G'day Sam,
Mass extinctions huh. Needs a new thread methinks. But it is something that does deserve a thread on its own and is one of the most complex of all of the arguments being put forward.
To stay with this thread however, I do agree that man has caused harm to the planet, sometimes in quite severe ways and that things can and should be done to reduce the damage or reverse it. It is clear for instance that man first immigrated to North America and had no idea how to manage large animals and so wiped them from the face of the earth (bit of overlap into species extinction there) but once they seemed to learn that they had had such an effect then species extinction in North America then seemed to stop completely until the advancement west of White settlers. A 10,000 period of reasonable harmony isn't that bad even if it started after a huge amount of extinctions.
Once agriculture was "invented" the world was going to change. It seems to me that trick is getting the land use to be of benefit to man without being a huge detriment to the future of the land or to other inhabitants of the planet. The emphasis of climate change, imho, often completely obscures some of the very real problems being faced.
Richard
