It'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.
I think it is a useful distinction for non-religious reasons. First is that humans change the environment more than anything else, by a large margin. As they say, “the dose makes the poison”. All species modify the environment they live in, but none are reshaping the oceans, every landmass, the air, the climate etc. like humans. Humans created multiple elements that never existed on earth.
Second, humans are conscious of the things we are doing. We can write articles about it and make choices about how we will change the environment in the future. We cannot discuss things with wolves in Yellowstone about how they are changing the area. The cinnamon trees in Hawaii can’t get together and decide how to share space with other plants.
And finally, always have at least three items when listing things.
How long did it take to oxygenate the planet though? Millions of years, billions?
How long did it take to spew enough carbon into the atmosphere to create acid rain? How long did it take to clear cut most of the wester European forests?
No one thinks the earth was perfectly harmonious before man, but in the last 200k years (0.0004% of the earth's age), we have DEFINITELY left a mark that no other life form before had. In the last 200 years, we've probably done more harm than all other life forms before as well (but that I'm less confident about).
That carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere was once part of the atmosphere. We're just putting it back.
Similarly, life forms are responsible for removing it, producing oxygen etc. The planet has gone through multiple mass extinctions, ice ages etc, it has changed much more significantly and over short time periods before.
That's not to say we shouldn't be reducing emissions and trying to reduce our impact. I just don't like this argument that seems to me like it's based on trying to guilt people - "The earth was fine until we ruined it!", it's bullshit. The earth is a planet, we do not have the capability of destroying it. We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.
The problem is we are shitting where we sleep, we are ruining our own home. If we take it too far, which we may already have done, we won't be able to live here any more, at least not in the way and scale we currently are. And we're certainly not living anywhere else any time soon either, so that means we screwed ourselves.
And when we're gone I personally don't care whether there's still dolphins or whatever. Life comes and goes. That's life. Everything will end, the sun will die and so will the universe. The only question is when.
Why anyone would care about what happens after we're gone is beyond me. What we need to prioritize is self preservation. And we rely on the current ecosystem so if we ruin it we ruin ourselves. But from the resulting apocalypse new life will form, which couldn't have existed without it. The earth will be fine, we might not be.
“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“
When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigger that change. It’s a small planet, and even if we had no knowledge of it, looking around in the universe suggests its ecosystems and atmosphere are fragile and can’t be taken for granted.
>They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life
You should really look deeper into the effects of large historical asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms. Literally, the worst that humanity could do even if it tried with current technology doesn't even come close to being so fantastically destructive. We could, tomorrow, start polluting the earth to the absolute straining maximum of our ability and follow this up with the launch of all our nuclear weapons everywhere in the world, and we'd kill ourselves off (or at least enough of us to no longer be able to continue our destruction efforts in a meaningful way) long before we'd more than pull off a tiny fraction of the destruction one large asteroid causes.
And no, we wouldn't at all ruin the Earth's ability to sustain life. Our planet and its ability to regenerate ecosystems has survived multiple impacts my massive asteroids, at least a couple of impacts by literal small planets, at least two total ice ages in which the planet turned into an essential snowball (think ice caps from pole to pole) and at least three massive magmatic events (that I can think of off the top of my head) spanning whole subcontinents worth of lava flow and multiple massive volcanoes erupting constantly, without pause, for hundreds of thousands of years, only for life to bounce back from all of this.
It's pure ignorant hubris to think that any human effort today could come close.
I agree that, obviously, large scale asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms have exponentially bigger immediate destructive outcomes. Ridiculously so.
That doesn't mean the atmosphere itself, and the weather systems governing them, don't have to be kept in balance from the inside. It's a different kind of threat, man-made effects on the planet, sustained and over time. Two different systems – one where the life-sustaining systems suffer an acute disruption but then can naturally restore itself over time, and another where the nature of the system itself could slowly be adjusted, potentially compromising its basic life-sustaining qualities.
I wouldn't say it's a bigger threat than large asteroid impacts or cataclysmic events – though, those are relatively minuscule percentages, where the other is something approaching 100% on our current trajectory –, but that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a threat in itself to the planet's life-sustaining properties. Every threat merits attention, regardless of how they compare.
And the threat is not about human effort, it's about ignorant human hubris.
I for sure agree with your sentiments. I added the correction because I thought the acid rain reduction program worked and was a good example of how regulation can work, but after looking it up again I found that the pH of rain didn't increase even though so2 emissions of power plants were significantly reduced.
The life that produced oxygen wasn't using technology to create that change at accelerated rates. Also each time that has happened, it destabilized the ecosystem and led to mass extinctions.
Indeed, microbial life did not have technology and yet fundamentally changed the environment to the point that it produced mass extinctions. That was my point. Humans are not the only form of life to fundamentally transform the environment, nor is technology required in order to do so.
Well done in getting this up immediately. Pieces like this BBC piece are either implicit or explicit propaganda to define “nature” as a world without humans. Even the word “freakosystem”, as novel as it is, sets up an implicit good/bad dichotomy.
Edit: If you on-board the assumption that all change is bad, you potentially open yourself up to a great deal of anxiety associated with that change.
While this is technically correct, there is an important distinction to be made that we are the only species capable of even understanding the ramifications of our actions on an ecosystem, and choosing to change our behavior to have less (or more) of an impact on the environment we are in.
Any species could drive another species to extinction, or carry them from one location to another, but no other species are actively choosing to do so.
Thinking of individual ants is really the wrong analogy; ant colonies are more like the organism. Your hands work on instinct too (just look at newborn babies; they can do very little, but they can grab things).
