Thoughts about the documentary

1/ Documentary Idea

The first idea about ecology from around the 70's explain that
- nature is stable / nature is a loop
-  after a big disaster nature will recover the same as it was before
- humans are messing up the stability of nature
- humans should respect nature

The second idea established in the 90's tend to demonstrate that
- nature is not a cycle
- nature is unstable
- after a big disaster nature will recover in a different way
- humans are not messing up nature because humans are natural
- fast extinction, etc are natural

2/ Confrontation with my opinion

This movie made me think because at first sight, without thinking too deep, my ideas sound like the first thesis of this documentary. Which is scientifically not correct. And worst, which is some kind of propaganda. Although, at the end of the movie I was confused because I don't really agree with the conclusion of the film either.

The director describes the first ecology theory as too simple (it's only an electronic components scheme) but on the other hand he also presents the second theory as computed electronic scheme. In my opinion, this is also a reduction of the nature and this can't be true as well even if it's more realistic than the first theory.

Both theories are materialist, in my opinion, it is not possible to reproduce nature with a computer. This problem is also connected to the matter to life mystery. As long as we don't understand how matter came to life, we cannot pretend that we can understand the complexity nature.

Although, what we can surely infer, if we look at the past, is that after each big disaster nature recovered in the same organisation and the same laws as before but only with small appearance divergences. The director took the exemple of the population of a certain animal that decreased and got replaced by the population of another animal. Maybe his exemple was a good exemple because it's not predictable but in fact most of population fluctuation are predictable and it can vary following different frequencies. (Over a month, a year, 2 years, 10 years, etc).

In my opinion, we can represent nature as a point cloud image in which these points look randomly positioned with random scale but when we look at it from the outside this randomization appears as pattern that we can identify (voronoi diagram, golden number, etc).

Also the documentary seems to posit that all of humans action and evolution are "natural" and that everything happening these days included mass extinctions caused by humans are normal. In a sense I agree, but this is a very egocentric/anthropocentric vision.

In my opinion we can also choose to be part of this global point cloud pattern instead of being one big dot. We can use our strength to control what our position and size should be in this noisy "cloud".


Documentary : All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis