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I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Say

I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops. There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications. What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break. Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money." And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?

vinbreau 6y ago
Reminds me of an old adage I heard in high school: If you take the frogs out of the environment, you don't have the same environment minus frogs, you have an entirely new ecosystem.
- honkycat 6y ago
  The classic example is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone: https://sites.tufts.edu/tuftsgetsgreen/2018/02/27/wolves-change-ecosystem-and-geography-in-yellowstone/ https://sites.tufts.edu/tuftsgetsgreen/2018/02/27/wolves-cha...
  - tzs 6y ago
    Wolves in Yellowstone are a "keystone species" [1]. A year ago, there was a fascinating episode of "Nature" on PBS about keystone species. It's available for free online streaming here [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species [2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/20105/?button=fullepisode https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/2...
    - ganafagol 6y ago
      The sad thing with this "keystone species" concept is that people see it as "oh but this weird insect that's about to go extinct in south-east asia is not a keystone species, so whatever."
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  True, but it's also good to remember that the new system isn't "worse" or "better" than the old one. A lot of people seem to think that if you "destroy" an ecosystem it is a step toward a lifeless environment.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    We are experiencing this in parts of the ocean - a switch from fishes to jellyfish. One is edible, the other, not so much. Here's some comments: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    In the short term it's reducing the diversity of the ecosystem, yes. And the effect of that tends to pull in quite a bunch of effects that contribute to that effect even more. Only in the long run will there be more diversity again. But by that time we'll all sit in Musk Kingdom on Mars with oxygen masks and radiation suits and legends of ancestors who used to know what a summer breeze at a lake felt like, cause we succeeded to colonize another planet and that was totally worth it!!!11
coliveira 6y ago
Capitalism doesn't know how to account for things that have no dollar signs attached. The only answer to anything in capitalism is: let's create a market for that. When you elevate capitalism to an ideology (which is what is happening for many people) instead of an economic tool that you need to use when necessary, then you lose focus of the real world outside markets.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  As opposed to the Communists draining the Aral sea? It's not about socialism or capitalism here, scarce resources and humans need regulation
  - coliveira 6y ago
    Why you assume that non-capitalism is the same as communism? Capitalist ideology and communism are extremes, in my opinion there is a healthy balance between them.
    - gremlinsinc 6y ago
      I agree with this viewpoint. A more non-statist communism (re: unions and local area orgs that manage 90% of all needs), worker coops, less power for D.C. more for states and local municipalities. healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union then don't and if your employer still has their own health ins. use that, or maybe they use ours anyways cause it'd be better... Either way options still exist with the best ones rising to the top like normal capitalism, just CEOs and execs wouldn't be paid as well, because their value is a lot less than they think it is.
      - coliveira 6y ago
        Exactly. Extremes of capitalism and communism are bound to lead to conflict and destruction because there is no way to convince everyone of something. But a well balanced society should be able to combine market based solutions with community based solutions where it makes sense.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
- s3graham 6y ago
  I feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.
  - lpolovets 6y ago
    The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      there must be some science fiction series in which humans are called chaos monkeys!
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    It's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.
    - not_kurt_godel 6y ago
      > it'll still be running some code. This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.
    - toss1 6y ago
      Yup, with one addition >> It'll still be running some code... until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction
reader_mode 6y ago
> Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. Working towards reducing that reliance sounds like a better investment than hoping that a fragile system keeps stable if we undo the changes we noticed we cause (a system that had multiple extinction events in the past)
- hellotomyrars 6y ago
  Extinction events don't happen that often. Meanwhile the massive changes we've made to our environment (in a relatively small time frame) are having a serious impact on our ability to survive on this planet. We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    > We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc. There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Closed system biospheres on Earth have proved impossible to date. Mars is vastly less tractable. Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.
    - hellotomyrars 6y ago
      None of those things protect you from an extinction event. I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress. Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth. Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.
masklinn 6y ago
> I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves. However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.
- chmod775 6y ago
  >FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat. Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    It's worth noting there are wild pollinators, some more efficient than others. Orchard bees are like 200x more efficient than honeybees on an individual basis when pollinating apple trees, for instance. The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.
    - giantDinosaur 6y ago
      Is it not possible to domesticate other bee species? Surely a x200 increase in efficiency would be a major reason to domesticate orchard bees, right?
      - 6y ago
ip26 6y ago
If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops. There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee Sorry, what? https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-better-pollinators-honey-bee https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-bette... I haven't got it out for honey bees, but as your comment makes clear, native species are underappreciated.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  The article you cite doesn't seem to really agree with you: > So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees. > ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating. From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity. So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  I know where I live most native pollinators are very selective and, as a result, in very small numbers since their habitat doesn’t resemble what it did even 100 years ago. They’re a drop in the bucket compared to what we require... And even if we made enormous efforts to boost their populations, I think they’d largely only pollinate fruit trees.
