Chapter 2. Respecting Planetary Boundaries and Reconnecting to the Biosphere.

[Ted]

Comments on "Respecting Planetary Boundaries and Reconnecting to the Biosphere"

[Ted]

Anyone who wants to can start this discussion thread. I will kick something off later today (5/27) if no one else does before that. (Boy that was an easy first comment.)

[Ted]

I was somewhat disappointed in the overly scholarly (technical) language in this chapter, it was sort of out-of-character with most writing in this series.

Despite the tone of the writing, I thought the ideas about Planetary Boundaries were interesting. I hadn't heard of this concept before.

As it says on p. 21, these boundaries are connected to what the writer refers to as "Earth System services", which he defines as operating on "large temporal and spatial scales without the major direct influence of living organisms", and contrasts these services with "ecosystem services", a term I was more familiar with.

Regarding the Planetary Boundaries themselves, the chapter is basically summarized in Table 2-1.

Although the Proposed Boundary is very tentative for many of these processes, it seems to me useful to have a check-list of the processes, and at least a notion of what is involved in approaching the ill-defined boundaries, when assessing the usefulness of various solutions or fixes that may be proposed for environmental problems in the coming years.

As it states near the bottom of p. 26

Large-scale developments in information technology, nano-and bio-technology, and new energy systems have the potential to significantly improve our lives. But if, in framing them, society fails to consider the adaptive capacity of the biosphere and the safe operating spaces for humanity, there is a risk that unsustainable development may be reinforced by technological innovations and policies that are successful in the short term.

This is how I would see the usefulness of this idea of Planetary Boundaries: giving us a capacity to evaluate carefully seemingly good ideas, and perhaps foreseeing some of the unintended consequences that always seem to toss a wrench into our plans of controlling nature.