Or consider a more topical example. Virtually everyone is aware of global climate change, which vies with terrorism for billing as the top existential catastrophe. Stand away from the Kyoto Protocol process and the surrounding hysterics pro and con, however, and take a longer perspective. What the climate change negotiation process taken as a whole represents, fitful and ad hoc as it is, is the dawning of a realization that, regardless of what results from current international negotiations, our species will be engaged in a dialog with our climate, our atmospheric chemistry and physics, and the carbon cycle so long as we exist at anywhere near our current numbers on the planet.
This is not a problem, it’s a condition. We can change – more likely, redistribute – some of our impacts on these complicated and interrelated systems, but we will not reduce the human influence. Moreover, these particular perturbations are not isolated phenomena but just one way to perceive the evolving behaviour of interconnected global systems. A population of some 7 billion humans, each seeking a better life and thirsting for technologies used and perceived at the shop-floor level of complexity, ensures that our overall role in global systems will increase unless there is some sort of population crash. And be careful if you wish for this under your breath, for such a catastrophe, whether from nuclear winter, terrorism and response, ecosystem collapse, or some other source, would create havoc among all systems, human, natural, and built.
