It probably wouldn't be practical and woukd require a lot of preresearch and funding to get right but I could see a "buffer" common species to make a more appealing prey. Say getting a huge hatchery full of fish and mass releasing them to boost non-endangered prey numbers for example. Of course doing that without making another disaster would be easier said than done.
Yeah, looks like the old engeneering strategy "solve problem A by creating problem B, solve problem B by creating problem C, solve problem C ... etc etc."
Not that I have a better idea how to get out of this mess...
Most endangered species would not be so if it wasn't for human intervention and over-consumption. It's arguable that saving a species from extinction is leaving nature alone.
So here's a radical idea that's fun to think about. Usually we think of nature as "conditions before humans came along." And we figure that if humans disrupted it, then humans should try to undo the disruption.
But that's just fixing one intervention by means of another intervention, and the fix likely has just as many, if a different set, of poorly-understood and unintended consequences. So lately I've started to define nature a little differently - maybe "nature" isn't what earth looked like before humans, it's what earth would look like if humans disappeared. Or to put it less fantastically, a scenario of minimal human intervention from this point forward.
In that context, the blackberry, kudzu and ivy vines that we introduced, are the new landscape, the new nature, the thing that ends up taking over the sites we disturbed. Similar dynamics would presumably play out in the oceans and everywhere else.
The thing this definition of nature has in common with the more usual one, is that phrase "minimal human intervention." The difference of course is that it doesn't try to undo the recent past, which in general throughout the universe but also specifically in this context, I think is pretty much impossible. So this definition, and the course of action that follows logically from it, has the bonus attribute of being a bit more consistent with current reality.
Of course it'll never happen that way unless homo sapiens really does "disappear," i.e. suffers a dramatic decrease in either demand for intervention (read: population), or ability to intervene, in ecosystems. But it's interesting to think about.
"Nature" could also include humans. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the natural outcome of billions of years of evolution isn't some highly intelligent, dominant organism that ends up shaping its environment to an extreme degree.
Thank you for posting this. This is a really good 2-sentence summary of what I have been struggling to put into words. The other approaches to nature seem so anti-human.
I like the idea that somehow the quality of the world is somehow intrinsically better when humans aren't involved. Certainly there are plenty of ways that humans can make it worse, but that is not the same thing as saying that somehow humans are less a part of nature than any other organism or geological feature.
> "Nature" could also include humans. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the natural outcome of billions of years of evolution isn't some highly intelligent, dominant organism that ends up shaping its environment to an extreme degree.
I wonder if the narrative that humans are not of nature makes it easier for us to harm the environment, since we do not feel part of it (as evidenced by our use of the word nature as some _other_).
I think this point has merit and it’s important for us to think of ourselves as part of the environment, but also, there are lots of other animals (like most of them?) that don’t care at all about the environment and the only reason they don’t destroy it in pursuit of their vital resources is that they can’t. There are endless stories of animals eating and breeding until their ecosystems are destroyed and they suffer massive die offs. Of course that tends to happen most often to invasive species, but nature certainly does not keep itself in balance through conscientiousness.
> here are endless stories of animals eating and breeding until their ecosystems are destroyed and they suffer massive die offs.
I believe the hypothesis that we're not one of these animal species may well prove false.
> Of course that tends to happen most often to invasive species, but nature certainly does not keep itself in balance through conscientiousness.
Neither do humans. We tend to fuck things up until they become real problems, then mitigate the damage, sometimes with success. That's not really conscientious, that's "winging it". This is the true nature of the human being.
>I wonder if the narrative that humans are not of nature makes it easier for us to harm the environment, since we do not feel part of it (as evidenced by our use of the word nature as some _other_).
To the contrary, there is a worldview whereby humans are not part of nature. Instead, they have dominion over it and a responsibility to care for all aspects of it as a custodian. To use a metaphor, nature without humans can never reach its full potential, just as a garden without its gardener will revert to a less ordered -- and less diverse -- state.
That's exactly the idea - the environment does include humans. And if humans stopped intervening: that's "nature" (still adhering to the idea of nature as separate from humans, which I agree with other commenters, is problematic).
