We talk about how things are natural and unnatural, but it’s kind of a slippery slope. The logic is that "natural" is good and "unnatural" is bad. Maybe it doesn’t even really matter. I'm not really so much interested in the semantics game as I am the pragmatics of the situation.
Ideas like “carrying capacity” make a lot of sense. They say that the only sustainable level of technology is stone-age, which is to say virtually zero permanent environmental impact or “footprint.” The projected models appear to support this paradigm as the most reasonable.
Industrialization, energy consumption, and bio-engineering are the big things that I’m considering. When you get down to it, these things are merely replications of the natural process.... so you could argue that everything is natural. Evolution is the most natural thing in the world, the drive toward greater complexity. Regression, steering away from technological advancement doesn’t appear to be the right way. That is in fact the “unnatural” way.
But on the other hand, these things clearly present problems - Global warming, pollution, instability. Is it that we have the right idea but that our application is wrong? Is our entire methodology wrong, maybe we have no idea. I don’t really know how to reconcile these two contradictions.
I’m not really sure what my point is, I don’t really have one. Just something that’s on my mind.
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