Science vs. Nature

I was just listening to Naomi Klein "This Changes Everything" - and she's talking about "Geo Engineering".

And a lot of parallels strike me between that discussion (is GE a reasonable approach - is there some level at which it is reasonable - what will happen should the world's feedback systems become a serious mess for human survival without it, etc.) and GMOs and the many concerns that they bring up.

I have many friends on both sides of both debates.

I feel like neither side is wrong, so much as both have something important to contribute if the other would just listen.

Naomi Klein's description of seeding the outer atmosphere with sulphur dioxide, and similar to the ocean, and more to seed clouds that we can help control the rain distribution, and so on, and i'm thinking "Hey, this is also the discussion about western medicine and its failures."

I know that my science friends will roll their eyes and dismiss everything that is essentially about creating health without using scientific interventions such as we commonly name "medicine" in the west. Pills mostly, but surgeries as well.

And I'm not saying that western medicine doesn't have its uses - it's amazingly wonderful aspects. On the other hand, I'm seeing my own body and many other people's become a mess with folks trying to figure out how to manage them with pills and surgeries and the medicines tend to be more and more and more. They don't seem to do a good job of ending, but rather one starts a medication to address one imbalance, only to then need another to address a new imbalance, only then to need yet another for another imbalance (each additional imbalance at least contributed to by the previous medications taken).

We all know it's true - we watch those godforsaken ads on TV about some new pill and then for two minutes straight some poor bloke is talking as fast as humanly possibly to squeeze in the endless list of side effects that may be caused by the pill in question.

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My point, and Naomi Klein's point is that western scientific approaches tend to be very intrusive and dependency-creating.

So once we start with some form of Geo Engineering, we're likely to cause other imbalances (less rainfall in our best food valleys, for example), that then need additional highly intrusive GE interventions to try to manage, that then beget other imbalances.... and the cycle doesn't end until the patient is dead.

Now, yes, for a Human, the patient is always going to die anyway. But for Earth... this is ... a whole different ball game.

Instead of losing one patient, we're talking wiping out the Human race (at a minimum).

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I'm tempted to wax philosophical here and remind myself that oh-well, if we all die we all die.

But honestly, I'd really rather not be the cause of the death of Earth.

And ultimately - the only reason we have for trying to intervene in all of these already balanced feedback loops we call the biosphere or weather or climate or nature is because we're already interfering viz. carbon emissions.

The solution isn't to ignore the root cause, and find new pills to shove down the patient's throat to manage symptom after symptom, but to address the original cancer - our addiction to carbon fuels.

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Anyway, all of this has parallels with GMOs Yes, we can engineer various things - but will we ever end up with crops that are more robust in the long term, less energy intensive, etc?

I know my science-y friends are screaming "YES!" - but I'm worried about the unintended - the unforeseen consequences.

It would help enormously if I saw humanity as being responsible when things go wrong - saw us as having good feedback systems in our own societies that dealt with illness - in this case pollution or bad science or what not, but the reality I see is that as humans - our social structures are incredibly bad - awful - miserable at taking responsibility for when things go wrong and even worse at fixing them or addressing the messes they create.

So I am not - NOT - reassured about GMOs, nor about GE, nor about western medicine & pharmaceuticals, despite also seeing that all of these has great potential for good - the good is swamped by our long, long track record for irresponsibility as a species.

And to me, that's the part I need my science friends to become literate about.