I heard that in the American desert plain, shielded by Pacific Coast mountains, the lack of wind leads to a reduced sand movement and ultimately sun-bleaching of our holes. This discoloration confuses local fauna.
What a bittersweet article. It’s amazing to see how these feral horses and donkeys are making the ecosystem friendlier for the native wildlife but it’s damn depressing to realize that our massacre of megafauna didn’t just end with the extinction of various great species but contributed to the overall decline of the ecosystem and probably the extinction or extirpation of hundreds of other, indirectly influenced flora and fauna.
On a similar note: George Monbiot once wrote an article (don't have the time to spend a half hour searching it) where he laments that most conservation societies are basically just a bunch of local volunteers trying to preserve nature as they remember it from their childhood... not realizing that that ecology was already incredibly impoverished.
Which then results in sad scenarios where, say, a local forest is left alone and starts to recover, and starts to show signs of ecological succession[0], which is then stopped by these conservation societies. Because that usually implies new species of trees and shrubs that weren't in the version of nature they remember, and are therefore deemed "invasive".
Nature conservation is full of good intentions hampered by a lack of ecological understanding.
Strange to see how different Britain is from the USA, maybe because the USA is slightly bigger. Around here there's any number of conservation/wildlife preserves and they literally buy land, maybe put a trail through it and a dinky dirt parking lot at the trailhead, and then just leave it alone.
I doubt size has as much to do with it as the fact that Europe didn't have a "great dying" of its native peoples, followed by colonization. And it's agricultural and industrial history is also very different so the natural landscape was vastly different to begin with.
Not bringing that up as an "America bad" comment, just pointing out that the way people in either country look at "their" land is different.
For me it’s a conclusion I personally came to after reading various studies and papers on the matter from the two viewpoints. I don’t think the alternatives are impossible but to my engineering brain it’s the most likely explanation.
I love donkeys. IMO they are the most underrated animal in terms of cuteness, They are easily S-tier. My dream is to run a Free-Open-Source-Software incubator/commune that also has donkeys.
My grandmother had them when I was growing up. Their adorable assholes. Like fat dogs. They love attention and are very stubborn and patient when it comes to getting their way. Our English mastiff had a lot of donkey tendency--heavy, loved pets and treats, would do the heavy lean on you when they wanted attention.
I love them as well, ever since I read about the feral donkeys on the Big Island of Hawaii and couldn’t stop laughing to myself about the “trouble” they were getting into, braying all night and annoying the humans. Do you want a friendly animal who will also guard your flock of sheep? Get a “guard donkey,” the only downside being they hate dogs and will stomp them given the chance.
My son and I are watching YouTube videos about donkeys right now. Lovable creatures. If you start and incubator that also has Donkeys please look me up.
Count me in! I’ve been doing a lot of donkey-related reading lately and would certainly be interested in a donkey startup!
What fascinated me was how important they were in the past, I never realized.
FYI the most expensive cheese in the world comes from a certain kind of donkey. I only know this because I am a moose enthusiast, their cheese being the second most expensive.
I never really thought about all the cheese that could be made. The logical end question then is, can you make cheese with human milk? dog milk? rodent milk? is the only thing preventing this just the ick/cultural factors?
What does moose milk taste like? Are there potential for different varieties?
Burros would wander into the outdoor theater I'd go to as a kid and a stage worker would have to walk over to them and try to quietly shoo them out. Raucous bunch sometimes.
> Our research didn’t evaluate the impact of donkey-dug wells in arid Australia. But Australia is home to most of the world’s feral donkeys, and it’s likely their wells support wildlife in similar ways.
Definitely possible, but not sure on likelihood - the water table in the arid parts of Australia is going to be pretty deep. TFA cited 4m deep holes made by modern wombats - but the holes they dig tend to be narrow, as their burrows are defensive - so the claim made:
> In Australia, for example, a pair of common wombats were recently documented digging a 4m-deep well, which was used by numerous species, such as wallabies, emus, goannas and various birds, during a severe drought.
... is hard to reconcile.
A 4 metre deep standing water table would mean most deep-rooted trees, and many tougher smaller plants (eg comfrey, vetiver, maybe grasses like lucerne/alfalfa) would sustain through drought, and that's clearly not the case.
I'm sure there's some benefit to native wildlife to have these introduced animals dig and expose water, but I'm sure the damage they cause outweighs it.
It's about digging in intermittently wet streambeds (where the water is likely very close to the surface for a long time after the stream dries), not the middle of the desert.
I think the whole article is biased and far too targeted to trying to make a case not to cull invasive species, particularly in Australia.
