Needed: paradigm adjustments, Part 2

I've been a fan of space ships my entire life. When I was younger, my family had back issues of National Geographic from the '60s through the '80s. I used to browse through the table of contents and read every article I could find on space exploration. More recently, I've been watching lots of Star Trek, in which people live on largely self-sustaining spaceships for months or years at a time.

With the knowledge looming over me that we humans are in the process of destroying the earth's self-sustaining ecosystem, I realized that as huge and stable as the Earth seems when we are living on it, it is really nothing more than a large spaceship, and as such is not any more inherently stable than any other well-designed ecosystem. If a space-ship relies on a certain kind of plant to produce oxygen, and that plant dies, the ship is rendered unlivable. The Earth has a lot of redundancies built in, but tip it far enough off balance, and we too could lose a vital system.

I realize that this is not original thinking by any means. But if we're going to undue the damage we've done to the Earth already, a good place to start would be for the general public (and governments in particular) to adopt more of this spaceship mind-set. We need to maintain our environmental systems or we're going to be nothing but a dead hunk of rock floating in space.