  - BasicObject 6y ago
    Not disagreeing with you just curious why they would largely only pollinate fruit trees?
    - 6y ago
kortilla 6y ago
What is this strawman that you are attacking even proposing? Since you’re not replying to anyone or even quoting it seems like a vague bogeyman that hates nature?
- freewilly1040 6y ago
  The early comments on this thread were skeptical of the value of using government dollars to remove murder hornets
  - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
    To me, this seems like similar thinking that we should just go for herd immunity - possibly even more ill contrived.
maxerickson 6y ago
Calorie crops mostly self pollinate or similar (wheat, corn, soy, etc). Bees don't matter there. For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'. And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  It's clear you are mixing up vanilla and most every kind of fruit tree. One is a high-value, low-volume speciality crop, the other is the exact opposite. Pollinating a cherry orchard! Dude, you go first!
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    I'm not saying it would be a good situation to end up in, I'm saying it is economically viable (so we'd still have fruit). Hand pollination of apples is already sometimes done in China.
    - ganafagol 6y ago
      Dude you need to look up the definition of "economically viable". You seem to be speaking from an unquantifiably elevated position of privilege.
philtechguy 6y ago
It's useful to note that system's thinking is such an outdated model of looking at the world. Basically modeling the world as a fancy mechanism, with mechanistic explanations about every aspects of the world. Very reductionist about organisms, nature, societies, etc.
- xg15 6y ago
  Why is it outdated? Do you have any souces for that? What do you propose instead?
  - animal_spirits 6y ago
    I think its a good start to learn about chaotic systems instead. For most systems, minute parameter changes can have dramatic effects on the predictability of the system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo
  - philtechguy 6y ago
    Well, one of the reasons is that a lot of systems theory was basically trying to apply notions, concepts and mathematical analysis from physics, firm management, and game theory to contexts where they just didn't apply: ideal rationality of agents, information flow diagrams, and even notions like equilibria. The notion of equilibrium in ecosystems, for example, came from the physics of gases in vacuum chambers, neither organisms or populations of organisms exhibit such tendencies. There are many more examples of why mechanistic explanations simply don't work for many phenomena in the philosophy of science. Weiner, Simon, and others were just trying to use the maths they knew to solve some bigger more complex problems and in the process ended up stretching the metaphor of the system a bit too far.
coldtea 6y ago
>I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong"). It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.
- syrrim 6y ago
  So if technology was used to eliminate murder hornets, maybe hn would be more in favour of the practice?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Oh, absolutely. The more genetic engineering and radiation the better. With a bit of machine learning you've got a pitch deck for murder hornet removal as a service.
    - iamtedd 6y ago
      Shut up and take my money!
notabee 6y ago
Yep, genetic diversity is a resource. It's painstakingly written natural code that solves various biological problems. We're just now getting to the point where we can start to understand this massive legacy codebase that creates the biosphere, and it's like we're just deleting huge swathes of it without analyzing it because we want more space to store cat jpgs or something stupid like that. So goddamned shortsighted.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
What does this have to do with an invasive species? Do you assume that we allow Murder Hornets to spread and displace multiple native species? I'm confused about the intent of your post.
immmmmm 6y ago
I cannot agree more. If i could upvote twice i would. We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned. This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now. And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares. If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved. By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife-destruction-not-a-slippery-slope-but-a-series-of-cliff-edges https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...
- dotancohen 6y ago
  > And no one says a world. No one even dare spending > 5 minute reading the material. No one cares. Recommend something that I can give to people that they can read in 5 minutes and be convinced.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience of their favorite bars being closed or having to wear a mask. There is no document in the universe of any length that will convince them.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims. On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the response; this person responded so badly to the lockdown that they had to be committed. It's possible that the existence of a pandemic isn't what people are denying...
teawrecks 6y ago
The problem is that people think environmentalism is about preserving the environment. The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.
- wyre 6y ago
  >The planets gonna be fine I see this line a lot but everyday humans are doing irreparable damage to ecosystems. Taking millions of years to heal from events is not ‘fine’.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    But what is "heal"? There's no such thing as the "right" or "fine" ecosystem. In 100 years, I'm nearly 100% certain that this planet will still exist and something will live on it. His point was that we're killing ourself. An ecosystem and a planet will continue existing, the question is whether humans will exist on it.
    - bmitc 6y ago
      I think an appropriate definition of the right ecosystem is the one that would be here without the vast narcissism of humans. Yes, humans are animals, but we have broken out of the natural balance of things and relished in that fact by destroying everything in our wake in the name of so-called progress. I think it’s similar to how we view viruses.
      - ganafagol 6y ago
        I agree, but when dealing with a narcissist, the only way to make progress may be to play to their narcissism. If that's what it takes, sure, let's do it and pretend that we need to live sustainable livestyles to save humanity.
- radium3d 6y ago
  Humans (and every other species we cause suffering to) are gonna have a bad time.
haberman 6y ago
> How could you honestly take this position? What position do you mean? Your comment is not replying to anybody. I don't see anybody in this thread who is arguing that we should do nothing.
bsder 6y ago