I was listening to an interview of Shane Dorian, a well-known big wave surfer from Hawaii. He was remarking on how, when he was growing, when there was a shark attack the locals would go on a shark hunt, killing numerous sharks. Around the nineties sentiments around these hunts changed, and that combined with the depleting of fisheries, shark attacks in Hawaii have risen dramatically. I think it's time we brought back these hunts in the name of protecting otters. I am obviously not just saying this as a biased surfer...
Hawaii's population has also increased from 1.1 million people in 1990 to 1.4 million people today. There's no great peculiarity around the fact that more people means more encounters with sharks.
Also, "dramatically" is quite the claim, when there's a total of only 137 recorded shark attacks in Hawaii ever (including incidents without injuries) dating back to the 1700s.
Just eyeballing here there was 6 shark atacks from 1980-1985 to about 50 in the last 5 years. Seams like that backs up his claim that there has been a dramatic increase.
99% of species went extinct before humans arrived. Adapt or die is how life works. Can't survive alongside humans? Tough call.
That's not to say conservationism is futile, I fully agree we should save those Pandas, or various sea mammals, or monkeys and apes. Why? Because they're fascinating and adorable. Not out of principle.
But let's be real, even if it wasn't for humans some of these would've been destined to go extinct with just a minor tilt of the ecosystem.
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[ 29.4 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadNot that I have a better idea how to get out of this mess...
But that's just fixing one intervention by means of another intervention, and the fix likely has just as many, if a different set, of poorly-understood and unintended consequences. So lately I've started to define nature a little differently - maybe "nature" isn't what earth looked like before humans, it's what earth would look like if humans disappeared. Or to put it less fantastically, a scenario of minimal human intervention from this point forward.
In that context, the blackberry, kudzu and ivy vines that we introduced, are the new landscape, the new nature, the thing that ends up taking over the sites we disturbed. Similar dynamics would presumably play out in the oceans and everywhere else.
The thing this definition of nature has in common with the more usual one, is that phrase "minimal human intervention." The difference of course is that it doesn't try to undo the recent past, which in general throughout the universe but also specifically in this context, I think is pretty much impossible. So this definition, and the course of action that follows logically from it, has the bonus attribute of being a bit more consistent with current reality.
Of course it'll never happen that way unless homo sapiens really does "disappear," i.e. suffers a dramatic decrease in either demand for intervention (read: population), or ability to intervene, in ecosystems. But it's interesting to think about.
I like the idea that somehow the quality of the world is somehow intrinsically better when humans aren't involved. Certainly there are plenty of ways that humans can make it worse, but that is not the same thing as saying that somehow humans are less a part of nature than any other organism or geological feature.
I wonder if the narrative that humans are not of nature makes it easier for us to harm the environment, since we do not feel part of it (as evidenced by our use of the word nature as some _other_).
I believe the hypothesis that we're not one of these animal species may well prove false.
> Of course that tends to happen most often to invasive species, but nature certainly does not keep itself in balance through conscientiousness.
Neither do humans. We tend to fuck things up until they become real problems, then mitigate the damage, sometimes with success. That's not really conscientious, that's "winging it". This is the true nature of the human being.
To the contrary, there is a worldview whereby humans are not part of nature. Instead, they have dominion over it and a responsibility to care for all aspects of it as a custodian. To use a metaphor, nature without humans can never reach its full potential, just as a garden without its gardener will revert to a less ordered -- and less diverse -- state.
Also, "dramatically" is quite the claim, when there's a total of only 137 recorded shark attacks in Hawaii ever (including incidents without injuries) dating back to the 1700s.
Just eyeballing here there was 6 shark atacks from 1980-1985 to about 50 in the last 5 years. Seams like that backs up his claim that there has been a dramatic increase.
That's not to say conservationism is futile, I fully agree we should save those Pandas, or various sea mammals, or monkeys and apes. Why? Because they're fascinating and adorable. Not out of principle.
But let's be real, even if it wasn't for humans some of these would've been destined to go extinct with just a minor tilt of the ecosystem.