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I think Ayten's point is very well posed. What may once have been
possible to entrust purely to Nature's way of remediation, in Nature's time
scale, would not be enough at our current level of global overpopulation and
that level is continually growing. Ultimately, Nature will take care of our
problem for us if we don't take care of it for ourselves, but it will be very
unpleasant...
So, we can look at a number of things we could do to
improve the situation. My favorite is to live smarter, as a species. But I have
few illusions that this is going to happen fast enough to really prevent climate
change or worsening of other global forms of damage. My country just
re-elected George W. Bush!!!! (Forgive me a primal scream.....) It would
require a massive unified effort to reorganize our ways of doing everything,
from what we build our houses out of, and how we build them, to how we supply
all our physical needs (food, power, water, etc), to how we get around
(transportation) to how we run our industries, to how we handle inevitable
waste flows... To make such sweeping changes at the pace humanity is used
to would take generations, and that will be too late to prevent many of the
global changes, I fear.
Failing that, then ways to slow down the global climate and
other environmental changes, whilst working to encourage the human
reorganizational changes, would be my second choice. What I suspect will happen
is that as global climate changes manifest themselves in ways that scare
humanity, there will be far more interest and willingness to embrace the
wider-scale, more difficult reorganization of our ways of doing things. We at
least have a chance, then, of "beating the clock"; our efforts at slowing down
the changes may just provide us with enough time to prevent the worst of the
global climate shifting. What I'm most concerned about is the kind of "system
oscillation" my father spoke of, which happens when systems are
destabilized. He said the oscillation is very difficult to stop and will
continue until it runs its course and the system regains
equilibrium. If we can avoid destabilizing global climate to that extent, we can
consider ourselves very, very lucky.
So, to that end, where would our efforts best be spent? What is
both feasible and do-able, in terms of application of Rosennean Complexity?
That's what got me to thinking about the molecular recycling/reconfiguration
idea in the first place. I'm sure there are plenty of other applications we
could come up with, on this group, so I suggest a brainstorming session. Who's
game?
Judith Rosen
PS: I'm currently researching, thanks to Leo's suggestions for
links and databases, the nature of Dioxin molecules... Specifically, the worst
of the dioxin compounds is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin. It's created by
burning things with chlorine in them, or processes which use chlorine with other
hydrocarbons... so garbage incineration, paper mills, PVC plastic manufacturing,
Pesticide manufacturing, etc..... The trouble with dioxins is that they mimic
hormones in living organisms, so they have all sorts of widespread effects.
Worse; they persist in the environment and bioaccumulate in fat
(which females mobilize when they are pregnant or nursing-- dosing the
developing embryos and newly born with it). I chose dioxin as my research
subject because I've been reading about it for twenty years; ever since my first
pregnancy, during the Reagan years, which was also the beginning of my
environmental activism (Coincidence? Not!). Dioxin is a bigger problem
now than ever.
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