> There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications. This is solely due to the industrialization of agriculture. Leaving fallow portions of the field and growing native crops winds up with an assortment of pollinators--including a lot of native bees. The problem is that they are less efficient. So, a farmer who does this will lose to a farmer who uses industrialized honeybees. This is a standard case of privatize the profit and socialize the risk.
hinkley 6y ago
> we still need nature to sustain ourselves. There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves. We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.
sandworm101 6y ago
Bee careful when talking about wiping out invasive species. Honeybees aren't native to north america. Nor are the majority of crops that they pollinate. "Invasive", by government definition, means not just foreign but also economically dangerous. Conversely, screwworm is native but we chose to wipe that species from north american because it was economically dangerous. I haven't heard anyone talk of allowing it back.
- adamredwoods 6y ago
  Let's not bring back the screwworm: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-reasons-flesh-eating-screwworms-are-as-gross-as-you-think https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-reasons-flesh-eating-...
souprock 6y ago
Short-sighted "environmentalist" thinking will let this invasive species take over all of North America and South America. We aren't willing to sacrifice, even temporarily, the local insects. You have to be willing to do that if you expect to stop this invasive species, because you can not possibly find all the nests fast enough. If we were to think long-term, we could stop this invasive species. Crop duster planes spray everything within at least several generations or years of insect migration. That might mean 10,000 square miles gets completely soaked in a mix of Sevin, Malathion, and neonicotinoids. Compared to the roughly 16,300,000 square miles at risk of being irrevocably harmed by an invasive species, that local and temporary ecosystem damage would be practically nothing. We'll argue a bit and do nothing. The wasps are here to stay. Say goodbye to bees.
Aeolun 6y ago
> Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications. We have honey bees in Japan. While I agree it will have huge implications, it’ll hardly be the last of them. That said, I’d rather murder hornets go away everywhere.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I think those bees learned how to fight them, which is probably untrue for the rest of the bee population elsewhere. There might also be birds that eat them. I love having hornets on my property if their nest isn't located in a path I have to cross. They also eat wasps and you won't have any problems with them throughout the summer. They don't try to eat your cake or drink you lemonade and you can peacefully chill in your garden. They always leave their nest after a season and it can make quite a mess. But nothing is better than having them in a remote location in your garden. It is better than any insect spray. But you still might seriously want to get rid of them because they could indeed do a lot of damage in another ecosystem that needs to sacrifice several species until it adapts.
rvba 6y ago
> people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them This whole idea is very batshit insane too.
mykmallett 6y ago
Who are you arguing with?
Santosh83 6y ago
Remember, a lot of people on this forum hate their own biological heritage and want to "upload their memories" into silicon super-computing chips and seek to escape the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The biological world and interdependence are repugnant to them. They are wannabee versions of Skynet essentially.
milchek 6y ago
I completely agree with what you're saying here, but I'm going to just discuss one thing that you said: > "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever." I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there). We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.
- PsylentKnight 6y ago
  I think this statement makes a point opposite what you intended: > We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history That's exactly the problem. We're causing massive changes on a much shorter timescale than evolution operates on. I think it's likely the global ecosystem will struggle to adapt.
donw 6y ago
I'll try and explain the "anti-environmentalist" position as best I can. Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem. Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon. Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect. And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power. This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people. What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot. The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking. The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities. But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
I generally agree, but could you further define what Nature means to you? especially when you say "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
gorgoiler 6y ago
This is in no way a rebuttal to your points, but merely out of interest: how does pollination by honey bee work in countries where the hornets are endemic?
- zaphod4prez 6y ago
  Japanese bees have developed a strategy to defeat the hornets so they're better able to protect their nests. Bees in the US don't have that strategy. Pretty cool to watch actually: https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185 https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185
ganafagol 6y ago
> And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for? Mars, apparently.
toper-centage 6y ago
Nature is full of pollinators. The reason we need to carry around bees to pollinate crops is because we have dedicated vast areas to monocultures where no insect diversity can be established. They become diversity deserts. So a known and tried solution: mixed crops, crop rotation, and insect oasis. We keep paying in environmental health so our food is cheaper and easier to produce. That needs to end.
boudin 6y ago
Just to add on this, pollinators cannot replace each others. Some plants can only be pollinated by specific species, like red clover and bumblebees in the uk.
lm28469 6y ago
I'd recommend this book, it explains a few interactions between species of animals / insects / plants and shows how everything is more of less connected in ways we can't imagine https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discoveries-Secret/dp/1771642483 https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...
specialist 6y ago
"anti-environmentalist position that pops up" Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility. "Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections." Yup. In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.
abandonliberty 6y ago
It's okay, we can just get cheap Chinese labor to manually pollinate all the fruit. https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-bees-die-off/ https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-be... Wonder how the economics are now!
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
In general, I find people, probably due to the sheer difference in timescale that is beyond palpable understanding, to appreciate that our collective environmental impact precludes other species the evolutionary time to adapt to our impact and to fill gaps in "species web" to fill all the extinctions that are occurring. Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt. Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.

