🚀 go-pugleaf

donquijote1111@yahoo.com (Don Quijote) wrote in message news:<d82348eb.0312291003.5ec90bc5@posting.google.com>...

> I have a hard time telling of another animal who hates Nature so much.
> Other species have learned to live with it, but we sure are
> relentlessly assaulting the bounty of Nature, almost with a passion...

All animals hate nature.  Otherwise, they'd happily plant seeds and
wouldn't eat, and would be happy to die, so as to feed another
generation.  Most animals fight for survival, many fight for
territory, many fight for sport, and some lifeforms are even
victorious by not appearing to fight at all.  Every animal that is
remotely sentient will always want more than it has -- greed and envy
are natural instincts throughout the wild kingdom.

Heck, even plants spend so much energy following the warmth and light
of the sun, and spend so much of their resources fighting gravity,
just to make other plants that are doomed to the same struggles.

Nature has already dealt the cards and life, and all things that every
life form has come to know as reality and eternal has long ago been
slated, by nature, to be slowly annihilated.

You seem to not recognize nature's true face.  Nature, you might say,
hates nature itself.

Comets & meteorites, tidal waves, volcanos, fires, hurricanes,
droughts, sun-spots, supernova and so on are likely contributors to
biomass destruction on scales larger than humanity could ever hope to
compete with.

Imagine those huge California or Utah fires that raged out of control
in the last few years.  Those happened all the time in millenia past,
and wouldn't it be sensible to assume that a great many of those
dwarfed the modern fires.

It is calculated that the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone would erupt
with the force of 2500 Mt Saint Helens, and Mount St Helens exploded
with the force of 25,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.  Such eruptions seem
to occur regularly ever 600,000 years in Yellowstone.  And that
eruption is still smaller in comparison to the Toba eruption of about
75,000 years ago (much sooner, and more frequent in occurance), which
unleashed 2800 cubic kilometers compared to the weak Mt St Helens
event which released about 1 cubic kilometer of ejecta.

Now, if you assume that there was even a remotely similar bio-density
to that found in the rain-forests in some other portions of the Earth
affected by these incidents, then you must realize that killing off
70% of the animals larger than a large dog for an area twice the size
of Utah, then you'd have to realize that MANY species disappeared.  It
would only be logical because people are presuming that destroying 500
square acres of rain-forest causes the extinction of multiple species.

Next, you have virii and bacteria, which are not intelligent hunters. 
They have no qualms about killing off every one of their hosts, even
if it means the death of entire species.  Maybe some, in the specie
will be immune, but the virus and bacteria adapt too, so even if the
original host specie dies, then other species can become targets.  A
good example is the flu virus vector from birds, to pigs, onto humans.

It would be folly to assume that plagues hadn't struck animals which
depleted their numbers only to be finished off by predators.

Some naturalists try to stick their heads in the sand and claim that
extinction by "natural" predation is impossible.  Several plausible
situations can be raised which would cause such an extinction without
huge swings in ecological behaviours.  It's probably natural that such
extinctions occur often, but that it's not important...  Like losing a
three-striped barn-bass (not a real animal) -- nobody saw one before
in that part of the woods, and when the last one died, nobody realized
it.  This seems to have been a factor in the Paleozoic era which
contributed to huge increases in the extinction rates.

Nature, by virtue of her (anthropomorphisizing here / or would it be
gynocomorphisizing?) very essence does not seek equilibrium and it is
not a creative force.  Nature is inherently destructive.  You never
see a tornado build a forest of trees, and you don't see a platypus
born at the moment a meteor strikes the breadth of a mountain.  The
old life-systems permitted huge beasts and horrendous extremes of wild
activity.  Earth, even without mankind, would not now accomodate a
planet replete with dinosaurs.  The food chain is tool "tall" to
permit those creatures, en masse.

The very laws of entropy mean that everything will die, and at some
point, nature will be quite universally void of all life and
eventually, all matter itself as substances lose cohesion and then
again when atoms decay back into their constituent particles and drift
apart into the cold lifeless void of space.  In a few hundred billion
years, nature will snuff out the last star and the last hope for life
in the universe will die with it.

That's the basics of "nature".  She isn't loving, she isn't forgiving,
she ABHORS equilibrium.  She thrives on, cultivates and enforces
entropy and destruction.

Mankind, although he too fights nature, is the first lifeform on this
planet with a shot at actually seriously delaying the inevitable, or
at least the first to be able to come to terms with nature's rules (I
am not saying that we understand nature in all her simplicity or
complexity -- just that we COULD possibly understand it in a way that
no creature from this planet ever has).  Mankind is just doing
(slightly more successfully) what every other creature on the planet
has wanted, tried and failed to do.