This is super depressing, it's crazy to see how much the flora/fauna have changed locally in my lifetime.
It makes me wonder how much worse it actually is. Is looks like most of these were initially listed in the 80s, not too long after Endangered Species Act passed.
Is there some sort of time limit before they officially declare something extinct?
The Ivory Billed Woodpecker hasn't had a confirmed sighting since 1944.
Lots of these species have been long gone. But the landowner of that 1944 sighting probably couldn't turn over a rock on his property without fines and lawsuits coming at him, at least until now.
ETA: If I'm remembering the stories right, either the last or one of the very last IBW sightings was doubted by officials, because the guy was a farmer or something and "not a scientist or expert".
Not getting them to pay him any attention, he went home, shot the breeding pair, and returned to the officials office with proof.
Lots of these species have been long gone. But the landowner of that 1944 sighting probably couldn't turn over a rock on his property without fines and lawsuits coming at him, at least until now.
The endangered species act wasn't enacted until 1973, so I think that landowner had plenty of opportunity to do what he wanted with his property.
That's not really a fair comparison/ justification.
I don't know how much "warning" was given for the endangered species act, or if that even matters, since land that's about to be worthless is already worthless.
Also, I have no idea what actually happened in this case. But to speculate/generalize:
IBW were already (obviously) extremely rare in 1944, so there would have been an intense amount of pressure preventing him from "doing" anything with the land, and in a rural, wooded area, there probably weren't many options at the time besides farming it, anyway.
If the guy would have known in 1944 that the endangered species act would be passed in 1973, you'd maybe have a point. But he wouldn't have known.
If the government suddenly told you tomorrow you couldn't sell your house, then claiming it's fair because you could have sold it all the way up to yesterday doesn't do you any good if you had no advanced knowledge of it. And if it were public knowledge, who would want to buy it anyway?
I was curious what actually happened so looked it up -- looks like conservancy groups tried (and failed) to purchase the land to preserve it, and the land was logged despite the presence of the known endangered bird: "Eckelberry also saw the logging that cut down the trees used by the last Ivory-billed woodpecker"
So, just to confirm: he did what he wanted with the land, and other than attempting to purchase the land from him and being declined, nobody interfered with his use of his land?
I only know what's in the PDF I linked to, but as far as I can tell, that's exactly what happened. The company (Chicago Mill) that owned the land turned down the attempt to purchase the land, conservationists tried to get the government to condemn the land, but the government declined. Then they watched them log the trees that were home to the bird.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say.
Above, you made some speculative claims that the endangered species caused the property owner to experience increased hardship in using their land. Research in this thread that others have done has shown that wasn’t the case, and yet you persist in pitching speculatively that perhaps they had their property taken away.
What is the statement you’re trying to make, and can you do the legwork to suggest it’s plausible rather than just technically not-yet-disproven?
The increased hardship for landowners post 1973 is fact. The endangered species act turns affected land into a liability instead of being an asset.
The original response was that if they were able to enjoy the use of their land before 1973, then there was no harm done.
1) Which doesn't mean the harm/hardship didn't come into play in 1973 once the law was passed. It did. The land would have lost significant value overnight by being declared endangered species habitat.
2) The research showed that the land is now, in fact, a National Wildlife Refuge. The government acquired it. That rarely happens in a fully voluntary way with full compensation, but I don't claim to know the circumstances here.
3) My speculation was merely that harm could have also been done before 1973, which has been turned into somewhat of a straw man.
3b) And I only included that speculation because it's applicable to the state of affairs today, because if the same thing happens to any generic landowner post-1973, it's no longer speculation. Your property value becomes significantly diminished.
can be read in two ways. I assume you meant the person who owned that land when it was taken away, and that's how I read it. But it's not unreasonable to interpret it as the person who owned it at the time of the sighting.
I only speculated/generalized because that situation has happened, thousands of times, just not with the interesting backstory.
Landowner discovers he has an endangered species, reports it, gets rewarded by having his property restricted, endangered species moves on (or dies), and restrictions remain indefinitely.
Or landowner doesn't report it, "disappears" the animals, and uses it or sells it while it still has value.
Sounds like in this case, it somehow managed to be a bit of both of those.
Government isnt there to protect every business from ever going out of business. Sorry but I dont see the argument for compensation. By your argument everyone who has planning controls changed in their neighbourhood should be paid out, tobacco companies should be paid for revenue loss due to taxation and government adverts and anyone with a house built next to them should sue their neighbour for overshadowing and traffic noise. Sorry but its unworkable. Its simply the risks of doing business.
The purpose of taxing tobacco is to discourage consumption. The tax is directly the mechanism for achieving the desired purpose rather than a hardship imposed on some otherwise innocent people only incidentally. It's not a taking, it's a penalty.
