Sol
0
Well perhaps instead of killing our 10-20 people outright we should just enslave them and work them to death contructing an army of advanced robots to do all the work for us...
Terrestrial Engineering. Objections?
- Thread starter LiamC
- Start date
Sol said:
That's no different than now. We already have a classed society with an elite and a worker class (another word for slaves) and it's too much. The point of killing people off is that they no longer use any of the earths resources -- i.e. no Co2, no food, no water, no coal, no Iron, no radioactives, no waste, no nothing. That way, nature can start repairing itself and potentially support the remaining population, indefinately.
Take your pick:
or
Either way, fine with me.
or
Either way, fine with me.
Howell
0
P5-133XL said:
Is that what you call getting involved?
Howell
0
More from Wendell Berry:
COMMUNITY IN 17 SENSIBLE STEPS
Wendell Berry
A few practical quidelines on how to sustain a place-based community.
How can a sustainable local community (which is to say a sustainable local
economy) function? I am going to suggest a set of rules that I think such a
community would have to follow. I hasten to say that I do not understand
these rules as predictions; I am not interested in foretelling the future.
If these rules have any validity, it is because they apply now.
Supposing that the members of a local community wanted their community to
cohere, to flourish, and to last, they would:
1. Ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our
community? How will this affect our common wealth?
2. Include local nature - the land, the water, the air, the native creatures
- within the community.
3. Ask how local needs might be supported from local sources, including the
mutual help of neighbors.
4. Supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting their
products, first to nearby cities, and then to others).
5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of "labor
saving" if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or
contamination.
6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products in
order not to become merely a colony of the national or global economy.
7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm
or forest economy.
8. Strive to produce as much of their own energy as possible.
9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community, and
decrease expenditures outside the community.
10. Circulate money within the local economy as long as possible before
paying it out.
11. Invest in the community to maintain its properties, keep it clean
(without dirtying some other place), care for its old people, and teach its
children.
12. Arrange for the young and the old to take care of one another,
eliminating institutionalized "child care" and "homes for the aged." The
young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school; the
community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.
13. Account for costs that are now conventionally hidden or "externalized."
Whenever possible they must be debited against monetary income.
14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan
programs, systems of barter and the like.
15. Be aware of the economic value of neighborliness - as help, insurance,
and so on. They must realize that in our time the costs of living are
greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, leaving people to face their
calamities alone.
16. Be acquainted with, and complexly connected with, community minded
people in nearby towns and cities.
17. Cultivate urban consumers loyal to local products to build a sustainable
rural community, which will always be more cooperative than competitive.
>From a speech delivered November 11, 1994, at the 23rd annual meeting of the
Northern Plains Resource Council.
COMMUNITY IN 17 SENSIBLE STEPS
Wendell Berry
A few practical quidelines on how to sustain a place-based community.
How can a sustainable local community (which is to say a sustainable local
economy) function? I am going to suggest a set of rules that I think such a
community would have to follow. I hasten to say that I do not understand
these rules as predictions; I am not interested in foretelling the future.
If these rules have any validity, it is because they apply now.
Supposing that the members of a local community wanted their community to
cohere, to flourish, and to last, they would:
1. Ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our
community? How will this affect our common wealth?
2. Include local nature - the land, the water, the air, the native creatures
- within the community.
3. Ask how local needs might be supported from local sources, including the
mutual help of neighbors.
4. Supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting their
products, first to nearby cities, and then to others).
5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of "labor
saving" if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or
contamination.
6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products in
order not to become merely a colony of the national or global economy.
7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm
or forest economy.
8. Strive to produce as much of their own energy as possible.
9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community, and
decrease expenditures outside the community.
10. Circulate money within the local economy as long as possible before
paying it out.
11. Invest in the community to maintain its properties, keep it clean
(without dirtying some other place), care for its old people, and teach its
children.
12. Arrange for the young and the old to take care of one another,
eliminating institutionalized "child care" and "homes for the aged." The
young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school; the
community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.
13. Account for costs that are now conventionally hidden or "externalized."
Whenever possible they must be debited against monetary income.
14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan
programs, systems of barter and the like.