vinbreau 6y ago

Reminds me of an old adage I heard in high school: If you take the frogs out of the environment, you don't have the same environment minus frogs, you have an entirely new ecosystem.

honkycat 6y ago
The classic example is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone: https://sites.tufts.edu/tuftsgetsgreen/2018/02/27/wolves-change-ecosystem-and-geography-in-yellowstone/ https://sites.tufts.edu/tuftsgetsgreen/2018/02/27/wolves-cha...
- tzs 6y ago
  Wolves in Yellowstone are a "keystone species" [1]. A year ago, there was a fascinating episode of "Nature" on PBS about keystone species. It's available for free online streaming here [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species [2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/20105/?button=fullepisode https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/2...
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    The sad thing with this "keystone species" concept is that people see it as "oh but this weird insect that's about to go extinct in south-east asia is not a keystone species, so whatever."
BurningFrog 6y ago
True, but it's also good to remember that the new system isn't "worse" or "better" than the old one. A lot of people seem to think that if you "destroy" an ecosystem it is a step toward a lifeless environment.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  We are experiencing this in parts of the ocean - a switch from fishes to jellyfish. One is edible, the other, not so much. Here's some comments: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6
- ganafagol 6y ago
  In the short term it's reducing the diversity of the ecosystem, yes. And the effect of that tends to pull in quite a bunch of effects that contribute to that effect even more. Only in the long run will there be more diversity again. But by that time we'll all sit in Musk Kingdom on Mars with oxygen masks and radiation suits and legends of ancestors who used to know what a summer breeze at a lake felt like, cause we succeeded to colonize another planet and that was totally worth it!!!11

coliveira 6y ago

Capitalism doesn't know how to account for things that have no dollar signs attached. The only answer to anything in capitalism is: let's create a market for that. When you elevate capitalism to an ideology (which is what is happening for many people) instead of an economic tool that you need to use when necessary, then you lose focus of the real world outside markets.

