5 ms·

I've never heard this apologetic argument for mass extinction, it's somewhat disheartening. Do you think domesticated animals and scavengers are going to make

by efuquen 12y ago

I've never heard this apologetic argument for mass extinction, it's somewhat disheartening. Do you think domesticated animals and scavengers are going to make up for the lost in biodiversity and ecological damage? Basically whatever can survive in our concrete jungles and farms will be alright, screw the rest? The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself.

NotAtWork 12y ago
> a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species In what way? The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior. I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous. Ed: A key word.
- schiffern 12y ago
  >In what way? Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]). Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness. Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2]. So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for. Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system… (of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems) [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11983.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
  - NotAtWork 12y ago
    I don't think your evaluation of human ability to cultivate environments realistic. The vast majority of the external effects of forests and wildernesses is the effect of a few major species. In nature, those species are supported and interacted with by a complex network of other species. However, this established relationship isn't necessarily optimal for the few species of interest to us. I find it likely that we're able to cultivate select main species of interest in forests if we set our minds to it, especially considering the large scale agriculture that we already do. There's simply nothing to suggest that you can't construct an ecosystem with many fewer elements or the elements rearranged to, say, make room for houses, that has the same external effects as other ones. In fact, the success of many environments-in-a-bottle, indoor marijuana production, etc, suggests that we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive. No one is suggesting that we do something silly like wipe out all the major predators while we let herd animals run free (which is the case with wiping out the wolves in Yellowstone), but rather that we can get away with a lot less moving parts and that we can tune the parts quite a bit to suite our fancy. The only large scale human dependencies on plants relate to weather, oxygenation, water flow, and soil control. The last two we know we can do with intentionally seeded groves and other such constructs of plants we choose (using a reasonable selection), and don't need to replicate the full array of plants. In terms of oxygen, seeding the oceans with an algae would be far more efficient, but we really only need ferns, which are incredibly efficient at producing oxygen and are relatively hardy plants. The final complexity is weather, which I must admit I know relatively little about, but am dubious there's any material reason it wouldn't work fine with planned forests. Again, no one is saying "Fuck it, kill all the things". I just think we can get away with many fewer species - and sometimes who groups of species, where another can reasonably fill its role. Or are you telling me we couldn't survive with 3,500 kinds of beetle... we really need all 350,000.
    - sk5t 12y ago
      Mass agriculture works despite of our enormous ignorance of how the ecosystem works... you really shouldn't take our ability to manipulate corn or soybeans as indications that humans know how to create "relatively stable environments." We haven't and we don't.
tedks 12y ago
>The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself. Why? Humans don't even need animals. It's brutally cruel to enslave, torture, kill and eat animals the way we do. Humanity can be fine on its own. Regardless of whether or not you like things like, say, hippos, or mosquitoes, or prairie voles, humanity does not need them. Should we set half the earth aside for wildlife? I think it'd be better used by humans.
- pyre 12y ago
  Let's be frank. I don't need you. So if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you? Saying "I don't need animals so fuck them" is not a great attitude to have. Not to mention that we do need plants/trees, and we'd find it difficult to keep them going without the biospheres that they survive in.
  - vlasev 12y ago
    I think the person is confusing needing animals for food versus needing animals in general. We certainly don't enslave and eat ALL animals.
  - tedks 12y ago
    I think you're misrepresenting my argument, which isn't "actively perpetuate harm on non-humans", but rather "let's build a world with mostly humans via the most humane way possible." >if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you? Please avoid casually triggering rape survivors; 1/4 women has suffered sexual assault and using thought experiments that are triggering without any reason to (mugged/murdered would have sufficed) is a way to exclude women from spaces. But as to your question, that depends. Do you think anything sentient has some sort of right not to suffer, or do you generally prefer a world without sentient suffering? If so, it'd be morally consistent to help me, and it'd also be morally inconsistent to eat meat or consume animal products in general. As a vegan myself, I'm generally opposed to actions that perpetuate the suffering of sentient life. However, this only applies, critically, to life which exists. I have no moral obligation to perpetuate a species, because a species is a concept, not an actual thing, and it does not have the ability to suffer. So, I'd be totally supportive of diffusing birth control for non-human species and just letting them go extinct. I'd honestly rather use that space and resources for humans than animals. I care about humans more and I generally think a world with more humans is more interesting and diverse (information-theoretically) than a world with more animals than humans. We need oxygen, not trees. Algae makes most oxygen. As a matter of self-preservation I'm okay with algae; we can eat them anyway so it's a useful symbiosis.

