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A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
- rbanffy 2y agoIreland feels the same. A lot of the green spaces have absolutely no indigenous species. You can only find them in places that are being rewilded.
- mjburgess 2y ago> O'ahu, at least, is teaching us important lessons that can help protect other environments not yet so degraded The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it. So it's just an article of faith that whatever series of major evolutionary catastrophes led to to an ecology are morally or aesthetically preferable to those of human design and intention? This disneyification of nature is a great stupidity. Nature is just a series of major crises, punctuated by periods with some novelty -- that this process should be preferable to any other, reads quite implausibly to me.
- decimalenough 2y agoWhile I get where you're coming from and agree to some extent, the cost of introducing new species is often the eradication of native species that can't compete. The moral argument is that those species deserve to be protected because they're valuable as is, while the utilitarian argument is that if native species die, we're losing access to genetic diversity that could be exploited now or in the future for medical treatments, innovations in science, etc.
- mjburgess 2y agoThey're being replaced by ecologies useful to humans, here a variety of crops and the like. I'm unconvinced that the land should exist for some specific species of mice and birds, but not for us. All I really hear is that some very small group of aesthetically-minded human apes are precious about one more variety of bird, against the interest of very many other human apes that need to eat. If the new ecology were really extremely desolate, we might weigh up this a little differently, sure. But the article's entire analysis is that these new ecologies are genuinely "natural" in the sense of self-sustaining, and varied, and so on.
- treyd 2y agoThe GP gave a good reason that directly explains why biodiversity is useful to humans: > we're losing access to genetic diversity that could be exploited now or in the future for medical treatments, innovations in science, etc.
- stinos 2y agoThe entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it Isn't the point rather that the novelty itself isn't the degradation, but the disappearance of the other native species as they get replaced by other species which already exist elsewhere, thereby decreasing overal number of individual species should the native ones go extinct? You could then argue that less species isn't a degradation because on a huge timescale that might not matter. However on a more 'current' timescale, I'm not sure how else to treat the man-made huge biodiversity loss other than a degradation.
- denom 2y agoI think your judgement here sets aside the value of ecosystems in balance.
- mactavish88 2y agoIt's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural". Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.) My hypothesis has long been that this view of human activity as "unnatural" was actually born of the religious perspective that some religions hold that humans were implanted into the universe from the outside.
- eloisius 2y agoWas it George Carlin that joked something like “maybe the earth conjured up humans in order to put all this plastic in its crust for some purpose we don’t understand”?
- binarymax 2y agoHe certainly decried the use of “all-natural” labels for products, because “everything comes from nature!”
- hiccuphippo 2y agoJust like organic and non-organic vegetables. All vegetables are organic!
- Ygg2 2y agoMaybe that's just the sidequest. The real quest is getting multi planetar.
- bix6 2y agoIs it? No other animal seems obsessed with getting off this beautiful rock.
- haswell 2y agoWhat if the real quest is to collectively find ways to coexist without destroying the only planet we know to be fully capable of supporting human life richly? And this doesn’t have to be at odds with our space ambitions. But framed the way you framed this, it somewhat reminds me of the religious perspective that this world is just prep for what is to come. As a consequence, they see the harms we’re doing as inconsequential.
- undebuggable 2y agoAn example specie over here would be Canadian goldenrod. It completely dominates other plants and creates monoculture.
- lproven 2y ago> An example specie over here "Specie" means "of the same kind" and generally specifically coins, especially gold coins. It is not the singular of "species". Species is both singular and plural, like "sheep" or "deer" or "salmon". Where is "over here"?
- undebuggable 2y agoWell TIL, thanks. The location I mean is Poland.
- faassen 2y agoA good book about the related topic of novel urban ecosystems is "Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution" by Menno Schilthuizen. For urban ecosystems Schilthuizen argues we should accept it; cities are a new habitat anyway, and we should treasure the novel ecosystem that forms in them. For non-urban places where thriving existing ecosystems get changed completely due to introductions the picture is more complicated; we should not ignore what has been gained by accident, but also mourn the loss.
- Biologist123 2y agoIf you set up (or more likely inherit) a story that change = loss, you will also onboard a needless eco-anxiety.