mhh__ 6y ago
As opposed to the Communists draining the Aral sea? It's not about socialism or capitalism here, scarce resources and humans need regulation
- coliveira 6y ago
  Why you assume that non-capitalism is the same as communism? Capitalist ideology and communism are extremes, in my opinion there is a healthy balance between them.
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    I agree with this viewpoint. A more non-statist communism (re: unions and local area orgs that manage 90% of all needs), worker coops, less power for D.C. more for states and local municipalities. healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union then don't and if your employer still has their own health ins. use that, or maybe they use ours anyways cause it'd be better... Either way options still exist with the best ones rising to the top like normal capitalism, just CEOs and execs wouldn't be paid as well, because their value is a lot less than they think it is.
    - coliveira 6y ago
      Exactly. Extremes of capitalism and communism are bound to lead to conflict and destruction because there is no way to convince everyone of something. But a well balanced society should be able to combine market based solutions with community based solutions where it makes sense.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.

s3graham 6y ago
I feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.
- lpolovets 6y ago
  The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    there must be some science fiction series in which humans are called chaos monkeys!
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  It's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.
  - not_kurt_godel 6y ago
    > it'll still be running some code. This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.
  - toss1 6y ago
    Yup, with one addition >> It'll still be running some code... until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction

reader_mode 6y ago

> Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. Working towards reducing that reliance sounds like a better investment than hoping that a fragile system keeps stable if we undo the changes we noticed we cause (a system that had multiple extinction events in the past)

hellotomyrars 6y ago
Extinction events don't happen that often. Meanwhile the massive changes we've made to our environment (in a relatively small time frame) are having a serious impact on our ability to survive on this planet. We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  > We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc. There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Closed system biospheres on Earth have proved impossible to date. Mars is vastly less tractable. Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.
  - hellotomyrars 6y ago
    None of those things protect you from an extinction event. I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress. Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth. Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.

masklinn 6y ago

> I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves. However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.

chmod775 6y ago
>FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat. Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  It's worth noting there are wild pollinators, some more efficient than others. Orchard bees are like 200x more efficient than honeybees on an individual basis when pollinating apple trees, for instance. The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.
  - giantDinosaur 6y ago
    Is it not possible to domesticate other bee species? Surely a x200 increase in efficiency would be a major reason to domesticate orchard bees, right?
    - 6y ago

ip26 6y ago

If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops. There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee Sorry, what? https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-better-pollinators-honey-bee https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-bette... I haven't got it out for honey bees, but as your comment makes clear, native species are underappreciated.

crazygringo 6y ago
The article you cite doesn't seem to really agree with you: > So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees. > ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating. From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity. So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
I know where I live most native pollinators are very selective and, as a result, in very small numbers since their habitat doesn’t resemble what it did even 100 years ago. They’re a drop in the bucket compared to what we require... And even if we made enormous efforts to boost their populations, I think they’d largely only pollinate fruit trees.
- BasicObject 6y ago
  Not disagreeing with you just curious why they would largely only pollinate fruit trees?
  - 6y ago

kortilla 6y ago

What is this strawman that you are attacking even proposing? Since you’re not replying to anyone or even quoting it seems like a vague bogeyman that hates nature?

freewilly1040 6y ago
The early comments on this thread were skeptical of the value of using government dollars to remove murder hornets
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  To me, this seems like similar thinking that we should just go for herd immunity - possibly even more ill contrived.

maxerickson 6y ago

Calorie crops mostly self pollinate or similar (wheat, corn, soy, etc). Bees don't matter there. For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'. And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.

HarryHirsch 6y ago
It's clear you are mixing up vanilla and most every kind of fruit tree. One is a high-value, low-volume speciality crop, the other is the exact opposite. Pollinating a cherry orchard! Dude, you go first!
- maxerickson 6y ago
  I'm not saying it would be a good situation to end up in, I'm saying it is economically viable (so we'd still have fruit). Hand pollination of apples is already sometimes done in China.
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    Dude you need to look up the definition of "economically viable". You seem to be speaking from an unquantifiably elevated position of privilege.

philtechguy 6y ago

It's useful to note that system's thinking is such an outdated model of looking at the world. Basically modeling the world as a fancy mechanism, with mechanistic explanations about every aspects of the world. Very reductionist about organisms, nature, societies, etc.

