8 ms·

I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we stopped destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are already living in small, isolated poc

I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we stopped destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are already living in small, isolated pockets surrounded by roads, farms, and industry. Meanwhile, plants and smaller animals face intense competition from invasive species - often brought in by accident thanks to the constant flow of goods around the globe. We're probably headed for a pretty homogeneous global ecology - where "economically significant" or highly adaptable plants and animals thrive, while the others are relegated to zoos, national parks, or extinction.

samatman 6y ago
That's the direction things are heading. It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples from as many critically endangered species as possible. Unextinction is a difficult problem, but without the necessary material, it's impossible. Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like those, it's right in the name. And it's no substitute for building wildlife corridors, managing park lands better, extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it doesn't draw resources away from those things either.
- sethherr 6y ago
  ... wait, how is what you’re suggesting different from zoos?
  - samatman 6y ago
    In a zoo, we take an animal out of the wild, and keep it alive. Ideally breeding them as well. In my suggestion, we tranquilize an animal, take a blood sample, and extract marrow from the hip. We then perform a full genome sequence on the blood, and freeze the marrow down, with compounds which vitrify the cells such that they can be revived at any point in the future. We should do both. But the latter has advantages: the animal stays in the wild, it scales better, and the only ongoing input is a bit of energy to keep the cells cold. We don't have the technology to print a whole genome from a file, but I expect we will. Stem cell cloning is well understood, and will only get better. Doing this to as many individuals as possible will preserve genetic diversity. It's insurance, basically.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    It's like a zoo where everything's dead. Which actually simplifies things quite a bit for us. There are many animals we still haven't figured out how to keep in captivity, because studying wild animals in the wild is very expensive. Crazy expensive. Especially ocean animals.
- giantg2 6y ago
  It doesn't really matter if we collect the genetic material if we aren't reversing the actions that caused it to become extinct. For example, arable land is shrinking and population growth as well as an increase in consumption will not leave much (if any) suitable space for some types of wildlife.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Which is why I specifically said that those actions are important also. But it does matter regardless, because rewilding in the future is distinctly possible. If we're able to rebuild an acceptable habitat, and we have the genetic information on hand, we can conceivably unextinct a species and reintroduce it. Without the genetic material, this is impossible. It's similar to the logic of cryostorage, although I would estimate the odds of it working for wild species to be much higher than those for frozen humans, let alone their brains.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I guess you're just much more optimistic than me when it comes to shrinking the population below the current level and reducing consumption.
      - samatman 6y ago
        The second derivative of population is decidedly negative, as is the slope throughout the high-consumption regions of the world; optimism on that front is rational.
        giantg2 6y ago
        We'll all be long dead before that results in a population less than today's, so I guess it's a moot point either way.
- rch 6y ago
  Bio-banking is worthwhile in some cases, but generally speaking it's on par with escaping to Mars in terms of practical utility. Genomes without a hospitable environment would be mostly anachronistic.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  What you propose is like putting humpty dumpty back together, except you're also drunk, blind-folded, and one of your arms is handcuffed to a hippo. I think gene-banks are a novelty, nothing more. Definitely not part of any serious wildlife conservation strategy.
- throw51319 6y ago
  Another pseudo-intellectual "solution" in the same realm as... let's go to Mars! This planet is made for us, we are made for it. We need a top down approach to limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow.
  - fsociety 6y ago
    They aren’t mutually exclusive - believe it or not.
  - bostik 6y ago
    > We need a top down approach to limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow. I'm ready to say that most us know, instinctively, what the solution needs to be. It's just that we are morally obliged not to even consider it, let alone propose it. Thanos lacked ambition.
throwaway894345 6y ago
The glimmer of hope that I have is that the same sort of market forces that create these problems can be marshaled to solve them. For example, if the wealthiest countries implemented a carbon tax including a border adjustment (accounting for goods from countries with a laxer carbon policy) would give governments a single, simple dial that the could turn to lower carbon emissions. Similarly, we ought to be able to implement other kinds of ecological taxes to great effect. However, arriving at that kind of policy is a purely political problem. In the meanwhile, there are other market-based solutions, like organizations who certify products' sustainability. The certifier allows the manufacturer to place the sustainability trademark on their products if they pass the required audits. I'm of the impression that this has made a significant impact for forest-derived products via the Forest Stewardship Council (https://fsc.org/ https://fsc.org/) with a handful of activists decades ago pushing the largest retailers (e.g., Home Depot) of forest-derived products to invest significantly in FSC-certified products.