Kangaroos dig wells. The arguments made here that somehow with a very long bow you could justify some benefits from these non-native species but they have to pretend that those benefits don't already exist from native species to do this.
> However, as we show in a new research paper in Science, these animals do something amazing that has long been overlooked: they dig wells — or “ass holes”.
I agree with you in principle, but nowadays, every newspaper seems to try hard to cram as many puns as possible in every article and it gets boring fast.
Indeed. I was liking the article but then it included the opportunistic “ass holes” and “mass shootings” where what they refer to already has a specific term “culling”. It’s the journalist version of “your momma so…”
"Despite these ecological benefits in desert environments, feral animals have long been denied the care, curiosity and respect native species deservedly receive. Instead, these animals are targeted by culling programs for conservation and the meat industry."
"However, there are signs of change. New fields such as compassionate conservation and multispecies justice are expanding conservation’s moral world, and challenging the idea that only native species matter."
And "pests" are pests usually due to human-caused imbalances in ecosystems. Addressing the root of the issue, such as biodiversity loss, would solve a lot.
That's quite the romantic view of nature. My view is that nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, and that almost every species regard almost every other species as pests.
Homes, human or otherwise, are virtually defined by the absence of undesirable critters. If cows could be rid of flies buzzing about, they would. Increasing biodiversity would most likely also mean increased diversity of pests. Would we not be bothered by mosquitoes, if we had a lighter footstep on the environment? I'm sure cavemen also got bit and stung.
Funny enough that’s exactly what happens here in Oregon. Most of the wetlands were drained for farming, or just because we could. Turns out our selfish human geo-engineering had benefits to humans.
Whenever we restore a wetlands, the area goes from “surprisingly low amounts of mosquitoes most of the time” back to “fuck I can’t go outside”
There are ways to somewhat mitigate this through more intelligent wetland design methods, but ultimately no way to even mostly resolve the problem without more intensive control methods, which sometimes end up being pesticides.
In ecosystems where predators are removed, the population of their prey, in this case, mice, often increases due to a lack of natural control. This process can lead to an increase in the tick population, as ticks often feed on mice. This is especially true for the white-footed mouse, which is a common host for ticks in the eastern and central United States. When the mouse population increases, ticks have a higher chance of obtaining their first blood meal from a mouse, which often carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. (less predators => more mice => more ticks)
As biodiversity declines on corn farms, pest problems grow
"We found that communities with stronger networks – that is, more linked species – had fewer pests. Not only this, but network centrality was important; communities with several groups of highly linked species, including insects that prey on others, don’t have the pest problems that loosely linked networks have. Thus, in addition to species diversity, the strength of interactions among species within a community seem to be related to when and where pest outbreaks occur. This research suggests that practices that reduce diversity in cornfields will aggravate pest problems over time."
Biodiversity offers great potential for managing insect pests. It provides resistance genes and anti-insect compounds; a huge range of predatory and parasitic natural enemies of pests; and community ecology-level effects operating at the local and landscape scales to check pest build-up.
> Increasing biodiversity would most likely also mean increased diversity of pests
It’s not the opposite that is true but that the net effect is not that negative.
Anecdotally, from my backyard food growing experience, biodiversity increase means more pests, but once more species come in, there comes a balance that exists in nature. Year 1 of my backyard farming, I had plentiful bounty. All my crops did extremely well, and I thought I was some kind of genius that disproved the decades of agricultural progress re:chemicals in farming. Year 2, was my biggest and most ambitious growing season and I could barely get anything out of it. The pests came, from insects to rodents and nothing survived. Year 3 and year 4 were my learning days. I introduced more plants to my garden, native plants, plants that provided food in late summers to next spring for the fauna, more varieties of food crops, etc. I welcomed everything in my garden, including pests. Eventually I hit a balance. Aphids suddenly affecting plants? The wasps are here. Rats and squirrels eating my strawberries? The owls and crows came to rescue. Slug problem? The neighborhood possum took care of it (though I had to put up a fence around some of my veggies for the possum). Overall I think with the constraints of the size of my backyard, I still need some proactive measures of pest control, but most of the time nature takes care of it and makes sure the problem is only temporary.
I do not understand the fetishization of “biodiversity.” If an animal removes all others it will quickly begin competing with its own, evolving into new species. We all come from the LUCA after all.
Scale matters. Species are currently going extinct at a rate orders magnitude greater than the historical average, due to humans. This breaks normal feedback loops and is absolutely something to be concerned about, even if you value all non-human intelligent life at zero.