I'm not saying ants/ant colonies don't exhibit intelligent/sophisticated behavior, but we don't have evidence to suggest they understand the higher order consequences associated with where they build their colonies.
For similar reasons, we don't consider it murder when an apex predator kills a human, but we do when it's another human.
> Your hands work on instinct too
The operation of many (if not most) of the systems in our bodies is instinctual and a mystery to us from a 1st person perspective, e.g. we don't actively beat our hearts, digest our food, etc. But continuing the last point, if you used your hands to cause harm to another human, "my hands work on instinct" isn't a reasonable defense. We still have agency and the ability to choose how we use our hands, and we're (generally) aware of the consequences of the actions we facilitate with our hands, even if we aren't directly aware of how our hands function.
It goes beyond that. Depending on ecosystem and size of settlements human leaving may actually decrease bio diversity. Think it was Bulgaria or Romania, but with rural places that had their populations die out, also saw decrease in bio diversity.
Incidentally, this concept of modifying one's ecosystem comes up in Richard Dawkins' book The Extended Phenotype, which is a follow up to The Selfish Gene. One of the illustrative examples is beavers turning fast moving streams into convenient slow moving fisheries by building dams. The ecosystem the beavers built is "natural" in the sense that beavers are animals and it's in their nature to chew through trees. But presumably, at least some other animals were pushed to extinction when their habitat was modified by the beavers.
Was 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”?
What 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.
> And this doesn’t have to be at odds with our space ambitions.
I never said, it is. Did I?
A side quest is an optional thing you do while you complete the main quest. Mentioning it as a side quest serves as a link to the supposed Carlin quote.
I always considered the main quest of life is to promote more life. Multi-planetary life is life more resistant to medium to large cosmical calamities.
Which when viewed as the "real" quest, has potentially problematic downstream effects. My point was that there are many people who see who see the world as something to escape and live lives prioritizing things that harm our long term ability to survive here in the pursuit of that escape.
I appreciate the clarification that this is not what you meant. It wasn't clear that the "real quest" had any connection to the side quest since they seem unrelated.
> Multi-planetary life is life more resistant to medium to large cosmical calamities.
I don't disagree. But I strongly believe that stabilizing the home base is a higher priority in the near term i.e. at a time when the planet is in a precarious place, spending enormous amounts of resources trying to colonize mars is a questionable priority when we have more immediate problems that would benefit from such lofty ambitions.
> I appreciate the clarification that this is not what you meant. It wasn't clear that the "real quest" had any connection to the side quest since they seem unrelated.
Thanks, I'm pretty sure I know what I meant. I meant a gaming analogy (main quest/ side quest) not the Christianity metaphor. Just because you perceive as such doesn't mean I meant it as that.
> But I strongly believe that stabilizing the home base is a higher priority in the near term i.e. at a time when the planet is in a precarious place
Sure, just make sure you're not waiting for Godot (I meant the play, but pun is intended).
Earth is never a stable place. Ecosystems are a constant rise and collapse of dietary chains, continents aren't standing still, and cataclysms are a dime a dozen. Organisms causing mass extinctions are also nothing new under the Sun. Albeit, we do hold a speed run record I believe.
> Just because you perceive as such doesn't mean I meant it as that.
Fully agree, nor was it my intent to imply otherwise. But once uttered, we can't control how other people interpret our words. I see clarifying these differences in interpretation and gaining a shared understanding as the primary purpose of a thread like this.
> Earth is never a stable place. Ecosystems are a constant rise and collapse of dietary chains, continents aren't standing still, and cataclysms are a dime a dozen. Organisms causing mass extinctions are also nothing new under the Sun. Albeit, we do hold a speed run record I believe.
Again, agree. And yet, despite that instability, life on earth has rebounded or remained abundant up to this point given large enough timescales. What is different now is that we have some control over what may be the next major cataclysm. Whether or not we figure out how to collectively exert that control is another question entirely.
All I'm saying I that I hope we're not spending time trying to terraform mars while our own planet dies. If we can make mars habitable, we can rectify the situation here barring cosmic scale events that doom earth entirely.
> If we are waiting until every human being is content and happy, and environment is perfectly stable, we'll be waiting past heat death of the universe.
Do you feel that’s a good faith interpretation of my point given what we’ve discussed?
There are several competing, and sometimes complementary perspectives on what 'nature' means. Some include humans and their activity within it, others do not.
One thing you can ask yourself: if human activity and the impact it has on its environment is included in what you call 'natural', then what even does remain of the word 'unnatural'? What do people refer to, when they use that word? If you don't have any sensible explanation for it, then the whole thing collapses, yet evidently a lot of people really want to keep using the word nature and even seem to have no problem in making themselves understood when doing so.
That's interesting. Aren't there examples in nature where a species essentially destroys itself? There are many on the population level. Plants often do this, its called succession.
There's a layer to this, where natural also implies good and unnatural implies bad. For example, plastic is bad because it is unnatural, but arguing it is natural after all somehow makes it good (that is the rhetoric I believe). This depends on the notion of a 'natural order', whether that is some vague concept of 'the universe' or of God himself. Anything against that order is bad and unnatural. Humans are part of that order.
Of course, that is very pre-modern idea. I believe what comes close to a useful definition of natural would be something like 'emergent' or 'spontaneous', as opposed to deliberately designed. Its a quality you could also ascribe to, for example, cities or software systems. You don't need the human/nature split for it to be useful. It is not exactly capturing what people think of as natural, but then again we also do not believe in God anymore - by and large. At least not in the way we used to.