- runarberg 6y ago
  This comment is currently being downvoted, seemingly only for political reasons. It provides a clearly stated opinion not hostile towards anybody. I guess the HN crowd is not the once who like to hear that carbon tax might actually be a good solution.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Dang, I thought it was because I said “market based” and “market forces”. I can’t tell if I’m too left wing or too right wing.
    - runarberg 6y ago
      That is actually the reason I was surprised to it being downvoted. The comment gives both right wing and left wing solutions. But it’s not being downvoted any more, so I guess HN-ers are now reading the full answer, instead of hitting that down arrow as soon as they see a praise for a tax.
- 6y ago
x87678r 6y ago
You're right. On a good day I think end of biodiversity is basic Darwinism in in the new environment.
air7 6y ago
That might be over pessimistic as "95% Of The World's Population Lives On 10% Of The Land" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217192745.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217192745.h...
- hh3k0 6y ago
  The important part of that statement is "lives". According to the IPCC, humans have transformed _more than 70%_ of all ice-free land if you take stuff like agriculture into account. Edit: It'd seem that I've had remembered outdated figures.
  - andai 6y ago
    What's the latest stat?
    - hh3k0 6y ago
      Ah, sorry. It'd seem that my edit note was confusing. The >70% figure mentioned in my previous comment is recent (2019).
- elihu 6y ago
  Still, even sparsely populated rural humans have a pretty big effect on the natural habitat. We've pretty significantly displaced wild animals with humans/livestock/pets everywhere: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
- nostromo 6y ago
  And what about land we use for food. And for watersheds. And for lumber and metal. And for electricity. The amount of land we live on is tiny compared to the amount of land we use.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  We don't live on land that looks like this but it's destroying biodiversity anyway https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-view-taken-from-an-airplane-on-september-11-2014-news-photo/455242596 https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-view-t...
julienb_sea 6y ago
Fragile species will continue to be in decline. Long term, large species will remain in protected environments like national parks. The idea that humans are incapable of protecting larger species is belied by a visit to Yellowstone. Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted species to flourish. This will certainly shift the makeup of our planet's biodiversity. You mention all of this in passing, but I think these effects make the prognosis on biodiversity somewhat less than "very grim".
- mongol 6y ago
  I don't think it is a matter of what humans can do if they make enough of an effort, but what is most likely to happen.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted species to flourish That statement is a tautology. "Some" species will flourish in all productive biomes, by definition. But the ecosystems that existed will be highly disrupted. So we're replacing large predator marine species with jellyfish. Beavers with rats, wolves with feral cats, etc... And the plant diversity is quite a bit more impacted. Your point amounts to "well, all life isn't going extince, so what's your problem?". The problem is that there is moral value in preserving what exists. Some of us like to believe that "causing a mass extinction event due to entirely preventable causes" is, y'know, a bad thing.
- e_dv1 6y ago
  The United States went through a roughly 100 year period or so where conservation efforts were... er, not terribly great. It took about 100 years for humans to shoot an incredibly large passenger pigeon population into extinction, and bison which once numbered millions on the plains was reduced to mere hundreds. Fortunately, in the mid 19th century to early 20th century in particular, people began to notice and started protecting areas. Thank goodness for that, but a large portion of ecosystems did get wiped out (to give one example, roughly 95% of the California redwood forests). Megafauna do get most of the attention, but a lot of the hidden economic / scientific benefits of maintaining biodiversity I think comes from smaller parts of the ecosystem -- for instance, drug discovery. Or, the widely used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique for copying DNA... which for all we know is a technique that might not even exist today had preservationists not had the foresight to preserve the Lower Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park, where the crucial enzymes for this technique were found.
coronadisaster 6y ago
> often brought in by accident also often brought on purpose
bamboozled 6y ago
Yup, I guess the best strategy is to sit on the internet and talk about the doom to come? Why don’t you do something about it ?
- rewgs 6y ago
  Surely you see the irony here.
rch 6y ago
My perception is that climate change policy hasn't been sufficiently focused on biodiversity, maybe because it has taken so much effort to get the public on board with the idea that the science is real. That's going to have to change.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  There isn't much overlap between these two issues. Climate change is associated with using fossil fuels to produce energy. Decreases in biodiversity are associated with human land use such as agriculture, transportation, and construction, and also with pollution. Politically, tying one issue to the other just poisons them both. The only variable they share is the human population. Growth in human population is already slowing dramatically.

