Reading this article, like reading Sea of Slaughter, makes me cross my fingers and hope that we kill ourselves off completely and as quickly as possible and so start the process again: the rise of a new powerful killer that will most assuredly drive the future Earth to the brink. Its not just us humans that have produced "data" showing that we will populate and consume until there are no resources left but almost every species will do this if left unchecked by a rich web of life, one that includes a feedback for overconsumption. Our only feedback looks like the depletion of the Planets full catalogue of life.
J.B. MacKinnon has written a superb story that gives some hope for the Planets future but perhaps not ours.
This line summarized our dilemma for me: “It is crucial for the restoration of this ecosystem that [the] public are able to visualize previous states of their local ecosystems.” Very few of us, as mobile as we are, live out our lives observing and interacting with the same ecosystem — we aren't locals anywhere anymore. So we all suffer from Dr. Pauly's shifting baselines: now our scope is narrowed to the distance of keyboard and monitor, our memories strain back to last week's episode, and our ire is raised only when Facebook changes its layout.
"Then, about 10,000 years ago, late in the Pleistocene epoch, they disappeared..."
Excuse me, but where did you get these "facts"?..
Thank-you.
I live at the northern boundary of the Chihuahan Dest ecosystem in the Tularosa Basin. I don\'t know if your turtles migrate this far, a few have shown up in my back yard to hibernate aand the ones around here do migrate, moving some thirty miles per day, by one account. along with rattlesnakes and turantiallas. Their shells and eyes are, yes, cosmic.
The playa must have filled for a while in the monsoon seasons of 2006 and 2008. Hope that revitalized them. But desert climate is demanding of the \"jewel.\"
