climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion
The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.
Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.
Everything else could hypothetically be fixed
We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.
The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.
Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.
We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.