samatman 6y ago

That's the direction things are heading. It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples from as many critically endangered species as possible. Unextinction is a difficult problem, but without the necessary material, it's impossible. Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like those, it's right in the name. And it's no substitute for building wildlife corridors, managing park lands better, extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it doesn't draw resources away from those things either.

sethherr 6y ago
... wait, how is what you’re suggesting different from zoos?
- samatman 6y ago
  In a zoo, we take an animal out of the wild, and keep it alive. Ideally breeding them as well. In my suggestion, we tranquilize an animal, take a blood sample, and extract marrow from the hip. We then perform a full genome sequence on the blood, and freeze the marrow down, with compounds which vitrify the cells such that they can be revived at any point in the future. We should do both. But the latter has advantages: the animal stays in the wild, it scales better, and the only ongoing input is a bit of energy to keep the cells cold. We don't have the technology to print a whole genome from a file, but I expect we will. Stem cell cloning is well understood, and will only get better. Doing this to as many individuals as possible will preserve genetic diversity. It's insurance, basically.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  It's like a zoo where everything's dead. Which actually simplifies things quite a bit for us. There are many animals we still haven't figured out how to keep in captivity, because studying wild animals in the wild is very expensive. Crazy expensive. Especially ocean animals.
giantg2 6y ago
It doesn't really matter if we collect the genetic material if we aren't reversing the actions that caused it to become extinct. For example, arable land is shrinking and population growth as well as an increase in consumption will not leave much (if any) suitable space for some types of wildlife.
- samatman 6y ago
  Which is why I specifically said that those actions are important also. But it does matter regardless, because rewilding in the future is distinctly possible. If we're able to rebuild an acceptable habitat, and we have the genetic information on hand, we can conceivably unextinct a species and reintroduce it. Without the genetic material, this is impossible. It's similar to the logic of cryostorage, although I would estimate the odds of it working for wild species to be much higher than those for frozen humans, let alone their brains.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I guess you're just much more optimistic than me when it comes to shrinking the population below the current level and reducing consumption.
    - samatman 6y ago
      The second derivative of population is decidedly negative, as is the slope throughout the high-consumption regions of the world; optimism on that front is rational.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        We'll all be long dead before that results in a population less than today's, so I guess it's a moot point either way.
rch 6y ago
Bio-banking is worthwhile in some cases, but generally speaking it's on par with escaping to Mars in terms of practical utility. Genomes without a hospitable environment would be mostly anachronistic.
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
What you propose is like putting humpty dumpty back together, except you're also drunk, blind-folded, and one of your arms is handcuffed to a hippo. I think gene-banks are a novelty, nothing more. Definitely not part of any serious wildlife conservation strategy.
throw51319 6y ago
Another pseudo-intellectual "solution" in the same realm as... let's go to Mars! This planet is made for us, we are made for it. We need a top down approach to limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow.
- fsociety 6y ago
  They aren’t mutually exclusive - believe it or not.
- bostik 6y ago
  > We need a top down approach to limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow. I'm ready to say that most us know, instinctively, what the solution needs to be. It's just that we are morally obliged not to even consider it, let alone propose it. Thanos lacked ambition.

throwaway894345 6y ago

The glimmer of hope that I have is that the same sort of market forces that create these problems can be marshaled to solve them. For example, if the wealthiest countries implemented a carbon tax including a border adjustment (accounting for goods from countries with a laxer carbon policy) would give governments a single, simple dial that the could turn to lower carbon emissions. Similarly, we ought to be able to implement other kinds of ecological taxes to great effect. However, arriving at that kind of policy is a purely political problem. In the meanwhile, there are other market-based solutions, like organizations who certify products' sustainability. The certifier allows the manufacturer to place the sustainability trademark on their products if they pass the required audits. I'm of the impression that this has made a significant impact for forest-derived products via the Forest Stewardship Council (https://fsc.org/ https://fsc.org/) with a handful of activists decades ago pushing the largest retailers (e.g., Home Depot) of forest-derived products to invest significantly in FSC-certified products.

