To What Extent Can We Control Our Environment?

This blog is in response to a point I brought forward in one of my wikis entitled: Faustian Bargain with close connection to a newspaper mail response I found particularly interesting; featured on the November 27 2007 issue of the Metro newspaper. The reader’s feedback reads as follows:

I am sick of hearing about all the ways in which the human race can stop global warming. Climate change has been going on since the beginning of time. Are we humans so arrogant we think we can control the nature?

We are so used to controlling everything around us that it scares us when we are confronted by something that ultimately, will control us. Not only that, but it also gives the Government an excuse to tax the living daylights out of us.

I think it is time to wake up and realise the climate will change, as it always has, whether we like it or not.

D Mason, Tyne and Wear

It is interesting to note that the point I draw in The Faustian Bargain is about how mankind has always wished to control his environment and hates being controlled by it instead. Mason D is also on the same horizon and his line of argument somewhat substantiate my point.

Despite all of our technological advances, controlling nature hazards has always been beyond Man’s reach. More to this, we have also never been confronted by a natural calamity as big as that of the heading Global Warming. Some school of thoughts claim that the Global Warming is occurring as a result of Man’s impact on environment by emitting an excess of Carbon Dioxide.

However, Geographical and Geological studies about Earth reveal that the planet has known various periods of glaciations and global warming independent of human activities; and so since even before the existence of human.



Put differently, we are simply freaked out by the idea that the next global warming followed by another period of glaciations and without forgetting the theory of natural selection, could imply that the Human race is nearing to extinction as our predecessor, the dinosaurs were swiped off the planet.