> Species are currently going extinct at a rate orders magnitude greater than the historical average
Nobody has a good idea how many species there are currently, let alone how many there were in the past and how many of them went extinct. Estimates for the current species count are from 3 to 100 million[0], which is a range too wide to be useful in this context.
Of the mass extinction events in Earth's history, we may be peeking above the baseline rate[1]; the most severe statement we can make is that vertebrate mammals don't appear to be doing very well in recent times, which stands to reason, considering that Homo sapiens is by far the most competitive vertebrate mammal, doing a good job of crowding others out. But there's a lot of life and biodiversity outside of vertebrate mammals.
Think of biodiversity as the entropy source for all of the random number generators that drive biological innovation.
When biodiversity goes down, there are fewer potential biological resources that can be tapped to solve new problems.
You are correct that biodiversity has a natural upwards component from speciation. But the timescale (which you describe as "quickly") is many orders of magnitude slower than the timescale of the downwards component that extinction has. A species that took literally tens of millions of years to speciate and evolve can be wiped out in months.
The definition of a native species is one that arrived without human intervention. You are correct that animals migraine all the time.
Insects can travel accross oceans under certain favorable wind conditions. I live in an island nation, New Zealand, and insects from Australia show up every so often after getting blown here. They usually don't establish themselves as the conditions are not right for them to thrive.
we are the ultimate invasive predatory species, there is no doubt about that outside of the possibility of some awful multispecies viral/bacterial threat; nothing else comes close to be as destructive as humans to ecosystems.
I think there's an argument that if an animal is having a negative effect on the ecosystem (having a negative effort on other animals) removing it can be a net good.
You have a dangerous lack of fundamental understanding of the topic to which you speak. I suggest you start your learning journey here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
I won't debate any further with someone who resorts to name-calling or dismissive language. You didn't provide a proof of contradiction or any argument. I provided valid reasons and evidence to support my point of view.
You're right, but you are being pretty harsh and insulting, and it does distract from your point and make it just about impossible for the other commenter to hear what you're saying.
Complexity implies a creator if you can't cite the theory of evolution. You are trying to say "nothing" designed them and they lack any intelligent design. GA have intricate, complex rules and codes. There is and has only been one version of the algorithm.
I find the atheist to be the largest proponents of determinism. Most religions Embrace some idea of a soul, free will, and agency.
On the other hand, almost every atheist I know believes in some form of material determinism. For them, individual Behavior is entirely driven by the physical makeup of an individual and their interacting environment. They deposited if you had a sufficiently accurate model of the universe you would be able to determine every action they would make.
Sure? I mean, we obviously don't want to eliminate humans, but it would probably be nice to have fewer of them. The ZPG movement isn't terribly controversial.
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach
One study estimates it would take just over 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone’s consumption patterns were similar to the average American.
We don't have those extra Earths, and won't anytime soon.
> the key is not to try and force change on the general population
Sure, solve the biggest problem we've ever faced, but don't change a thing.
That is such a clear example of Chesterton‘s fence, it makes me mad people can’t see it.
Not by any means do we understand enough about ecosystems to justify the hubris to declare any animal as a net negative effect to the environment.
In western Europe, hunters argue they need to cull deer, for example, to keep the forest in balance. That is only true because a) they make an effort to feed the animals during the winter, helping more to survive than otherwise would, and b) because natural predators have been eradicated in the previous centuries.
Don’t ever trust someone that attempts to justify culling a species for the greater good.
I don't disagree that our hubris gets us in trouble, but we do have eyes, some animals when introduced cause very quick changes to ecosystems and I don't think it's hubris to say "oh fuck, we goofed". I don't condone cullings specifically but I think conservation absolutely requires controlling non-native species in certain circumstances. New Zealand has had enumerable species go extinct thanks to introduced species.
The obvious one is usually feral cats, which end up killing birds in large numbers if they haven't dealt with cats before. And a lot of those tend to be escaped house pets.
> feral cats, which end up killing birds in large numbers ... escaped house pets
I'd argue that it's also a problem of biodiversity (at least in the U.S., don't know about New Zealand). If we hadn't eradicated almost all wolves, coyotes, foxes, birds of prey, weasels, and I don't know what else, nature would have solved the problem already.
Problem of biodiversity is one way of putting it. New Zealand did not have any mammals apart from bats. When those arrived, the native wildlife were not equipped to deal with them.
Even a common rat caused a number of species to go extinct in NZ. I can't imagine any conservationist would agree that we should let a common rat kill off dozens of incredibly unique species of such a one of a kind ecosystem, just in case the rat has a net positive effect in the long term.
Now that is hubris, what the hell do we know about long term net positives? Selfish warm feelings, while watching the reality of introduced extinction take place in a matter of mere decades. Pardon me.