When your neighbor builds a house next to yours, that's not a taking because it's not the government doing it. If you wanted to control what got built on a piece of property that isn't yours, you should have bought it yourself, or entered into a contract with the property owner where they agree not to do that for a particular period of years and you compensate them for the restriction.
Governments should have to compensate property owners for zoning restrictions and the like. That makes perfect sense, for the same reason they have to compensate for any other takings -- because you're imposing a hardship on a specific innocent third party for a collective benefit, which is unreasonable. If there is to be a collective benefit then it should be paid for out of the collective fund and not disproportionately imposed on unconsenting innocent people at random. And if it turns out that the cost of compensating the property owners for the restriction you want to impose exceeds the value you hope to achieve by imposing it, that's some pretty good evidence that you shouldn't be doing it -- which is exactly why it should have to be paid out.
The fact that courts decided not to do that with zoning is the whole reason we have a housing shortage -- because now we've over-produced zoning restrictions since they can be imposed without accounting for their cost.
> The purpose of taxing tobacco is to discourage consumption. The tax is directly the mechanism for achieving the desired purpose rather than a hardship imposed on some otherwise innocent people only incidentally. It's not a taking, it's a penalty.
And the purpose for environmental regulation is to discourage extinction in the same way. You are arguing black with one and white with the other...
> When your neighbor builds a house next to yours, that's not a taking because it's not the government doing it.
So when I'm overshadowed, my view is blocked, added noise etc. thats not 'taking'? Only governments can take not private citizens? I don't understand this view at all.
I agree zoning has been completely overdone but its definitely necessary unless you want your neighbour to be a 24-hour chemical plant.
> If there is to be a collective benefit then it should be paid for out of the collective fund and not disproportionately imposed on unconsenting innocent people at random.
Its going to have to be a huge fund to pay for all of this. Where's all this taxation going to come from to compensate me for not being able to build my chemical plant? or skyscraper?
> The fact that courts decided not to do that with zoning
I think you need to look deeper into the history of zoning. For me the new york zoning of 1916 is a good start in the United States - it was obviously needed and lobbied for by all the boroughs, as well as huge numbers of residents and landowners. Nobody could have had the money to pay for the compensation you ask for. The Euclid case I would tend to agree wasn't a proven good and has started a downhill trend.
You should also understand that land has historically always had a communal quality and this is growing more important in the 21st century as a scarce resort. Land use regulation of some kind has always co-existed with land ownership through history.
> And the purpose for environmental regulation is to discourage extinction in the same way. You are arguing black with one and white with the other...
The difference is the proportionality of the hardship.
If you smoke cigarettes and there is a cigarette tax, you might pay an extra $5/pack, but so does everybody else. It's uniform. That amount might convince you to quit or smoke less, which is the whole idea.
With zoning or environmental rules, they're not uniform. It's not the case that anybody who cuts down a tree has to pay a tree tax. It's that one unlucky soul can't cut down any trees on his property, and the trees there are worth a million dollars, but somebody else is free to log their trees without constraint.
Notice that in the first case, compensating the target for the tax would make it totally ineffective. If you paid $5 in cigarette tax but then that was a taking and you got your $5 back, that wouldn't cause anybody to quit smoking.
Whereas if government had to pay the one guy with the land where the woodpecker lives a million dollars to not cut down his trees, that works fine. All it does is spread the million dollar cost of saving the woodpecker onto the whole tax base instead of unjustly imposing it on only that one guy.
And it forces you to do the accounting. So that if it turns out to cost a trillion dollars to save that one woodpecker, maybe it's not worth that much.
> So when I'm overshadowed, my view is blocked, added noise etc. thats not 'taking'? Only governments can take not private citizens? I don't understand this view at all.
Your view goes through the neighbor's property. So there are two ways to handle this.
One is, you have a right to the view. Then the person who wants to build a skyscraper first has to pay you for the right. But this works very poorly because you can see a skyscraper for miles and if any one person can stop it then everybody has the incentive to demand a million dollars. It becomes impossible to build anything anywhere.
The other is that it's the property owner's view and they just hadn't been charging you for it. If the neighbors don't want a skyscraper there then they can get together and buy the property and not build a skyscraper on it.
Mostly that still causes the skyscraper to be built, because in general the value of a skyscraper is greater than the value of the view, so people aren't willing to pay that much to preserve the view. But that's things working as intended. You want the thing that produces the most value. If people really want to preserve the view that bad, they have to pay the money.
> Its going to have to be a huge fund to pay for all of this. Where's all this taxation going to come from to compensate me for not being able to build my chemical plant? or skyscraper?
It only has to be a huge fund if you're over-using zoning restrictions so that it costs a lot to build certain things.
Suppose you say that 20% of the town is restricted to single family housing. Well, that's fine, if you want a single family house which isn't next to a chemical plant then you buy one there, and if you want to build a chemical plant then you can do it in the other 80% of the town. Since there are still plenty of places to build a chemical plant, the value of the properties where it's allowed is only negligibly higher than the value of the properties where it isn't, and that's the amount you have to compensate for the restriction.
