Other pages in this site: Book recommendations (in association with Amazon.com) Poems, mostly by me. Comics and manga Wallpaper and screensavers Jokes. Footnotes to my main topics, some not referenced any more. Raves about whatever subjects take my fancy. Miscellaneous Links. Post your comments View Comments This page has been accessed times.

This site was created and is maintained by Tony Lovatt, and the attitudes and opinions expressed herein are entirely my own. Any comments, criticisms, complaints, or (heaven forfend!) legal notices can be sent to tonysl@ihug.co.nz. Much of the content of this site was originally aired in other fora. Created 16/April/1999. Last updated 15 March 2001. Now and always under construction. Since Gaia does not exist, it is necessary to invent Her.* What am I going on about? Each era of history has had its own defining characteristic, its paradigm, to use the modern term. The medieval world-view was a static one, in which God laid down the rules, and men learned them by revelation and obeyed them through faith. The Enlightenment introduced the notion of continuous progress and of natural law which mankind could discover by experiment. The Romantics of the nineteenth century denied the primacy of reason and exalted the passions, but they were essentially a philosophical and artistic reaction amidst a century of scientific progress. The twentieth century has seen the triumph of science - but a science that is, paradoxically, increasingly remote from everyday human life and understanding. Einstein's theory of relativity kicked off the century with the counter-intuitive announcement that the speed of light is always the same, no matter where you are or how fast you're travelling. Still, the mathematics held ways to decide what was visible from any viewpoint, so the philosophic underpinnings of science were scarcely disturbed. Around the middle of the century, twin results in physics and mathematics rang the death knell for mankind's hope for ultimate knowledge. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle shows that it is is impossible to know everything there is to know about even the simplest elementary particle. Gödel's Undecidability Theorem proves that it is impossible to construct a system of mathematics that is both complete and consistent. But even then, scientists could hold onto the belief - or hope - that, in the macroscopic "real" world, it was possible to approach arbitrarily close to complete knowledge. The development of Chaos theory in the latter part of the twentieth century put paid to that hope. In a perfectly deterministic world, even minuscule differences in starting conditions can lead, not merely to different results, but to different classes of results. Quantum uncertainty, meanwhile, guarantees that there are always unpredictable differences at atomic scales. The combination of quantum uncertainty and deterministic chaos has finally killed the old Enlightenment concept of the clockwork universe. The twentieth century has been characterised by the discovery and assimilation of Relativity, Uncertainty, and Chaos. Biodiversity and the human race There is still debate, partly because such research takes many years, but I believe that ecosystems are, in fact, fragile in a global sense. The hardest hit ones are already showing signs of irreversible degradation. Human impact on the environment is older than just the last century. There is speculation that we helped to kill off the Cave Bears and Mammoths 40,000 years ago or so. Certainly when human populations moved into new territory, such as America or Australia, the large native animals (what biologists endearingly refer to as "indigenous megafauna") were effectively obliterated. The bison ("buffalo") and moose of North America are merely the surviving representatives of several dozen giant animals that were wiped out within a thousand years or so. (There is a web-page entitled Ecology of Land-use Changes, maintained by the Ecology faculty of the Colorado State University, which examines this in a pretty scholarly way. Be warned, it has a lot of (fairly small) graphics.) Visible signs of devastation (such as the midwest Dustbowl earlier this century) tend to scare people and at least mitigate some of the worst effects. But ecosystems that are destroyed (OK, converted to simpler, less species-rich forms) out of sight of the public can continue to be exploited until they are virtually extinct. Wetlands, tundra, deserts all come into this category. And while these may be of relatively minor importance (although wetlands, for example, seem to play a major role in reducing the effects of global warming), one "invisible" biome that cannot be ignored is the sea. "Oceans Without Fish", while obviously pushing an environmentalist barrow, does it with some restraint and several references to magazines like Science. It points out that, despite increasing modernisation and investment, the world's total fish catch has been declining for ten years. This is merely a symptom of serious problems under the waves. Even ecosystems that are still in survivable shape are under constant attack. Deforestation is well-known. New pesticides, expanding farmland and expanding cities are converting once-thriving natural communities into precarious monocultures all the time. And the human population continues to expand. Most projections lead to a population of ten billion or so within a century. Somehow we will have to find something for those people to eat and to wear, and someplace to live, which in itself could destroy the last remaining wild habitat on the Earth. OK, that shows that ecosystems are in trouble. But why should we care? If we can live in our cities, eating farm-grown food, what difference does it make if the rest of the planet is a wasteland? The difference is that we are still dependent on the natural world. "Wild" food is still an important part of our diet (fish being the most obvious example.) Moreover, we rely on the environmental buffering of natural ecosystems to purify the water we drink, the air we breathe, and in most cases to help our crops and animals to grow. Human farms are mostly monocultures, which make them seem like paradise to disease organisms. Forget obscure breeds of beetle: geneticists right now are searching for wild relatives of wheat and rice. (See Our Food Supply Depends on Rich Biodiversity, by the National Wildlife Federation.) Moreover, there is the little-considered fact that the biomass of mankind already outweighs any other species on the planet. Especially if the tropical rainforests (the "lungs of the planet") are felled, we could actually find ourselves running short of oxygen to breathe! OK, end of lecture. I should mention that I found the above references by trolling through huge lists of results from several websearches. Most, of course, were off-topic, and some disqualified themselves through asininity: I didn't even look at the page entitled "Genetic Foods Spread Disease"! About this site This is not a "stylish" site. It has no pretty pictures, clever layouts or cute toys. This is because I am not a stylish person. What it does have is words. And links. This is because I am pedantic and prolix. If you don't like that sort of site, go away. I created the site using plain-vanilla HTML done on an ordinary text editor. (I'm an old pro(grammer), I don't trust anything to mess around with my code.) I got the colours from this Non-dithering Color Chart. To find out more, click the icon in the top right-hand corner of this page.