N = 1 but the cats I’ve seen around my neighborhood seem to be quite well cared for and simply killing for the sport of it, toying— ok, perhaps I’m anthropomorphizing— with their prey and often, IME not eating it at all
(in North America) and if we hadn't hunted and driven away the bobcats lynx and ocelots that would have killed those bird for food (along with the weasels stoats ferrets ermine mink foxes and other predators) how many birds would they have killed?
Generally speaking, if prey and predator evolve together then the prey have adapted and have a fair chance of escape/survival.
Non-native introductions usually have the issue of such a sudden population explosion that the prey cannot adjust in a timely fashion and get killed very quickly, very suddenly.
Fortunately for the birds then wild cats such as lynx bobcat and ocelot close cousin species to house cats were among those species we removed from the ecosystem before we introduced Felix catus.
Sure and that was bad. However using New Zealand as an excuse for pearl clutching in North America over cats, when there were several species wild cat here already not to (mention many other predators) that we decimated the populations of is disingenuous at best.
With deer, the problem is often not an excessive population but rather their tendency to stay in one place, destroying young shoots and plantings and hindering the growth of the plants we care about.
In contrast, with predators they cannot stay in one place for long enough, allowing most plants to outgrow their vulnerable size and survive.
It isn't Chesterton's fence though. We removed the fence (wolves in your example) and have now discovered why the fence was there, and have now stepped in to build a new fence.
Also removing native species and sending the balance out of whack is different to removing a non native species that has sent the balance out of whack.
> We removed the fence (wolves in your example) and have now discovered why the fence was there, and have now stepped in to build a new fence.
This isn’t quite accurate, though. Between removing the fence and getting fence construction inclinations, a lot of time has passed, and in the meantime, nature did lots of stuff we hardly understand.
Assuming otherwise is just repeating the same mistake again. Feral donkeys might be part of a new ecosystem now.
> I think there's an argument that if an animal is having a negative effect on the ecosystem (having a negative effort on other animals) removing it can be a net good.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47444297 "Villagers have been whipped with belts, attacked with machetes, beaten unconscious with bamboo sticks, sexually assaulted, shot, and murdered by WWF-supported anti-poaching units, according to reports and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News."
Herbivores that cut plants when they bite are far more benign than those that pull up the whole plant and eat the roots.
For example, camels have evolved to coexist with the plants that briefly flourish in the desert after
rains. Goats just consume everything and will die in a second season.
As terrible as the consequences of humanity will be for biodiversity and life on Earth, there is a strange silver lining. We seem to be one of the most intense, unprecedented, sudden, and multifaceted selection pressures life has ever experienced on Earth. We affect everything from the DNA and biochemistry to continent-wide land use. We are creating weird, new, toxic environments all over the planet, to which existing life must adapt. We're going to see all sorts of weird and wonderful novel behaviours evolve in basically every form of remaining life over the next few millennia, assuming we're still here to see it.
Yeah this. Humans aren’t destroying life on earth they’re changing it and forcing new species to evolve. Who knows how weird the world will be in a million years: what creatures will evolve to feed on humans.
Terrible is not an objective measure either. Oxygen and asteroids destroyed most life on earth but neither was terrible, they just were. The only reason people think we’re doing terrible things is because we’ve convinced ourselves we aren’t a natural part of the biosphere that adapted to what we’re doing now.
Isn’t it about control? An asteroid coming down is random as in no one caused it. What we’re doing is different: it’s a conscious choice and course of action (collectively). We didn’t really know in the beginning but we’ve knows for decades and collectively chose to continue mostly unabated. By that token we as a species are fully responsible for what’s happening in my opinion.
Here's hoping 2200 will be the century of the Polymerphage (some bacterium whose favorite food is polymers, i.e. plastics).
It'll be interesting to see what effect it has on the whole food supply chain, as we're pretty dependent on the idea of polymers "keeping out" the things that normally eat our food before we'd get the chance to.
Maybe we'll go back to only eating crazy fermented and spicy things.
Why would you hope that wide-spread polymer-munching bacteria becomes a reality? Polymers have been terrifically important in more applications than I could list, and whilst we could go back to 'only eating crazy fermented and spicy things' (or risk dying if we don't), there are plenty of useful things that cannot be that: cheap and widely-available medicines exist partly because of the ease of constructing sterile packaging for them. Distributing pills in glass tubes would be considerably more expensive than using plastic containers, and I am sure that there are some substances for which polymers are the only viable storage material.