But if you want to zone 90% of the town for single family housing and there is almost nowhere to build chemical plants and skyscrapers then the value of the land where you are allowed to build those things will be really high and so will the amount you have to compensate everyone else for the restrictions.
That would be completely unaffordable, but the solution isn't to pay out the money, it's to increase the number of locations where it's permissible to build chemical plants and skyscrapers so that you don't have to.
> it was obviously needed and lobbied for by all the boroughs, as well as huge numbers of residents and landowners.
Existing landowners like for zoning restrictions to exist on everybody else's property, because it increases scarcity. If you have a single family home and it's illegal to build high density condos anywhere in the city, the value of your home goes up, because you don't have to compete for home buyers with the condos.
Zoning restrictions on your land reduce the relative value of your land and increase the relative value of everyone else's land. So the profit maximizing strategy for a land owner is to have none on your own land and heavy restrictions on everyone else's. The next best, especially if you weren't planning to further develop your land anyway, is to have heavy restrictions on yours and everyone else's, because the increase in artificial scarcity is more than the value lost to the restrictions on your own property.
The cost of this is paid by anyone who wasn't already a property owner when the zoning restrictions were put into place, e.g. people who don't yet live in the city. This is one of the reasons they spread so rapidly -- the victims don't have a vote at the time when they pass, and to get a vote in order to remove them, you have to buy property at the artificially raised price, at which point you have the incentive to retain the restrictions and not lose the money you paid.
> You should also understand that land has historically always had a communal quality and this is growing more important in the 21st century as a scarce resort.
It's growing more scarce because of zoning restrictions. If it was easier to build skyscrapers then the supply of real estate in terms of available square footage would increase and ease the scarcity.
Imagine you are a farmer and you actually see an endangered species. What do you do ? Kill it and hide it so that no one finds it. If you by mistake report it, boom, your land is not your land anymore.
Not the same species at all, but you just reminded me of the family of three Pileated Woodpeckers that I saw with my parents this summer in rural NY. They are really amazing looking (and bigger than I thought) birds. Hopefully more people will recognize the importance of saving our natural habitats and preserving species like these:
It's funny, because the number of people who regularly claim to have seen an IBW is really high. And 9 out of 10 times you can show them a picture of a pileated, and they instantly realize their mistake.
Idk why people who can't ID fairly common birds get so certain in thinking they've ID'd a really really uncommon one, but they do.
There's also the perverse incentives of developers and farmers not wanting endangered species to be "discovered" on their property because of the restrictions that will incur.
But what gets really interesting is re-introduction of endangered species, like with sandhill cranes being re-introduced to Louisiana (transplants from other surviving populations).
Is government introduction of an endangered species on/near private land, in a way that will certainly incur restrictions on that land (to protect said species), considered a "taking" under the constitution, or should it be?
More practically, as was the case with the sandhill crane, the government had to make concessions to land owners to get them on board and make the project politically viable.
Now they're protected, but it's a "special/experimental program" where farmers and other land owners aren't restricted in the ways they would be if they were still naturally occurring in that location.
(Of course it's still illegal to shoot them, but every few years someone manages to misidentify a 6 foot tall bird as a goose or something else legal to hunt.)
There's also the perverse incentives of developers and farmers not wanting endangered species to be "discovered" on their property because of the restrictions that will incur.
I'm not sure that's really a "perverse incentive".
By hiding, destroying, or not reporting the endangered species, they're going to develop the land and harm the species.
But if there were no endangered species act making them afraid of the endangered species being discovered, they'd have just developed the land anyway, so the end result is the same. But at least with the endangered species act, they face some legal repercussion if they are caught harming an endangered species.
The "perverse incentive" is that people who might otherwise be hospitable to a reintroduced animal will likely lose control of their property if they do anything to help. They could put out feeders, cull predators or provide habitat. Instead they are encouraged (if they want to keep control of their property) to be as uninviting to these animals as possible.
The incentive is to kill/not-kill the animals, not necessarily protect the habitat.
The only fix I can see is making it a worthwhile rational decision: incentives for reporting endangered animals that are worth more than the value in developing the property. But that has it's own pitfalls and potentials for abuse.
>The incentive is…not necessarily to protect the habit
Except many of the incentives explicitly state the goal is to protect habitat.
“How does a CCA or CCAA help species?
These voluntary agreements reduce or remove identified threats to a species. Examples of beneficial activities include measures for restoring or enhancing habitat, expanding or establishing habitat…”
The land owner's incentive to be a bad vs good actor.
There aren't maps of some universal truth as to what habitat is protected for what species.
Many habitats aren't "known" and made protected until the endangered animal is actually discovered, on-site.
The land owner has incentive to prevent that discovery from happening, and therefore has incentive to kill the animals before they can be discovered on his property.
