I think my general answer is that we are seeing really massive changes to the ecosystem, it’s just that humans don’t really need to worry that much about the health of the ecosystem. By and large, and taking into account human industrial scale efforts and ingenuity, the only thing that we really need is fresh water and oxygen, and as long as those exist we can probably adjust our crop production somehow to make things work. There is a good chance we can colonize mars, which doesn’t have a healthy ecosystem at all, because we have such a massive ability to reshape our environments to our needs.
What kind of observations would you expect to see in a world in which the biosphere has exploded and humans were able to reshape their environments as much as I think they can?
I would think that, even if we could adapt to things long-term, massive damage to the biosphere should still be more visible while we are adapting to the changed conditions.
As an imperfect analogy, consider global warming and sea levels rising. If sea levels were to rise so that most of what are currently coastal cities would go under water, then we could certainly adapt to that by building new cities inland and moving everybody there. But it would also be very obvious to everyone that this is what’s happening.
Similarly, if the biosphere exploded, I would expect there to be obvious signs of it, in the form of e.g. news articles about how crop production is failing and how new technologies are being developed to compensate. I have seen, for a long time, news articles about e.g. reductions in the amount of potential cropland, possible rises in sea levels due to climate change, changes in the price of oil causing famine in poorer countries, and the need to develop renewable energy sources due to fossil fuels declining. But with maybe one exception, I don’t recall running into much news about how agriculture is reacting and adapting to an ongoing ecosystem collapse.
I would also weakly expect changes in my ordinary surroundings that were obvious to me even as a non-expert, e.g. my local forest getting noticeably less healthy.
The changes to American national forests upon the reintroduction of wolves (and thus a reduction in the deer population) were supposedly obvious to non-experts; similarly, changes based on the collapse of friendly species (such as chestnuts being destroyed by blight) were also somewhat obvious (but perhaps less so, if you didn’t know what chestnut trees looked like).
I do recall another ‘friendly’ species decline that was of economic importance besides bees—vultures in India have been mostly wiped out by a cattle drug, which means huge increases in the amount of feral dogs, which means an increase in rabies (for humans as well). In California, condors were mostly wiped out through a similar process (lead poisoning from eating animals that were shot with lead bullets is a major cause of death now) but it’s not obvious that the reduction of condors has been hugely impactful (probably because we have better systems for dealing with roadkill / animal carcasses that the condors had been dealing with for us before). With bees, it seems like we both successfully prevented their complete decline and found out that it wasn’t too costly to replace their pollination services—either with robots, as linked, or with humans, as was done in China.
Random speculative ideas:
I think my general answer is that we are seeing really massive changes to the ecosystem, it’s just that humans don’t really need to worry that much about the health of the ecosystem. By and large, and taking into account human industrial scale efforts and ingenuity, the only thing that we really need is fresh water and oxygen, and as long as those exist we can probably adjust our crop production somehow to make things work. There is a good chance we can colonize mars, which doesn’t have a healthy ecosystem at all, because we have such a massive ability to reshape our environments to our needs.
What kind of observations would you expect to see in a world in which the biosphere has exploded and humans were able to reshape their environments as much as I think they can?
I would think that, even if we could adapt to things long-term, massive damage to the biosphere should still be more visible while we are adapting to the changed conditions.
As an imperfect analogy, consider global warming and sea levels rising. If sea levels were to rise so that most of what are currently coastal cities would go under water, then we could certainly adapt to that by building new cities inland and moving everybody there. But it would also be very obvious to everyone that this is what’s happening.
Similarly, if the biosphere exploded, I would expect there to be obvious signs of it, in the form of e.g. news articles about how crop production is failing and how new technologies are being developed to compensate. I have seen, for a long time, news articles about e.g. reductions in the amount of potential cropland, possible rises in sea levels due to climate change, changes in the price of oil causing famine in poorer countries, and the need to develop renewable energy sources due to fossil fuels declining. But with maybe one exception, I don’t recall running into much news about how agriculture is reacting and adapting to an ongoing ecosystem collapse.
I would also weakly expect changes in my ordinary surroundings that were obvious to me even as a non-expert, e.g. my local forest getting noticeably less healthy.
The changes to American national forests upon the reintroduction of wolves (and thus a reduction in the deer population) were supposedly obvious to non-experts; similarly, changes based on the collapse of friendly species (such as chestnuts being destroyed by blight) were also somewhat obvious (but perhaps less so, if you didn’t know what chestnut trees looked like).
I do recall another ‘friendly’ species decline that was of economic importance besides bees—vultures in India have been mostly wiped out by a cattle drug, which means huge increases in the amount of feral dogs, which means an increase in rabies (for humans as well). In California, condors were mostly wiped out through a similar process (lead poisoning from eating animals that were shot with lead bullets is a major cause of death now) but it’s not obvious that the reduction of condors has been hugely impactful (probably because we have better systems for dealing with roadkill / animal carcasses that the condors had been dealing with for us before). With bees, it seems like we both successfully prevented their complete decline and found out that it wasn’t too costly to replace their pollination services—either with robots, as linked, or with humans, as was done in China.