However, I think those people would be more focused on „giving nature space and letting it do it’s thing“ rather than trying to upgrade nature. Given our track record, I would tend to agree with them. Let’s not put the cart in front of the horse and think that we can effectively design ecological ecosystems just yet.
Yeah, there’s a big ol’ Chesterton’s Fence between where we are now and redesigning nature. We’re not ready. But we can intervene to undo damage we’ve already done, and stop doing more.
Design implies a plan, and an expectation for how that plan leads to desired outcomes, and I don’t think we usually have that in any coherent, big-picture sense. Not in the way we design a car, or a supply chain, or an operating system. We’re reshaping nature, taming some of it, destroying some of it, and damaging some of it. Sometimes we’re also enhancing or repairing some of it, and that is increasing too, thankfully.
There are several places in the world where nature is being designed like a modern car. At least measured by a similar or greater number of man-hours being put in by designers.
There’s no Ford-style assembly line or General Motors of environmental infrastructure yet.
Environmental infrastructure/engineering is a fundamentally harder problem, at least under current levels of understanding. Comparable man-hours are nowhere near adequate to obtain comparable results. I would certainly agree that we are now close to where car engineering was in the pre-Ford days.
Just to let you know that this overall framing is pretty common in sustainable development contexts. It’s often called blue and green infrastructure. See for example: https://iucn.org/news/europe/201911/building-resilience-green-and-blue-infrastructure
However, I think those people would be more focused on „giving nature space and letting it do it’s thing“ rather than trying to upgrade nature. Given our track record, I would tend to agree with them. Let’s not put the cart in front of the horse and think that we can effectively design ecological ecosystems just yet.
Yeah, there’s a big ol’ Chesterton’s Fence between where we are now and redesigning nature. We’re not ready. But we can intervene to undo damage we’ve already done, and stop doing more.
For better or worse, we are already doing a lot to redesign nature right now.
Design implies a plan, and an expectation for how that plan leads to desired outcomes, and I don’t think we usually have that in any coherent, big-picture sense. Not in the way we design a car, or a supply chain, or an operating system. We’re reshaping nature, taming some of it, destroying some of it, and damaging some of it. Sometimes we’re also enhancing or repairing some of it, and that is increasing too, thankfully.
There are several places in the world where nature is being designed like a modern car. At least measured by a similar or greater number of man-hours being put in by designers.
There’s no Ford-style assembly line or General Motors of environmental infrastructure yet.
Environmental infrastructure/engineering is a fundamentally harder problem, at least under current levels of understanding. Comparable man-hours are nowhere near adequate to obtain comparable results. I would certainly agree that we are now close to where car engineering was in the pre-Ford days.