Your hypothesis makes sense. I'd call it "human exceptionalism" - the (wildly unsupported) assumption that we are separate from nature.
Religions that see humans and nature as part of the same system don't have this idea of "unnatural" landscapes. They have no concept of "wilderness". All landscapes are landscapes to which we both belong and shape through our actions.
I do think there is a difference when you can cause rapid global change. And most animals are benefitting their ecosystem in some way whereas we’re just extracting resources for the highest bidder 3000 miles away. Our ecosystems are struggling to replenish themselves because we lack harmony with nature. We live in an unnatural society that clearly cannot sustain our changes.
This is what the headlines say but it's not true. For example look into regenerative agriculture. All of the small scale farms around me are moving to rotational grazing systems because they improve the pastures and fertility of the land over time.
Except we know certain chemicals are harmful, and we have no idea about the long term effects of many others. We also have a history of using materials we don’t understand and only stopping after it kills or harms enough people.
The problem with this worldview is that it dramatically underestimates the harm of "natural" products compared to "artificial" products.
You see, if it's fermented grape juice, it's "natural", and so it's a complex flavor profile. But if you actually list out what's in it, it's a lot of toxic chemicals banned as food additives, and synthetic wine is illegal as a result. And you can't omit the egregiously toxic stuff because it makes the test came out wrong.
Your assumptions about beverage law are dead wrong. "Synthetic wine", whatever you mean by that, is not "illegal". And beverage makers actually have much more freedom than ordinary food makers in their choices of ingredients.
Synthetic wine is the name for people who are trying to create wine from its chemical ingredients rather than from the natural process of fermentation.
There was an article several years back about one of these groups trying to get regulatory approval to sell their product, and the stumbling block was the use of things that weren't approved additives. (I want to say it was tannins, since that's the most overtly problematic chemical in wine, but it has been several years since I've seen the article, so I could be mixing it up for one of the other carcinogens involved).
My point wasn't that there are no naturally occurring harms, but that foods which on their own are otherwise considered safe may take on a different safety profile when altered depending on the nature of that alteration.
e.g. we're beginning to realize that eating highly processed meats on a regular basis can cause GI problems/cancer in the long run while eating some of the components individually and prepared differently does not.
But surely you’d agree that “vat of chemicals” is not the only metric by which to evaluate a substance, and that not all vats of chemicals are strawberries.
You can play this game with everything that exists. Everything is just a concoction of atoms. But some arrangements of atoms result in nuclear weapons. Others make up the breakfast I ate this morning.
The fact that they’re all just atoms doesn’t mean they share other properties like: safe to eat, tastes good to humans, etc.
> So you're positing a spiritual or etherial nature for strawberries? Such that pure materialism is inadequate to address?
Not in the slightest. You seemed to be placing a high degree of weight on the shared property “vat of chemicals”, and I’m trying to understand why or in what way this informs us.
> Yes, which is why this wasn't my point.
I’m trying to understand what someone is supposed to take from the point you say you are making.
My goal is to have a conversation so I can better understand your point, not to exchange a series of textual jousts.
> It reminds me of people who won't eat certain foods because it contains "too many chemicals".
Maybe I misread this, but I took this to refer to the current food industry and how it processes/produces foods. The market is filled with products labeled "strawberry" that are not really strawberries or even close to the makeup of strawberries.
> What do you mean by "vat of chemicals called a strawberry?"
The breakfast food aisles at most (American at least) grocery stores summarize what I'm getting at. Many of the "strawberry" products are highly processed and highly artificial.
My point was that the ship of Theseus analogy seems misapplied, since we're not talking about a situation where the food choices we have are between the real thing and some molecularly perfect replica.
And secondarily, to call strawberries just a "vat of chemicals" in this specific context seems like a misnomer when considering that the reason people "avoid food with too many chemicals" is quite unrelated to the fact that everything is made up of the same stuff of the universe and more to do with questioning whether or not the human-made processed option is safe in the long run.
> There’s a big difference between a real strawberry and a vat of chemicals called strawberries.
> The market is filled with products labeled "strawberry" that are not really strawberries
What is a "real" strawberry? Is a generically modified strawberry "real" to you? What about a strawberry grown in a greenhouse?
> even close to the makeup of strawberries.
If you're talking about flavored food, sure. Maybe that's what they were meaning. That would make sense. That's not what I'd consider a "vat of chemicals called a strawberry," as the a would seem (to me) to indicate that it is a replica of a strawberry.
> the ship of Theseus analogy seems misapplied, since we're not talking about a situation where the food choices we have are between the real thing and some molecularly perfect replica.
Sure, it's a hypothetical that we can't yet technologically replicate in its entirely. The GMO/hothouse question is entirely practical, though. And the point of these kinds of questions isn't that the're immediately practical, it's to figure out an interesting question by pushing things to the limits.
> fact that everything is made up of the same stuff of the universe and more to do with questioning whether or not the human-made processed option is safe in the long run.
That still isn't the point, though. Sure "chemicals" is a bogeyman for many (see also dihydrogen monoxide). But why is "dihydrogen monoxide" bad but water good?
> What is a "real" strawberry? Is a generically modified strawberry "real" to you? What about a strawberry grown in a greenhouse?
This seems like a shift of the goalposts. Setting that aside, I have no inherent issue with GMO foods, but that ultimately depends on the nature of the modification. There could certainly be cases where something is modified to a degree that it no longer resembles the original plants and it'd be fair to question whether the new creation carries the same benefits/harms as the original. The use of pesticides and fertilizers may also change the outcome.
