Thinking Bigger Than Yourself

mohandasgandhi:

dominickbrady:

There are a lot of issues surrounding this and I’m pretty certain that the FDA will drop the ball again.  The issue of wild fisheries being dead in 20 years is real.  We can’t get away from that.  Instead of finding methods to fish in a more sustainable manner, we’ve got this short cut.

uzairm:

Two same-age salmon, one a genetically modified salmon (rear), the other a non-genetically modified salmon (foreground) appear in this photo provided by AquaBounty Technologies. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently been studying whether to approve marketing a genetically engineered animal as safe for people to eat. (AP Photo/AquaBounty Technologies)

Hat Tip: The Big Picture

I don’t particularly care whether these salmon are safe to eat or not.  This isn’t going to solve the problem of overfishing.  Genetically modifying an animal to meet our rate of over-consumption is unsustainable itself. 

I don’t think the path the environmental sustainability is to tweak it with science and technology so it becomes suitable for us to use to our benefit in order to sustain human life.  We do not need to be adapting Earth to us, WE need to be adapting to Earth.  

We drown our vegetation in pesticides and fertilizer so it grows faster, we pump cattle and poultry full of hormones and antibiotics so they grow faster, we add “vitamins” to our sugar water because it’s too difficult for us to eat healthy unless it tastes good, and we wonder what the problem is. 

Why is my planet warming?  Why is my child getting sick from drinking bottled water?  Why is Russia on fire?  Why can’t I breathe when I go outside?  Why am I getting sick all the time?  Why is there oil on my beach?  Where are the butterflies and flowers?  Why don’t the birds sing in the morning anymore?

We need to start treating the Earth with respect. It will respect us back.

Emphasis mine. This is exactly why I get ticked off at the folks who spout geoengineering ideas as climate-saving gospel - those who say dump things in the ocean to promote algae growth! Shoot silicon dust into the outer atmosphere to block solar radiation! Because it’s all business-as-usual crock … sure, some of these solutions might have a positive effect, but a) we don’t have any clue what the negative effects would be, and b) wasn’t dumping and polluting and acting unnaturally what got us into this mess in the first place? We don’t need solutions that let us continue life as usual, producing and consuming and discarding ad nauseum. We need solutions that MIMIC nature, rather than counteracting it. Our planet is not a disposable, endless resource. We need to stop treating it like one.