It feels to me like the mistake is abusing plastics, which are some of the longest living, most resilient materials, for disposable products. Bacteria that eats polymers might clean up our mess, but it will also destroy one of the key foundations of modern industry, and I don't think the world will just sit back and become pre-industrial again - we'll be back with something worse.
It was more tongue-in-cheek, but I'm not sure it would (on net, and a long enough time horizon) be a bad thing if we had to go back to some combination of paper and glass – like you said, we mainly use polymers because they're cheap, not because they're the best material when you consider all the negative externalities.
Plus, I guess I'm imagining the polymerphages would probably be more interested in soft plastics – grocery bags, styrofoam. The kind of stuff that already disintegrates pretty easily.
Thank you for the clarification. I agree that paper and glass are excellent materials in their own right.
When you go back to books from the 60s, they make bold statements about hard plastics would be everlasting materials, immune to rotting, rusting or shattering - and for the most part, they were right! But for some bizarre reason people chose this 'everlasting' material to make disposable items, and once they realised that it was cheaper than materials that actually do degrade the cat was out of the (polyethylene) bag.
I'm hoping that we can rapidly phase out our use of disposable polymers before these polymerphages start chomping through our indestructible wondermaterials like butter. We can keep the hard plastics for truly long-lived things like car bumpers... and try to stop automotive manufactures from making those disposable, too!
Here's an idea to accelerate this:
"Require by law standard glass bottle designs for all drinks of a certain class, like four or five types of wine bottle and likewise for soft drinks and spirits. Ensure that those designs are public domain. Delegate responsibility of defining the standards to an international organisation like ISO to encourage international adoption. The only losers would be a handful of companies with 'distinctive' or 'iconic' branded bottles (and realistically, people aren't going to stop buying Pepsi because it's in the wrong shape bottle), but the winners would be all manner of industrial bottle-washing and reuse firms, bottle-handling machinery makers and of course consumers getting lower prices. End result: widespread reuse of glass bottles, replacing one-use plastic bottles."
What do you think? I think it's pretty uncontroversial, which is the only thing that seems likely to be passed within a premier's term and thus survive the path to the statute books in liberal democracies!
Yea, we should probably adopt these rules regardless of how close to the horizon polymerphages are. Until there's some crisis, though, I'm not very confident in a change.
IMO, we should tax plastics manufacturers in proportion to the product of their biodegradability half-life and known toxicity. Alas, a pipe dream.
> Yeah this. Humans aren’t destroying life on earth they’re changing it and forcing new species to evolve. Who knows how weird the world will be in a million years: what creatures will evolve to feed on humans.
Is this even remotely likely given how much control we have over our environment? It surely wouldn't be any other predatory animal, we wouldn't let it come to that. Microbes, viruses, bacteria something like that maybe but those aren't "feeding" on humans in the common sense of the word.
Humanity is the ultimate invasive species, destroying and killing all in its wake without second thought. Overall, everything but other humans is an afterthought, and even that not always so.
This isn't really how evolution works; this is just brainwashing optimism at best. Sure, there's epigenetic memory which buys life time to adapt during outlier times. But evolution itself is a function of time[generations of mutations * recombination]. Thousands of branches of the tree of life are burning that have persisted since the beginning of life on earth.
The bacteria on the other hand, reproduce rapidly relative to the nice plants and birds and critters you're thinking of. They will be fine.
> Despite these ecological benefits in desert environments, feral animals have long been denied the care, curiosity and respect native species deservedly receive...
> However, there are signs of change. New fields such as compassionate conservation and multispecies justice are expanding conservation’s moral world, and challenging the idea that only native species matter.
I never heard anyone make the argument that "only native species matter", that sounds like a framing. The issue with feral species is that in many cases they drive out native species and have a destructive impact on the ecology in a way that is hard to mitigate. I hope that these compassionate conservationists are also big picture conservationists who evaluate the system as a whole.
This reminds me of the Schizophrenic public policy with respect to invasive horses in the US south west.
We simultaneously engage in publically funded programs to feed them during the winter, and programs to control the population in the summer.
Conflicting interest groups want differnt things. Environmentalists want to protect native habitiat and animals, while horse enthsiasts can't stand to let them suffer the hardships of a wild life.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadI guess not all ass holes are bad…
Hehehehehe (snorts)
Which then results in sad scenarios where, say, a local forest is left alone and starts to recover, and starts to show signs of ecological succession[0], which is then stopped by these conservation societies. Because that usually implies new species of trees and shrubs that weren't in the version of nature they remember, and are therefore deemed "invasive".
Nature conservation is full of good intentions hampered by a lack of ecological understanding.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession
Strange to see how different Britain is from the USA, maybe because the USA is slightly bigger. Around here there's any number of conservation/wildlife preserves and they literally buy land, maybe put a trail through it and a dinky dirt parking lot at the trailhead, and then just leave it alone.
