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This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all

This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doing is no big deal.

elzbardico 3mo ago
Natural boundary crossing isn't rare; it's the mechanism that built much of the biosphere. Every fucking oceanic island on Earth, Hawaii, the Galápagos, New Zealand, the Mascarenes, was stocked entirely by organisms that crossed open ocean or sky without any help from us. The entire South American primate and caviomorph rodent lineages (everything from capuchins to capybaras) descend from African ancestors that rafted across the Atlantic on vegetation mats roughly 40 million years ago. When the Isthmus of Panama closed (~3 million years ago), North American placental mammals poured south and drove a large fraction of South America's endemic fauna—native ungulates, many marsupial lineages—to extinction. Yeah. Some species get crowded out, maybe we should avoid that in a lot of cases, but is not the capital sin western people have been brainwashed to believe it when they replaced their christianism with new age Gaia worship. Species get extinct, eco-systems change, sometimes it is worth preventing that, in other, who fucking cares?
- soiltype 3mo ago
  Rare is relative. Those changes all happened over much longer timescales and with far fewer species involved in a given ecosystem. It's not the same thing as what we're doing. You're making essentially the same argument as "Earth's climate has always been changing, what's the big deal?" The big deal is that when a species becomes invasive, the effects can cascade. You don't just lose their direct competitors and their prey, you can lose anything they pollinate, nest in, are nested in, etc. You can replace a diverse ecosystem with a near-monoculture. Of course, if you don't hold the fundamental belief that biodiversity is Good, and is Better than raw biomass increase, I see why this doesn't bother you, but I do hold that position.

elzbardico 3mo ago

Natural boundary crossing isn't rare; it's the mechanism that built much of the biosphere. Every fucking oceanic island on Earth, Hawaii, the Galápagos, New Zealand, the Mascarenes, was stocked entirely by organisms that crossed open ocean or sky without any help from us. The entire South American primate and caviomorph rodent lineages (everything from capuchins to capybaras) descend from African ancestors that rafted across the Atlantic on vegetation mats roughly 40 million years ago. When the Isthmus of Panama closed (~3 million years ago), North American placental mammals poured south and drove a large fraction of South America's endemic fauna—native ungulates, many marsupial lineages—to extinction. Yeah. Some species get crowded out, maybe we should avoid that in a lot of cases, but is not the capital sin western people have been brainwashed to believe it when they replaced their christianism with new age Gaia worship. Species get extinct, eco-systems change, sometimes it is worth preventing that, in other, who fucking cares?

soiltype 3mo ago
Rare is relative. Those changes all happened over much longer timescales and with far fewer species involved in a given ecosystem. It's not the same thing as what we're doing. You're making essentially the same argument as "Earth's climate has always been changing, what's the big deal?" The big deal is that when a species becomes invasive, the effects can cascade. You don't just lose their direct competitors and their prey, you can lose anything they pollinate, nest in, are nested in, etc. You can replace a diverse ecosystem with a near-monoculture. Of course, if you don't hold the fundamental belief that biodiversity is Good, and is Better than raw biomass increase, I see why this doesn't bother you, but I do hold that position.