Nature: agile and aggressive

I was down at San Francisco Fisherman’s Wharf the other day, waiting for a ferry.  While there, I admired the sea lions sunning themselves on the wooden rafts off of Pier 39.  They’re a great local and tourist attraction.  Very smelly, but very amusing. I had my iPhone so I took an indistinct picture.  The blurry brown things are the sea lions:

These wooden rafts, of course, weren’t built for sea lions.  They were built for boats and, in fact, there are some operative slips a few feet away from the ones that the sea lions coopted.  Here’s a picture, which shows the area just to the left of the Sea Lion hangout, with boats:

The point, of course, is that, environmentalists to the contrary, nature is adaptive and resilient.  Yes, humans can push too hard and destroy things entirely (think wooly mammoths), but the fact is that nature, for the most part, is willing, anxious and able to take over.  Our task, most (although certainly not all) of the time, isn’t to stop ourselves from destroying nature.  It’s to stop nature from destroying us.

And if you don’t believe me, check out Laer’s post for more on raw nature’s ability to adapt and survive.