Not especially- because generally whenever zoning is enacted, the current land owner gets to decide the initial zone of their property.
And land that is already zoned can't be rezoned without the current property owners consent.
So the only thing restricted / "taken" here, is if the property owner wants a re-zoning and is denied.
Yeah, being forced into the system at all is arguably a violation of rights, but I don't think requiring the land to be used in a consistent way (of the owners initial choosing) is at all comparable to not being allowed to use the land.
The owner never consents to endangered species restrictions. For zoning they do.
> Lots of these species have been long gone. But the landowner of that 1944 sighting probably couldn't turn over a rock on his property without fines and lawsuits coming at him, at least until now.
Citation? Oh I see further down the chain you just made this up.
Sounds like the limit is discretionary. From the NYT:
"Scientists do not declare extinctions lightly. It often takes decades of fruitless searching. About half of the species in this group were already considered extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global authority on the status of animals and plants. The Fish and Wildlife Service moved slower in part because it is working through a backlog, officials said, and tends to prioritize providing protection for species that need it over removing protection for those that don’t."
I’m appalled by the housing codes (PLU in French). They do require to estimate and compensate the fauna and flora, by providing other shelters in another forrest for example, or manually
moving individuals (butterflies, birds).
But it will never be the same! Maybe that land was in the middle of a communication axis, maybe it had the right fungus. If you move all the species around, it’s like when you move all the humans around: They become unrooted, and, ultimately, stress on their lives shows up as obesity or as socially disordered!
We need to stop colonizing more land. We need to limit population in a country.
It’s less about structures than it is other modifications to natural habitats like pollution, cutting forests, draining swamps, introducing invasive species, and growing crops.
> We are too small and insignificant to make any true, lasting impact.
Holocene Extinction?
I guess it depends on the scale we're talking about. If we're talking on a planetary scale and the grand scheme of things, humans are insignificant insects. However, if we stick closer to a relatively more tangible reality, humans are responsible for an ongoing mass extinction event and the climate change crisis.
Surely the same fallacy is the reason we care about these species in the first place?
You can kind of make an argument from entropy, an extinction cuts off our access to information about a species. But if that were the reason, taking samples for DNA and then killing off the animals would be okay. We care about extinction because we like nature and want to preserve it.
It cuts both ways. Having more species is not inherently better.
Climate change is a battle against ourselves, for ourselves. We will be the ones to pay the cost (potentially with our lives, or way of life at the very least); nature will persevere whether we win or lose.
Life will always find a way no matter how much humans (or ice ages, or asteroids, or whatever) screw up this planet.
From the article: Many of the species were likely extremely endangered or extinct before the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, meaning that possibly no amount of conservation would have been able to save them
Most of these wouldn't have been around in any sustainable number well before most of us were born. The real question is whether or not conservation efforts are working on species IDed in the 48 years since. I suspect not, given climate change is bigger than any single species.
In the case of the ivory-billed woodpecker it was probably extinct in the 80s too. There hasn't been a universally accepted sighting of one since 1944, the few sightings made since then aren't really conclusive.
For most of these creatures they only existed in one particularly small region or area. The San Marcos gambusia, for instance, historically only lived in a single 1km stretch of the San Marcos River. Species with that tiny of an area can be driven extinct by a single bad weather event or epidemic. Or because some real estate developer decides they want to build a couple apartments. It doesn't even necessarily have to be something big. It's unfortunate, but sadly something like the San Marcos gambusia would probably have gone extinct within a few centuries, human activity or not, unless it was able to adapt to expand its range.
While climate change is definitely something to be concerned about, it is not, currently, the main driver of extinction events like this. The far bigger cause is more direct human activity, like poaching and land development.
Hawaii had iirc 14 species of birds on the list that were all native to either one island or a portion of one, with some preferring certain altitudes or only living on certain plateaus, etc.
The funny thing about Hawaii though, is that there are only two or three (extremely isolated) places that remain with any true Hawaiian plant habitat, because Polynesians brought their own plants with them that almost universally outcompeted the native plants.
Birds on islands are some of the quickest animals to specialize and differentiate into new species.
Which makes Hawaii incredibly interesting, from an island biogeography perspective.
Something as simple as the fact that no mosquitos made it to Hawaii until Captain Cook accidently introduced them, means no native fish, frogs, birds, lizards, or anything that specialized in eating them.
Now extrapolate that to wiping out all the native flora and replacing it.
That so much biodiversity remains in Hawaii today ought to actually give us some comfort in nature's ability to quickly adapt to significant change.
There's similar issues with possums in New Zealand, who also have no natural predators there and have flourished. New Zealand wants to eradicate them to save their native birds.
But what's interesting is: the same possum is extremely endangered in it's native habitat in Australia because of so many introduced predators.
So do you go to war to kill the invasive species, even if that contributes to their extinction?
Does it matter that as an invasive species, they might cause multiple species of birds to go extinct?
