This is my land! (not)

Let's see where this goes.

Coberst,

The notion of stewardship neither began, nor ended with the British landed aristocracy. Stewardship is at least partially a Medieval concept, and it was still alive and well in mid-twentieth century America. The concept and importance of being an honorable gentleman (even if in reduced circumstances), and stewardship of family wealth and property was unquestioned in the ranching world of Southeast Arizona where I was raised. Those early family and social lessons have never been superseded in my personal value system. I would suppose that those values were widespread in this country, especially the rural areas. The changes from regarding the importance of making long-term commitments to one of instant gratification and credit really got going about the time we elected JFK. The Baby Boomers were pampered and beneficiaries of the peace, security, and accumulated wealth of their parents. Rural areas emptied out and the extended family ties were stretched to the breaking point. My cousins and I grew up together isolated on a ranch where every adult was either related to us, or worked for our family. Everyone worked toward the family's goals, even the little children. My sister fed the chickens and collected the eggs. All the children loved "candling the eggs" for sale, but we really hated plucking the dinner chickens. My Grandmother fed all the family and ranch hands at a single table by cooking on a woodstove. Our Great-Grandparents lived in a small cottage on the hill, and were the moral compass and sounding board for life on the ranch. Pappy didn't own the ranch, my Grandfather did, but Pap was really the man in charge. Grandfather worked most weekdays 35 miles away at the smelter, and carried mail from the Benson railhead to Douglas. We depended upon one another and the land. Like I said before, not terribly uncommon for the time, but very different than things are now.

The greatest problem probably with your notion of creating a sense of stewardship for the environment is that you seem to believe that this MUST happen, the people MUST overcome their human emotional frailties. Neither rationality nor religion (which may be just as rational as the lack of religion) is capable of making angels of human communities. Some people will adopt a life style and attitude toward the world that meets whatever goals are set, others will act contrary to their own best interests, and will have not the slightest care for anyone else, living or dead.

You can't herd cats, nor make a zebra into a thoroughbred racehorse. Neither can we dictate the values and fashions that drive strong, lasting trends in large, complex human populations. Let me give you an example. The Chinese have spent half a century discouraging consumerism, while emphasizing the duty and responsibility of every individual to the collective whole. The nation remains terribly poor, but the current Party leadership has begun loosening social controls and now even encourages some consumerism. Even today, most Chinese find the bicycle a more than adequate means of transportation, and its cheap. However, the Chinese, like most of humanity, have a love affair with automobiles. They love the speed and the sense of freedom one gets behind the wheel of a powerful machine. China has only a few good roads built to insure fast movement of military units, but their road system is hardly better than it was in the United States before WWII. The cost of imported automobiles is far beyond the reach of all but a few, so China has begun manufacturing its own cars for local sale. These Chinese cars get really terrible gas mileage, they have no safety or anti-pollution devices, they are generally inefficient and prone to breakdown.

So in fine ... a billion people have an existing effective, efficient and affordable transportation system in hand. There are no good roads, and government control over people's movements discourage travel. The only automobiles available are expensive, needlessly destructive to the environment, and are even arguably dangerous. Chinese cars are selling like hotcakes, and if Detroit had similar sales figures they'd be pleased as punch. The Party now must divert resources badly needed elsewhere in the economy to building roads, which in turn will encourage more car sales and that threatens Party control over personal travel. To fuel those cars the Party has to either discover oil reserves of their own, or import oil. Chinese may have some oil reserves, but they have yet to be discovered and brought on-line. China needs Iranian oil, so politically they support the Iranian government; a government that hates the Communists even more than they hate Americans, but, as they say, business is business. Chinese demand for petroleum is rising, and can be expected to drive up the cost per barrel ... and that impacts every other industrialized nation in the world.

Now it is certain that the Chinese SHOULD not abandon their bicycles at this time, but there is no reasoning with their desire to hit the roads. The Party has let loose a hungry tiger, and no amount of coercion is likely to reverse the trend. In fact, it may be easier for the Party to control the internet than to curb the Peoples hunger for automobiles.

Try telling the enbattled farmer in Brazil that he shouldn't clear cut the rainforest to make for himself a fertile plot of ground that will only last a year or so. The farmer is hungry and must fee his family, so even if he believes that the loss of the rainforest will eventually lead to a Great Die Off, he will still persist in his foolish "stewardship" of the environment.

I know that this post highlights the problems involved, but I know of no means by which people can be forced to abandon their short-term wants, needs and desires for what might be a better world (maybe) several hundred years from now.