15. Be aware of the economic value of neighborliness - as help, insurance,
and so on. They must realize that in our time the costs of living are
greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, leaving people to face their
calamities alone.
16. Be acquainted with, and complexly connected with, community minded
people in nearby towns and cities.
17. Cultivate urban consumers loyal to local products to build a sustainable
rural community, which will always be more cooperative than competitive.
>From a speech delivered November 11, 1994, at the 23rd annual meeting of the
Northern Plains Resource Council.
I like the animation in the BBC link. It wasn't too much bigger in 1990.
Communist Conspiracy! (as I get hit in the back of the head by my Russian GF) 
timwhit
0
This might be a joke, but I'm under the impression that nuclear power does not contribute to global warming.
Iron seeding in the Oceans has a potential shot at dealing with excessive carbon in the atmosphere which is one of the issues of Global warming. I predict lots of studies, that will end up in one of two results. The first is that the studies take so long that the effects of global warming will already have occurred. The second, will be that there is a leap of faith with an experiment on a global level that disrupts the ocean eco-system significantly.
Man's previous attempts at manipulating eco-systems have universally not gone well. There is no rational reason for me to think this will be any better. We don't know enough about the interactions between species. The only real difference that I can see, is the scale: We've never attempted to manipulate at the global level ...
Man's previous attempts at manipulating eco-systems have universally not gone well. There is no rational reason for me to think this will be any better. We don't know enough about the interactions between species. The only real difference that I can see, is the scale: We've never attempted to manipulate at the global level ...
Howell
0
Nuclear reactors use circulating water to cool the reactor. A lot of that hot water is dumped back into the supply reservoir. In this case it would be the arctic ocean. Maybe we'll start seeing algae plumes in the arctic. Yay for more krill. Hypothetically.
Back on topic for a while. You'll have to excuse the lack of links as I'm at work.
It seems from searching, that Lake Eyre floods more often than twice a century. If this is true, and your worried about flooding it, where do the animals go when it does flood?
If flooding was that catastrophic to their habitat, and given that it floods more often than twice a century, why haven't said animals been wiped out already?
If we did flood it, how would the animals know it was by human hands and stay put to be wiped out? I think they would migrate to the edges. of the water like they seem to have done.
Most of the water that floods in carries large amount of salt anyway, and it is a salt pan on which nothing lives anyway, so flooding it with salt water doesn't seem to be a massive adjustment.
If the speed of the inflow is a problem, make the channel bigger, a la Panama canal. Put locks on it. Or use the inrush to power turbines. Or both.
Something to ponder. Tree planting may achieve the same effect as a canal. If you make the interior greener as is postulated it was before man, then all you will be doing (by planting trees) is making the interior damper -> more flooding of Lake Eyre.
If sea levels rise enough, it may be a moot point on whether to build a canal anyway
It seems from searching, that Lake Eyre floods more often than twice a century. If this is true, and your worried about flooding it, where do the animals go when it does flood?
If flooding was that catastrophic to their habitat, and given that it floods more often than twice a century, why haven't said animals been wiped out already?
If we did flood it, how would the animals know it was by human hands and stay put to be wiped out? I think they would migrate to the edges. of the water like they seem to have done.
Most of the water that floods in carries large amount of salt anyway, and it is a salt pan on which nothing lives anyway, so flooding it with salt water doesn't seem to be a massive adjustment.
If the speed of the inflow is a problem, make the channel bigger, a la Panama canal. Put locks on it. Or use the inrush to power turbines. Or both.
Something to ponder. Tree planting may achieve the same effect as a canal. If you make the interior greener as is postulated it was before man, then all you will be doing (by planting trees) is making the interior damper -> more flooding of Lake Eyre.
If sea levels rise enough, it may be a moot point on whether to build a canal anyway
Tannin
0
The animals don't go: they arrive, in vast, uncountable millions. Beneath the dry salt crust, there are unimaginable numbers of organisms: shrimps, yabbies (freswater crayfish for our over-the-water friends, though "fresh" isn't really the term for this water), fish, insects, you name it. These creatures exist more-or-less in stasis through the dry years, then when the nutrient-rich brown, muddy water comes down the Cooper, they burst forth and multiply at an incredible pace.
