What Is Natural? The Environment Is Now Political

What is not natural? The environment is now political.

Evolution does not stop.

The ecology of planet Earth is rightly a topic of vigorous discussion; great claims are made that the world will end if we do not reverse modern industrial practices and stop the use of “fossil” fuels. There is often, in the media reporting of scientific claims, confusion between fact and opinion, the borders between actual, scientific evidence-based knowledge and an expectation based on a theoretic extrapolation of unverified data. These concepts get very blurred in the media. Modern popular journalism and, especially, the unrestrained social media posts do not expect the reader to actually think about what is being claimed. Persuasion without being restrained by truth is the accepted norm. The various “causes” from climate change, from air quality to social degradation to species extinction, get all interwoven in a confused tapestry of ideologies. Many of the slogan uttering advocates of social change claim we must get back to nature to save the world. Politics with all its mix and ideology and deceit, with its greed and its ability to distort truth to suit a leaders stance, has taken over all debates about environmental issues. So, let us attempt to express some rational thoughts.

What is natural? Long before humans evolved, other species roamed this planet and almost all have become extinct without human action. So, it has to be asked: Is extinction of species a natural occurrence? The global climate of Earth has varied from ice age to temperate and back again before human activity could have been influential. So, is global climate change natural?

The indigenous people of Canada have a saying: Nature can provide for your need, but not your greed; many people do not seem to grasp the idea that everything comes from a natural source. Most plastics come from petrol-carbons and these come from natural materials. Oil and coal are naturally occurring substances. There is a very old law of physics which states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be altered. If we burn coal, the ash, the chemical gasses and particles in the smoke, are the parts of that altered state. If we make something from iron, the metal comes from iron ore, which is dug out of the ground and altered to become what we want. The cry is “renewable resources,” but no one suggests how fast we can renew woodlands if we build all homes from timber only.

What seems to escape all those advocating changes to the way humans live is that even those “ecologically acceptable” products come from a natural source and are then changed. The changing process requires energy. There are natural cycles, which would appear to say matter, once transformed and then left to nature, will revert back; and so, eventually all ends up back where it started, for example, water. Starting in the ocean, it evaporates into gaseous state, condenses, and falls as rain. This lands on the ground, moistens this, but eventually ends up back in rivers which flow back to the ocean. Even when we humans interfere and drink water, it eventually ends up as gaseous moisture that we breath out, or via sewage treatments, back in rivers.

There are many reports of complaints about the amount of methane given out by farm animals. It is possible these complaints are orchestrated by a vegetarian food processor, but the real point is the numbers of bovine farm animals is probably about the same as the vast herds of buffalo that roamed the North American landscape, especially if we add these numbers to the vast herds of wildebeests that used to migrate back and forth in Africa.

It is the same with wild claims about carbon footprints of politically incorrect vehicles. To get an accurate figure for any particular vehicle, you have to add the carbon footprint of the total manufacturing process (which includes obtaining and processing lithium) and the carbon footprint of all fuel used during its life, then that of dismantling and reprocessing it, all obviously spread over the total life of the vehicle.

I would guess a 30 year use diesel will not come out so bad even compared to an electric vehicle that needs new batteries every three to five years and has a total use of around 10 years. Now politics is involved in environmental issues, some very clever people are paid to ensure any published data supports a previously established political view.

Politics is getting in the way of science and so many very misleading statistics get pronounced as factual evidence when they are only carefully selected aspects of the whole picture. Politicians are not concerned with truth, only with what is achievable. They do not ask is this data accurate, but they do ask how can we use this to support our argument, what slight changes are needed to win this debate?

If human activity continues, even if all the ecological green demands are met, we will, eventually, totally deplete the resources of the Earth. Consider the demand that we change all vehicles to electric power. Leave aside the problem of supplying the power, we would still have an ever-increasing number of vehicles on the roads. This means an ever-increasing demand for building ever larger, ever greater, and more efficient road systems. If we ban the use of non-renewable building materials, we could not provide enough housing for an ever-increasing world population. If we do not ban many of the materials we now use, we will eventually run out of them.

Draconian solutions are considered; for example, we turn back time and return all nations to localised, agrarian structures, with each area self sufficient in food, water, power, etc. That is to go back to pre-industrial revolution. This would slow down the depletion of resources, but it would need the population reduced back to a fraction of the present one.

There is another old law of physics which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. The reasoning behind these laws was altered by the discovery of quantum physics, but within the scope of normal life, they still hold. If we can unlock the mechanics of cold fusion generation, we will still be altering latent energy into transitional energy; we will not be creating it. The much cheaper energy thus produced, with much less pollution, could help humans accommodate to the natural changes.

We have to accept that nature is an ever-changing structure, a constantly evolving entity, and we have to accept and accommodate that.

We need to get politics out of the debate and we need to expose the political and commercial exploitation of “green” issues. Some multinational global companies stand to profit from getting restrictive laws imposed on people. Some political ideologies have linked themselves with the genuine concern over the environment, and are trying to use this genuine concern to attain political ends they cannot reach through open, honest debate.