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Sorry but I have to disagree with the whole tone of this. I see it this way, the thought hat we have "destroyed a natural ecosystem" is incorrect. Just as inco

Sorry but I have to disagree with the whole tone of this. I see it this way, the thought hat we have "destroyed a natural ecosystem" is incorrect. Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. Those changes, have changed the ecosystem around them. What Gedge and others in the article are saying, is that it is in human's best interest to support a diversity of habitats that can co-exist with their own. The benefits are three fold, they keep biodiversity higher (balancing other processes in the environment), they can provide benefits for the humans for "free", and they lower the negative impact of humans on the flora that used the space before humans started changing it for their own use. An example close to home. I live in a typical California 2 story single family home. Because California homes are typically "next" to each other, the walls on the side of my house are blank since there isn't much point of a window that looks at your neighbors wall or worse inside their house at close range. I built a "bat house" which is really just a couple of plywood sheets separated by 1x2s to attach to the eastern wall. Voila, bats come to live at my house. And those same bats are eating pests such as mosquitos which carry West Nile virus in my area. If we could get all the houses on my street to do the same, the city would likely never catch another mosquito on our street. So what is the "cost" of that? The bat house takes no electricity, its materials are pretty simple. The bats show up for "free" and take care of themselves. There is a guano disposal "problem" but I just dump it into my compost pile and it adds a crap ton of nitrogen to the soil. So the net of it is that is saves me money on fertilizer, it saves me money on pest control, and it costs nearly zero to maintain. How is that not a "win" here?

clumsysmurf 5y ago
> Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to. If Timothy Morton is correct, humans have already destroyed the earth but we don't know it yet because it is a hyperobject.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  > I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to. Humans are just a later stage of life's flourishing than beavers: Eukaryotes have more extropy than prokaryotes; Multicelled organisms have more extropy than single celled ones; Complex mulicelled organisms have more extropy than simple ones; and humans (once they invented farming and writing) have more extropy than complex animals. The next stage after that -- the stage we're currently in -- is the industrial revolutuon. The stage after that is the singularity, when AIs will take over. But it's all life, doing what it does: expanding, controlling resources, reproducing, etc.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Beavers are extremely important parts of their ecosystems. Their dam building behavior is depended upon by many other actors within the ecosystem. They're a keystone species. Humans clear cutting a forest is not part of any larger, stable system. Entropy is a myopic way to frame it
  - helmholtz 5y ago
    Sometimes, it's so difficult to not be full of bitter spite and hatred for humanity when viewpoints like yours exist. Whales lay dying in fishing nets which trap any and all, their companions watch on, suffocating in our acidic oceans, or choking on a plastic bag, sea birds flying hundreds of miles just to be able to feed on scraps, leaving their nests alone nearly the whole day at the mercy of God, delicate insects burnt to a crisp by gender-reveal forest fires, the very cliched polar bear stands on his tiny piece of ice looking in all four directions for a hint of food, a herd of wild elephants gathers in a circle looking down at their pathetic, poached brethren hunted for a small piece of white sticking out of their heads, turtles being turned into mince meat just to make guitar picks, insects being squished to make colored goo, chickens shitting themselves in fear as they're beheading is up next, all while a know-nothing bloviates self-importantly about AI and Singularity and things he has little understanding of. A shame.
bmitc 5y ago
I have always felt that the "what humans do is natural too!" argument is a massive cop out and totally understates the massive destruction that humans are a part of. Your analogy misses the mark by a long shot, and I would say that it's totally irrelevant except that it actually supports the opposite of what I think your point is. Beaver dams, like almost everything we find in nature, sit within a carefully evolved and evolving balance. Beaver damns actually generate and create thriving ecosystems, including benefits for other species, when viewed from a perspective other than a human one. It's only humans that find beavers a nuisance. What humans build does not add to a balance but rather provides an imbalance. There is no reason to believe, that I know of, that highways and city building, for example, support or diversify or catalyze or <whatever> the ecosystems that they replace and neighbor in any sort of holistic manner. There may be small wins for a very small subset of animal species, but other than that it is destruction and displacement of habitats. Just imagine the next time you're on a highway, even out in the country. Monitor the road kill that you see or the bug splashes on your windshield. They're killed by technology they don't understand while trying to cross a habitat they once crossed freely that is now separated by large swaths of concrete and impassable barriers. Think about all the animals that literally have huge lines drawn in between areas they once roamed. Then notice all the fences, cut grass, buildings, and more that are there and increase in density as you get back closer to the city. All the birds, insects, mammals, and other animals that once inhabited those areas have to go somewhere, or they die off. Now they get condensed and dispersed into areas of tighter competition for resources, all the while still being pushed out by humans in more and more creative ways. There is nothing about this that increases the diversity of ecosystems that once were. It decimates them, literally. I encourage you to go to a remote place and just notice the area absolutely teeming with varieties of flora and fauna. Then imagine a road there, a house there, etc. and realize what would happen to all that there is there. Then multiply that destruction, degradation, and displacement by the size of human habitats. Do you know why bat houses are so effective and encouraged by state governments and conversation groups? It's because humans have destroyed and taken over habitat areas for bats, and they struggle to natural find places to call home. https://www.mass.gov/guides/bat-houses#-why-are-bat-houses-important?- https://www.mass.gov/guides/bat-houses#-why-are-bat-houses-i... https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bats/habitat-loss.htm https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bats/habitat-loss.htm So again, your example supports the opposite of what you think. The fact that bats show up so readily is that they are struggling to find other suitable areas that used to be there. I would encourage you to think about things from a different perspective when you are out in the "nature" that humans have built. Would you like if another species or even a human bulldozed your house and then built you a little tent to live on a corner of your former plot? Would you call that a "win"? Would you like it if there was, for all intents and purposes, an impenetrable wall or walls built between you and grocery stores and separates you from your family and friends? What humans have done may be "natural" in a very general sense, but it is almost entirely self-serving. There are clear reasons why extinction rates have gone up and there are countless stories of species struggling more and more in the past 100-200 years.
tarsinge 5y ago
It’s a win but a small one, because what about every other animal displaced by concrete, light pollution, lack of wild flowers…? Where I live near Paris there where hedgehogs until a few years ago because there were still a few unmaintained and unbuilt land, and finally real estate project after project they are finally completely gone from the city.

