, that worked out, didn’t it? We cleaned up the air by slurrying it through water; we cleaned the water by evaporating it into the air. When I worked for Air Quality in Oklahoma, the air and water departments were on different floors, but it was a simple one floor flight to visit. No one from air quality ever consulted with water quality; no one from water quality ever consulted with air quality. Everyone is a specialist in one thing, and doesn’t stop to consider how their one thing impacts everything else.
As a result of my rather meandering college and career path, I have education in a lot of diverse areas. It helps me at least a little when I try to pull what appear to be separate ideas but which are connected in strange, overlapping webs of confusion. When I try to explain to my students about the interconnections, I ask them if they think the economy is complicated (a simple flow chart of what companies are owned by one company is enough to elicit a yes). Then I point out that the economy is extremely simple compared to the ecology. It’s sort of like comparing a brick to the Grand Canyon.
I appreciate the spotlight put on these long-form thoughtful comments.
They’re useful because they enable discussion of the comment without derailing
and because they get more attention
and because they encourage people to write long-form thoughtful comments.
Win 1 win 2 win 3.
This comment neatly sums up why I find the idea of people who predict the future – futurists – fairly laughable. There’s just too many moving parts, too many interconnected elements, so as to make future predictions incredibly dicey.
Reminds me of the stoats in New Zealand (Rob can corroborate). They were introduced to control the rabbit population, because stoats in the UK eat rabbits. But they discovered that the native birds which, unlike rabbits, evolved in an environment where escaping predators like stoats wasn’t a survival skill, required much less effort to catch. Why waste your energy trying to take down a rabbit when you’ve got a juicy kiwi sitting in front of you?
And now New Zealand has a stoat problem. (But at least they’re trying to do something about it.)
Like NZ, Australia was also the “beneficiary” of imported flora and fauna – rabbits, foxes, cane toads, and prickly pear, to name a few.
Cane Toads were introduced to control beetles that fed on the cane, but just like the stoats, found plenty of other food and have spread far and wide away from cane fields.
But there was one success story the catoblastis moth that was introduced to kill the prickly pear. The moth did its job so well, that to the best of my knowledge, it is the only insect in the world to have two monuments to it – a public hall in Chinchilla and a stone cairn near Dalby.
https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/disaster/plagues/display/91268-cactoblastis-memorial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactoblastis_Memorial_Hall
WaM, can confirm. If there was a plant, animal, insect, algae, or fungus designed to stuff up our native ecosystem, the early settlers introduced it. The settler diaries pretty much read as “Oh this place is pretty we should totally settle here. What’s next – burn it all down and make it look like England.” Sadly there are still numpties who try and smuggle things in (and out), as well as all the stuff that gets introduced accidentally by tourists and through trade. It’s a losing battle.