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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (8176)	3/12/2001 1:10:58 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 82486

I doubt they spend their money that way - my preferred approach is a paradigm shift from articulation (which is great for legislators) to habitat preservation (which means areas where no one is allowed access). This is not going to sit well with people because they want to use land. At least when you lose a species in a habitat, the who web is probably not influenced. Unless it is an indicator species (and how that is determined is a bit nebulous and subject to academic argument), the dieoff of one species doesn't tell you much about the overall health of your planet. However, habitat preservation is hard to accomplish unless you know all the inputs and outputs of a system. We just don't have that level of knowledge. The problem with articulation is that you can get some strange things being protected while other things die off. If you are going to have die-offs and extinctions, I'd rather it be 1 species than 1000 species. How does one make these tradeoffs? Here is an interesting, unrelated, but parallel case: when the FDA was formed, certain compounds were grandfathered in and are only removed from the list if there is proven harm (like oral mercury compounds). This is the opposite standard that the FDA uses on all new drugs. For example mercurochrome is a pretty good topical antibacterial, but it is toxic. There are other, new compounds that do a similar job, but aren't toxic. Mercurochrome is still available over the counter. Colloidal silver is being touted on the Internet as a health remedy. It predates the FDA and is therefore exempt. People are using this, taking it internally, and there is little anyone can do to prevent it. YES, it is antimicrobial, but from what I know about chemistry, it isn't a good idea to have little spheres of noble metals bumping around inside you doing charge transport. There is no excretion mechanism for colloids, so they just build up over time.