runarberg 6y ago
This comment is currently being downvoted, seemingly only for political reasons. It provides a clearly stated opinion not hostile towards anybody. I guess the HN crowd is not the once who like to hear that carbon tax might actually be a good solution.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Dang, I thought it was because I said “market based” and “market forces”. I can’t tell if I’m too left wing or too right wing.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    That is actually the reason I was surprised to it being downvoted. The comment gives both right wing and left wing solutions. But it’s not being downvoted any more, so I guess HN-ers are now reading the full answer, instead of hitting that down arrow as soon as they see a praise for a tax.
6y ago

x87678r 6y ago

You're right. On a good day I think end of biodiversity is basic Darwinism in in the new environment.

air7 6y ago

That might be over pessimistic as "95% Of The World's Population Lives On 10% Of The Land" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217192745.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217192745.h...

hh3k0 6y ago
The important part of that statement is "lives". According to the IPCC, humans have transformed _more than 70%_ of all ice-free land if you take stuff like agriculture into account. Edit: It'd seem that I've had remembered outdated figures.
- andai 6y ago
  What's the latest stat?
  - hh3k0 6y ago
    Ah, sorry. It'd seem that my edit note was confusing. The >70% figure mentioned in my previous comment is recent (2019).
elihu 6y ago
Still, even sparsely populated rural humans have a pretty big effect on the natural habitat. We've pretty significantly displaced wild animals with humans/livestock/pets everywhere: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
nostromo 6y ago
And what about land we use for food. And for watersheds. And for lumber and metal. And for electricity. The amount of land we live on is tiny compared to the amount of land we use.
bosswipe 6y ago
We don't live on land that looks like this but it's destroying biodiversity anyway https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-view-taken-from-an-airplane-on-september-11-2014-news-photo/455242596 https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-view-t...

julienb_sea 6y ago

Fragile species will continue to be in decline. Long term, large species will remain in protected environments like national parks. The idea that humans are incapable of protecting larger species is belied by a visit to Yellowstone. Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted species to flourish. This will certainly shift the makeup of our planet's biodiversity. You mention all of this in passing, but I think these effects make the prognosis on biodiversity somewhat less than "very grim".

mongol 6y ago
I don't think it is a matter of what humans can do if they make enough of an effort, but what is most likely to happen.
newacct583 6y ago
> Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted species to flourish That statement is a tautology. "Some" species will flourish in all productive biomes, by definition. But the ecosystems that existed will be highly disrupted. So we're replacing large predator marine species with jellyfish. Beavers with rats, wolves with feral cats, etc... And the plant diversity is quite a bit more impacted. Your point amounts to "well, all life isn't going extince, so what's your problem?". The problem is that there is moral value in preserving what exists. Some of us like to believe that "causing a mass extinction event due to entirely preventable causes" is, y'know, a bad thing.
e_dv1 6y ago
The United States went through a roughly 100 year period or so where conservation efforts were... er, not terribly great. It took about 100 years for humans to shoot an incredibly large passenger pigeon population into extinction, and bison which once numbered millions on the plains was reduced to mere hundreds. Fortunately, in the mid 19th century to early 20th century in particular, people began to notice and started protecting areas. Thank goodness for that, but a large portion of ecosystems did get wiped out (to give one example, roughly 95% of the California redwood forests). Megafauna do get most of the attention, but a lot of the hidden economic / scientific benefits of maintaining biodiversity I think comes from smaller parts of the ecosystem -- for instance, drug discovery. Or, the widely used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique for copying DNA... which for all we know is a technique that might not even exist today had preservationists not had the foresight to preserve the Lower Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park, where the crucial enzymes for this technique were found.

coronadisaster 6y ago

> often brought in by accident also often brought on purpose

bamboozled 6y ago

Yup, I guess the best strategy is to sit on the internet and talk about the doom to come? Why don’t you do something about it ?

rewgs 6y ago
Surely you see the irony here.

rch 6y ago

My perception is that climate change policy hasn't been sufficiently focused on biodiversity, maybe because it has taken so much effort to get the public on board with the idea that the science is real. That's going to have to change.

jessaustin 6y ago
There isn't much overlap between these two issues. Climate change is associated with using fossil fuels to produce energy. Decreases in biodiversity are associated with human land use such as agriculture, transportation, and construction, and also with pollution. Politically, tying one issue to the other just poisons them both. The only variable they share is the human population. Growth in human population is already slowing dramatically.