Within weeks, birds are arriving from all over the continent: cormorants, waders of all kinds, Black-winged Stilts, the mysterious, endemic Banded Stilt (a listed threatened species, if my memory is to be trusted), avocets, pelicans, egrets, herons, swans, all kinds of ducks .... vast numbers of birds.
Lake Eyre and similar, smaller inland lakes are vital breeding grounds for these birds. How they find the particular lake system that is flooded at any particular time is a mystery unknown to science, but find it they do, and they immediately start breeding while the food supply is plentiful. As the fish and other creatures grow bigger, the lake dries out, and the feeding frenzy increases. Eventually, the water disappears, the birds move off elsewhere, and, somewhere underneath the mud, another generation of small creatures hibernates, waiting for the next big wet.
Lake Eyre is one of the natural wonders of the world.
Now, let's deal with some misconceptions. First, it does not fill up "twice a century"; it fills all the way up around twice a century. It fills to a lesser extent considerably more often than that. There was water flowing into the Lake Eyre system as recently as a few months ago, for example. It would all be gone by now, no doubt, but it is nothing at all unusual to have a little water in the lake.
Second: it is a gross misunderstanding of the natural cycle to think "empty = good" or "empty = bad". Like most natural systems, the Lake Eyre ecology thrives on change, on the filling, drying, waiting, filling again cycle. To disrupt that would be a crime of the first order.
Third: Time has demonstrated the immense scale of the proposed task - so large an engineering task as to be impractical.
Last, and perhaps most important: let us return to the fundamental point: it wouldn't increase rainfall anyway. There is no observed relationship between rainfall in the surrounding countryside and water levels in Lake Eyre - just like Spencer Gulf, it can (when full) produce evaporation, but that moisture doesn't fall anywhere useful. We already know this from examining rainfall records in years when the lake was full.
If you really want to increase rainfall in Horsham or Berri or Wentworth, don't buggerise about building a lake, build a mountain. But you'll have to make it a bloody big one - I've never seen figures on this, but I imagine something in the rough order of two or three thousand metres high and a few hundred kilometres long would do the trick. Mind you, you had better be prepared to deal with the opposition of absolutely everyone who lives on the other sde of your mountain range, because they will get practically no rain at all in the lee of your artifical range.
Actually, thinking about it, it might need to be more like 5000 metres high: the Flinders Ranges and the Macdonnells, after all, are hardly threatening to get themselves listed among the highest rainfall areas of the continent.
Within weeks, birds are arriving from all over the continent: cormorants, waders of all kinds, Black-winged Stilts, the mysterious, endemic Banded Stilt (a listed threatened species, if my memory is to be trusted), avocets, pelicans, egrets, herons, swans, all kinds of ducks .... vast numbers of birds.
Lake Eyre and similar, smaller inland lakes are vital breeding grounds for these birds. How they find the particular lake system that is flooded at any particular time is a mystery unknown to science, but find it they do, and they immediately start breeding while the food supply is plentiful. As the fish and other creatures grow bigger, the lake dries out, and the feeding frenzy increases. Eventually, the water disappears, the birds move off elsewhere, and, somewhere underneath the mud, another generation of small creatures hibernates, waiting for the next big wet.
Lake Eyre is one of the natural wonders of the world.
Now, let's deal with some misconceptions. First, it does not fill up "twice a century"; it fills all the way up around twice a century. It fills to a lesser extent considerably more often than that. There was water flowing into the Lake Eyre system as recently as a few months ago, for example. It would all be gone by now, no doubt, but it is nothing at all unusual to have a little water in the lake.
Second: it is a gross misunderstanding of the natural cycle to think "empty = good" or "empty = bad". Like most natural systems, the Lake Eyre ecology thrives on change, on the filling, drying, waiting, filling again cycle. To disrupt that would be a crime of the first order.
Third: Time has demonstrated the immense scale of the proposed task - so large an engineering task as to be impractical.
Last, and perhaps most important: let us return to the fundamental point: it wouldn't increase rainfall anyway. There is no observed relationship between rainfall in the surrounding countryside and water levels in Lake Eyre - just like Spencer Gulf, it can (when full) produce evaporation, but that moisture doesn't fall anywhere useful. We already know this from examining rainfall records in years when the lake was full.
If you really want to increase rainfall in Horsham or Berri or Wentworth, don't buggerise about building a lake, build a mountain. But you'll have to make it a bloody big one - I've never seen figures on this, but I imagine something in the rough order of two or three thousand metres high and a few hundred kilometres long would do the trick. Mind you, you had better be prepared to deal with the opposition of absolutely everyone who lives on the other sde of your mountain range, because they will get practically no rain at all in the lee of your artifical range.
Actually, thinking about it, it might need to be more like 5000 metres high: the Flinders Ranges and the Macdonnells, after all, are hardly threatening to get themselves listed among the highest rainfall areas of the continent.
Tannin
0
Now you are thinking. Nevertheless, some difficulties arise with this plan - not least that the trees you plant out in that part of the world will all die - it is way too arid to support forest, or even woodland - although it certainly did in the past. (Not speculation this: there is any amount of fossil evidence demonstrating it conclusively.)
But the major part of the water that (sometimes) fills Lake Eyre doesn't fall anywhere near the place. Most of the water in Lake Eyre fell as rain in Queensland, many hundreds of kilometres to the north-north east. Camooweal, for example, is in the Lake Eyre Basin; so is Birdsville. That is where you need to increase the rainfall.
And, you know, it's not by any means impractical. Most of that country has been cleared for grazing, and although it produces a lot of beef, the actual profit from that beef is miniscule in the overall scheme of things. 90% of the profit made from farming in Australia comes from just 10% of the land - and you can be very confident indeed that not a single acre of that 10% is anywhere near the Cooper Basin. (Think places like Gippsland, King Island, New England, and the Atherton Tableland - that's where all the money is made.)
So you could revegatate vast areas of inland Queensland at remarkably low cost - indeed, by the time you factor in the various government subsidies and the actual long-term cost to the nation of non-sustainable farming practices, and the below-the-poverty-line real income of many outback farmers, and the substantial cost of community support services for poor agricultural districts (suicide help lines for just one example) .... factor all that in and you would probably find that allowing poor quality grazing land to regenerate would actually be cheaper than doing nothing.
More problems need to be dealt with, however. Weed control would be a huge task, now that cattle have spread nasties like Horehound and Patterson's Curse and Capeweed and Onion Grass all over the continent (these are southern weeds - I'm not sure what the problem species up north are, but you can bet your last dollar that there will be plenty.
Transpiration rates will be a huge problem. Back when the continent was well-watered, a good deal of it was covered by old-fashioned rainforest-derived species (there are still pockets of this stuff to be found in northern Queensland - amaging stuff called "dry rainforest" - look it up). These plants transpired a lot of water through their leaves, and thus had a significant effect on the climate. But they were replaced by hard-leaved eucalyptus and acacia species which are water misers - these sclerophyllous plants can get by with less water than the soft-leaved older types (though the difference is much smaller than you might think) but more importatly, they can survive fire.
It is believed that fire was a key factor in the quite recent replacement of rainforest by sclerophyl forest in northern Australia - almost certainly, human activity was a major part of t.
Nevertheless, this is the sort of thinking which just might produce a worthwhile result. If you are going to dream, then start here - you have some faint hope of success, where the idiotic 1950's style of brute-force engineering schemes of the flood Lake Eyre variety have exactly zero chance of working as designed.
http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1130/G21033.1&ct=1
..."Additional simulations show that the penetration of monsoon moisture into the interior is sensitive to biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks linked to vegetation type and soil properties. This sensitivity offers a resolution to the observed failure of the Australian Monsoon to penetrate the interior in the Holocene. Postulated regular burning practiced by early humans may have converted a tree-shrub-grassland mosaic across the semiarid zone to the modern desert scrub, thereby weakening biospheric feedbacks and resulting in long-term desertification of the continent."...
One advantage of flooding the Lake is that you will add significant amounts of moisture to the interior air, which would assist the transpiration processes of revegetation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Australia
See Precipitation.
