What evidence do you have that there is some such thing as a "balanced world ecology" at all? It seems to me that all the evidence, in addition to logic, is in the opposite direction.
I guess I share your problem, I’m not sure “balanced” is the right word. You could have two species, a single celled animal and a single celled plant and ostensibly that would be “balance”.
Maybe a better word for what is at risk is “diversity”. At this time there are still wild ecologies with incredible diversity in all three phases of water on Earth, the frozen, the liquid, and the steamy.
And there are also partly dead places. The American Midwest is largely ecologically dead, although we know before the European settlers came there was stable soil and incredible biodiversity there.
But balance and biodiversity are connected. In a diverse ecology, you can remove any species, or turn any dial slightly, metabolism will dip, and then roar back into full power because there is so much latent genetic material in the ecology ready to go.
That’s been destroyed in a place like the Midwest. If you stop putting oil into that ecology, the metabolism would plummet, and it would take a million years to return to anything close to what it was before European settlers.
In a so-called “balanced” ecology, metabolism would rebound on a scale of decades or even seasons.
The moral assumption underlying this is that the most metabolism per square foot of solar energy is the most good.
Ok, I think we are talking about two different things:
One thing is biodiversity and the ecological resilience of biodiverse systems, of which there are many (still) where different species live in a healthy, productive and dynamic balance. These habitats are under attack for sure, spurred by industrial production modes of various kinds.
Quite another thing is the notion (represented by GP if I'm correct) that the whole earth somehow is a balanced system, were it not for greedy humans. This is a mystical belief that I don't see any proof of.
It is far-fetched not to think that comet impacts, massive volcano eruptions and/or solar radiation variance accidentally could make most if not all ecological systems devoid of life, quite without human intervention.
tl;dr, It was a light-hearted ironic idea, not some statement on the impending downfall of human civilization
"that the whole earth somehow is a balanced system, were it not for greedy humans"
This was in no way implied by what I said!
I think the word balance is justified here, the word I got wrong was ecology (I meant climate, but it was late, and I didn’t expect such a defensive response to my joke,…).
Either way, both the climate and ecology of earth work by balancing conflicting interests and drivers. food chains, carbon cycles, etc.. all are based on interlocking processes that combine to create a system that is stable at a macro level (Of course localized factors can make things seem much less stable). But on the whole, these systems are balanced. Things periodically come along and upset that balance, and it takes a while for the system to adjust and re-balance, typically with a result that is different from before.
My point was that it would be ironic if ANY civilisation got to the level where it could alter these systems meaningfully, but by doing so, and not understanding what/how they were doing things, created a situation where not only were they wiped-out, but also all trace of their technology was wiped-out too.
I accept that this exact scenario is extremely unlikely, as our current models predict that in these situations, at least some of the population would survive due to those localized factors, but the civilisation could easily be destroyed by sudden and climactic shifts.
It's unclear (to the best of my knowledge) if we would expect the historical record of such a thing to be carried by these people, but a lot of the detail of our knowledge of roman and pre-roman times(1,000s years, not millions) has been derived from archeological records, so it's not unreasonable to assume that if Ice were to scour all hard evidence of such things from the surface of the earth, then the knowledge of such may die out or become so garbled that it ceases to be believed.
Of course there /are/ parallels with the situation modern humans find ourselves in. I think there's little doubt that what we do has an effect on the balance of the world's climate and ecological systems (you eat a chicken, that has affected the food chain by an infinitesimal amount), but how much impact we will have, and our ability to comfortable adapt to any resulting changes would require a much longer response, and isn’t relevant to my original post at all :)
What I meant was that this hypothetical civilisation supposedly flourished in a particular environment. If their actions altered that environment radically enough to wipe them out, AND wipe out all traces of their existence, then that would be an interesting idea to consider
