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Surprisingly my reasons for not eradicating pests like mosquitoes and tsetse flies is that these insects protect natural environments from human encroachment. R

• bedobi 5y ago
  I'm not surprised at this argument at all, it's guaranteed to come up given the nature of hacker news commenters. Which is why I said even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing "because humans are bad for the environment" - while these mosquitoes do cause a lot of human deaths, the environmental "benefit" of those deaths are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things)
• finiteseries 5y ago
  Historically ignorant cynical misanthropy that at the end of the day, still condemns millions to disease and billions to poverty in the name of some nebulous environment. Humans are the ones who brought Aedes aegypti, yellow fever, and the malaria parasites to the “natural environment” of the Americas in which >100,000,000 people lived prior to contact. Yellow fever came with the English colonists from their infested coastal marsh natural environment (where people lived). Parasites from their slaves, taken from their malarial natural environments (where people lived). Imported into the New World, helping kill 90% of the people who already lived there, perpetuating the use of chattel slaves thought less susceptible to “fevers and ague”. One of the single most important components to the Colombian Exchange, the idea of mosquito borne disease protecting any natural environments from human encroachment at this point is borderline delusional / actively malicious.