> We started altering the Earth's nitrogen cycle in a major way about 1 century
> ago.
Who gauged these "major" changes? When were they measured? Where were the samples
drawn? What methodology was applied? Which controls were established? How did the
researchers document the state of nitrogen in the atmosphere before these
supposed major changes happened, in order to determine the differential in change
rate? In what manner could a rational being find this reseach, in order to study
the thesis?
> All major food crops have been substantially altered from their origins
One would only expect that much efficiency from agricultural science. To mention
a single historical case, the Incas succeeded in harvesting potatoes from scrawny
wild tubers.
> some so completely we're not entirely sure what the origins are.
Chemical analysis can trace the origin and composition of any substance,
including foods. And if we couldn't be entirely sure what the origins were, how
could we possibly relate them to major food crops, which have mostly been with us
for centuries, when not millennia?
> When the natural world fails to provide
What has the natural world failed to provide? What natural event does no longer
take place in the natural world?
> we can and do change the world.
So does every phenomenon over the globe, be it rational, biological, chemical or
physical. Unlike the latter three, however, rational phenomena can be regulated
by individual will in order to control the rate of impact upon its environment.
> Rather, it's now the "natural" world which requires the focused effort of
> large numbers of humans to maintain it in the face of all the other people who
> want to change it.
The "natural" world lacks any will or reason that would enable it to require
anything from human beings. Rather, it is humans (and other organisms) who lay
claims to the surrounding natural world in order to satisfy their natural somatic
drives and natural reasonings.
The "natural" world, of which human beings and their activities are an integral
part, is a dynamic system. Regardless of the presence of human beings, the
natural world undergoes continuous changes by dint of its physical dimensions:
space, time, mass and the resultant vectors. Any focused effort by an entity or
collective to preserve a system's status is an essay in entropy, the outright
anathema of every principle cherished by extropians. Indeed, since reason is a
human phenomenon, and humans are a natural phenomenon, and phenomenons are the
dynamic expression of the natural world, any effort to maintain the natural world
in a static condition would be contradictory to the essence of that ever-changing
natural world.
All the other people who want to change the world are known as living human
beings. They are actually performing what comes natural to them.
J. Vaquer Jr.
vaquerjr@primenet.com