The Future is Poop

Okay, so I'm working on a theory about...THE FUTURE. Original, I know. But there's something fantastically mesmerizing about trying to figure out how things are going to go. Here, I'm going to try and propose a new (well, at least to me) flavor of future than what's been posited before. Pop culture is really great at gauging where the collective human conscious is at least at the time the movie/song/show/book/whatever was written.
            So it seems like what we've seen so far, at least concerning movies and TV shows, is the following categories:

• Disaster resulting in apocalypse
• Utopia achieved with technology

I'M HELPING!

Those are vast generalizations, but I think I could argue most things into those categories. Now for my alternate path. My idea all stems from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q.

If you watched it, you'll see that video is about how when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park, they had these incredible side effects that overall improved the area greatly in a dozen different ways. This is called a trophic cascade, where one species at the top of the food chain can have a trickle down out affect on many others. Essentially, because deer and elk had been left alone without a major predator for so long, the grazed the ever-loving crap out of the area. This caused tree-growth to stagnate, there was no cover for smaller animals, and the banks of rivers were unstable because the vegetation holding them together was gone. When the wolves came back and started bringing those grazing populations down, they also caused those deer and elk to avoid previous grazing areas. This caused the vegetation to grow back,  which brought in other animals, the taller trees brought in birds, and the river banks held together better which resulted in better habitats for even more wildlife. The list goes on, all due to the reintroduction of one single species (in small numbers, at that) back into an ecosystem.

Mmm, chocolate...

Now, the same organization that put out that video, Sustainable Human, have another one on whales. More specifically, whale poop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18HxXve3CM. This situation follows basically the same pattern as the wolves. Whales apparently stir up plankton and algae much more than ocean currents and storms combined, and those photosynthetic organisms make up a large percentage of our oxygen producers. Whale poop is incredibly nutrient rich and creates the perfect food for plankton, which is eaten by fish. Thus, whales gulping down massive quantities of fish actually comes full circle and helps facilitate larger fish populations.

Okey dokey, one more example. There's been a connection made between elephant and tree populations. You see, elephants eat the seeds of trees as part of their diet, and their digestive system softens up the seeds. This helps the seeds germinate once they're passed and voila! New tree. Of course, when the elephants are hunted and no longer around to help spread tree seeds?

So, everything's connected, we all knew that. Every species is precious, blah blah blah. What I want to focus on is how these revelations about trophic cascades can give us an alternate path to an awesome future. We humans have gotten to the point where we recognize we've done some damage to the Earth. Like, a ridiculous amount of damage. Just, soooo much damage, you guys. But our answer to that seems to be to develop new technology that can either replace, or directly fix what we've broken. We're not even settling for half-measures. The movie Transcendence showed a near future where the singularity results in an artificial sentience that creates microscopic bots that can seed the air and fix the planet. I feel like a lot of sci-fi goes in this direction i.e., we can fix the planet with technology.

The Depp will save us all

But these examples of trophic cascades highlight just how self-sustaining a system the Earth already is. Yeah, everything's connected, and we don't have to look at that through the hippie-druid lens. We can look at it as, "Holy shit, whale poop will save us!" Freaking wolves fixed rivers! On their own! They can't even hold shovels, guys. They don't have thumbs. So if we can find ways to help these species just thrive and inadvertently do their jobs, perhaps everything else will fall into place. Whale poop results in decreasing CO2, wolves enable forests to flourish, elephants gives us more trees, which means even less CO2. This begs not only the question 'what other species have these effects on their environments?' but also 'what seemingly insignificant species we've overlooked in the past might have had an unseen effect on their environment?'

I guess my overall point here is that instead of focusing on developing incredibly complicated technology to fix our problems, maybe humans' big endeavor should actually be to hold ourselves back. To take ourselves out of the equation a bit and let the Earth bounce back. I don't personally think we've gone so far that the Earth can't recover, but somewhere there has to be a breaking point, right? I mean, at some point we are all completely screwed. I'm sure this isn't a completely original idea at all, but talking with some of my students got me excited about it and I thought it would be a great way to get back into writing on a regular basis. More to follow! (Hopefully)