Looking for the big picture

[Ernie Rogers]

I am a new guy around here.  That means I may at times reinvent a "wheel."  That's what I think I will try for this morning.  The world is in trouble--geoengineering is one approach to the problems.  Humankind went through a somewhat similar crisis about twelve thousand years ago (my view).  We were strugging with overpopulation and driving vast numbers of species to extinction.  The problem was solved--I think we should say that the answer was geoengineering--we learned how to better manage our environment.  We moved dirt around, added chemicals and propagated seeds that helped the situation.  And we built water systems.  We mostly gave up the former hunter-gatherer way of living off the land and switched to "farming." And gave up wearing animal skins (resource depletion) and learned to weave plant fibers.  The environmentalists back then must have been horrified.

       Today there are engineering schools for how best to work with dirt--agricultural engineering.  Sad to say, there are holdouts that still want to keep the old ways and sometimes don't realize they are part of the problem.  The hunter-gatherer mentality is still alive in the oceans of the world.  They don't plant or nourish, but they still expect to harvest.  We need a more comprehensive schools of engineering: geoengineering schools.  They can help us to deal with those old problems, overpopulation and loss of species, AND take on the new problems like climate change (waste management).

      My view: we can do a lot about all of these problems by learning how to better manage the oceans, or, should we say, the biosphere.

  Ernie Rogers