2 ms·

Not to be too aloof, but why should we care too much about if the desert tortoise stands to win or lose if we’re doing what’s necessary to save our civilization

• roughly 3y ago
  Well, because we’ve discovered time and again that when we fuck up ecosystems, it’s bad for us, too. Should we care specifically about the desert tortoise above other species? Probably not. Should we be cautious about taking actions that have long ranging future consequences, such as obliterating at least one species? Probably yes. It’s not so much that the desert tortoise is of particular concern, it’s more that we’re so bad at tending to the one and only livable planet realistically available to us that we keep rendering it uninhabitable for species that have the same basic vital needs as us that should be cause for reflection. I’ll note as an aside that as we expand our bioengineering capabilities, the stock of genetic resources we’re drawing on as our toolkit is exactly the biodiversity we’re rapidly depleting, so even beyond the warm fuzzies of not rendering entire species extinct and the basic awareness of how finite and bounded our little bubble of cosmic survivability is, it seems like a waste to keep throwing away the library of useful genetics that took a couple billion years to furnish the first time.