(INCOMPLETE)
One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend who said to me, “You just littered on the street! Don’t you care about the environment?” And I thought about it, and I said, “You know what? This isn’t the environment. This is New York City. New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, it’s the shittiest piece of litter in the world.
Louis C.K.
- Daisy World and the Gaia Hypothesis
- The Carboniferous Period, during which there were so many trees (who produced oxygen as the byproduct of their respiration), that “the atmospheric content of oxygen also reached their highest levels in geologic history: 35% compared with 21% today, allowing terrestrial invertebrates to evolve to great size.” See also: Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
- Also, the trees sequestered so much carbon that it also skewed the atmosphere: “Back in the Carboniferous many, or perhaps all, of the bacteria that decompose wood were not yet present. Trees would fall and not decompose. Eventually sediment would cover the unrotted trees and reduced carbon would be buried in the process. With all of these trees (and the plankton in the seas) producing oxygen through photosynthesis and very little of this new oxygen being used to decompose the rapidly growing and falling forests, oxygen levels began to rise.” (From Out of Thin Air by Peter D. Ward)
- Interestingly, the fact that bacteria had not devised a way to break down lignin (a newly evolved plant polymer that added structural strength to trees) explains why these trees did not decompose but rather went on to form the massive coal beds — i.e., they became the “fossil fuels.” I think about this a lot in the context of plastic/petrochemicals and the bacteria that we are engineering to munch on them. Maybe we are simply in a transitional period right now as the world tries to attain equilibrium.
- The Oxygen Holocaust, when cyanobacteria (which are obligate anaerobes) produced so much oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis that they killed themselve — paving the way for our great^1000 grandparents, the aerobic eukaryotes.
- Recycling is Garbage, the classic NYT article on why recycling, long regarded as a sacred obligation among the educated elite, is not always great for the planet and nowhere near as important as the other two R’s – reduction and reuse.
- The Permian – Triassic Extinction Event, the most severe extinction event in the history of the world. The overwhelming majority of species (both marine and terrestrial) completely died out.