To your point, at the end it's all just particles. But that doesn't remove the need to evaluate the properties of the resulting concoction.
> Sure, it's a hypothetical that we can't yet technologically replicate in its entirely.
And that was really the point.
> That still isn't the point, though. Sure "chemicals" is a bogeyman for many (see also dihydrogen monoxide). But why is "dihydrogen monoxide" bad but water good?
You're describing a scenario in which people are afraid of big words.
I'm describing a scenario in which people are concerned about the effects of specific substances added to the dihydrogen monoxide they drink.
To demonstrate the inverse, I know people who only drink sugared soda, which is clearly going to impact their bodies differently than drinking plain water. This is not speculation or hypothetical. The health conscious person who prefers pure drinking water over Mountain Dew is not afraid of big words, they're concerned about the sugar, caffeine, and other additives that make the liquid less healthy.
Going back to where this started, many people feel uncomfortable consuming products that contain chemicals added by humans/corporations.
Whether or not this concern is fully justified is a fair point to debate. If we could perfectly replicate the ideal strawberry down to the molecular level, said strawberry shouldn’t be a concern, even for people who go out of their way to avoid food additives.
People value diamonds for an entirely different reason. What they value is the narrative behind the diamond. Its (supposed) rareness, and the fact that natural forces produced something beautiful. There are also still echoes of hundreds/thousands of years of culture that placed a high value on them before science could replicate them.
But ultimately I think this is all orthogonal to the strawberry situation. The reasons someone does or does not want to eat a truly perfect strawberry replica will be very different from the reasons someone values a diamond.
I agree strongly (except with the religion part - I suspect that being guilty for existing is a perspective that was thought of / rediscovered many times over the generations, regardless of religious tradition).
My takeaway from the article is: yes, we can adjust ecosystems, and no, they don't immediately wither and die, nor do they become boring monocultures. Despite popularly repeated memes, we aren't destroying everything we're touching or otherwise "playing god". If anything, this tells me we should study those ecosystems and learn from them, to become gradually more intentional about the changes we introduce.
Humans have brought with them the ability to dramatically change ecosystems on timescales far shorter than usually seen without them (exceptions being volcanic eruptions etc).
These short timescales mean that the mechanism of natural selection and evolution do not have time to adjust ecosystems to changes, so they can collapse rapidly.
I completely agree with disregarding the man/nature dichotomy, it’s complete nonsense. On the other hand, tool use and tool construction aren’t exactly the same as beaver dams, anthills, or bird nests because the particulars of the tool aren’t at all hardwired, which implies that the tool might have unexpected ramifications for the environment that would have otherwise been detected if the behavior had appeared over evolutionary timescales. A wariness towards self-conscious human ecosystem modification isn’t exactly unwarranted.
Humans are part of nature but if humans are also growing to have disproportionate impact on the rest of nature it kinda worth thinking about what's going on then
> 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.
The 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.
While 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.
They'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.
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.
Try 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.
While 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.
A 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.
If 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.
You 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.
Very 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.
Over 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.
If 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
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).
"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".
Kind 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.
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.
It'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.
I think it is a useful distinction for non-religious reasons. First is that humans change the environment more than anything else, by a large margin. As they say, “the dose makes the poison”. All species modify the environment they live in, but none are reshaping the oceans, every landmass, the air, the climate etc. like humans. Humans created multiple elements that never existed on earth.
Second, humans are conscious of the things we are doing. We can write articles about it and make choices about how we will change the environment in the future. We cannot discuss things with wolves in Yellowstone about how they are changing the area. The cinnamon trees in Hawaii can’t get together and decide how to share space with other plants.
And finally, always have at least three items when listing things.
Life has fundamentally changed the environment multiple times. The reason you live in an oxygenated environment is due to the waste produced by life.
How long did it take to oxygenate the planet though? Millions of years, billions?
How long did it take to spew enough carbon into the atmosphere to create acid rain? How long did it take to clear cut most of the wester European forests?
No one thinks the earth was perfectly harmonious before man, but in the last 200k years (0.0004% of the earth's age), we have DEFINITELY left a mark that no other life form before had. In the last 200 years, we've probably done more harm than all other life forms before as well (but that I'm less confident about).
That carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere was once part of the atmosphere. We're just putting it back.
Similarly, life forms are responsible for removing it, producing oxygen etc. The planet has gone through multiple mass extinctions, ice ages etc, it has changed much more significantly and over short time periods before.
That's not to say we shouldn't be reducing emissions and trying to reduce our impact. I just don't like this argument that seems to me like it's based on trying to guilt people - "The earth was fine until we ruined it!", it's bullshit. The earth is a planet, we do not have the capability of destroying it. We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.
The problem is we are shitting where we sleep, we are ruining our own home. If we take it too far, which we may already have done, we won't be able to live here any more, at least not in the way and scale we currently are. And we're certainly not living anywhere else any time soon either, so that means we screwed ourselves.
And when we're gone I personally don't care whether there's still dolphins or whatever. Life comes and goes. That's life. Everything will end, the sun will die and so will the universe. The only question is when.
Why anyone would care about what happens after we're gone is beyond me. What we need to prioritize is self preservation. And we rely on the current ecosystem so if we ruin it we ruin ourselves. But from the resulting apocalypse new life will form, which couldn't have existed without it. The earth will be fine, we might not be.
“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“
When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigger that change. It’s a small planet, and even if we had no knowledge of it, looking around in the universe suggests its ecosystems and atmosphere are fragile and can’t be taken for granted.
