Letters to the Editor
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Not so rosy future, according to reality
I hate to sound all Hippy-Dippy, but the older I get, the more obvious it becomes to me that there is a carefully worked out balance in the natural world that simply can't be ignored. Balance, there is a balance. As Dyson might understand it better, there is an equal sign in the middle of all things. What is done on one side of that equal sign will change the result on the other side.
We remove the predators from an ecosystem, their prey increase and eat all the young aspen trees destined to shade the stream bed; the water heats up, fish have a hard time and begin to die off.
Farmers demand water to be siphoned off for their crops, there is not enough water to flush young fish down into the ocean; a couple of years later, the fishing industry falls into decline; it's barely worth it, for some fishermen, to gas up their boats.
These are two simplified examples, but I think they make the point. Dyson sees a world where humans can live and behave in any manner they like, do anything they want on their side of the equation because it either has no effect on the other side, or if it did, what happens on the other side doesn't mean much anyway. Even if we screw things up on the other side, and ecosystems fall into collapse, what do we care? We can always whip out our gene-splicing kits and conjure up some plant or animal that poops gasoline Flippity Doo!
What a horrible world he postulates. Horrible and horrifying. Who wants to life in genetic-splice world with 100 billion people? I don't, even if I believed it was possible. Climate change is effecting an enormously complex equation, and I think we could see ripple effects on the other side that we can't even begin to imagine yet, wreaking biological, sociological, and economic changes at a rate that will leave us breathless in our attempts to keep up. And really, for what? Why is the idea that we should try to reduce our footprint on the planet so laughable and abhorrent? What is the downside to that lifestyle?