GEOL 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Anton Chekhov, United Nations Development Programme, Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering
• Course: GEOL 106
• Professor: Daniel Layton- Matthews

Document Summary

The earth, as it now exists, is a human artifact (brad allenby) It reflects the (frequently unintended and unconscious, but nonetheless real) design of a single species . In the allenby paper, he mainly discusses the big picture issues -> e. g. managing/engineering the climate. Seeding hurricanes with dust may reduce its force (seeding a hurricane with microscopic dust could sharply reduce its force); reduced temperatures and the hurricane"s stores of energy. Anything that any of us does is earth systems management/engineering. Think globally; act locally -> everything you do has an impact on the earth. There are no passengers on spaceship earth. So: allenby calls for conscious, controlled management/engineering of earth. The question: to what end are humans engineering, or should humans engineer, the earth is a moral one, not a technical one! The issue, then, is not whether we should begin earth-system engineering, because we have been doing it for a long time, albeit unintentionally.