[Coral-List] Struggling with ocean optimist.

[Durwood M. Dugger]

Coincidently, and immediately after reading Bob Buddemeimer's and then Scott’s comments - I came across a prescient quote from my one of my all time favorite humorous poets - Ogden Nash <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogden_Nash#Death_and_subsequent_events> - "Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.” 

Environmentally, modern humans seem not to be up to the challenge of separating “progress” from “growth” - an admittedly difficult task - especially if you ignore the basic math. Until we figure out how to accomplish the tasks of continuing technical progress environmentally/economically, while managing our gross overpopulation to real sustainable levels and rather than focusing only our overpopulation’s symptomatic negative impacts to the climate, environment and ecosystems (especially corals) - our species continues to spiral deeper into a classic biological critical resource collapse. Ours is of course is complicated and made more serious by nuclear armed resource competitors.

A daunting challenge managing human overpopulation - both fiscally, physically, biologically and socially, but it is a binary decision. Survive, or not so much. Currently, we have yet to extricate ourselves from the denial phase and thus far have lacked a significant enough catastrophic signal event sufficient to do so. It does seem clear as Scott suggests that we will only react when the obvious is upon us - making recovery a slow and painful process - if possible at all. 

Unfortunately, if a collapse is the solution to human over population it is hard to imagine the coming onslaught of pollution from such a collapse on the marine environment and ecosystems. For those that see obvious, I agree with Scott - all we can do is prepare as best we can, though I am not at all confident that any amount of preparation will be enough.

Best regards,

Durwood M. Dugger, Pres.
ddugger at biocepts.com <mailto:ddugger at biocepts.com>
BCI, Inc. <http://www.biocepts.com/BCI/Home.html>