Planetary engineering

I was watching "20/20" last night with some friends and they were talking with Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures. The segment "Can a garden hose stop global warming" (http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8904740) elicited what I have found to be typical responses to these kinds of ideas. "Every time we try to change the planet for the better it never works," "Every time humans try to improve things like this it's always a disaster," "The world is to complicated, we can never understand the entirety of it all and whenever we mess with things like this there are always unintended consequences that end up making things worse"

But here's the thing - humans have never tried large scale global engineering like this (purely to make things better). Never. The large scale engineering that has been done so far has been been either to make money, provide humans with protection from the elements or for military purposes. And they typically worked in so far as doing what they were designed to.

The re-engineering of much of the Everglades (which wiped out much of the Everglades) was done in order to create arable land so sugar growers and orange growers could make money. Damming of rivers is done either for flood control (protecting humans) or to generate electricity - IE to make money. Floods are limited and electricity is generated. Dams generally work. The great wall of china was created for military purposes. China has never been overrun. Many swamps have been drained worldwide to either create arable land, protect humans from mosquito born illness or even to create cities (Chicago for example). Humans did these things for the benefit of themselves . Thoughts of global scale engineering for the benefit of the planet as a whole are an entirely recent phenomenon. Only recently has mankind acknowledged that he is creating global scale problems and only recently has mankind achieved the engineering skills to contemplate global scale solutions. Only recently has mankind started to wisely realize that a) his fate is very much tied to the planet and b) his actions have become big and consequential enough to cause real damage.

We have attempted small scale engineering in order to generally improve some aspect of the environment around us and so far our efforts seem to have generally worked. Fish ladders alongside dams, the cleanup of Boston harbor, various remediation projects. There have been unintended consequences but none that have been catastrophic. Generally these efforts have worked well.

But the really big things humans have done so far in our history are exclusively selfish and it seems that it will be genuinely tragic if selfish destruction of the environment is largely tolerated but attempts to undo or fix what we have broken are rejected.

We are tolerating massive selfish destruction of course. It's becoming rapidly clear that mining the tar sands in Canada for oil is an environmental disaster of epic proportions. But we need the oil we say. We need the oil for our "way of life."

So we tolerate the large scale experiment of ripping up much of the tundra in Alberta to fuel our SUVs and we tolerate various massive global experiments - replacing millions of acres of prairie in North America with industrial non sustaining farms, large scale ocean fishing that has decimated world fish stocks, releasing billings of tons of CO2 from our tailpipes and smokestacks each year. We tolerate numerous global experiments - as long as they are for selfish purposes.

In my opinion it will be genuinely tragic if we do not even entertain ideals on how to fix the damage we are doing.

BTW one of my friends who was arguing against the garden hose drove back home in his SUV.