Fairy Dust vs. Weeding the Garden
I was reading about WWI chemical munitions washing up on our shores, and it occurs to me just how the electorate’s mindset is influenced by the meme of “fairy dust.” We create tension with another nation, we sprinkle fairy dust on them and they go away. We create enviro problems, we sprinkle fairy dust (on the previous fairy dust no longer needed) and it goes away.
The issue with this “magical thinking” (did I use the term correctly?) is that it’s wrong in a profound way. There is no magic solution to anything, every problem takes work. The law of unintended consequences guarantees this. What we need is a cultural meme for weeding a garden. The solution here is simply mechanical, we either wait for the weeds to grow, then pluck them, or we plant the desirable species in a manner that regular investments of energy render the places for weeds unusable by those undesirable species. Either way, we ingrain the idea that it is constant work to manage change, not sudden and large investments of energy and time that make the problem go away. The success-rate with problematic asteroids would be much higher with this attitude. The next legislator who talks about nuking this (or any) problem should consider farming as rehabilitative trade. And therein my reference to both Mao and Pot. Sorry, but maybe vastly gentled down, they might’ve been onto something.