dohboi wrote:"We are the most vulnerable, but not to extinction"
That's exactly the contradiction that SG and I object to.
I acknowledge this and stand corrected.
My guess is that you have taken a metaphor/likeness/similarity (human society is like an ecosystem) and turned it into an actual and evaluative equivalence (loss of some part of that 'human ecosystem' has the same intrinsic value as loss of parts of the actual global ecosystem).
This is not the metaphor I am employing here. Intrinsic value implies better or worse. There is no better or worse in nature. I am viewing man made environments in all its facets from cities to cow pastures as an integrated self created ecosystem. This is not hard to understand when you consider biomass. We replaced the biomass of native ecosystems when we destroyed them and replaced this biomass with our own living arrangement; crops, pastures, cities, etc. Just like a natural ecosystem our man made living arrangement supplies the same components; food, shelter, sanitation, etc. It is less a metaphor and more an accurate term in my view. We are not integrated any longer into natural ecosystems in the way we gather our food or shelter ourselves. We have created our own ecosystem quite literally.
And it is highly vulnerable to correction.
What I have done with these posts, which I will now acknowledge as being not completely correct, was use the provocative term "most vulnerable" in comparing humans and our landscapes as disproportionately more vulnerable to climate change than are natural ecosystems.
Where I stand by though is that any species, human or otherwise, when in extreme overshoot, does become the most vulnerable component in their ecoystems. There I did it again
Let's say "most vulnerable to correction" then. Maybe that is better. Ripe for correction we are. OK, I don't want to any longer belabor the point unless anyone else still has juice to go further into this.....