[Thor]

Originally Posted by Azure

Loosing them at a faster rate than anytime in the past 4 billion or so years?

Certainly we are just keeping up the trend, but its dangerous to think we cannot harm or are not speeding up our demise with our destruction of our enviornment.

Seems a bit strange to think that a 'species' that has been on this planet for not even 1% of the time that it has supposedly existed.....and less then 1% of THAT time we've been in the industrial age.....and in that short time frame we can destroy a planet that has gone through God knows what the past 4 billion years?

Its not that we're destroying our planet, its gonna survive well beyond us. Its that we are destroying the conditions we as a species require to sustain our existence. We have massive challenges to the repair and recover what we've already made a mess of.

Suggesting we just keep going as we have been and thinking all will be fine because earth survived all this time is a bit naive. I mean Earth is one mean b*tch. She's destroyed 99% of life that has existed and we are doing ourselves no favors to buck the trend of our own existence.

IMO, George Carlin laid it out quite well.

Its a bit stupid to think that what we have done in the short time frame we have been here will amount to anything more than a blip on the historical notes the planet keeps.

I love George, but thats comedy. The reality is we are destroying ecological systems, we are seeing key indicators that are early warning signs for whats to come. Should we all panic and freak out, no. But should we stop bickering about "If theres a problem" and move on to doing what we know needs to be done to start cleaning up this planet so we can assure our children and their children a real future; hell yes.

Our blip is clearly all about technology, we've gone from feudal farmers to burning millions of tons of warming gases in 100yrs. To suggest this is safe because our planet has dealt with some crazy cycles in its life is silly. Our zone that allows us to live on this planet is rather small, we've seen whats happened in the past with regards to massive volcanic activity that created the dreaded toxic oceans, wiping out almost all life. We've seen the devastations of ice ages, warming ages..

The point we need to focus on is we need to behave better, this is the only habitable planet we have, and its not right for our generations to destroy what we do have.

I'm not a panicky person, nor do I think we need extreme action. I think we do need to smarten up and do the logical things to start moving away from fossil fuels, lessen our impact, and hopefully with future technology deal with the inevitable food and water issues for large portions of the world.