>They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life
You should really look deeper into the effects of large historical asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms. Literally, the worst that humanity could do even if it tried with current technology doesn't even come close to being so fantastically destructive. We could, tomorrow, start polluting the earth to the absolute straining maximum of our ability and follow this up with the launch of all our nuclear weapons everywhere in the world, and we'd kill ourselves off (or at least enough of us to no longer be able to continue our destruction efforts in a meaningful way) long before we'd more than pull off a tiny fraction of the destruction one large asteroid causes.
And no, we wouldn't at all ruin the Earth's ability to sustain life. Our planet and its ability to regenerate ecosystems has survived multiple impacts my massive asteroids, at least a couple of impacts by literal small planets, at least two total ice ages in which the planet turned into an essential snowball (think ice caps from pole to pole) and at least three massive magmatic events (that I can think of off the top of my head) spanning whole subcontinents worth of lava flow and multiple massive volcanoes erupting constantly, without pause, for hundreds of thousands of years, only for life to bounce back from all of this.
It's pure ignorant hubris to think that any human effort today could come close.
I agree that, obviously, large scale asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms have exponentially bigger immediate destructive outcomes. Ridiculously so.
That doesn't mean the atmosphere itself, and the weather systems governing them, don't have to be kept in balance from the inside. It's a different kind of threat, man-made effects on the planet, sustained and over time. Two different systems – one where the life-sustaining systems suffer an acute disruption but then can naturally restore itself over time, and another where the nature of the system itself could slowly be adjusted, potentially compromising its basic life-sustaining qualities.
I wouldn't say it's a bigger threat than large asteroid impacts or cataclysmic events – though, those are relatively minuscule percentages, where the other is something approaching 100% on our current trajectory –, but that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a threat in itself to the planet's life-sustaining properties. Every threat merits attention, regardless of how they compare.
And the threat is not about human effort, it's about ignorant human hubris.
SO2 and NOx produces acid rain
My bad - point stands, just wrong element/molecule.
I for sure agree with your sentiments. I added the correction because I thought the acid rain reduction program worked and was a good example of how regulation can work, but after looking it up again I found that the pH of rain didn't increase even though so2 emissions of power plants were significantly reduced.
The life that produced oxygen wasn't using technology to create that change at accelerated rates. Also each time that has happened, it destabilized the ecosystem and led to mass extinctions.
Indeed, microbial life did not have technology and yet fundamentally changed the environment to the point that it produced mass extinctions. That was my point. Humans are not the only form of life to fundamentally transform the environment, nor is technology required in order to do so.
I see what you did there.
Well done in getting this up immediately. Pieces like this BBC piece are either implicit or explicit propaganda to define “nature” as a world without humans. Even the word “freakosystem”, as novel as it is, sets up an implicit good/bad dichotomy.
Edit: If you on-board the assumption that all change is bad, you potentially open yourself up to a great deal of anxiety associated with that change.
While this is technically correct, there is an important distinction to be made that we are the only species capable of even understanding the ramifications of our actions on an ecosystem, and choosing to change our behavior to have less (or more) of an impact on the environment we are in.
Any species could drive another species to extinction, or carry them from one location to another, but no other species are actively choosing to do so.
What does "actively choosing" mean? An ant might choose to move the bugs they milk. Do they count?
I’d define this as: we consciously understand the potential and real consequences of our actions.
Ants operate on instinct and are not capable of extrapolating higher order consequences like we are.
Thinking of individual ants is really the wrong analogy; ant colonies are more like the organism. Your hands work on instinct too (just look at newborn babies; they can do very little, but they can grab things).
I don't think my response changes for a colony.
I'm not saying ants/ant colonies don't exhibit intelligent/sophisticated behavior, but we don't have evidence to suggest they understand the higher order consequences associated with where they build their colonies.
For similar reasons, we don't consider it murder when an apex predator kills a human, but we do when it's another human.
> Your hands work on instinct too
The operation of many (if not most) of the systems in our bodies is instinctual and a mystery to us from a 1st person perspective, e.g. we don't actively beat our hearts, digest our food, etc. But continuing the last point, if you used your hands to cause harm to another human, "my hands work on instinct" isn't a reasonable defense. We still have agency and the ability to choose how we use our hands, and we're (generally) aware of the consequences of the actions we facilitate with our hands, even if we aren't directly aware of how our hands function.
Thanks, “actively choosing” assumes we have conscious will. Whilst widespread, this belief is alas just an assumption.
It goes beyond that. Depending on ecosystem and size of settlements human leaving may actually decrease bio diversity. Think it was Bulgaria or Romania, but with rural places that had their populations die out, also saw decrease in bio diversity.
Incidentally, this concept of modifying one's ecosystem comes up in Richard Dawkins' book The Extended Phenotype, which is a follow up to The Selfish Gene. One of the illustrative examples is beavers turning fast moving streams into convenient slow moving fisheries by building dams. The ecosystem the beavers built is "natural" in the sense that beavers are animals and it's in their nature to chew through trees. But presumably, at least some other animals were pushed to extinction when their habitat was modified by the beavers.
> It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural".
While this may be true, it's not what this article is about, which is IMHO why it's a refreshing change.
Was 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”?
Or to release the energy in oil and coal. When you get a build up of stored energy something evolves to use it up.
I'm not being serious, but it's an interesting thought.
Sounds like an extension of the second law of thermodynamics.
He certainly decried the use of “all-natural” labels for products, because “everything comes from nature!”
