Lata Sententia

Alien Ecologists  What would alien visitors studying Earth's ecology for the first time conclude? Let's stop thinking about ourselves as something special for a while and instead, think of ourselves as just another species of mammal . Where do we fit in Earth's ecological system? Where did we fit? Before we discovered how to make tools, we probably sat somewhere in the lower-mid part of the predator hierarchy. Technology changed that.  Once we developed clubs, spears and arrows we moved up the predator ladder. Weapons and co-operative hunting techniques enabled us to kill animals much larger and more dangerous than our unarmed selves. It is no coincidence that, wherever we went, the giant mammals that once ruled the land died out. Technology continued to advance to the point where, today, we are the apex predator, all across the globe. The Agriculture Problem The beginnings of agriculture seems to be the domestication of pigs in Mesopotamia around 11,000BC. Prior to that, ...

 I am a bit ambivalent about on-line privacy. Most of us happily sign up to Facebook, Google, Twitter and the like without a thought as to how a free service can earn so much revenue.  Like most people, I love a bargain, but then, at times I get worried about what these free services are doing with my information. So, how do these companies earn so much when they are charging users nothing? They do it by selling the on-line version of you and me. Our digital lives are their product, not the services they give us for free. Social media companies give us free services so that we willingly sign up to them with hardly a thought to their (invariably multi-page) user and privacy agreements. These agreements permit them to vacuum up every bit of our on-line searching, browsing, emailing, messaging and social history. They then use this information to profile us and sell targeted advertising, or to sell on to third parties for their various uses. Is there another way? I would like to ...

  Polarized Views Social media posts about the environment more often than not advocate one or other extreme view depending on the which side of the divide the poster sits. We are either told "Stop worrying. It's all a hoax and there is no need to change anything" or, "Stop ( insert: burning fossil fuel, dairy, eating meat, using plastic, deforestation, etc. as you choose )    immediately, or we are all doomed!" Both of these polarized positions are unhelpful in a debate about the environment because, as well as probably being untenable, they turn off a large proportion of the population, preventing them from taking any action at all. If we have an all or nothing viewpoint and discover all or nothing is impossible, we tend to switch off and not consider the "more or less" possibility. We need to think of most environmental problems and solutions, not from either side of a divide, but as a position on a continuum. Depending on your own circumstances, it...