anthroposcenic

I guess that's the way we see it. If you drive down the road in a nicely kept neighborhood where the lawns are neatly mowed, the houses landscaped and painted and all the pathways to commerce well-maintained and trash-free, you say to yourself, "Oh, this is nice." That's human habitation at it's best. (We say 'habitation', not 'infestation.') Places where the model breaks down are less inspiring. Buildings and pathways we frequent and fail to maintain get run-down. We dig holes and leave them open and raw; abandon bits of our lives and let the weather have them. Everyone knows the story; at our best we push back against entropy and pour energy into the system to hold our corner of the multiverse shiny and upright, at ninety degree angles to itself. At our worst we destroy and dissipate and let the energy wash away, puddling the good, the bad , and the indifferent into that long flow downstream.

In the long run it's all the same, I suppose. Pulling up the floorboards in the barn and throwing a cat at the fleeing rats, kicking over an anthill or spraying a wasp nest, cutting the juniper to make pasture for the sheep -- there we go being anthropocentric. Is there a problem with that? Some days I see the humanizing of the planet as a process with a goal of peace and stability. More often it's the relentless growth of a parasitic infestation of the biosphere, like the rats under the floorboards. No other species to show such adaptability and persistence has been able to escape some ultimate demise. Although the fossil record does show some amazing success stories. Do we really think we're that different?

"Discover" magazine has an interesting article about our perception of risk, and the gist of the article is that our perception (as with so many other things) is not rational. We don't fear what is really going to kill us. Climate change? Obesity? How about getting into a car and driving five miles down the road? Are you paralyzed with fear yet? Apparently you should be. How about a serial killer or a huge toothy shark? Now we're talking! And yet the real risk from the last two is quite minimal. Yet I've never seen anyone run screaming from a cheeseburger.

So really, what do you think our chances are? Should we fight the flow of entropy in earnest? Make our habitations trim and green? Give up the fossil fuels and curb the population growth? Or just carry on as we are; trust to the miracles promised by technology to help us adapt to the new and warmer world? We're human, after all. We're different. We make the world what we want it to be; not like the rats at all. We're rational. We have a plan, right?