Just like organic and non-organic vegetables. All vegetables are organic!
Maybe that's just the sidequest. The real quest is getting multi planetar.
What 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.
> And this doesn’t have to be at odds with our space ambitions.
I never said, it is. Did I?
A side quest is an optional thing you do while you complete the main quest. Mentioning it as a side quest serves as a link to the supposed Carlin quote.
I always considered the main quest of life is to promote more life. Multi-planetary life is life more resistant to medium to large cosmical calamities.
I was primarily responding to this:
> The real quest is getting multi planetar.
Which when viewed as the "real" quest, has potentially problematic downstream effects. My point was that there are many people who see who see the world as something to escape and live lives prioritizing things that harm our long term ability to survive here in the pursuit of that escape.
I appreciate the clarification that this is not what you meant. It wasn't clear that the "real quest" had any connection to the side quest since they seem unrelated.
> Multi-planetary life is life more resistant to medium to large cosmical calamities.
I don't disagree. But I strongly believe that stabilizing the home base is a higher priority in the near term i.e. at a time when the planet is in a precarious place, spending enormous amounts of resources trying to colonize mars is a questionable priority when we have more immediate problems that would benefit from such lofty ambitions.
> I appreciate the clarification that this is not what you meant. It wasn't clear that the "real quest" had any connection to the side quest since they seem unrelated.
Thanks, I'm pretty sure I know what I meant. I meant a gaming analogy (main quest/ side quest) not the Christianity metaphor. Just because you perceive as such doesn't mean I meant it as that.
> But I strongly believe that stabilizing the home base is a higher priority in the near term i.e. at a time when the planet is in a precarious place
Sure, just make sure you're not waiting for Godot (I meant the play, but pun is intended).
Earth is never a stable place. Ecosystems are a constant rise and collapse of dietary chains, continents aren't standing still, and cataclysms are a dime a dozen. Organisms causing mass extinctions are also nothing new under the Sun. Albeit, we do hold a speed run record I believe.
> Just because you perceive as such doesn't mean I meant it as that.
Fully agree, nor was it my intent to imply otherwise. But once uttered, we can't control how other people interpret our words. I see clarifying these differences in interpretation and gaining a shared understanding as the primary purpose of a thread like this.
> Earth is never a stable place. Ecosystems are a constant rise and collapse of dietary chains, continents aren't standing still, and cataclysms are a dime a dozen. Organisms causing mass extinctions are also nothing new under the Sun. Albeit, we do hold a speed run record I believe.
Again, agree. And yet, despite that instability, life on earth has rebounded or remained abundant up to this point given large enough timescales. What is different now is that we have some control over what may be the next major cataclysm. Whether or not we figure out how to collectively exert that control is another question entirely.
All I'm saying I that I hope we're not spending time trying to terraform mars while our own planet dies. If we can make mars habitable, we can rectify the situation here barring cosmic scale events that doom earth entirely.
> But once uttered, we can't control how other people interpret our words.
Sure I could. If the HN had an edit button.
Death of the author, eh? I don't prescribe to that notion. It makes every interpretation valid. Even if the one interpreting them is tripping balls.
> All I'm saying I that I hope we're not spending time trying to terraform mars while our own planet dies.
If we are waiting until every human being is content and happy, and environment is perfectly stable, we'll be waiting past heat death of the universe.
> If we are waiting until every human being is content and happy, and environment is perfectly stable, we'll be waiting past heat death of the universe.
Do you feel that’s a good faith interpretation of my point given what we’ve discussed?
Is it? No other animal seems obsessed with getting off this beautiful rock.
There are several competing, and sometimes complementary perspectives on what 'nature' means. Some include humans and their activity within it, others do not.
One thing you can ask yourself: if human activity and the impact it has on its environment is included in what you call 'natural', then what even does remain of the word 'unnatural'? What do people refer to, when they use that word? If you don't have any sensible explanation for it, then the whole thing collapses, yet evidently a lot of people really want to keep using the word nature and even seem to have no problem in making themselves understood when doing so.
I think if you are short-terming your existence by destroying everything around you, that could qualify as unnatural.
That's interesting. Aren't there examples in nature where a species essentially destroys itself? There are many on the population level. Plants often do this, its called succession.
There's a layer to this, where natural also implies good and unnatural implies bad. For example, plastic is bad because it is unnatural, but arguing it is natural after all somehow makes it good (that is the rhetoric I believe). This depends on the notion of a 'natural order', whether that is some vague concept of 'the universe' or of God himself. Anything against that order is bad and unnatural. Humans are part of that order.
Of course, that is very pre-modern idea. I believe what comes close to a useful definition of natural would be something like 'emergent' or 'spontaneous', as opposed to deliberately designed. Its a quality you could also ascribe to, for example, cities or software systems. You don't need the human/nature split for it to be useful. It is not exactly capturing what people think of as natural, but then again we also do not believe in God anymore - by and large. At least not in the way we used to.
> what even does remain of the word 'unnatural'?
Shame.
With our consumption humans are drawing down on the ‘reserve’ that ecological services have built up.
Human activities lack the sophistication of an ecosystem that is in balance and cannot recreate the network of benefits thereof.
Your hypothesis makes sense. I'd call it "human exceptionalism" - the (wildly unsupported) assumption that we are separate from nature.
Religions that see humans and nature as part of the same system don't have this idea of "unnatural" landscapes. They have no concept of "wilderness". All landscapes are landscapes to which we both belong and shape through our actions.
