Nuke the environment
Surprising news from what’s left of the Bikini Atoll, in the south Pacific, where they used to stage nuclear explosions for the benefit of press photographers. Here’s New Scientist:
What does a coral reef look like 50 years after being nuked? Not so bad, it seems. Coconuts growing on Bikini Atoll haven’t fared so well, however.
Three islands of Bikini Atoll were vapourised by the Bravo hydrogen bomb in 1954, which shook islands 200 kilometres away. Instead of finding a bare underwater moonscape, ecologists who have dived it have given the 2-kilometre-wide crater a clean bill of health.
“It was fascinating – I’ve never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands,” says Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia.
Richards and colleagues report a thriving ecosystem of 183 species of coral, some of which were 8 metres high. They estimate that the diversity of species represents about 65% of what was present before the atomic tests.
The ecologists think the nearby Rongelap Atoll is seeding the Bikini Atoll, and the lack of human disturbance is helping its recovery. Although the ambient radiation is low, people have remained at bay.
This mirrors a similar story a few years ago about the remarkable recovery in biodiversity in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, compared to regions outside it.
One doesn’t want to oversimplify a complex, non-linear system, or pretend that nuclear contamination isn’t a serious threat to life, property and the environment. However, such counter-intuitive findings do reinforce the point that nature is really a resilient, adaptible, stable system, and is surprisingly capable of recovering from or evolving through even major catastrophe. It isn’t the fragile, unstable and static system that is so often portrayed by environmental doomsayers and media sensationalists.
(Hat tip to Rich for forwarding the link.)
I agree with your conclusion, Ivo.
No matter what man does, I don’t believe we have the power to utterly and irretrievably destroy our planet. No matter what we do, this planet will heal itself.
However, what we do to it does decide whether our species will survive. I believe that we have the ability to so disrupt the planet that we cause our own extinction.
That we will eventually become extinct is of no doubt - we will eventually all die out and nothing we have ever done will be remembered. It will all be lost. Every single last bit of information about us will one day be irretrievably lost.
I’m glad you agree with that part, but I’m not convinced about your pessimism about humanity.
It’s possible that we’ll accidentally cause our own extinction, but people are pretty good at acting when things look like getting critical. Consider the hysteria and heavy-handed government action when infectious disease breaks out, for example.
Sure, eventually the odds are we may be extinct. It’s not like we’ve been on the planet forever. But it’s not exactly something that keeps me up at night. It’s not something that’s likely in the next, say, few centuries. And when it does appear to become a major risk, I doubt anything we do today could prepare our progeny much. They’ll live in a completely different world with technology unimagineable today.
If you asked someone in 1800 what the biggest risks facing humanity would be in 2000 given a six billion population, and what they’d do about them then, what would they answer? Remember, they wouldn’t know about aircraft, diesel powered ships, electric light, antibiotics, horseless carriages, the telephone, social security, computers, oil wells, organ transplants, or how to conceivably feed billions of people given the world’s available arable land.
No, I’m not only confident in nature’s robustness and ability to adapt and recover, I’m equally confident about the adaptability and ingenuity of humanity. Solving problems and adapting, in a local, decentralised, spontaneous fashion, to previously unknown conditions is among our strong suits.
One thing that is natural, however, is dystopic fantasies about the future. Humans have always been a pessimistic bunch, reveling in scary prophesies of apocalypse brought upon our own heads by our sinful nature. Which is another reason I reckon we’ll be just fine.
To put it in perspective, I consider a major natural disaster, such as a cataclysmic super-volcano eruption or an earth-striking object, a more likely reason for the demise or decimation of humanity than our actions today.