</lurk>
--- In Robb Nichols <>
> wrote, citing his friend in his cups:
>
> <The planet will recover in a blink of cosmic time" >
>
David replied:
>
> Robb, your friend is sadly mistaken and his "astuteness" reflects a
> profound and cavalier ignorance of the dynamics governing the changes
> we have wrought on the Earth.
I think this is a difference of parsing, David?
To me it seems non-controversially true both that the species and habitat
lost underway today are irrecoverable in many senses, and almost certainly
on the time frame that humanity as a species may be around to witness...
...but also that on truly cosmic, or rather, geological timeframes (what
John McPhee called "deep time"), this insult, like previous major
extinctions, will likely be followed by a fallow period but then, yet again,
by a resurgent explosion of life in unimagined new forms.
That we [write large] won't be around to see the latter, I am guessing, is
the source of what I read as your anguish. It is certainly the source of
mine.
Me, over my own cups I have been known to opine that in some sense it is
reassuring to think that the lasting legacy of our species on this planet
may well be a very thin, very very dirty, layer of sediment, and a few
centimeters of relatively boring and impoverished fossil layers piled
thereupon.
aaron
<lurk>
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