As in literally don't do anything.
What the article I linked is talking about would be called a "farm preservation society" around here, and some do exist, but it's rare.
Not bringing that up as an "America bad" comment, just pointing out that the way people in either country look at "their" land is different.
Better than a horse in every way.
My son and I are watching YouTube videos about donkeys right now. Lovable creatures. If you start and incubator that also has Donkeys please look me up.
What does moose milk taste like? Are there potential for different varieties?
Like fat and salt. Same as plant based cheese ;)
Adult humans don't need milk of other species.
Not you mother, not your milk.
> is the only thing preventing this just the ick/cultural factors
Cruelty? Environmental impacts? Health concerns? Antibiotic and hormone use? Food inefficiency?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI
Definitely possible, but not sure on likelihood - the water table in the arid parts of Australia is going to be pretty deep. TFA cited 4m deep holes made by modern wombats - but the holes they dig tend to be narrow, as their burrows are defensive - so the claim made:
> In Australia, for example, a pair of common wombats were recently documented digging a 4m-deep well, which was used by numerous species, such as wallabies, emus, goannas and various birds, during a severe drought.
... is hard to reconcile.
A 4 metre deep standing water table would mean most deep-rooted trees, and many tougher smaller plants (eg comfrey, vetiver, maybe grasses like lucerne/alfalfa) would sustain through drought, and that's clearly not the case.
I'm sure there's some benefit to native wildlife to have these introduced animals dig and expose water, but I'm sure the damage they cause outweighs it.
Kangaroos dig wells. The arguments made here that somehow with a very long bow you could justify some benefits from these non-native species but they have to pretend that those benefits don't already exist from native species to do this.
Unnecessarily childish
"However, there are signs of change. New fields such as compassionate conservation and multispecies justice are expanding conservation’s moral world, and challenging the idea that only native species matter."
We should be kind to all kinds.
And "pests" are pests usually due to human-caused imbalances in ecosystems. Addressing the root of the issue, such as biodiversity loss, would solve a lot.
Homes, human or otherwise, are virtually defined by the absence of undesirable critters. If cows could be rid of flies buzzing about, they would. Increasing biodiversity would most likely also mean increased diversity of pests. Would we not be bothered by mosquitoes, if we had a lighter footstep on the environment? I'm sure cavemen also got bit and stung.
Whenever we restore a wetlands, the area goes from “surprisingly low amounts of mosquitoes most of the time” back to “fuck I can’t go outside”
https://www.opb.org/news/article/restored-marsh-breeds-swarm...
There are ways to somewhat mitigate this through more intelligent wetland design methods, but ultimately no way to even mostly resolve the problem without more intensive control methods, which sometimes end up being pesticides.
You haven't restored biodiversity; you've simply flooded an area. You need to wait for all the animals to return and propagate.
> without more intensive control methods, which sometimes end up being pesticides
Yep, that'd be the opposite of intelligent solution.
The exact opposite is true.
https://www.caryinstitute.org/science/research-projects/biod...
In ecosystems where predators are removed, the population of their prey, in this case, mice, often increases due to a lack of natural control. This process can lead to an increase in the tick population, as ticks often feed on mice. This is especially true for the white-footed mouse, which is a common host for ticks in the eastern and central United States. When the mouse population increases, ticks have a higher chance of obtaining their first blood meal from a mouse, which often carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. (less predators => more mice => more ticks)
https://theconversation.com/as-biodiversity-declines-on-corn...
As biodiversity declines on corn farms, pest problems grow
"We found that communities with stronger networks – that is, more linked species – had fewer pests. Not only this, but network centrality was important; communities with several groups of highly linked species, including insects that prey on others, don’t have the pest problems that loosely linked networks have. Thus, in addition to species diversity, the strength of interactions among species within a community seem to be related to when and where pest outbreaks occur. This research suggests that practices that reduce diversity in cornfields will aggravate pest problems over time."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4646789/
Decisions that reduce insect diversity and decrease the network strength in insect communities result in higher pest abundance.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821039116
Tree diversity regulates forest pest invasion
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97811182318...
Biodiversity offers great potential for managing insect pests. It provides resistance genes and anti-insect compounds; a huge range of predatory and parasitic natural enemies of pests; and community ecology-level effects operating at the local and landscape scales to check pest build-up.
It’s not the opposite that is true but that the net effect is not that negative.