I do think there is a difference when you can cause rapid global change. And most animals are benefitting their ecosystem in some way whereas we’re just extracting resources for the highest bidder 3000 miles away. Our ecosystems are struggling to replenish themselves because we lack harmony with nature. We live in an unnatural society that clearly cannot sustain our changes.
This is what the headlines say but it's not true. For example look into regenerative agriculture. All of the small scale farms around me are moving to rotational grazing systems because they improve the pastures and fertility of the land over time.
Small scale being the key word.
Industrial farming is ruining our water supply. We just had another algae bloom here and all the wild life died.
It reminds me of people who won't eat certain foods because it contains "too many chemicals".
Except we know certain chemicals are harmful, and we have no idea about the long term effects of many others. We also have a history of using materials we don’t understand and only stopping after it kills or harms enough people.
The problem with this worldview is that it dramatically underestimates the harm of "natural" products compared to "artificial" products.
You see, if it's fermented grape juice, it's "natural", and so it's a complex flavor profile. But if you actually list out what's in it, it's a lot of toxic chemicals banned as food additives, and synthetic wine is illegal as a result. And you can't omit the egregiously toxic stuff because it makes the test came out wrong.
Your assumptions about beverage law are dead wrong. "Synthetic wine", whatever you mean by that, is not "illegal". And beverage makers actually have much more freedom than ordinary food makers in their choices of ingredients.
Synthetic wine is the name for people who are trying to create wine from its chemical ingredients rather than from the natural process of fermentation.
There was an article several years back about one of these groups trying to get regulatory approval to sell their product, and the stumbling block was the use of things that weren't approved additives. (I want to say it was tannins, since that's the most overtly problematic chemical in wine, but it has been several years since I've seen the article, so I could be mixing it up for one of the other carcinogens involved).
You mean like caffeine and fried animal fat? :D
My point wasn't that there are no naturally occurring harms, but that foods which on their own are otherwise considered safe may take on a different safety profile when altered depending on the nature of that alteration.
e.g. we're beginning to realize that eating highly processed meats on a regular basis can cause GI problems/cancer in the long run while eating some of the components individually and prepared differently does not.
you just sound like an anti-vaxer, one of those UPF fearmongering cultists.
There’s a big difference between a real strawberry and a vat of chemicals called strawberries.
A real strawberry contains many times more chemicals. The chemistry of a strawberry is like alien technology compared to our primitive science.
Seems akin to the Ship of Theseus.
Is an entirely artificial--but indistinguishable down to the atomic level--strawberry not a strawberry?
When we have the ability to replicate strawberries at the atomic level, then I’d grant you this point.
We presently do not, and the market is filled with products calling themselves one thing while in reality being in essence a vat full of chemicals.
My point was that strawberries are a vat of chemicals.
But surely you’d agree that “vat of chemicals” is not the only metric by which to evaluate a substance, and that not all vats of chemicals are strawberries.
You can play this game with everything that exists. Everything is just a concoction of atoms. But some arrangements of atoms result in nuclear weapons. Others make up the breakfast I ate this morning.
The fact that they’re all just atoms doesn’t mean they share other properties like: safe to eat, tastes good to humans, etc.
apples contain amygdalin and cyanide, theoretically lab-grown apples that exclude these are far better for you than wild/farmed apples.
> But surely you’d agree that “vat of chemicals” is not the only metric by which to evaluate a substance
So you're positing a spiritual or etherial nature for strawberries? Such that pure materialism is inadequate to address?
> , and that not all vats of chemicals are strawberries.
Yeah, this is elementary logic really. All A are B does not imply that all B are A.
> Everything is just a concoction of atoms.
yes, exactly. So what is the difference between an artificial and a natural arrangement of the atoms, if they are otherwise the same?
> The fact that they’re all just atoms doesn’t mean they share other properties like: safe to eat, tastes good to humans, etc.
Yes, which is why this wasn't my point.
> So you're positing a spiritual or etherial nature for strawberries? Such that pure materialism is inadequate to address?
Not in the slightest. You seemed to be placing a high degree of weight on the shared property “vat of chemicals”, and I’m trying to understand why or in what way this informs us.
> Yes, which is why this wasn't my point.
I’m trying to understand what someone is supposed to take from the point you say you are making.
My goal is to have a conversation so I can better understand your point, not to exchange a series of textual jousts.
I think we mostly agree but somehow you seem to still be missing my point.
A different tack, then. What do you mean by "vat of chemicals called a strawberry?"
To bring this back to where it started:
> It reminds me of people who won't eat certain foods because it contains "too many chemicals".
Maybe I misread this, but I took this to refer to the current food industry and how it processes/produces foods. The market is filled with products labeled "strawberry" that are not really strawberries or even close to the makeup of strawberries.
> What do you mean by "vat of chemicals called a strawberry?"
The breakfast food aisles at most (American at least) grocery stores summarize what I'm getting at. Many of the "strawberry" products are highly processed and highly artificial.
My point was that the ship of Theseus analogy seems misapplied, since we're not talking about a situation where the food choices we have are between the real thing and some molecularly perfect replica.
And secondarily, to call strawberries just a "vat of chemicals" in this specific context seems like a misnomer when considering that the reason people "avoid food with too many chemicals" is quite unrelated to the fact that everything is made up of the same stuff of the universe and more to do with questioning whether or not the human-made processed option is safe in the long run.
I was replying specifically to
> There’s a big difference between a real strawberry and a vat of chemicals called strawberries.
> The market is filled with products labeled "strawberry" that are not really strawberries
What is a "real" strawberry? Is a generically modified strawberry "real" to you? What about a strawberry grown in a greenhouse?
