When the giant asteroid is days away from smashing Earth into space dust, I highly doubt the whales are going to be the ones stepping up to the plate to save the planet.
Bruce Willis alone is worth the human population's weight in whale blubber.
__________________
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Yes we are, but that doesn't mean we're essential to the eco system. The opposite in fact is true...if humans were to disappear from the earth the eco system would be much healthier.
__________________ There are more humans in the world than rats.
Apex predators existed for hundreds of millions of years before we were here, though unlike us were not harmful to the biosphere. We do far more damage to the eco system than good.
__________________ There are more humans in the world than rats.
No, just different. Ecosystem "health" really just means something we consider healthy or beneficial.
Take cities for example. They are a whole new ecosystem, one that is almost totally dependent on human action. If you remove people from cities the existing ecosystem there will collapse and be replaced with a new one. Neither is "healthier".
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
Neither is "healthier" in and of itself, but and other top predators don't sustain themselves in ways that destroy the environment they are in without balance. That said, I don't know that humanity suddenly disappearing and leaving untreated toxic waste, spent and unspent nuclear fuel, and whatever other various processed and unprocessed chemicals lying around would be a good thing.
You can't destroy "the environment" only whatever environment there currently is.
Health is really a human-centric thing. Cyanobacter killing off so many other life forms it defined an epoch was natural. An asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs was natural.
In both cases the environment wasn't destroyed. It just changed.
Humans are no different except that, unlike cyanobacter and large pieces of rock, we are consciously self interested. If the current environment changes too much we all die. That's bad because we die not because things have changed, change is a constant.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
Gender: Unspecified Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
But that's the thing, untreated toxic waste, pent and unspent nuclear fuel and whatever other various processed and unprocessed chemicals are only bad in relation to humans.
Actually, there's a small village somewhere in Asia where tigers prey on people (it's so bad that people wear masks on the back of their heads to deter the tigers). The tigers will even attack their canoes when they're in the middle of a river.
My second post in this thread about tigers, weird, didn't even intend for that to happen.
I know that, we've driven tigers to the brink of extinction. I was just talking about this one particular village where the tigers are higher on the food chain than people.
I think in those cases tigers are cordoned into such tight spaces that they have a caged animal mentality and will be unnaturally aggressive toward humans.
__________________
“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
Whale shit reduces carbon levels greatly by stimulating growth of phytoplankton.
__________________ Land of the free, home of the brave...
Do you think we will ever be saved?
In this land of dreams find myself sober...
Wonder when will it'll all be over...
Living in a void when the void grows colder...
Wonder when it'll all be over?
Will you be laughing when it's over?
KMC Community Forums
Jul 22nd, 2012 07:25 PM