There was an article in Harvard Magazine earlier this year about how people almost always opt for the short-term goal when making a decision.

I tend not to.

Yes, I suppose my meaning was unclear. Of course enough coercion can compel compliance with a tyrant's dictates. We do not disagree on that point.

However, I'm not convinced that the species is doomed to extinction anytime in the near future. At some point in the future there may well be another major die-off, and whether our species survives or not, only time will tell.

Here are the most likely causes, in my opinion, of a global die-off that would threaten our species in the next 200 years.

Death from Space. The last major species die-off occurred after a relatively small astroid struck what is today the norther part of the Yucatan Peninsula. The great majority of all existing species went extinct, leaving only a small percentage of the species to fill all of the environmental niches. Prior to the die-off mammals were a footnote, today we are the dominant land species. There are still astroids out there that are larger than the last one, and someday ... maybe in a year or so, one will enter the atmosphere and drastically change living conditions overnight with secondary effects lasting as much as a thousand years. There isn't a whole lot that can be done to prepare for, or avoid this scenario from happening. There are scientists and engineers working to find means of avoiding the problem, but how successful they might be is a very open question. If its going to happen (and the probabilities are reasonably good on a scale of the next 5 thousand years), there isn't much we can do about it. So why worry. I'll be dead in the next 20-25 years, if I can avoid accidents and remain reasonably healthy, so death for me is a certainty either way. The species may escape extinction by expanding human habitations off of this planet, so even in the worst case scenario we as a species will probably survive for a long, long time yet.

2. Epidemic. A disease with a very high morality rate (over 30%), air spread, and with no onset of symptoms for 14 days. This sort of disease has occurred in the past, most notably the Plague which appeared in the 14th century with continued outbreaks well into the 17th century. The Plague (combined Bubonic and Pheumonic) reduced European population by something between 20% and 50% (no really good statistical reports are available before the mid-17th century). The Plague was instrumental in destabilizing the social/economic/political system that had remained stable for 1000 years. On the upside, the Plagues spread relatively slow from its inception in Sicily to the rest of Europe, and populations outside Europe may not have been seriously affected. Some Europeans already had a natural resistance to the disease that might have been inherited from one of the several known Plagues to hit Europe in ancient times.

During the early 20th century there was an outbreak of Influenza called the "Spanish Lady" at a U.S. Army training camp. The disease quickly spread around the world, and the mortality rate was extemely high, perhaps 30%. In any case, the Spanish Lady killed more than the War whose lethality and horrors still has the power to shock.

Conditions have been "right" to produce a "Doomsday Disease" in Southeast Asia already for over 50 years. Even if the Bird Flu were to mutate and cross over into human populations, it probably would only have a mortality rate of around 25%, though trying to predict lethality of a germ that hasn't yet mutated is sheer guess work. We have some time to discover, manufacture and distribute shots that might further reduce the mortality rate of this potential killer. If another, different disease appears directly into the human population the potential outcome is even more frightening. Imagine the effect of a 30% mortality rate in China, or India, both of which have relatively poor public health systems AND populations over one billion.

Consider the consequences of secondary effects of the deaths of over 500,000,000 people in East Asia alone over a period of just a few months. Political and economic collapse are almost certain, and secondary infections might claim another 10-20% of the surviving populations.

As terrible as this scenario is, it would probably not mean extinction for our species. Some portion of the world's human population may already carry immunities to whatever bug appears, others will survive the disease and pass on their resistance to future populations. Modern understanding of epidemics and a strong Pubic Health system will reduce mortality rates in the more developed countries. Some of us will survive and within a generation or so population will again begin to rise.

3. Radical Environmental Change. This is currently a popular doomsday concern. The planet's climate system isn't static, but is naturally dynamic within a wide range of temperatures and humidity. I have no doubt that we are currently seeing a change in the planet's weather patterns. The secondary effects of the changes have the potential to kill off large numbers of people. Rising sea levels aren't likely to drown significant numbers, but failure of the monsoons for a couple of years could set off a major famine throughout an area ranging from India through Southwestern Asia and into the heart of Africa. Millions could die of hunger, and the world very well might not be able to do anything at all to prevent it. If the great grain growing regions fail to produce larger than usual surpluses. there would be no food to send to devastated regions. How does one transport and distribute effectively enough food to feed say, 100,000,000 starving people? It is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that the Great Plains could also experience drought and total crop failure just when those harvests are most needed. Malnutrition increases the lethality of starvation, so the death toll might well push some populations to the very edge of survival. On the up-side, some areas might experience greater than normal rainfall and long fallow ground might then become agriculturally bountiful, and local communities would then prosper.

