Why does it have to be
so complicated? All we ask of nature is to be able to do what we
want to do; no more, no less. We like to think of our impact on the
world as controlled and businesslike, with only one variable
changing at a time. But no matter how hard we try to keep things
simple, they won’t stay simple. Nature is not just one thing:
it’s everything. And it just won’t stop.
Take, for example, fires. They bother us all a lot — that
ugliness, the blackened trees, the homeless wildlife and more often
lately, the homeless homeowners — not to mention all the burned-up
timber. So for decades we have followed a simple rule: Stop forest
fires. The problem is that nature changes in response to change.
Without the cleansing effects of frequent burns, dense fuels
accumulate — live saplings form dense thickets, dead brush piles
up — and fires when they come are terrible to behold. Our best
efforts to protect the forests have made things worse.
Then there’s global warming. This one seems really unfair. We
didn’t think nature was even involved with it. All we did was
burn the cheapest, most perfect fuels we could find: fossil fuels.
This burning has produced almost miraculous economic and
technological growth. Who would have thought to worry about
changing the huge and seemingly unchangeable atmosphere? For many
decades — no one. But all that time, as carbon dioxide levels
invisibly rose, nature was paying attention. It was changing, in
many, many ways. So now, when we have finally taken notice, we see
changes everywhere we look, from the vanished glaciers of
Kilimanjaro to the melting permafrost of Alaska, from the blooming
times of wildflowers to the breeding ranges of birds.
You’d think we might have learned one lesson by now: When it
comes to the environment, we don’t know what we are doing.
Or, more precisely, we might know one particular thing we’re
doing, but we have no idea of everything we’re doing. What to
do with this lesson? A reasonable response would be to exercise a
certain caution when it comes to “managing” nature. But
it doesn’t seem to be working that way, judging by some
proposals for dealing with global warming.
The logic goes
like this: The almost endlessly complicated consequences of global
warming come from one change — rising carbon dioxide levels. So,
couldn’t we make just one other change to get things back to
the way they were? That is the temptation of the simple, and
apparently, it’s irresistible.
Some of the most
gifted scientists in the world have proposed technological
interventions to reverse or mask the effects of carbon dioxide
rise. These range from the seemingly plausible to the bizarre. In
the latter category is the idea of lofting a Saturn-like ring of
micro-satellites into orbit above the Earth, where they would cast
a cooling shadow over the equatorial regions.
More
plausible is the idea of “ocean fertilization,” adding
iron to the nutrient-rich but iron-poor open ocean. This would
stimulate algae blooms that would soak up carbon dioxide. When the
algae died and sank, the CO 2 would be effectively
“sequestered,” or removed from circulation. There have
been some small-scale tests of this concept, which suggest that it
could work. Several commercial firms now propose to begin adding
iron to the world’s oceans on a massive scale, selling the
resulting “carbon credits” to companies facing
penalties for their carbon dioxide emissions.
The
question is: Would nature let us change just this one thing? Or is
it more likely that drastically increasing algae in the
world’s oceans would have unanticipated effects on fisheries,
or the acidity of seawater, or perhaps even currents and global
weather patterns? Have we ever, even once, made a large change to
the global environment that did not produce unanticipated
consequences? Has nature ever let us change just one thing?
Ninety years ago, the American humorist H. L. Mencken
wrote: “There is always an easy solution to every human
problem — neat, plausible and wrong.” Surely it’s time
to finally abandon the search for easy solutions and begin the task
of dealing with the mess that we have made of the world. We really
can’t delay any longer, because, for her part, Nature just
won’t stop.
Pepper Trail is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer in Ashland,
Oregon.
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