[PLUG-TALK] Religious gene

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 5 Oct 2011, Michael Moore wrote:

>> Changing it, surely. Destroying it, hardly.
>
> George Carlin made similar points.
>
> Excerpt:
> "Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. ..."

   I've seen this constantly in my business. Too many folks think that
natural systems are stable, that change is bad, and change by humans is
exceedingly bad. The reality is that natural systems are variable, and vary
on different time scales.

   The summer water temperature of a high gradient headwater stream varies
greatly from the low just before dawn to the high in late afternoon. "Old
growth" forests are a seral stage of vegetation replacement that begins with
bare rock with lichens and moss, becomes soils, then sees pioneer grasses
followed by forbs, shrubs, and trees. The so-called old growth seral stage
usually persists longer than prior stages, but windthrow and
lightning-caused fire make holes that fill in the biologic desert of their
forest floor (all the nutrients are tied up in living biomass). What we call
old growth today were saplings 200 years ago, and today's saplings will be
old growth in 200 years.

   There's constant change, much caused by man, but change is inevitable and
we ought to learn to adapt to it rather than try to fight it. An example of
the latter were the massive fires in Yellowstone N.P. in 1988 after decades
of micro-(mis)managment. Today's public forest managment practices are
equally bad.

Rich