by rockdoc123 » Fri 13 Jan 2006, 13:20:09
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he suggested mitigation seems to me sensible and not much of a downside, although I recognize that Hirsch refers to risks of actions taken prematurely. From interviews, Hirsch clearly discounts this risk, however. If my thinking is simplistic in this regard, please point out the flaws
I am not sure what the risks are....but therein may lie the problem. In the past man has intervened in many things in an attempt to be pre-emptive, in many cases this has backfired and made for worse problems.
Examples:
At one time the US Forest Service was adamant about the Smoky The Bear policy where they put out all fires as soon as they started. What they found out was that many forests are comprised of fire successional species...if you don't have regular fires there is no new growth and eventually the whole forest will wither and die. As well the occassional fire is important for cleaning out the deadfall....not allowing the deadfall to burn regularily resulted in huge buildup of fuel for what turned out to be several climax type fires. The exact same thing happened in Canada.
In Canada this same policy even created more trickle down effect. With no fires and no new aspen growing the elk had to eat food that was not nutricious. This resulted in complete die-off of virtually all of the elk in the Alberta National Parks.....what disease didn't kill the wolves made short work of. Man thinking he knew what the problem was proceeded to kill all of the wolves. Later on they figured out it was in fact disease that was the problem so they imported elk, but with no natural preditors the herds got way too large for the available food source, again die-off.
On a more global aspect it wasn't that many years ago that DDT was touted as being an evil poison and lobbyists have been busy trying to ban its us around the world. In Africa it is pretty clear the only places that malaria has not decimated the population in one way or another are those using DDT.
I guess going forward a possible analogy would be with Kyoto and global warming. What if the heating from greenhouse gases is the only thing keeping us out of another glaciation? History has shown that warmer climates make for better economies....colder ones have the opposite effect.
Of course I can be completely wrong....I do believe we should at least get people being responsible consumers....but the choices we make in terms of switching to alternatives etc. have potential repurcussions that I don't think anyone has really thought about. I still think we would be better prepared for an appropriate response if we understood the issues much better than we do now.
