[Vision2020] Biosphere in Catastrophic Trouble?

[Mike Weatherford]

Pat,

  In the immortal words of my little brother: "Huh? What?" From your short 
post, I can't tell if you're being derisive of evolution, derisive of 
environmentalism, derisive of both, or very, very subtly satirizing people 
who are one of the first three. Since I'm not 100% sure, here's a big 
honkin' post aimed at people who are any of the first three:

- Creatures evolve. They do this over long periods of time, to adapt to 
gradual changes in their environment. If you'd like an example, pick up 
Finding Darwin's God and read the chapter about colorational variations in 
otherwise identical species of moths, depending on how close they are to 
pollution centers. Evolution can be quick - it probably didn't take terribly 
long at all (a couple of years, maybe) to adapt to a little thing like the 
change in background colour.

- Having the forest in which your species live cut to the ground over the 
course of a month and shipped off for processing, while the stumps are made 
into slash piles and burned, and then having the ground in which it was 
growing nicely enriched with the byproducts of a heavy machine logging 
operation run in a country with no real rules to regulate it... that isn't a 
gradual change. That would be like me shooting someone in the chest a couple 
of times, and then in my defense telling the police that "they should have 
evolved around the bullets."

- For the record, it /has/ actually taken longer than 6,000 years for the 
biosphere to get to this point. Ask anyone who isn't a YEC nutjob. The real 
number, as I recall, is a little closer to three billion, give or take a 
couple epochs. (Until recently, it was commonly estimated at around 3.85 
billion years, but some recent information has thrown the last .05 billion 
into doubt.) Expecting this system to survive the crazy **** that humans 
have spent the last two hundred years doing to it is a little... well... 
optimistic would be one way of putting it.

I'm sure it'll be fine in the long run, though. Worst case scenario, when we 
run out of real food, we can just eat the elderly, in the form of delicious 
green food cubes.

Mmm, cubes.
-Mike Weatherford

>From: "Pat Kraut" <pkraut at moscow.com>
>To: "vision2020" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
>Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Biosphere in Catastrophic Trouble?
>Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 13:21:59 -0800
>
>I thought you all believed the earth and the creatures would 'evolve'!
>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Tbertruss at aol.com
>   To: vision2020 at moscow.com
>   Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 12:45 PM
>   Subject: [Vision2020] Biosphere in Catastrophic Trouble?
>
>
>
>   All:
>
>   A brick building can lose a lot of bricks and still stand.  But if you 
>keep pulling out bricks one by one, eventually the building will collapse.  
>So how many species can we destroy before the earth's biosphere is in 
>catastrophic trouble?
>
>   Ted Moffett
>   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6502368/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>   _____________________________________________________
>    List services made available by First Step Internet,
>    serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>                  http://www.fsr.net
>             mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
>   ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
>_____________________________________________________
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>                http://www.fsr.net
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
>¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