xg15 6y ago
Why is it outdated? Do you have any souces for that? What do you propose instead?
- animal_spirits 6y ago
  I think its a good start to learn about chaotic systems instead. For most systems, minute parameter changes can have dramatic effects on the predictability of the system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo
- philtechguy 6y ago
  Well, one of the reasons is that a lot of systems theory was basically trying to apply notions, concepts and mathematical analysis from physics, firm management, and game theory to contexts where they just didn't apply: ideal rationality of agents, information flow diagrams, and even notions like equilibria. The notion of equilibrium in ecosystems, for example, came from the physics of gases in vacuum chambers, neither organisms or populations of organisms exhibit such tendencies. There are many more examples of why mechanistic explanations simply don't work for many phenomena in the philosophy of science. Weiner, Simon, and others were just trying to use the maths they knew to solve some bigger more complex problems and in the process ended up stretching the metaphor of the system a bit too far.

coldtea 6y ago

>I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong"). It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.

syrrim 6y ago
So if technology was used to eliminate murder hornets, maybe hn would be more in favour of the practice?
- pjc50 6y ago
  Oh, absolutely. The more genetic engineering and radiation the better. With a bit of machine learning you've got a pitch deck for murder hornet removal as a service.
  - iamtedd 6y ago
    Shut up and take my money!

notabee 6y ago

Yep, genetic diversity is a resource. It's painstakingly written natural code that solves various biological problems. We're just now getting to the point where we can start to understand this massive legacy codebase that creates the biosphere, and it's like we're just deleting huge swathes of it without analyzing it because we want more space to store cat jpgs or something stupid like that. So goddamned shortsighted.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

What does this have to do with an invasive species? Do you assume that we allow Murder Hornets to spread and displace multiple native species? I'm confused about the intent of your post.

immmmmm 6y ago

I cannot agree more. If i could upvote twice i would. We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned. This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now. And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares. If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved. By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife-destruction-not-a-slippery-slope-but-a-series-of-cliff-edges https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...

dotancohen 6y ago
> And no one says a world. No one even dare spending > 5 minute reading the material. No one cares. Recommend something that I can give to people that they can read in 5 minutes and be convinced.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience of their favorite bars being closed or having to wear a mask. There is no document in the universe of any length that will convince them.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims. On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the response; this person responded so badly to the lockdown that they had to be committed. It's possible that the existence of a pandemic isn't what people are denying...

teawrecks 6y ago

The problem is that people think environmentalism is about preserving the environment. The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.

wyre 6y ago
>The planets gonna be fine I see this line a lot but everyday humans are doing irreparable damage to ecosystems. Taking millions of years to heal from events is not ‘fine’.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  But what is "heal"? There's no such thing as the "right" or "fine" ecosystem. In 100 years, I'm nearly 100% certain that this planet will still exist and something will live on it. His point was that we're killing ourself. An ecosystem and a planet will continue existing, the question is whether humans will exist on it.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    I think an appropriate definition of the right ecosystem is the one that would be here without the vast narcissism of humans. Yes, humans are animals, but we have broken out of the natural balance of things and relished in that fact by destroying everything in our wake in the name of so-called progress. I think it’s similar to how we view viruses.
    - ganafagol 6y ago
      I agree, but when dealing with a narcissist, the only way to make progress may be to play to their narcissism. If that's what it takes, sure, let's do it and pretend that we need to live sustainable livestyles to save humanity.
radium3d 6y ago
Humans (and every other species we cause suffering to) are gonna have a bad time.

haberman 6y ago

> How could you honestly take this position? What position do you mean? Your comment is not replying to anybody. I don't see anybody in this thread who is arguing that we should do nothing.

bsder 6y ago

> There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications. This is solely due to the industrialization of agriculture. Leaving fallow portions of the field and growing native crops winds up with an assortment of pollinators--including a lot of native bees. The problem is that they are less efficient. So, a farmer who does this will lose to a farmer who uses industrialized honeybees. This is a standard case of privatize the profit and socialize the risk.

hinkley 6y ago

> we still need nature to sustain ourselves. There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves. We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.

sandworm101 6y ago

Bee careful when talking about wiping out invasive species. Honeybees aren't native to north america. Nor are the majority of crops that they pollinate. "Invasive", by government definition, means not just foreign but also economically dangerous. Conversely, screwworm is native but we chose to wipe that species from north american because it was economically dangerous. I haven't heard anyone talk of allowing it back.

