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Leaving Alone

 I read this essay right after spending couple of hours working in the yard - not because I am growing a magnificent flower garden or the fruit trees are laden. That is just how much time it takes to take weeds out and bring some semblance of tidy. It is impossible to get a handle on the spider webs if I don't resort to chemicals. 

That seems to be the answer to most pesky problems in the yard - chemicals that can cause you a lot of harm or a lot of elbow grease. Nature is wild and ferocious in my yard, there are a lot of invasive plants and the rabbits don't live here any more. I am sure, this piece of land has been meddled with plenty and well before my time. People have tried to do things to it and with it that was never intended by nature, as is the case around the world and on much larger scale:

..a proposal to engage in the large-scale pumping of ozone-destroying sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere to cool it—a scenario various writers of science fiction have played out in recent novels. Also the dumping of iron dust into the oceans to trigger algal blooms and the genetic modification of crops to increase their carbon uptake.

There are also plans to block solar radiation by mechanical means that range from the deployment of huge, heavy sunshades to the placing of 55,000 orbiting, wire­mesh mirrors, each 40 square miles wide.

All of these schemes come with serious failure risk

It seems like all the proposals read like mistakes with effects that would become apparent as soon as they are implemented. If people could just get far away from where nature is distressed, chances are time will do the healing. We are not needed and our ill-conceived interventions most certainly are not.

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