Our Earth is always in dynamic balance. Change one thing and everything else changes to maintain the balance. If our decisions create a balance where we are redundant then we shall become redundant.
There is nothing moralistic or right and wrong about that. It is simply 'what balance do we wish to create?' One that includes us or one that does not?

Actually Lucy is spot on. It goes to the core of Western philosophical thinking. Almost all anti-pop thinking is predicated on systems thinking and closed thinking at that. They believe the earth is a ball spinning in space and that people are nothing but rampant consumers. They have no concept of creative intelligence or technology. There's no subtly in their thinking - it's' all or nothing. They completely ignore human agency. It's what you get when some scientists have a crack at public policy - just get rid of the humans.

In fact, if one wanted to take this further, there's considerable force of argument for declaring intellectual war on people who advocate such extreme measures. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Pelican, The article is clearly about ridding the world of human habitation, not sustainability.

As Cheryl says its all or nothing thinking. The author cannot consider combining human progress with environmental sensitivity, which says a lot about thought processes and belief systems.

If you trace the history of the Environmental movement you can see that the "misanthropic" thread is of fairly recent origin but is now beginning to dominate the movement.

the author is perfectly correct that something, i would argue patriarchy, has brought humanity to the brink of
extinction over the past half century, the essential concern behind President Obama's complementary initiative
to decrease nuclear weaponry.

in the circumstances, shooting the messenger is the worst of all possible responses.

What is really anti-human is leaving the next and later generations with an impoverished, degraded environment.

I am a scientist and have worked over the years with many other scientists and engineers. I can't think of one of them who shared Cheryl's childlike faith that technology will solve all of our environmental problems, at least on a time frame that matters to us. This also ignores mankind's long history of societal collapses, every one of them representing an instance where human ingenuity didn't ride to the rescue. We have been lucky in the past century with the Green Revolution and other discoveries, but this is no guarantee that the luck will continue, especially since a number of the natural systems that provide us with our life support are in trouble.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

If Cheryl wants a reality check, she might take a look at some of the science fiction and popular science writing of the 1940s and 50s. It is quite true that we can now do things that the people then never imagined, but many of their predictions were definitely overly optimistic. Where are our flying cars and robot servants? Where is our nuclear power that was going to be too cheap to meter? Why can't most of us make a good living on 20 hours work a week? Why don't we have bases (let alone colonies) on the Moon or Mars? Why can't we regrow amputated limbs? The list could go on. What about the people who kept on smoking because the doctors would surely find a cure for cancer? On the statistics, half of them ended up dying prematurely.

Well put Christine, humans are mindlessly creating problems throughout the globe which will cause our downfall, and take the planet with us. Its the only one we got - but if our own lives only last 80 years its impossible to get people & govenrments to do any long term planning. We probably dont even know the worst of it.