clumsysmurf 5y ago

> Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to. If Timothy Morton is correct, humans have already destroyed the earth but we don't know it yet because it is a hyperobject.

cabalamat 5y ago
> I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to. Humans are just a later stage of life's flourishing than beavers: Eukaryotes have more extropy than prokaryotes; Multicelled organisms have more extropy than single celled ones; Complex mulicelled organisms have more extropy than simple ones; and humans (once they invented farming and writing) have more extropy than complex animals. The next stage after that -- the stage we're currently in -- is the industrial revolutuon. The stage after that is the singularity, when AIs will take over. But it's all life, doing what it does: expanding, controlling resources, reproducing, etc.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Beavers are extremely important parts of their ecosystems. Their dam building behavior is depended upon by many other actors within the ecosystem. They're a keystone species. Humans clear cutting a forest is not part of any larger, stable system. Entropy is a myopic way to frame it
- helmholtz 5y ago
  Sometimes, it's so difficult to not be full of bitter spite and hatred for humanity when viewpoints like yours exist. Whales lay dying in fishing nets which trap any and all, their companions watch on, suffocating in our acidic oceans, or choking on a plastic bag, sea birds flying hundreds of miles just to be able to feed on scraps, leaving their nests alone nearly the whole day at the mercy of God, delicate insects burnt to a crisp by gender-reveal forest fires, the very cliched polar bear stands on his tiny piece of ice looking in all four directions for a hint of food, a herd of wild elephants gathers in a circle looking down at their pathetic, poached brethren hunted for a small piece of white sticking out of their heads, turtles being turned into mince meat just to make guitar picks, insects being squished to make colored goo, chickens shitting themselves in fear as they're beheading is up next, all while a know-nothing bloviates self-importantly about AI and Singularity and things he has little understanding of. A shame.

bmitc 5y ago

I have always felt that the "what humans do is natural too!" argument is a massive cop out and totally understates the massive destruction that humans are a part of. Your analogy misses the mark by a long shot, and I would say that it's totally irrelevant except that it actually supports the opposite of what I think your point is. Beaver dams, like almost everything we find in nature, sit within a carefully evolved and evolving balance. Beaver damns actually generate and create thriving ecosystems, including benefits for other species, when viewed from a perspective other than a human one. It's only humans that find beavers a nuisance. What humans build does not add to a balance but rather provides an imbalance. There is no reason to believe, that I know of, that highways and city building, for example, support or diversify or catalyze or <whatever> the ecosystems that they replace and neighbor in any sort of holistic manner. There may be small wins for a very small subset of animal species, but other than that it is destruction and displacement of habitats. Just imagine the next time you're on a highway, even out in the country. Monitor the road kill that you see or the bug splashes on your windshield. They're killed by technology they don't understand while trying to cross a habitat they once crossed freely that is now separated by large swaths of concrete and impassable barriers. Think about all the animals that literally have huge lines drawn in between areas they once roamed. Then notice all the fences, cut grass, buildings, and more that are there and increase in density as you get back closer to the city. All the birds, insects, mammals, and other animals that once inhabited those areas have to go somewhere, or they die off. Now they get condensed and dispersed into areas of tighter competition for resources, all the while still being pushed out by humans in more and more creative ways. There is nothing about this that increases the diversity of ecosystems that once were. It decimates them, literally. I encourage you to go to a remote place and just notice the area absolutely teeming with varieties of flora and fauna. Then imagine a road there, a house there, etc. and realize what would happen to all that there is there. Then multiply that destruction, degradation, and displacement by the size of human habitats. Do you know why bat houses are so effective and encouraged by state governments and conversation groups? It's because humans have destroyed and taken over habitat areas for bats, and they struggle to natural find places to call home. https://www.mass.gov/guides/bat-houses#-why-are-bat-houses-important?- https://www.mass.gov/guides/bat-houses#-why-are-bat-houses-i... https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bats/habitat-loss.htm https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bats/habitat-loss.htm So again, your example supports the opposite of what you think. The fact that bats show up so readily is that they are struggling to find other suitable areas that used to be there. I would encourage you to think about things from a different perspective when you are out in the "nature" that humans have built. Would you like if another species or even a human bulldozed your house and then built you a little tent to live on a corner of your former plot? Would you call that a "win"? Would you like it if there was, for all intents and purposes, an impenetrable wall or walls built between you and grocery stores and separates you from your family and friends? What humans have done may be "natural" in a very general sense, but it is almost entirely self-serving. There are clear reasons why extinction rates have gone up and there are countless stories of species struggling more and more in the past 100-200 years.

tarsinge 5y ago

It’s a win but a small one, because what about every other animal displaced by concrete, light pollution, lack of wild flowers…? Where I live near Paris there where hedgehogs until a few years ago because there were still a few unmaintained and unbuilt land, and finally real estate project after project they are finally completely gone from the city.