I have been thinkin about this for a while now. Have had discussions with two people. One, my closest friend, and one my newbie roommate. The convesations totally bear out the fact that you can choose your friends not your roommates.
I am a geologist training now to be an ecologist. There's not much I wanted to do for a living than work with nature. In all its resplendent, glorious and oftentimes disgusting form. One vey important thing has bee driven into my head over these past 6 years of learning, and that is that we just dont know enough!... we really dont....
we dont know how all the intricate threads of nature work... we dont know just how miniscule or just how massive a change will caus catastrophe.... granted that we have done a lot of work... and over the years we have made a few strides... but we have also understood that the earth is so vast that we have probably not even covered 1/10th of the knowledge it has to give us....
we have made strides but we have also made gigantic mistakes.... and many a times we have made these mistakes behind the vener of knowledge.... (anybody doubting this should look up the hisory of the Yellowstone National Park)...
not only the lay people.. but even our scientists have fallen prey to this thought process... they get scred if their studies start to show anything contradicting older more accpted theories....
my roomie was under this illusion... when we had a iscussion on species coservation... she said why worry???... so we lose species?..... so we lose animals???... we'll just use our knowledge and adjust the equbrilium of the earth....those were her exact words...and dont start thinking tht this is some young girl with britany speas on her mind.... she's PhD student doing her degree in biomed....a scientist like her is full of such arrogance.... i can just imagine the many others.... and then i can just imagine the lay people who come under their influence and start believing in our position as the "ultimate rulers" (another one oher phrases)...
why hve we lost our humility?... why have we lost our sense of wonder?... why do we think we are indepndent of any other influence.. tht we dont belong to any ecosystem... rather that we own it....why dont we thing its horrible tht our children may never see a wild buck?...
i dunno... and i think lots of people dont care.... when i put tht argument to her.. she said to me tht we have ecologists like u working on it... we dont have to care... tht's when i decided i must write a blog abt this.... cos really... we ecologists are just a miniscule part of the society... it is people like my roomies an you who must care...otherwise we have no legs to stand on....
I was talking to my closest friend about this... and she made me find hope.... there are people who care and people who will use their voice... but use their voice they must....
i think i have finally found a purpose to my blog after all this floundering.... hopefully i can keep writing about issues i care about.... not just abstract thoughts... hopefully i can write about things you need to hear and not ramblings... dunno if i can do it...
sure will try.
4 comments:
Interesting thoughts!
ecology is indeed as u said....still very much unexplored...good motivation for researchers like u.
You dont really explain why we do need species conservation? I mean old species dying and new coming up, isnt it a law of nature?
I am no expert, but how do you assume that we human beings have actually done anything (good or bad) worthy enough to change an iota of nature's plans? Except maybe grown too large to be driven into a newer ecology...:D?
hey vaibhav... nice to know somebody's reading... well.. yeh if u talking of the natural progression of evolution and extinction... sure.. tht's a law of nature... even instances of species driven to extinction by competeing species is not new... what is new however is the fact tht we as just one species are competing for habitat, resources and just generally space with every other species in the world.. we are not only providing competition to a particular like species.. but everything... tht as far as we can deduce has never happened before in the history of our planet... and tht is wht will throw everything off balance...
Well, by some trick of infinite improbablity, I have reached back here, and see hat you have even cared to reply! (you do take blogging seriously:D)
ANyway, I agree with what you are saying. My question is could we have helped it? Say we knew what socalled effects of our progress were going to be on nature etc.? And had the political and social will power to act accordingly to 'save the planet'. Would that have helped? I mean, the human population was going to increase with scientific progress anyway, and so would the per capita natural resource consumption! When one species progresses, others suffer invariably! So even if we knew, would it have mattered???
And not just that (this is like Oracle and Neo), assuming similar logic, can whatever we do now help? If not, should we care enough?:D
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