Mother Nature Stressed Up By Her Unruly Children

In an excellent article called "Climate Change Only One Symptom Of A Stressed Planet Earth", ScienceDaily highlights that global warming -- a currently very fashionable topic -- is only the 'tip of the iceberg'. Human activity is pushing the resistance of Earth's biogeochemical system to its limits and breaking point seems pretty close, according to the experts.

How blind has the human species been to the stress it was imposing on the environment at a planetary scale? Why is it that we only realise now the extent of the damage our activities were doing to our world? Wasn't it obvious from the start that an unbalance of Nature was going to occur sooner or later?

Greed and carelessness are most probably responsible for the poor state of the Earth, and we are now in trouble with Nature because of unscrupulous leaders -- in politics or industry -- who didn't care about the legacy they were leaving to the next generations. We can't punish the culprits, but we need to fix the damage they've done, as well as identify precisely and eliminate the causes of such a global mess.

*goes out to hug a tree and apologise to Gaia*

Said By Thomas

Greed and carelessness are most probably responsible for the poor state of the Earth, and we are now in trouble with Nature because of unscrupulous leaders -- in politics or industry -- who didn't care about the legacy they were leaving to the next generations. We can't punish the culprits, but we need to fix the damage they've done, as well as identify precisely and eliminate the causes of such a global mess.

Right... It was all greed and carelessness back when the industrial revolution started. There is something called economics at work here as well. You can't magically switch all fossil fuel plants off and expect everything to be okay, nor can you tell everyone to stop using their cars and buy new electric only ones. It doesn't work that way.

Economics have certainly played an important role. But don't you think that research on alternative sources of energy could have been performed a bit more seriously? The switch from coal-burning power plants to nuclear ones has been done quite efficiently. So why not try to harness in a more efficient way all the possibilities offered naturally, like solar and wind power? The current technologies are totally inefficient in using the Sun and the wind, and certainly need more research to make these sources of energy economically viable.