I should have elaborated on my flippant closing comment, given that several people have referenced it (or, better yet, just not made it-- little good ever comes from flippant comments).
I don't particularly care about conservation. I find the hubris humankind has repeatedly demonstrated to be supremely odious, though. The repeatedly-demonstrated attitude of putting ourselves outside of nature, saying "Oh, but this time our actions won't have unintended consequences...", fills me with white-hot rage.
I recognize that hindsight makes bad decisions seem self-evidently bad. I can't help thinking that some historically bad decisions must have seemed bad at the time, too, yet we made them anyway.
Maybe our evolutionary progeny will be imbued with an intuition that speaks to the complex behavior that arises out of dynamical systems. Maybe they'll innately understand that they're inside the systems they want to influence, and not apart from them. Maybe they'll have sufficiently long lifetimes to skew their thinking away from short term gains. Maybe they won't exhibit the willful ignorance and motivated reasoning that we do. Maybe they'll just be less stupid.
Aside: Your retort of saying, effectively, "kill yourself" followed by "Yeah, but I don't really mean that" does seem a little gauche. I suppose, taken in kind with my flippant statement, it's not so out-of-place, but I do wish that the whole "kill yourself" meme hadn't ever made its way into Internet discourse.
I don't particularly care about conservation. I find the hubris humankind has repeatedly demonstrated to be supremely odious, though. The repeatedly-demonstrated attitude of putting ourselves outside of nature, saying "Oh, but this time our actions won't have unintended consequences...", fills me with white-hot rage.
I recognize that hindsight makes bad decisions seem self-evidently bad. I can't help thinking that some historically bad decisions must have seemed bad at the time, too, yet we made them anyway.
Maybe our evolutionary progeny will be imbued with an intuition that speaks to the complex behavior that arises out of dynamical systems. Maybe they'll innately understand that they're inside the systems they want to influence, and not apart from them. Maybe they'll have sufficiently long lifetimes to skew their thinking away from short term gains. Maybe they won't exhibit the willful ignorance and motivated reasoning that we do. Maybe they'll just be less stupid.
Aside: Your retort of saying, effectively, "kill yourself" followed by "Yeah, but I don't really mean that" does seem a little gauche. I suppose, taken in kind with my flippant statement, it's not so out-of-place, but I do wish that the whole "kill yourself" meme hadn't ever made its way into Internet discourse.