As someone with a reputation of starting many things but not always seeing them to an end, there seems to be a fair amount of trepidation for me to even write this post.
But let me go ahead with it.
If you find yourselves often thinking about climate and the Earth, how there is much much lesser flora and fauna in the world than older times, wondering how trivial our jobs are in the cycle of economy, an economy that is fundamentally based on ecological plunder, then maybe I’m not alone.
As silly as it might sound, I have indeed spent a lot of time scouring the internet for communities of like-minded individuals in this space. But not to great success.
So I’m making a personal attempt to find them.
If the tribe you want doesn’t exist, start it.
There is video yet that would be a befitting introduction.
The heart-breaking thing is that David Attenborough doesn’t say a mass extinction is imminent. He says it’s underway.
Overall problem
Here’s the extremely short description of the problem without rigmarole.
Earth is a thermodynamic system in equilibrium.
Heat is added to it by the Sun and subtracted by radiation into space through atmosphere. This is how it has been so for millenia. So temperature remained roughly constant.
But due to human activity, the subtraction has been screwed by what are called greenhouse gases. So we’re adding more heat that we are removing.
This needs to be fixed. Simple.
Approaching the problem
Broadly, there are 3 ways to deal with any problem.
- Eliminating
Identify the root causes and fix them. Few examples: Fossil fuels –> Renewable/nuclear energy Over-population –> Population control Consumerism –> Conscious-buying
- Solving
Bounding the solution-space
Establishing a system of thinking
Because nature is complex, the solution is guaranteed to not be simple and straight-forward. We will need multi-pronged approach to a multitude of problems.
Working from first principles
With a decade spent in software space, I have zero background in this ecology space. But it turns out you can go farther with the will to learn than with accumulated knowledge. So we’ll learn.