To reassure: I see policy makers (our most inertial fellow citizens) as being forced to include the environment in their thinking. The hue and cry in IBD and the Limbaugh show concerning the veracity of global warming researchers... is a vestige, kinda like Southerners predicting dire social straits upon forced rollback of our own little <i.apartheidgame. Green's gonna pay, and the idea that the planet is disposable is not gonna be mainline thinking, even at the highest levels.
I have great faith that as the decades unwind, environmentally-sound practice will become a universal premise in our economy. After all, ours is the first generation ('xept Easter Islanders and Greenland Norse) to be faced with the need to think about our environment's carrying capacity.
The two groups I mentioned became extinct because they didn't manage their own little corners of the world sustainably. The Easter Islanders wiped out all the trees (&presumably some delicious flightless fowl that taste like harp seal stewed in its mother's milk) and then slowly starved. The Greenlanders were too proud to learn about fish etc. from their Eskimo neighbors. Poor weather pot the nail into the coffin of their cattle-farming lifestyle.
As we learn that the world is a small place, I see two key technologies emerge hand-in-hand. The first is genetic engineering good enough to construct new species designed to meet needs previously met by drilling/mining. Gasfruit (see previous) are a striking example. A seaweed which concentrates gold, or cobalt.
The second is soil-free agriculture. Hydroponics are a first small step. I imagine compact plants which can be grown on mats and hung like honeycombs of epiphytes, or floating mats. Or small motile plantlike things grown on lit vats. These plants would then turn out fruit which improve on wheat or soybeans or yogurt in nutrition and flavor/texture. A beef bush is not out of the question - a plant set up with cow genome blocks to grow steakfruit!!! That's when I'll be a vegetarian... :-)
All this is "far out". It'll require a lot of tech which we don't have. But we'll close in step by step. Improved yield on crops. Crops which don't need irrigation or fertilizer. Crops with pest resistance traits which would make spraying an obsolete horror. Best of all, crops which grow densely on smaller tracts separated by wilderness corridors; farming techniques which don't need Diesel. The driver will be economic: the farm that can grow nice food without a combine and a Pawnee with spray tanks will make money. But first genetic engineering will have to evolve past "shooting in the dark" with poorly-understood scraps of DNA. That'll take time.
So what we have is a difference of perspective. I deliberately "write off" the present&immediate future, except of course the major problems like CFCs and Third World DDT, and I look toward the next (or next-after) economic cycle when biotech will be good for more than vat-grown insulin. I'm patient, except when sticking pins into my ZITL voodoo doll. :-)
Better,stronger and cleaner will happen right here! I'm enamored of space, but I don't hold with the idea that we need it to get our dirty laundry out of the bedroom. The tech that cleans out planet will be the same that lets us build compact, working life support for deep-space habitits. If we gain space, we collaterally (or consequently?) gain a gentler relationship with Homeworld, or any other rock on which we pitch tents.
I'm preaching technology, but I do not posit technocracy or a Randian society as necessary conditions. My political concept is much more "middle of the road" with Nasa, Darpa, the NIH etc. as members of our community. |