Lots of interesting ecological, biological, and ethical things to consider.
The common brushtail possum is very common in Australia and far from endangered, if anything it's adapted quite well to urban life. There are other species of possums that are endangered, but they're not the ones in NZ.
From the article it sounds like invasive species, plus the fact that we have royally screwed up the local ecosystem.
For instance — white-tailed deer are growing exponentially, eating all the underbrush and outcompeting other animals, and they have no/few natural predators left.
I agree that not much has changed since the 80s, I think it's just catching up to us now.
Yes, and worse, some (uninformed people) see the growth of any species as a positive sign that nature is bouncing back, or whatever. When in reality, ecosystems are hugely out of balance and the vast growth of one species is just a spasm as the system shakes itself apart. The knock-on effect of one species's sudden growth spurt may take decades to play out in the shadows, but it is almost assuredly not a good thing.
White-tailed deer have only recently recovered from over-hunting and returned to their pre-colonization population levels.[1] Do you have a source that frames their growth as exponential?
Apologies, I'm based in Pennsylvania and it's definitely more noticeable here. I expect it will become more apparent elsewhere too.
We're at 3x the total population that existed when europeans started settling here, and without an appropriate way to cull the herd I don't see that changing. We have milder winters (so no starvation), less interest in hunting, and again a lack of natural predators.
The Hawaiian deer population follows boom and bust cycles. They were introduced for hunting purposes, have no natural predators, and tend to mess up the ecosystem so badly via overgrazing that they end up dying off and then recovering.
Deer population growth during that recovery period (of white tail deer at least) seems pretty exponential. [1] However in the absence of natural predators it seems that disease and human culling have pretty effectively kept their population to stay at about pre-colonial levels rather than continuing upward to the point of over population.
That’s almost entirely aerodynamics. I recently drove a boxy truck from the 90s on the same stretch I’ve driven bug-free and had a deja vu from how bug-splattered the windshield was.
I.e. look at e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9922189,-97.664741,145755m/d... , and it's just patches of fields no matter which way you go for hundreds of miles. Areas that once was wild forrest (or praerie), and housing numerous of of species having enough space to live and reproduce.
Give it some more years, perhaps a few hundred, and e.g. this https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9922189,-97.664741,145755m/d... , will look much like the above map, with fields for hundreds of miles in all direction. With it goes the home of many, many species.
Over 20 species, so causes are as varied as the species.
In several cases, it was a combination of human activity and (relatively) fragile initial population conditions. 11 of the species are native to Hawaii and Guam, and when human expansion puts pressure on your ecosystem, there's nowhere to move to. One of the fish species lived in one particularly slow-flowing section of one river.
When your whole universe is one island, there's a lot of things humans can do that would render 100% of your habitat unusable.
Yeah, I agree. To add onto your sentiment that it was a combination [of things]... I'd like to add that it's a bit reductionist for people to suggest an extinction is one thing (e.g. it was pesticides, it was climate change, etc...). Sure, sometimes it might be ONE thing, but I would guess that in most cases it's a combination of stresses coming together.
> I don't expect things to change much with corporate's death grip on the government.
Statements like this always imply that if the government ran the businesses (socialism) things like this wouldn't happen. But the evidence is it is worse. The USSR had major problems with their heavily polluting industries, which persist today.
There is plenty of middle ground, including restrictions on corporate election donations, and generally limiting corporate lobbyists access to our legislators.
Again, you're saying government control won't have these problems.
Socialist governments produced tremendous environmental problems because even though the government consisted solely of altruistic, self-sacrificing, dedicated, incorruptible administrators, the people still needed food, clothing, and washing machines. And the government would try to provide them, rather than face mass starvation.
I am saying corporate interests are not aligned with those of the people at large, they are aligned exclusively with those of their shareholders. I do not want my country’s laws to reflect a small group’s desires to make money.
This completely overlooks the desires of the people that want the products the company provides at a reasonable price. This is not going away, regardless of how you structure things. People like to eat food and use washing machines.
The notion that profit is the root of the problem is implying that removing the profit will resolve it. History shows that this never works.
Socialism produces more environmental degradation, because it cannot produce things as efficiently as free market businesses can. So, to make up the gap, they pay little attention to the environment.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up socialism. My point is that corporate lobbying and donations should be restricted, not that free market businesses shouldn’t exist.
There is a broad, non-linear spectrum between socialism and unrestricted corporate influence on government.
You're never going to get money out of politics. Even in the Soviet Union. Do you really think the Soviet Union did not have endemic corruption in government?
Here in Seattle, the Council created "democracy vouchers" paid by the taxpayer to give to the candidate of their choice. What it really is is the incumbents using taxpayer money to fund their campaigns. If you're not an incumbent, good luck getting any of those vouchers.
>Do you really think the Soviet Union did not have endemic corruption in government?