Changing patterns of rainfall could easily push China's water system to disaster. China's history is filled with devastating floods that overflow the banks of its principle river systems resulting in the drowning of hundreds of thousands. A major failure today might easily carry off twice as many people as the worst flood in China's long history. Secondary effects, like famine, disease, political/economic collapse, and war are common in the wake of major flood events.

The longer and the more drastic climate change, the greater the destabilizing effects of it on human affairs. So how long could the dangers build and persist? Is the climate change we're observing natural, or is it at least partially the result of the Industrial and Technical Revolutions that began in the middle 17th century? If this climatic change is entirely natural, there is nothing we can probably do to change it. Even if the changes are due entirely to human activity, the trend has been building for at least two hundred years and will not be altered in less time sufficiently to maintain the status quo. The planet's climate and environment is a complex system and we can not be certain what effects even small changes in human activity might have on the whole. We are told that the hole in the ozone layer might be repaired in as little as 20 years, but what we've done to reverse that trend may well set off a chain of events just as threatening in some other part of the ecology.

One of our species most valuable characteristics is our ability to adjust and adapt to change. Evolutionary adaptation goes on, even though we've done our best to frustrate the Law of Survival of the Fittest. We've opted to change and control the environment, and that strategy has led to a massive population that may be pushing the envelope of natures carrying capacity. Mother Nature has her ways of adjusting the balance, and she may be getting ready to "call-in" our credit balances. Oh well ...

4. Total and Massive Nuclear War. This threat to human survival has always been overrated, and since the fall of the Soviet Union the threat has continued to diminish. The likelihood of there being a nuclear war in the future (say, within the next one hundred years) has grown somewhat as the India, Pakistan, and the DPRK have acquired nuclear weapons. The threat of nuclear war if and when Iran has operable nuclear weapons will greatly increase the probability of a regional nuclear exchange in Southern Asia. The threat of regional nuclear war as a secondary effect of a major epidemic or famine is scary, but not a real threat of human extinction. For nuclear war to threaten extinction would take the effective and efficient expenditure of all the world's nuclear warheads spread rather uniformly over the surface of the globe. That's just not likely to happen. The most likely scenarios of nuclear war concentrate multiple warheads on high-value targets, usually dense highly productive urban centers. Areas away from high-value targets and outside the fallout cone downwind might escape any direct damage from even a hotly contested nuclear war. Of course, millions would die, but that isn't enough by itself to lead to human extinction On the other hand, nuclear war is the one threat that we can do something about.

coberst -- I, too, believe in stewardship and I have heard about a group of fundamentalist Christians who have broken with the dominant trend of the religious right -- which tends toward anti-environmentalism -- to stress stewardship of the land.

Educating people to the value of stewardship is difficult. Just look at what happens on this forum every time global warming is mentioned!

Whoo! That the Christians are coming sounds like good news.

Stephen Hawking recently addressed the issue of stewardship and, in typical; Hawkins strait-on style, he concluded that , if we dont find a p[lanet to colonize soon, we shall be just one more extinct species with an excellent fossil record. Then, when the next ascendent species achieves self-awareness they can make up stories about us.

Wonder what the next ascendant species will be? I would love to hear what they will say about us.

All cockrochian scholars and historians agree that our first ancestors were oppressed by the giant's race which produced these musty artifacts. It is said that the Giants apparently killed us with the full intent of drivingus to extinction. As ludicrous as that might seem, there is evidence that the Giants used all manner of poisons indiscriminately. They had no mercy, even for hatchlings. Our ancestors were driven into the dark secret places of the earth, and the progress of cockrochian civilization was greatly retarded for at least 10,000 year.

Our best scientists are still undecided exactly what caused the great die-off 500,000 years ago. There is some evidence of climate change, but probably not enough to drive the Giants to extinction. It may only be a legend, but we believe the Giants had great and terrible powers to control the environment. So why didn't they do something to counter the alteration in climate. We have evidence that the atmosphere had much more oxygen in those days, and some think that might have played a role in the downfall of the Giants. A second hypothesis is that the Giants violent nature turned inward and they hunted one another down into extinction. There may have been some disease that struck them down, we can never know for certain.

Thankfully, they are gone ... just another one of Mother Nature's failed experiments. That made it possible for our exalted species to finally develop its full potential.