New York Times comment:
Just as a mass deflects the space-time continuum around it, every organism changes the flux of energies it is immersed within merely by its presence. Ecosystems are simple models of the complexity of inter-relation that the presence of Life brings to the planet.
Humans in their current numbers – attributable to ‘easy’ energy access (resources) – are clearly affecting the entire global system. Bolstered by a glut of consumable energy sources that allow us to propagate in unprecedented numbers, we are causing a shift in global energy flows paralleled in scope only by the rise of Prokaryotic Archean life-forms.
Our ‘management’ of the ecosystem, despite the occasional successes of a holistic systems thinking approach, is based on reductive models that can never fully anticipate the range of effects exerted on the global system.
Living organisms react to abundant energy sources by reproducing; when energy sources disappear, species numbers collapse. It may be that the planet will simply have to abide the burst of human population and its attendant systemic change. Once the species has consumed all easily accessible energy, a gradual (or precipitous!) drop in human numbers will follow, and the global system will take on yet another character, managing itself very well, thank you. Life will continue, projecting itself into the future with astonishing vigor, even ferocity, until the planet and the solar system get subsumed.
So it goes: https://tinyurl.com/hfpregr