The other end of the arc.

I thought this was interesting, not because I agree with his entire postulate, but because it represents in some ways the opposite swing of the pendulum from the Gaea "nature is everything" school.

That said, I think that this guy REALLY underestimates the power of natural processes in comparison to what we can do. That statement however opens up some questions about what is considered nature. The biggest change in the biosphere (once Earth had one) was largely driven by plants "vegeforming" (my word) the planet by creating Oxygen in large enough amounts to change the makeup of the atmosphere.

One major natural event (hurricane, volcano, earthquake, solar flare) puts out more energy, etc. than the entire human race does in an equivalent period of time. The idea that we can modify anything more than our immediate environment is pretty arrogant, the more so because it's demonstrably false. Thera and Krakatoa are just two volcanic events in (sort-of) recorded history that put any nuclear bomb we've come up with in the shade.

Society needs to learn from recent scientific efforts to explain changes in greenhouse gases and the biosphere during the Anthropocene. Three lines of evidence demonstrate that we live on a planet reshaped by humans for thousands of years.

The first evidence dates back to the beginnings of science itself, when amateur scientists stumbled across the bones of massive, long-extinct mammals like the mastodon, giant ground sloth and saber-toothed tiger. The last glaciation can’t explain their disappearance 10,000 years ago, because they survived many preceding glaciations.

So what do I think? That is after all what this spot is about, so I'll tell you. Of course we can modify our environment, and history (and prehistory) shows it, from those first photosynthetic respiring plants to draining the Aral Sea for cotton production. We can pollute and wipe out species left and right, and to date we've done a fine job of it. Hopefully we can cut back on that, because there are a hell of a lot more of us around, and we all want consumer goods which don't grow on trees, but may come from them in some form.

What we can't do, is totally derail the planet, at least not without a gob load of H-bombs going off, like, say, all that we've ever made. Even that the planet would eventually recover from, and some sort of life would reseed from whatever survived. It just wouldn't be us.

That, we can concern ourselves with. Keep things as clean as we can, but be realistic about what we're doing and why we're doing it. Heavy metals in the water: bad. CO2 in the water: fizzy, and we drink it all the time. How is that a pollutant? Is sugar? I guess the EPA should ban pop; I say that glibly, but if they join up with the FDA (using American examples here as they're bigger than ours) that's exactly what the nanny-crats might yet do to protect us from ourselves.