by efuquen 12y ago

NotAtWork 12y ago

> a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species In what way? The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior. I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous. Ed: A key word.

schiffern 12y ago
>In what way? Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]). Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness. Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2]. So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for. Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system… (of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems) [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11983.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
- NotAtWork 12y ago
  I don't think your evaluation of human ability to cultivate environments realistic. The vast majority of the external effects of forests and wildernesses is the effect of a few major species. In nature, those species are supported and interacted with by a complex network of other species. However, this established relationship isn't necessarily optimal for the few species of interest to us. I find it likely that we're able to cultivate select main species of interest in forests if we set our minds to it, especially considering the large scale agriculture that we already do. There's simply nothing to suggest that you can't construct an ecosystem with many fewer elements or the elements rearranged to, say, make room for houses, that has the same external effects as other ones. In fact, the success of many environments-in-a-bottle, indoor marijuana production, etc, suggests that we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive. No one is suggesting that we do something silly like wipe out all the major predators while we let herd animals run free (which is the case with wiping out the wolves in Yellowstone), but rather that we can get away with a lot less moving parts and that we can tune the parts quite a bit to suite our fancy. The only large scale human dependencies on plants relate to weather, oxygenation, water flow, and soil control. The last two we know we can do with intentionally seeded groves and other such constructs of plants we choose (using a reasonable selection), and don't need to replicate the full array of plants. In terms of oxygen, seeding the oceans with an algae would be far more efficient, but we really only need ferns, which are incredibly efficient at producing oxygen and are relatively hardy plants. The final complexity is weather, which I must admit I know relatively little about, but am dubious there's any material reason it wouldn't work fine with planned forests. Again, no one is saying "Fuck it, kill all the things". I just think we can get away with many fewer species - and sometimes who groups of species, where another can reasonably fill its role. Or are you telling me we couldn't survive with 3,500 kinds of beetle... we really need all 350,000.
  - sk5t 12y ago
    Mass agriculture works despite of our enormous ignorance of how the ecosystem works... you really shouldn't take our ability to manipulate corn or soybeans as indications that humans know how to create "relatively stable environments." We haven't and we don't.

tedks 12y ago

>The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself. Why? Humans don't even need animals. It's brutally cruel to enslave, torture, kill and eat animals the way we do. Humanity can be fine on its own. Regardless of whether or not you like things like, say, hippos, or mosquitoes, or prairie voles, humanity does not need them. Should we set half the earth aside for wildlife? I think it'd be better used by humans.

pyre 12y ago
Let's be frank. I don't need you. So if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you? Saying "I don't need animals so fuck them" is not a great attitude to have. Not to mention that we do need plants/trees, and we'd find it difficult to keep them going without the biospheres that they survive in.
- vlasev 12y ago
  I think the person is confusing needing animals for food versus needing animals in general. We certainly don't enslave and eat ALL animals.
- tedks 12y ago
  I think you're misrepresenting my argument, which isn't "actively perpetuate harm on non-humans", but rather "let's build a world with mostly humans via the most humane way possible." >if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you? Please avoid casually triggering rape survivors; 1/4 women has suffered sexual assault and using thought experiments that are triggering without any reason to (mugged/murdered would have sufficed) is a way to exclude women from spaces. But as to your question, that depends. Do you think anything sentient has some sort of right not to suffer, or do you generally prefer a world without sentient suffering? If so, it'd be morally consistent to help me, and it'd also be morally inconsistent to eat meat or consume animal products in general. As a vegan myself, I'm generally opposed to actions that perpetuate the suffering of sentient life. However, this only applies, critically, to life which exists. I have no moral obligation to perpetuate a species, because a species is a concept, not an actual thing, and it does not have the ability to suffer. So, I'd be totally supportive of diffusing birth control for non-human species and just letting them go extinct. I'd honestly rather use that space and resources for humans than animals. I care about humans more and I generally think a world with more humans is more interesting and diverse (information-theoretically) than a world with more animals than humans. We need oxygen, not trees. Algae makes most oxygen. As a matter of self-preservation I'm okay with algae; we can eat them anyway so it's a useful symbiosis.