adamredwoods 6y ago
Let's not bring back the screwworm: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-reasons-flesh-eating-screwworms-are-as-gross-as-you-think https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-reasons-flesh-eating-...

souprock 6y ago

Short-sighted "environmentalist" thinking will let this invasive species take over all of North America and South America. We aren't willing to sacrifice, even temporarily, the local insects. You have to be willing to do that if you expect to stop this invasive species, because you can not possibly find all the nests fast enough. If we were to think long-term, we could stop this invasive species. Crop duster planes spray everything within at least several generations or years of insect migration. That might mean 10,000 square miles gets completely soaked in a mix of Sevin, Malathion, and neonicotinoids. Compared to the roughly 16,300,000 square miles at risk of being irrevocably harmed by an invasive species, that local and temporary ecosystem damage would be practically nothing. We'll argue a bit and do nothing. The wasps are here to stay. Say goodbye to bees.

Aeolun 6y ago

> Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications. We have honey bees in Japan. While I agree it will have huge implications, it’ll hardly be the last of them. That said, I’d rather murder hornets go away everywhere.

raxxorrax 6y ago
I think those bees learned how to fight them, which is probably untrue for the rest of the bee population elsewhere. There might also be birds that eat them. I love having hornets on my property if their nest isn't located in a path I have to cross. They also eat wasps and you won't have any problems with them throughout the summer. They don't try to eat your cake or drink you lemonade and you can peacefully chill in your garden. They always leave their nest after a season and it can make quite a mess. But nothing is better than having them in a remote location in your garden. It is better than any insect spray. But you still might seriously want to get rid of them because they could indeed do a lot of damage in another ecosystem that needs to sacrifice several species until it adapts.

rvba 6y ago

> people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them This whole idea is very batshit insane too.

mykmallett 6y ago

Who are you arguing with?

Santosh83 6y ago

Remember, a lot of people on this forum hate their own biological heritage and want to "upload their memories" into silicon super-computing chips and seek to escape the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The biological world and interdependence are repugnant to them. They are wannabee versions of Skynet essentially.

milchek 6y ago

I completely agree with what you're saying here, but I'm going to just discuss one thing that you said: > "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever." I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there). We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.

PsylentKnight 6y ago
I think this statement makes a point opposite what you intended: > We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history That's exactly the problem. We're causing massive changes on a much shorter timescale than evolution operates on. I think it's likely the global ecosystem will struggle to adapt.

donw 6y ago

I'll try and explain the "anti-environmentalist" position as best I can. Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem. Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon. Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect. And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power. This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people. What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot. The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking. The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities. But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

I generally agree, but could you further define what Nature means to you? especially when you say "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."

gorgoiler 6y ago

This is in no way a rebuttal to your points, but merely out of interest: how does pollination by honey bee work in countries where the hornets are endemic?

zaphod4prez 6y ago
Japanese bees have developed a strategy to defeat the hornets so they're better able to protect their nests. Bees in the US don't have that strategy. Pretty cool to watch actually: https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185 https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185

ganafagol 6y ago

> And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for? Mars, apparently.

toper-centage 6y ago

Nature is full of pollinators. The reason we need to carry around bees to pollinate crops is because we have dedicated vast areas to monocultures where no insect diversity can be established. They become diversity deserts. So a known and tried solution: mixed crops, crop rotation, and insect oasis. We keep paying in environmental health so our food is cheaper and easier to produce. That needs to end.

boudin 6y ago

Just to add on this, pollinators cannot replace each others. Some plants can only be pollinated by specific species, like red clover and bumblebees in the uk.

lm28469 6y ago

I'd recommend this book, it explains a few interactions between species of animals / insects / plants and shows how everything is more of less connected in ways we can't imagine https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discoveries-Secret/dp/1771642483 https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...

specialist 6y ago

"anti-environmentalist position that pops up" Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility. "Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections." Yup. In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.

abandonliberty 6y ago

It's okay, we can just get cheap Chinese labor to manually pollinate all the fruit. https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-bees-die-off/ https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-be... Wonder how the economics are now!

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

In general, I find people, probably due to the sheer difference in timescale that is beyond palpable understanding, to appreciate that our collective environmental impact precludes other species the evolutionary time to adapt to our impact and to fill gaps in "species web" to fill all the extinctions that are occurring. Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt. Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.