Anecdotally, from my backyard food growing experience, biodiversity increase means more pests, but once more species come in, there comes a balance that exists in nature. Year 1 of my backyard farming, I had plentiful bounty. All my crops did extremely well, and I thought I was some kind of genius that disproved the decades of agricultural progress re:chemicals in farming. Year 2, was my biggest and most ambitious growing season and I could barely get anything out of it. The pests came, from insects to rodents and nothing survived. Year 3 and year 4 were my learning days. I introduced more plants to my garden, native plants, plants that provided food in late summers to next spring for the fauna, more varieties of food crops, etc. I welcomed everything in my garden, including pests. Eventually I hit a balance. Aphids suddenly affecting plants? The wasps are here. Rats and squirrels eating my strawberries? The owls and crows came to rescue. Slug problem? The neighborhood possum took care of it (though I had to put up a fence around some of my veggies for the possum). Overall I think with the constraints of the size of my backyard, I still need some proactive measures of pest control, but most of the time nature takes care of it and makes sure the problem is only temporary.
Absolutely, good point, thank you.
Nobody has a good idea how many species there are currently, let alone how many there were in the past and how many of them went extinct. Estimates for the current species count are from 3 to 100 million[0], which is a range too wide to be useful in this context.
Of the mass extinction events in Earth's history, we may be peeking above the baseline rate[1]; the most severe statement we can make is that vertebrate mammals don't appear to be doing very well in recent times, which stands to reason, considering that Homo sapiens is by far the most competitive vertebrate mammal, doing a good job of crowding others out. But there's a lot of life and biodiversity outside of vertebrate mammals.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160336/
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions
[2]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400253
When biodiversity goes down, there are fewer potential biological resources that can be tapped to solve new problems.
You are correct that biodiversity has a natural upwards component from speciation. But the timescale (which you describe as "quickly") is many orders of magnitude slower than the timescale of the downwards component that extinction has. A species that took literally tens of millions of years to speciate and evolve can be wiped out in months.
Yes, suddenly introducing a new species can be disruptive, but it can also not be disruptive.
Insects can travel accross oceans under certain favorable wind conditions. I live in an island nation, New Zealand, and insects from Australia show up every so often after getting blown here. They usually don't establish themselves as the conditions are not right for them to thrive.
You have a dangerous lack of fundamental understanding of the topic to which you speak. I suggest you start your learning journey here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
No, its not.
Sometimes, OTOH, completely moronic ideas are offered without any support, and without it, contradiction is all they warrant.
You weren't debating before, just posting unsupported conclusions with no argument in support, and complaining about responses in kind.
On the other hand, almost every atheist I know believes in some form of material determinism. For them, individual Behavior is entirely driven by the physical makeup of an individual and their interacting environment. They deposited if you had a sufficiently accurate model of the universe you would be able to determine every action they would make.
Similarly I don't think there is anything to offend with presumption, or at least anything that cares.
Deforestation and farming practices (incl. pesticides/herbicides, pollution) are the main drivers of biodiversity loss.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...
The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050
Two recent studies underscore the danger the meat production system poses for biodiversity.
Sure! Do you have a proposal to make agriculture more eco-friendly without impacting quantity, quality and cost of the food produced?
> The key is reducing meat consumption
No! If you really want to achieve something, rather than just talking ecology, the key is not to try and force change on the general population.
Sure.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449
How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w
Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
> If you really want to achieve something, rather than just talking ecology, the key is not to try and force change on the general population
The change is absolutely needed.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
One study estimates it would take just over 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone’s consumption patterns were similar to the average American.
We don't have those extra Earths, and won't anytime soon.
> the key is not to try and force change on the general population
Sure, solve the biggest problem we've ever faced, but don't change a thing.
Not by any means do we understand enough about ecosystems to justify the hubris to declare any animal as a net negative effect to the environment.
In western Europe, hunters argue they need to cull deer, for example, to keep the forest in balance. That is only true because a) they make an effort to feed the animals during the winter, helping more to survive than otherwise would, and b) because natural predators have been eradicated in the previous centuries.
Don’t ever trust someone that attempts to justify culling a species for the greater good.
I'd argue that it's also a problem of biodiversity (at least in the U.S., don't know about New Zealand). If we hadn't eradicated almost all wolves, coyotes, foxes, birds of prey, weasels, and I don't know what else, nature would have solved the problem already.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoat_in_New_Zealand
Now that is hubris, what the hell do we know about long term net positives? Selfish warm feelings, while watching the reality of introduced extinction take place in a matter of mere decades. Pardon me.
Non-native introductions usually have the issue of such a sudden population explosion that the prey cannot adjust in a timely fashion and get killed very quickly, very suddenly.