- 542354234235 2y agoIf your house burns down, your couch, photo albums, home server, and cats “change” into piles of ash. As amazing as piles of ash are, your previous belongings were unique and had value to you, and would be much more difficult to replace than the ash would be. Large mammals take 10s of millions of years to evolve. Their extinction due to “change” by humans is irreplaceable, for all intents and purposes. This idea that all changes are somehow neutral and so don’t matter is ridiculous.
- Biologist123 2y agoYou make the assumption that maintaining the status quo is the norm. In reality, change is the norm - sometimes slow, sometimes fast. I make this point because I strongly suspect humans become unhappy when their expectations divert from reality in a way that feels costly to them. If our expectation was environmental change, rather than equilibrium, this might change our opportunity set for managing, for example, environmental and climate change. And make us a lot less unhappy.
- PeterStuer 2y agoOver here forests were planted to drain the swamps and provide hunting grounds 300 years ago. Today, self accredited "eco-experts" double and triple dipping in EU "green" subsidies want to cut down all the forests and burn them off in pellet form in Dutch incinerators to selectively and arbitrarily restore the "original" ecosystem.
- lproven 2y ago> Over here Where is that? You don't say.
- PeterStuer 2y agoBelgium
- hoseja 2y ago>for millions of years before the arrival of humans. Actually the islands are only a few million years old, the Big Island is only about 400000 years old. So chaotic flux is the name of the game there.
- acdha 2y agoIf you’re going to play the “actually” game, at least check Wikipedia first. That quote is about Oahu and it’s correct: > Like all other Hawaiian Islands, Oʻahu was formed from the volcanism associated with the Hawaii hotspot; it started to grow from the sea floor 4 million years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oahu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oahu Your broader use of “few” is also dubious since 28 is not normally considered small enough to include in that number: > From this study and others,[14][15] it is estimated that the northwesternmost island, Kure Atoll, is the oldest at approximately 28 million years (Ma); while the southeasternmost island, Hawaiʻi, is approximately 0.4 Ma (400,000 years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Islands
- soared 2y agoIf you’re interested in this, the garden below is very worth visiting. https://ntbg.org/gardens/limahuli https://ntbg.org/gardens/limahuli It’s built into sections - plants from before any humans landed in Hawaii, plants from early settlers, plants from the plantation period, etc. My favorite learning was canoe plants (maybe a different name) - plants that early settlers would bring with them when exploring new islands in their canoe that were critical to their survival. They provided food, medicine, etc.
- euroderf 2y agoTry the first chapter of James Michener's "Hawaii". It tells a tale of huge catamarans laden with plants, pigs, and other starters for new outposts of a daring seafaring culture.
- goda90 2y agoWhile it's sad the devastation we've had on native species, this also feels like a testament to the ideas of permaculture. The article says the new ecosystem is full of cinnamon and guava. With just enough management to allow sustainable harvesting, such an ecosystem can be beneficial to the environment and people. It'd be better if our farms were freakosystems instead of ecological dead zones.
- trelane 2y agoKind of weird that they only seem to acknowledge changes by humans in the last few centuries. This despite the fact that the Hawaiian islands have been deliberately shaped by people for well over a millennium prior to Europeans ever setting for there.
- lproven 2y agoNot really, no. The point of this article is not the human-caused (and ongoing) extinction event of unique island species. The point here is that a new, healthy, diverse ecosystem has formed in the niche left by the human-induced extermination of a native one, and that this new ecosystem is healthy and diverse and interesting, even thought it is "unnatural" in the sense that it's composed of animals and plants from all over the world which do not normally occur together. The extinction even goes back a millennium or so. The new introductions do not. They follow on motor-powered boat and air travel and the arrival of non-islander humans from all around the world, with pets, garden plants, and accidental introductions. So this is not about what the original Hawai'ian islanders did: it's about what's happened since that event.
- denom 2y agoTropical forest ecosystems with introduced species thrive in a way others (e.g. boreal and oak savannas) do not. Not all ecosystems are resilient enough to handle invasive species, and can be destroyed with the introduction of a single aggressive species.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoVery interesting read. Piques the question of what’s indigenous. In Australia the dingo was introduced by humans - but it’s been so long that there’s a blurred line on whether they’re a pest or not. The sudden change described - too sudden for the ecosystem to absorb, so the old gets replaced instead - has echoes of disruption in tech.