Restoring humans to a place in the ecosystem
Published on Sunday, November 22nd 1998 on The San Juan StarThose of us who are concerned about environmental quality and abhor air pollution had pangs of pain and sweaty palms last week when we were advised that our Planet Earth would be subject to the recurring Leonides meteor shower. It brought back memories of the "Mars Invades the Earth" episode of 1938, when Orson Welles narrated his radio version of H. G. Wells’ "The War of the Worlds" so vividly and realistically that some people who were listening to the radio program went into panic and actually committed suicide. Here we are again, sixty years later, victims once more of denizens from outer space.
Perhaps the most impressive narration of what a massive object from space can do when it whams against the Earth is in Richard Muller’s account of mass extinctions, in his 1988 book "Nemesis: The Death Star". He and his collaborators, which include Louie and Walt Alvarez, postulate that a major meteorite striking the earth is a cause of mass extinction, and that mass extinction episodes recur at about every 26 million years or so. One such episode brought about the mass extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. This ended the great Cretaceous period of the huge reptiles. A meteorite impacted the Earth with such force that the fumes and dust stemming from it reduced sunlight, created what Carl Sagan used to call "nuclear winter", impaired photosynthesis, killed away vegetation, and the vegetarian reptiles starved to death. Their carnivore predators followed suit. Talk about air pollution!
As recently as June 30, 1908, something hit the Tunguska forest, in the Siberian wilderness. It leveled 3,000 square kilometers of trees, yet dug no crater. Some astronomers are still scratching their heads as to what it was that hit.
The fact is that between 55 and 100 tons of space debris –trash– enter our atmosphere every single day, a statistic that may be met by one piece alone. One space stone, the one that fell near Grootfontein in Namibia, weighed 60 metric tons. The first runner up is the Ahnighito that impacted near Cape York, Greenland. That one weighed only 31 metric tons. A metric ton is 1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds: you don’t want that on your windshield!
A heavy-duty specimen of one of these object landing near your house would make a crater almost 200 miles in diameter, or slightly bigger than Puerto Rico. Oh, by the way, meteorites are metallic (iron, nickel, cobalt and chromium: heavy metals), stone (silicate rock), or combinations thereof. All enter our atmosphere in violation of National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Who ever thought of igniting heavy metals openly in the atmosphere? Fifty five to a hundred tons a day of metallic fumes…! Wow! Doesn’t that upset the ecology?
As an ecologist I can assure you that nothing upsets ecology. Ecology is a science. It deals with the relationships between organisms and their environment. The ecology of a forest fire is that trees burn. The ecology of Hurricane Georges is that trees fall and lose their leaves and birds lose their nests. The ecology of predator-prey relationships is that cats eat birds. Meteorites kill dinosaurs. That’s nature. Ecology has no feeling, nor does it set moral standards. Ecology tells it like it is.
It is we who become enamored with some organisms and use ecology as an excuse to protect some above others, sometimes going against the laws of nature or skewing the normal relationships between organisms. But let’s be honest about this. Our love of manatees or parrots has nothing to do with ecology. It only has to do with manatees and parrots. Celestial spectacles like the Leonides shower, or natural disasters like the meteoric extinction of dinosaurs, are all part of nature. Like volcanoes, earthquakes, drought, El Niño, La Niña and species extinctions. If we choose to make our own arbitrary species selection, that is our prerogative, but not on behalf of ecology. Some people eat meat, some people don’t. It’s nice that we can eat fish, except that it’s not nice for the fish.
When we view nature, we often humanize it. When nature naturally shudders, some things get hurt. When meteorites strike against the Earth, there can be some damage. That’s nature. Did the Leonides file an Environmental Impact Statement? I’m almost sure none was filed. The Leonides or any celestial body striking the Earth is a force majeure, an act of God, and all is acceptable. Yet we build a highway under the best technology available, and we have insulted the ecology. We build an aqueduct to the highest standards, and we are defiling water resources. We propose to generate electric power under the strictest compliance and after obtaining all the permits, and we profane nature. We propose waste treatment plants to the best of our abilities, and we injure freshwater plankton. If we don’t do any of these things, we injure man, threaten his health and affect his quality of life. But that’s all right. Better to injure man than turtle grass.
Of course, many things were done wantonly in the past with sad environmental consequences. We have learned from past mistakes and have bent over backwards with the most stringent regulations to keep those mistakes from recurring. The problem is that we have not put in place the enforcement measures for all those restrictive regulations. We have only put in the constraints. The more abusive the constraints against necessary projects, the more imaginative and damaging the violators and the delinquents will be. Watchful management is far better than restrictive but unenforceable constraint. Otherwise, quality of life will be a coveted desire that will demand violation.
Let’s bring man back into the ecosystem. Let’s accept that man is part of nature. Man has needs and has as much right to be here as turtle grass and manatees.