Literally no one thinks that or implied it in this conversation. What a non sequitur. I don't think you're even properly reading the comments you reply to.
Saying that "but for" corporate/capitalistic influence, government would be benevolent is very much implying that countries without capitalism shouldn't have corruption.
I think the argument is that absent corporate lobbying, politicians can still be influenced. Something else will fill the position, and the total amount of influence over politicians not granted democratically will be unchanged. Maybe that's still through money, but taken as direct bribes under the table, or maybe it's populism, or something else entirely.
I don't know if that's true. I also don't know if what replaced campaign contributions would be better or worse.
I do know that lobbying is itself overstated. In 1999, the GDP was 10 trillion. 3 billion, or 0.03%, of that went into politics, mostly from individual donors rather than companies [1]. If lobbying were an effective way to buy political influence, more companies would shell out. Maybe it's already happening under the table, though.
Your notion that absent corporate lobbying, government control would work out in the best interests of everybody is utterly without foundation.
Your complaint about the profit motive being the root of evil also implies that without profit, things would be better. Without profit has been repeatedly tried. It never produces better results.
My father grew up a socialist. Then he joined the military, and spent years living on military bases. There is zero profit motive on a military base. But there was no end of ridiculous problems, enormous waste, glacial bureaucracy, etc. This thoroughly disabused him of his socialist notions.
For one small example, on a new base, furniture for the base housing had to be supplied. The base commander delegated the selection of furniture to his wife (men rarely care about these things). She picked all the furniture, confident in how great her taste was and what a big favor she was doing to the ignorant masses on base.
The servicemens' wives all hated that furniture. My dad would always have a huge laugh at how much they loathed it.
P.S. When my parents got married, my mom hated all of his furniture. He had to buy all new stuff to her specifications.
Please try responding to what people are actually saying rather than inventing endless strawman arguments.
There are important functional distinctions between a government run enterprise, a government regulated enterprise and a completely unregulated enterprise.
There are different types of inefficiencies in heirarchical systems and market systems. Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games. Heirarchical systems have trouble routing around incompetence and corruption.
If you pay attention you'll notice that the systems that work best are hybrids that layer market and heirarchical systems.
While the army seems like a purely heirarchical system, it is really a hybrid system since interfaces heavily with the market systems which we call the military-industrial complex.
> While the army seems like a purely heirarchical system, it is really a hybrid system since interfaces heavily with the market systems which we call the military-industrial complex.
That has nothing to do with how things are run on a military base.
Besides, if you've got any evidence that the military worked better in a non-market system, like the USSR, please present.
> Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games.
Another word for that is "competition". Competition makes them efficient. Eliminating competition leads to gross inefficiency and incompetence, making things far worse than the duplication ever did.
> Eliminating competition leads to gross inefficiency and incompetence.
It can, especially if poorly managed. However, there is a reason why most companies are heirarchical systems.
If markets were truely the "one true way to do things" you would see markets all the way down. That simply is not the case. In fact, instead we see that "vertical integration" can be extremely successful and can multiple companies linked purely by markets.
Similarly, you don't see very many successful truely free markets. It turns out that you need the rule of law and a regulating authority to minimize unproductive competition that would otherwise swamp the benefits of the productive competitive.
We don't want companies competing for sales by blowing up each other's stores. We want companies to compete for sales by making better products.
Deciding when and how to mix markets with heirarchical and other systems is extremely complicated and hard. But it is simple minded to pretend that pure markets are always the best solution when reality so clearly shows the benefits of hybrid systems.
And yet, the military is one of last institutions that the American public still has faith in. It's almost as if people realize there can be many motives, beyond profit, that drive people to act in a certain way.
I'm fairly blown away on a regular basis by how otherwise smart people revert to utterly simplistic models of the world.
And speaking from a Russian perspective, your assertion that anyone in the USSR viewed their officials as self-sacrificing and altruistic is quite frankly hilarious.
I have friends who grew up in the Soviet bloc. I once witnessed a hilarious conversation between one of them and another friend who was a committed socialist (I don't de-friend people because of their politics). My socialist friend would say "X under socialism would be better". The other would say "I lived under socialism, and here's how and why X was worse." Socialist would say "but that won't happen under socialism". The other would say "you have zero experience with this, I lived under it. You have no idea what you are talking about."
The back and forth like this would go on for a while.
It's ironic that in tarring all forms of "government" with the same brush, conservatives who lackadaisically compare the actions of multi-party democratic governments to those of single-party states minimize the importance of what was probably the most important structural difference between the Eastern Bloc and Western democracies. Eisenhower would be horrified.
I don't understand why this is portrayed as some sort of false dichotomy.
There can be government regulation without reverting to socialism. There can also be systems of checks and balances to both the ills of unfettered free-market economics and government power structures.
Because the argument isn't for regulation, it's against lobbying and it's against having a government that's influenced by corporatism/ capitalism (because that's largely what lobbying is).