> even close to the makeup of strawberries.
If you're talking about flavored food, sure. Maybe that's what they were meaning. That would make sense. That's not what I'd consider a "vat of chemicals called a strawberry," as the a would seem (to me) to indicate that it is a replica of a strawberry.
> the ship of Theseus analogy seems misapplied, since we're not talking about a situation where the food choices we have are between the real thing and some molecularly perfect replica.
Sure, it's a hypothetical that we can't yet technologically replicate in its entirely. The GMO/hothouse question is entirely practical, though. And the point of these kinds of questions isn't that the're immediately practical, it's to figure out an interesting question by pushing things to the limits.
> fact that everything is made up of the same stuff of the universe and more to do with questioning whether or not the human-made processed option is safe in the long run.
That still isn't the point, though. Sure "chemicals" is a bogeyman for many (see also dihydrogen monoxide). But why is "dihydrogen monoxide" bad but water good?
> What is a "real" strawberry? Is a generically modified strawberry "real" to you? What about a strawberry grown in a greenhouse?
This seems like a shift of the goalposts. Setting that aside, I have no inherent issue with GMO foods, but that ultimately depends on the nature of the modification. There could certainly be cases where something is modified to a degree that it no longer resembles the original plants and it'd be fair to question whether the new creation carries the same benefits/harms as the original. The use of pesticides and fertilizers may also change the outcome.
To your point, at the end it's all just particles. But that doesn't remove the need to evaluate the properties of the resulting concoction.
> Sure, it's a hypothetical that we can't yet technologically replicate in its entirely.
And that was really the point.
> That still isn't the point, though. Sure "chemicals" is a bogeyman for many (see also dihydrogen monoxide). But why is "dihydrogen monoxide" bad but water good?
You're describing a scenario in which people are afraid of big words.
I'm describing a scenario in which people are concerned about the effects of specific substances added to the dihydrogen monoxide they drink.
To demonstrate the inverse, I know people who only drink sugared soda, which is clearly going to impact their bodies differently than drinking plain water. This is not speculation or hypothetical. The health conscious person who prefers pure drinking water over Mountain Dew is not afraid of big words, they're concerned about the sugar, caffeine, and other additives that make the liquid less healthy.
How about diamonds? We are able to make diamonds and yet people prefer naturally created ones for some reason.
I think this is somewhat beside the point.
Going back to where this started, many people feel uncomfortable consuming products that contain chemicals added by humans/corporations.
Whether or not this concern is fully justified is a fair point to debate. If we could perfectly replicate the ideal strawberry down to the molecular level, said strawberry shouldn’t be a concern, even for people who go out of their way to avoid food additives.
People value diamonds for an entirely different reason. What they value is the narrative behind the diamond. Its (supposed) rareness, and the fact that natural forces produced something beautiful. There are also still echoes of hundreds/thousands of years of culture that placed a high value on them before science could replicate them.
But ultimately I think this is all orthogonal to the strawberry situation. The reasons someone does or does not want to eat a truly perfect strawberry replica will be very different from the reasons someone values a diamond.
Lab grown diamonds start with a diamond seed which comes from the earth (you can use a synthetic seed later on).
Which is irrelevant to the question.
Strawberry flavored sour candy is not the ship of strawberries you seek.
Strawberry flavored candy is easily distinguishable from a real strawberry.
I agree strongly (except with the religion part - I suspect that being guilty for existing is a perspective that was thought of / rediscovered many times over the generations, regardless of religious tradition).
My takeaway from the article is: yes, we can adjust ecosystems, and no, they don't immediately wither and die, nor do they become boring monocultures. Despite popularly repeated memes, we aren't destroying everything we're touching or otherwise "playing god". If anything, this tells me we should study those ecosystems and learn from them, to become gradually more intentional about the changes we introduce.
Humans have brought with them the ability to dramatically change ecosystems on timescales far shorter than usually seen without them (exceptions being volcanic eruptions etc).
These short timescales mean that the mechanism of natural selection and evolution do not have time to adjust ecosystems to changes, so they can collapse rapidly.
I also don’t see the value of the distinction. You could say that the idea that human-created change is unnatural is a purely artificial construct.
What does concern me is the collapse of natural (meaning tested over millions of years) biodiversity.
I completely agree with disregarding the man/nature dichotomy, it’s complete nonsense. On the other hand, tool use and tool construction aren’t exactly the same as beaver dams, anthills, or bird nests because the particulars of the tool aren’t at all hardwired, which implies that the tool might have unexpected ramifications for the environment that would have otherwise been detected if the behavior had appeared over evolutionary timescales. A wariness towards self-conscious human ecosystem modification isn’t exactly unwarranted.
Humans are part of nature but if humans are also growing to have disproportionate impact on the rest of nature it kinda worth thinking about what's going on then
> 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.
The 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.
While 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.
They'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.
The 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.
I think your judgement here sets aside the value of ecosystems in balance.
If you’re interested in this, the garden below is very worth visiting.
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.
Try 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.
While 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.
Ireland 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.
A 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.
If you set up (or more likely inherit) a story that change = loss, you will also onboard a needless eco-anxiety.
If 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.
You 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.
Tropical 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.
Very 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.
Over 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.
> Over here
Where is that? You don't say.
Belgium
>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.
If 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
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
An example specie over here would be Canadian goldenrod. It completely dominates other plants and creates monoculture.
> 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"?
Well TIL, thanks. The location I mean is Poland.
Kind 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.
Not 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.