Earl Mardle (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} rlmrdl) wrote,@ 2003-05-05 14:09:00 |
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Emergence With Even More Vengeance?
For those who don't believe that emergence is a real process which occurs because many many factors are linked in more complex ways than we can ever begin to calculate, this story from the Mercury news (Linked from the Agonist) might give pause.
It is significant that the 70's are identified as the point of emergence because they stand about 20 years down the track from the end of WWII which was surely the beginning of the most staggering intervention in the environment on a global scale that the planet has ever seen.
The planetary ecology is a vast system with huge inertia, it is quite reasonable that it would take that long to nudge it into a new track.
We have been conducting an uncontained, unplanned and uncontrolled experiment on ourselves, the results are coming in. The interesting question for the future is whether we will be stuck in crisis mode till we fail catastrophically, or whether we genuinely can apply to this planet the one we so grandly plan for Mars; maybe we need to start the terraforming here.
For those who don't believe that emergence is a real process which occurs because many many factors are linked in more complex ways than we can ever begin to calculate, this story from the Mercury news (Linked from the Agonist) might give pause.
"This period from the 1970s is without precedent in the history of the annals of medicine," Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and Global Environment.
The Institute of Medicine convened a panel of top U.S. researchers [who] attributed the surge in new diseases to 13 specific changes in the world and the way we live.
Those 13 factors are microbial adaptation and change; human susceptibility to infection; climate and weather; changing ecosystems; human demographics and behavior; economic development and land use; international travel and commerce; technology and industry; breakdown of public health measures; poverty and social inequality; war and famine; lack of political will; and bioterrorism.
Of the more than 35 new emerging diseases since the 1970s "a substantial proportion relate to man's manipulation of ecology," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview Thursday.
It is significant that the 70's are identified as the point of emergence because they stand about 20 years down the track from the end of WWII which was surely the beginning of the most staggering intervention in the environment on a global scale that the planet has ever seen.
The planetary ecology is a vast system with huge inertia, it is quite reasonable that it would take that long to nudge it into a new track.
We have been conducting an uncontained, unplanned and uncontrolled experiment on ourselves, the results are coming in. The interesting question for the future is whether we will be stuck in crisis mode till we fail catastrophically, or whether we genuinely can apply to this planet the one we so grandly plan for Mars; maybe we need to start the terraforming here.
