consider just one tiny ecosystem: american prairie (in general, not all the different kinds of prairie).
prairies are maintained by fire. natural fires come from lightning strikes and places that get more strikes are more likely to have scrublands, prairies, barrens, etc. strikes are related to global weather patterns and when they increase or decrease in regions those places are gonna change into different ecosystems that will support different animals and plants. the spread of fire is regulated by all kinds of fire breaks, a good amount of which are manmade.
without that ecosystem, the animals from it can’t live. a person could try to mitigate the effects of manmade firebreaks and manmade fire avoidance systems with proscribed burns but that’s a much more holistic approach to saving the animals and a lot of the work understanding it is from game management perspectives, not ecosystem preservation.
so lets say you did decide you have a hundred acres that youre gonna turn into prairie and manage through proscribed burns while the weather patterns that would have naturally allowed for its existence shift wildly and new, unexpected manmade firebreaks come into being as people adjust to climate change.
what happens when you die or can’t afford to manage that little preserve? what happens when the rainfall gets too far out of line to really have whatever particular kind of hipster ass barren (i’m not slagging on barrens but there’s a bunch of kinds that are particular to specific areas) you happen to be shepherding along? what kind of preserves should be maintained for animals whose natural existence is now impossible? what about wide ranging or migratory animals?
have a natural lawn and do burns and try to appreciate animals but also try to recognize that you can’t save them. the world is changing and their environments are going away. there’s not much that can be done about it on an individual level. love them while they’re here i guess.
The thing to remember is that you can’t control the weather and even stuff people don’t usually think about like lightning strike frequency have huge effects on the types of ecosystems that a given area can sustain and move through.
Having wild, native environments you manage is great. It’s really worth considering deeply what animals you’re trying to save and how. Let’s say in a hundred years you’ve managed to preserve a tiny three hundred acre swath of habitat and keep it from becoming destroyed. Are the animals there saved with no habitat they can live in unless people maintain it? You may well end up creating wildlife thatre as unviable in nature as brachycephalic dogs.
🤔 Doming over parts of the land would mitigate most of those problems.
Honestly, I think that most environments are going to end up being human controlled, especially as we begin human expansion into space and bring those environments up with us, so it’s kind of a moot point.
I think you might be seriously underestimating the complexity of the ecosystems around you.
For an idea of the complexity we havent touched on: soil acidity, moisture content and average temperature determines what fungi and microbiota can live there. Those determine what plants and fungi and animals can live in the area and what relationships they can have with each other. If that still sounds like something you can get your head around, the mineral content, the very origin of the rocks that would be weathered into substrate for the microfauna of any one of thousands of biomes have deep implications for what chemical pathways energy moves around.
If you want them to exist only so that the animals (which ones?) can exist in what people will view as a natural setting then yeah, using domes to make something like an ecosystem that has for example grouse or turkey is possible. If you want the ecosystems to exist in their truly natural interactions with each other as systems whose existence is tied to the entire global climate, a dome isn’t gonna cut it.
It’s not bad to underestimate your own backyard. It’s wildly complex.
Do you want to preserve a certain animal or was it more of a thought experiment?
More of a thought experiment. I am contemplating how best to prevent the effects of climate collapse, as it’s one of the things I want to do with my life.
Our world is changing and it can’t be stopped. Even if we were to magically halt emissions and use carbon capture to reverse what’s been done, the consequences that are already rolling in combination with the other effects of human civilization on earth will take millennia to reach some kind of equilibrium and involve large scale devastation.
We can never recapture the past and our present is fleeting.
you can’t.
consider just one tiny ecosystem: american prairie (in general, not all the different kinds of prairie).
prairies are maintained by fire. natural fires come from lightning strikes and places that get more strikes are more likely to have scrublands, prairies, barrens, etc. strikes are related to global weather patterns and when they increase or decrease in regions those places are gonna change into different ecosystems that will support different animals and plants. the spread of fire is regulated by all kinds of fire breaks, a good amount of which are manmade.
without that ecosystem, the animals from it can’t live. a person could try to mitigate the effects of manmade firebreaks and manmade fire avoidance systems with proscribed burns but that’s a much more holistic approach to saving the animals and a lot of the work understanding it is from game management perspectives, not ecosystem preservation.
so lets say you did decide you have a hundred acres that youre gonna turn into prairie and manage through proscribed burns while the weather patterns that would have naturally allowed for its existence shift wildly and new, unexpected manmade firebreaks come into being as people adjust to climate change.
what happens when you die or can’t afford to manage that little preserve? what happens when the rainfall gets too far out of line to really have whatever particular kind of hipster ass barren (i’m not slagging on barrens but there’s a bunch of kinds that are particular to specific areas) you happen to be shepherding along? what kind of preserves should be maintained for animals whose natural existence is now impossible? what about wide ranging or migratory animals?
have a natural lawn and do burns and try to appreciate animals but also try to recognize that you can’t save them. the world is changing and their environments are going away. there’s not much that can be done about it on an individual level. love them while they’re here i guess.
In that case, I would set up a foundation to manage the land and hire people to take care of it.
🤔 So I’ll need wealth, a lot of wealth. I guess maybe that’s the answer.
Actually getting rich and building artificial habitats to preserve species doesn’t sound like a bad idea.
The thing to remember is that you can’t control the weather and even stuff people don’t usually think about like lightning strike frequency have huge effects on the types of ecosystems that a given area can sustain and move through.
Having wild, native environments you manage is great. It’s really worth considering deeply what animals you’re trying to save and how. Let’s say in a hundred years you’ve managed to preserve a tiny three hundred acre swath of habitat and keep it from becoming destroyed. Are the animals there saved with no habitat they can live in unless people maintain it? You may well end up creating wildlife thatre as unviable in nature as brachycephalic dogs.
🤔 Doming over parts of the land would mitigate most of those problems.
Honestly, I think that most environments are going to end up being human controlled, especially as we begin human expansion into space and bring those environments up with us, so it’s kind of a moot point.
I think you might be seriously underestimating the complexity of the ecosystems around you.
For an idea of the complexity we havent touched on: soil acidity, moisture content and average temperature determines what fungi and microbiota can live there. Those determine what plants and fungi and animals can live in the area and what relationships they can have with each other. If that still sounds like something you can get your head around, the mineral content, the very origin of the rocks that would be weathered into substrate for the microfauna of any one of thousands of biomes have deep implications for what chemical pathways energy moves around.
If you want them to exist only so that the animals (which ones?) can exist in what people will view as a natural setting then yeah, using domes to make something like an ecosystem that has for example grouse or turkey is possible. If you want the ecosystems to exist in their truly natural interactions with each other as systems whose existence is tied to the entire global climate, a dome isn’t gonna cut it.
It’s not bad to underestimate your own backyard. It’s wildly complex.
Do you want to preserve a certain animal or was it more of a thought experiment?
More of a thought experiment. I am contemplating how best to prevent the effects of climate collapse, as it’s one of the things I want to do with my life.
You can’t.
We can’t.
Our world is changing and it can’t be stopped. Even if we were to magically halt emissions and use carbon capture to reverse what’s been done, the consequences that are already rolling in combination with the other effects of human civilization on earth will take millennia to reach some kind of equilibrium and involve large scale devastation.
We can never recapture the past and our present is fleeting.
What kind of future do you want?