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As an environmental engineer, albeit one educated in the US, this is generally a pretty true statement provided you stop doing whatever it is that wrecked the e
by Enginerrrd 7y ago
As an environmental engineer, albeit one educated in the US, this is generally a pretty true statement provided you stop doing whatever it is that wrecked the environment to begin with.
I have seen some of the worst environmental atrocities caused by people with good intentions of "fixing it". Let it be, it's often halfway to sorting itself out if you'll just leave it alone long enough.
- acchow 7y agoEven Chernobyl pretty much sorted itself out.
- pvaldes 7y ago> Even Chernobyl pretty much sorted itself out. I must admit that I almost cry when the bunnys, blue-tits, bears and deer all together started pouring concrete and building the sarcophagous whereas singing heigh-ho.
- smcl 7y agoFor a very specific and narrow definition of "sorted itself out" (I presume you mean that some wildlife has returned and some species flourish in the no-go zones) - there was a substantial amount of effort involved in minimising the ongoing harm, and people literally died as a result of the cleanup operations To say that Chernobyl sorted itself out is to completely fail to understand what happened and what was done in the decades following it.
- ivanhoe 7y agoIt would still sort itself out eventually, one way or the other. We can speed up the recovery and try to minimize the impact, but even if there's no humans left life would probably continue in some form. If some species are destroyed, others would evolve into the empty niche. That's how nature works. That's literally how we and all other life got to exist on this planet in a first place, as a replacement for someone else less lucky/efficient.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoIn order to save time and energy, sometimes every detail isn’t spelled out. “Sort itself out” presumably has a condition of not causing substantial harm to humans. It’s obvious the world will keep on spinning with or without humans, or maybe not, and it’ll get eaten by the sun. But that possibility doesn’t need to be addressed every time.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoFor a complete and total failure of an industrial facility a death toll on par with a bad bus crash is far below the threshold of "substantial harm to humans" Normally when something containing substances hazardous to human health and/or containing a lot of energy goes pop like that it's a lot worse. Strictly by the numbers the Chernobyl is not worthy of being called a disaster. We only hear about it because it is the worst case in its particular niche. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_industrial_disasters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_industrial_disasters
- titzer 7y agoYou can't fix loss of biodiversity.
- qeternity 7y agoOf course you can. Nature has done it multiple times before at scale. It’s pretty horrible but we always mean revert.
- ohduran 7y agoYeah, the argument I see most about climate change is "Do something to tackle climate change". And I wish I saw more of "Stop doing that to tackle climate change". Both are fine, but definitely the latter is my preferred choice. Many unintended consequences can arise from adding more action on top of bad action, even if they come with good intentions.