I grew up in Virginia so here's one specific example: https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/deer/deer-management-progr...
With deer, the problem is often not an excessive population but rather their tendency to stay in one place, destroying young shoots and plantings and hindering the growth of the plants we care about.
In contrast, with predators they cannot stay in one place for long enough, allowing most plants to outgrow their vulnerable size and survive.
Also removing native species and sending the balance out of whack is different to removing a non native species that has sent the balance out of whack.
This isn’t quite accurate, though. Between removing the fence and getting fence construction inclinations, a lot of time has passed, and in the meantime, nature did lots of stuff we hardly understand.
Assuming otherwise is just repeating the same mistake again. Feral donkeys might be part of a new ecosystem now.
And we can be fairly sure about some things.
Rats in new Zealand, rabbits in Australia, cane toads in Australia, etc, etc.
Further it takes time to remove these populations, so you can observe what happens when they're removed from a local area.
Are you suggesting Genocide? /s
For example, camels have evolved to coexist with the plants that briefly flourish in the desert after rains. Goats just consume everything and will die in a second season.
Terrible is not an objective measure either. Oxygen and asteroids destroyed most life on earth but neither was terrible, they just were. The only reason people think we’re doing terrible things is because we’ve convinced ourselves we aren’t a natural part of the biosphere that adapted to what we’re doing now.
It'll be interesting to see what effect it has on the whole food supply chain, as we're pretty dependent on the idea of polymers "keeping out" the things that normally eat our food before we'd get the chance to.
Maybe we'll go back to only eating crazy fermented and spicy things.
Related, great Stanislaw Lem novel about the "Great Decomposition" of paper.
It feels to me like the mistake is abusing plastics, which are some of the longest living, most resilient materials, for disposable products. Bacteria that eats polymers might clean up our mess, but it will also destroy one of the key foundations of modern industry, and I don't think the world will just sit back and become pre-industrial again - we'll be back with something worse.
Plus, I guess I'm imagining the polymerphages would probably be more interested in soft plastics – grocery bags, styrofoam. The kind of stuff that already disintegrates pretty easily.
When you go back to books from the 60s, they make bold statements about hard plastics would be everlasting materials, immune to rotting, rusting or shattering - and for the most part, they were right! But for some bizarre reason people chose this 'everlasting' material to make disposable items, and once they realised that it was cheaper than materials that actually do degrade the cat was out of the (polyethylene) bag.
I'm hoping that we can rapidly phase out our use of disposable polymers before these polymerphages start chomping through our indestructible wondermaterials like butter. We can keep the hard plastics for truly long-lived things like car bumpers... and try to stop automotive manufactures from making those disposable, too!
Here's an idea to accelerate this:
"Require by law standard glass bottle designs for all drinks of a certain class, like four or five types of wine bottle and likewise for soft drinks and spirits. Ensure that those designs are public domain. Delegate responsibility of defining the standards to an international organisation like ISO to encourage international adoption. The only losers would be a handful of companies with 'distinctive' or 'iconic' branded bottles (and realistically, people aren't going to stop buying Pepsi because it's in the wrong shape bottle), but the winners would be all manner of industrial bottle-washing and reuse firms, bottle-handling machinery makers and of course consumers getting lower prices. End result: widespread reuse of glass bottles, replacing one-use plastic bottles."
What do you think? I think it's pretty uncontroversial, which is the only thing that seems likely to be passed within a premier's term and thus survive the path to the statute books in liberal democracies!
IMO, we should tax plastics manufacturers in proportion to the product of their biodegradability half-life and known toxicity. Alas, a pipe dream.
Is this even remotely likely given how much control we have over our environment? It surely wouldn't be any other predatory animal, we wouldn't let it come to that. Microbes, viruses, bacteria something like that maybe but those aren't "feeding" on humans in the common sense of the word.
The bacteria on the other hand, reproduce rapidly relative to the nice plants and birds and critters you're thinking of. They will be fine.
> Ass holes in Australia
> However, there are signs of change. New fields such as compassionate conservation and multispecies justice are expanding conservation’s moral world, and challenging the idea that only native species matter.
I never heard anyone make the argument that "only native species matter", that sounds like a framing. The issue with feral species is that in many cases they drive out native species and have a destructive impact on the ecology in a way that is hard to mitigate. I hope that these compassionate conservationists are also big picture conservationists who evaluate the system as a whole.
We simultaneously engage in publically funded programs to feed them during the winter, and programs to control the population in the summer.
Conflicting interest groups want differnt things. Environmentalists want to protect native habitiat and animals, while horse enthsiasts can't stand to let them suffer the hardships of a wild life.