Which pretty clearly makes the alternative socialism / communism, depending on how you want to define them.
Ok, I was reading that the alternative to current lobbying was to regulate the practice. How are you interpreting the "against lobbying" side of the argument?
Lobbying is about the right to petition the government; I don't see the direct line to socialism/communism, which is generally more concerned with the means of production. I don't think there is "clearly" a connection but rather one used to shoehorn a divisive and emotional topic.
Bro, the government forbidding companies from using a certain pesticide because it's driving the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct isn't "socialism", man. Or if it is, then the very premise of governance is socialist. You're so desperate to attack your personal bugbear that you're thrusting it into a totally unrelated conversation by quite extravagantly strawmanning someone.
My posts here often talk about "internalizing the externalities" by putting taxes on externalities like pollution. The tax rate would be higher the more dangerous they are.
Free markets do not imply being free to hurt others or destroy others' property. A proper function of government is to protect people and property.
For example, I would not ban gasoline. I would tax the carbon content of fuels to reflect their true cost to the environment.
Democracy never made socialism competitive with free markets. Democracy in Seattle led to the government purchase of port-a-potties at $250,000 each and $12,000,000 per mile bike lane striping. All involved were comfortably re-elected.
There is a difference between "social" and "socialism". The social welfare state was invented by Bismarck in order to fight socialism.
Thus calling it "socialist" is a pretty gross error. Indeed the foreign minster of Denmark had to plead with uninformed Americans to please stop calling his nation "socialist" when it is a social democracy - this was back when Bernie was running as a democratic socialist and his schtick to try to normalize socialism was by saying Denmark had it which lead to this mess of misinformation.
The idea of social democracy is that you have social welfare programs. That is, you tax private industry and give the money to people for things like pensions (which is exactly what Bismarck did, and this basic model has not changed since it was developed in 19th C Germany).
Socialism is the idea that private ownership of the means of production be banned (thus you cannot own your own business). In communism, all private property is banned (thus you don't even own your clothes, or car, or apartment).
Obviously the utopia of banning all private property was impractical, but seizing factories was more practical. Thus even those nations that were controlled by communist parties officially declared that they had not reached communism, they were in the state of socialism, and were working towards, or "building" communism. This led to many jokes in the Eastern Bloc about when the building of communism would be completed and how could it be done with all the shortages, etc. That is why all the communist nations called themselves socialist. Now you know the difference between communism and socialism.
What about socialism versus democracy. Here the problem is the enormous amount of totalitarian government control needed to organize production based on political concerns rather than concerns of price -- e.g. market concerns. Even if you are just a painter, you need paint. How do you get the paint? You have to requisition it based on some political justification. Now the government needs to plan how much paint is produced each year. Then you need to plan how many paint buckets and paint brushes. It goes on and on. There were mathematicians working full time on these linear programming problems in the soviet union, just trying to figure out how to plan their economy. Imagine all the inputs you need, imagine writing them down, and requisitioning them, as part of a big five year plan.
This requires a vast array of secret police and government micromanagement and that is what makes socialism not free. Whereas the genius of Bismarck is that he understood that workers just wanted pensions, and did not care so much about political organization of the process of production. So it's a lot easier to tax private enterprise -- something that was done even in ancient Mesopotamia -- rather than trying to control the process of production. Thus social welfare states are more "free" than socialist states, and no socialist state can be free, it must be micromanaged by the Party. Nevertheless they all called themselves Democratic. E.g. the Democratic Republic of Germany.
Thus we have these two types of economies, the social welfare state and the "democratic" socialist state, but they are not gradations on the same scale, they are two rival approaches to the problem of providing a basic safety net for the people.
In one approach you do it by taxing and giving people money who then go out and buy what they need on the open market, and in the other by political administration of production and then political distribution of production to those groups you believe "deserve" the output the most.
Doubly tragic, because the ōʻōʻāʻā was the last member of the Mohoidae species family. Its extinction marks the termination of an entire family of species.
Even more tragic is that after the bird flew away the scientist played back the recording and the endling returned, thinking it another from its own species.
From the standpoint of understandig molecular biology and evolution, this is just basically burning the Library of Alexandria to keep yourself warm for a few days. This is unique information being lost forever.
Many of these species were considered done for by the time they were listed. The tools we have to rehabilitate our ecology from the brink of near total destruction really only came online in the late 60s through the 70s and it's taken time for them to be effective, but they have been in a lot of ways, whether it is the ESA, CWA, NEPA, etc.
How did you acquire it? Have you had it for a long time and are you certain it is really a flat pigtoe? Don't let any doubt stop you from reaching out, though. It would be a shame otherwise.
In theory, species should be going extinct all the time as the climate changes, from ecological changes, invasive species, new species forming, etc. The real question, is the rate of species going extinct increasing? (I believe the answer to that is yes). But the mere headline “species goes extinct” should make us react “yeah, that’s how evolution works”.
