Newfie wrote:We didn't create the surplus, we just figured out how to tap it.
Yes that's right. What I really meant was that we discovered and then exploited it, unlike yeast whose spores through dispersal passively land on sugar.
Discovering and exploiting is human agency. That is what we often glorify and consider exceptional about our species. What Kubli likes to remind us. The tragedy of our generation and recent generations is that, through our hubris, we allowed human agency to temporarily circumvent and ignore natural boundaries by eliminating our predators and producing huge amounts of food with the use of fossil fuels and by complete domination of landscapes. We have become culturally habituated to seeing this human agency as above and beyond the rules of ecology. That is the current cultural inertia.
And that cultural inertia is as finite as the drawing down of fossil fuels.
The Overshoot Predator will shift the gears in reverse and human agency will change from being temporarily dominant over ecological principals to becoming subservient to the consequences. That is what I mean when I say we have forfeited human agency in being able to solve the problem and we have by default surrendered solutions over to the agency of consequences. (i.e. Montequest's frequent reference that we will either solve overpopulation by design or default).
The OP is all about bringing back the historical balance of our place in natural ecosystems. Humans have always been a keystone species that have played a major role in the ecosystems we have inhabited. It is only recently that we have become a parasite on our planet.
We actually were already somewhat exceptional even before we had the hubris to believe that we were beyond the laws of ecology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_speciesA keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its environment relative to its abundance.[1] Such species are described as playing a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem and helping to determine the types and numbers of various other species in the community.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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