I don't see it as an "either or" proposition. If the interior air mass can be made wetter, then you get more chance of rainfall. More rain in the arid interior would assist in generating more vegetation, more transpiration etc. A feedback loop. At some stage, it may be possible to close the canal and dry the lake, but if rainfall has increased enough, it may not stay dry due to local falls.
Would it work. Dunno. Consider the alternative though. I really don't think genocide is an option though.
..."Additional simulations show that the penetration of monsoon moisture into the interior is sensitive to biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks linked to vegetation type and soil properties. This sensitivity offers a resolution to the observed failure of the Australian Monsoon to penetrate the interior in the Holocene. Postulated regular burning practiced by early humans may have converted a tree-shrub-grassland mosaic across the semiarid zone to the modern desert scrub, thereby weakening biospheric feedbacks and resulting in long-term desertification of the continent."...
One advantage of flooding the Lake is that you will add significant amounts of moisture to the interior air, which would assist the transpiration processes of revegetation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Australia
See Precipitation.
I don't see it as an "either or" proposition. If the interior air mass can be made wetter, then you get more chance of rainfall. More rain in the arid interior would assist in generating more vegetation, more transpiration etc. A feedback loop. At some stage, it may be possible to close the canal and dry the lake, but if rainfall has increased enough, it may not stay dry due to local falls.
Would it work. Dunno. Consider the alternative though. I really don't think genocide is an option though.
That would be the problem. No one is willing to think big enough. That's OK, a mass die-off will happen sooner or later anyway.
Tannin
0
I almost agree, but you still haven't explained how filling Lake Eyre would be different to filling Spencer Gulf - the two water bodies are roughly the same size after all. If a water body of that size increases rainfall, why is the country around Spencer Gulf so dry? Even the combination of Spencer Gulf and a decent-sized mountain range (the southern part of the Flinders Ranges) doesn't exactly produce a land of milk and honey - it's still bloody dry through there. (Fantastic place to visit though - I recommend it. Been there a couple of times and am sure to return before too long)
Tannin
0
Oh, and we don't need genocide, all we need is some sane and sensible long-term economic management. First thing on the agenda is removing artificial distortions in the economic landscape which create externalities which, in turn, result in people doing things they would not do if they were responsible for the cost of their actions.
A small example to illustrate the operation of an externality: In Australia, interstate rail transport runs on a 100% cost-recovery basis - i.e., every ton of Melbourne - Perth freight pays its own way, which is fine. However, interstate road transport is subsidised to the tune of $24,000 a year per B-double (for example, through non-recovery of road maintenence costs). This is an externality: we (the public) pay every truck operator about $500 per week over and above whatever we pay for shipping charges. The result, of course, is that about 90% of our interstate capital to capital freight goes by road because it's "cheaper", and we have poor condition highways, more traffic, more noise and pollution, more road accidents, and much higher atmospheric carbon production. But people go on buying more trucks and shipping freight on them because for the individuals concerned it is cheaper - part of the cost is external, i.e., paid for by someone other than the person making the economic decision. Externalities are pretty much always bad.
OK, now that we know what an externality is, let's look at the externalities that pertain to population in Australia.
Every child costs the country a great deal of money: you have subsidised health care costs associated with pregnancy and childbirth, subsidised and massively expensive IVF programs, subsidised infant welfare centres, subsidised pre-school systems, subsidised child-care programmes, subsidised private primary education and free public primary education, same again for secondary education. Those are direct costs (none of them paid for by the person deciding to have the child).
Then you have the indirect costs, and these are even larger. Every time you increase the population you have to build bigger roads, schools, hospitals, airports, and the like. You have to hire extra police, more public servants, more government officials, more bus drivers, more garbage collectors; you have to devote yet more good, productive agricultural land to urban sprawl (forcing farmers out onto poorer quality land).
At a more remote but equally real level of abstraction, you have a fixed pool of natural resources - farming land, water, minerals, seas to fish in, prime real estate to build on, and so on. Every time a citizen opts to increase the population by having an extra child, that citizen has reduced the net share of our natural resources available to every other citizen, yet makes no payment to the nation to compensate.
Is it any wonder we have started breeding like flies again these last few years since Lying John took over? Of course people are having larger families, the self-serving morons in Canbera are using my money (and yours) to pay them to do it! It's a massive externality, and until we address it, the problem will get worse, and worse, and worse.
A small example to illustrate the operation of an externality: In Australia, interstate rail transport runs on a 100% cost-recovery basis - i.e., every ton of Melbourne - Perth freight pays its own way, which is fine. However, interstate road transport is subsidised to the tune of $24,000 a year per B-double (for example, through non-recovery of road maintenence costs). This is an externality: we (the public) pay every truck operator about $500 per week over and above whatever we pay for shipping charges. The result, of course, is that about 90% of our interstate capital to capital freight goes by road because it's "cheaper", and we have poor condition highways, more traffic, more noise and pollution, more road accidents, and much higher atmospheric carbon production. But people go on buying more trucks and shipping freight on them because for the individuals concerned it is cheaper - part of the cost is external, i.e., paid for by someone other than the person making the economic decision. Externalities are pretty much always bad.
OK, now that we know what an externality is, let's look at the externalities that pertain to population in Australia.
Every child costs the country a great deal of money: you have subsidised health care costs associated with pregnancy and childbirth, subsidised and massively expensive IVF programs, subsidised infant welfare centres, subsidised pre-school systems, subsidised child-care programmes, subsidised private primary education and free public primary education, same again for secondary education. Those are direct costs (none of them paid for by the person deciding to have the child).
Then you have the indirect costs, and these are even larger. Every time you increase the population you have to build bigger roads, schools, hospitals, airports, and the like. You have to hire extra police, more public servants, more government officials, more bus drivers, more garbage collectors; you have to devote yet more good, productive agricultural land to urban sprawl (forcing farmers out onto poorer quality land).
At a more remote but equally real level of abstraction, you have a fixed pool of natural resources - farming land, water, minerals, seas to fish in, prime real estate to build on, and so on. Every time a citizen opts to increase the population by having an extra child, that citizen has reduced the net share of our natural resources available to every other citizen, yet makes no payment to the nation to compensate.
Is it any wonder we have started breeding like flies again these last few years since Lying John took over? Of course people are having larger families, the self-serving morons in Canbera are using my money (and yours) to pay them to do it! It's a massive externality, and until we address it, the problem will get worse, and worse, and worse.
Wow Tannin an entire post where I agree with you! But genocide would be much easier than trying to change a "democracy".
Evaporation rates. How deep and cold is the water in the Spencer Gulf? And where does said water come from? I suspect Antarctica. Cool/cold water, low evaporation rates, little water in the atmosphere for rain. And this is why Eyre would be different. Shallow, large surface area, high evaporation rates. Just what you want. A large surround of tree/forest and (short of a mountain range) as good as it gets for an attempt at this.
Another thought. When the Lake fills at odd intervals, you get a lot of marine life (and bird life) that emerge to take advantage of the conditions. What happens when he lake dries? They all die. If it was a semi permanent thing, you wouldn't get the mass die-offs that occur with an infrequently innundation.
timwhit
0
How do you know how this will affect the species that inhabit the area?
It's a salt pan. And no I don't know. Anyone who says they do know is lying. But animals are adaptable, and the lake fills at irregular intervals anyway to varying levels.
Man made flooding won't be any different to natural in this instance, the only difference is that the lake won't dry up after 12 18 months and the "life explosion" that a flood of the lake engenders won't be followed by a "mass extinction"—marine/lake life, immature birds and animals etc. Hopefully the wetter conditions will engender and assist the various species, and with locks, the lake can be allowed to dry, so it is reversible.
But that's the point of a discussion, different viewpoints and data points. Hopefully the discussion will raise points that I hadn't thought of for consideration.
Man made flooding won't be any different to natural in this instance, the only difference is that the lake won't dry up after 12 18 months and the "life explosion" that a flood of the lake engenders won't be followed by a "mass extinction"—marine/lake life, immature birds and animals etc. Hopefully the wetter conditions will engender and assist the various species, and with locks, the lake can be allowed to dry, so it is reversible.
But that's the point of a discussion, different viewpoints and data points. Hopefully the discussion will raise points that I hadn't thought of for consideration.