We are currently experiencing sixth Mass Extinction event. It started at least 20k years ago, and is generally linked to the end of glaciacion of the northern hemisphere and human activity.
It is not exactly known if this rate is fast or slow, because from our perspective we can't really estimate the length of previous mass extinction events. After all, the closest one was 66M years ago, and with fossil evidence gradual decrease of biodiversity over the course of 1M years wouldn't look much different if said decrease would take just 1 year.
“That’s how evolution works” isn’t a good framework once rational creatures (supposedly us) are involved. If we found a species of delicious pigs in a local area and ate them all, we don’t get to rest on the “well the overall rate of extinction isn’t historically high”. When species go extinct due to loss of habitat (because we destroyed it) or invasive species (that we introduced), it’s definitely worth reflecting and trying to make smarter decisions in the future.
There probably is an argument though that asks “by preserving the current species, are we missing out on new species that would emerge from the destruction?” So I admit it’s not so simple. But Im just trying so say that because we can make choices, we can’t just say “that’s nature”
There has been mass extinctions before, every one of them had their specific causes. So it's kind of how evolution and life works. But we don't need to shrug and do nothing.
Communication is not programming; every statement is not intended to be taken completely literally. When someone says "species go extinct" there is the subtext "... due to humans destroying their ecosystem." It is not necessary to say that every time, because that would make the the cost of communication too high. Humans depend on having a common ground of shared assumptions to communicate effectively. This is why people do not respond to this headline the way you think they should, and why people who act as if they are not able to read the subtext of a statement are described as autistic.
Well know species, such as the Monarch butterfly, are candidates for extinction, but don't make it to the list because other species are "higher priority":
As a kid, I loved the monarch migration that came through our mountain community. Thousands and thousands of them. Then hundreds. Then dozens. Then lucky to see a single one.
Two large reasons for the unnatural death of birds: Windows and feral cats [0]. In Australia, the government is hunting down feral cats to protect their biodiversity [1].
The cat lobby is very strong in many countries, including the US. Because of that, they stopped killing feral cats and use ineffective[2] techniques like TNR (trap, neuter, release). I can understand the fans of cats, they are cute lovely animals. And I think voting against killing feral cats is caused by a pseudo-moral of "killing cats is bad" and "cats are more valuable to me than wild animals". In the end, feral cats are an invasive species in most parts of the world. And feral cats surely don't have a nice life in comparison to the live of a house cat.
I'm not in any way saying that we should not be concerned about species going extinct. I remember Dr. Malcolm's line about extinction from Jurassic Park.
I like to think that the Hawaiian practice of using native bird feathers for large and elaborate cloaks might let us pursue de-extinction through DNA extraction and cloning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBAhu_%CA%BBula
Just think about how many individual birds' feathers contributed towards making these. And we know plenty of the yellow feathers are from the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird which was declared extinct. The Kauaʻi Akialoa was also declared extinct and they had yellow feathers too. There could even be feathers from species that went extinct before being cataloged by science. There is so much potential in this area, yet I don't know if there are any proposals to attempt DNA extraction or try to examine feathers and determine which species each came from.
Edit: This is food for thought and I'm in no way advocating we do any less to prevent extinctions today. I just like having the hope that future generations might be able to bring a few species back.
I love that the answer is always more technology will save us. Whether it's carbon removal advances or cloning, we just look towards future advancements instead of cleaning up our act.
I understand that expecting some sort of big shift in how we live is not feasible, it's just a shame.
> I love that the answer is always more technology will save us.
The solution to extincting the whales for whale oil was petroleum. The solution to denuding the landscape of trees was coal. The solution to coal is natural gas, solar, nuclear power.
The only alternative to technology is to shrink the human population by about 95%.
You do realize that the switch from whale oil to petroleum caused a massive, orders of magnitude increase in human footprint and ecological destruction? Had we not discovered petroleum, or had it not been there, human civilization would have plateaued or even declined, right after the extinction of these beautiful animals, because we would have absolutely hunted them to extinction unless they were protected. We would have been forced to live in balance with available resources.
The arc of whales would have followed the arc of so many other natural "resources" that are produced or even consist of living beings. There are several native hardwoods that are either effectively extinct or impossible to obtain because they were mined out.
No, we stumbled on a vast reservoir of energy buried under the ground and we've been draining that reservoir as fast as possible. We'll transition off petroleum about the time it becomes economically infeasible to extract and burn it, and not a second sooner.
By all means, bring on solar, nuclear, wind, whatever. They are just more reservoirs to tap to run this machine. Just so we can dig up, slice up, chop up, burn down, and chew up another order of magnitude of the biosphere. Because money and grandkids and ice cream.
We are too many and too greedy, and this planet has finite resources. "Technology". Always magical technology. Well until technology can grow a watermelon in a lightbulb, we are gonna keep munching away at this planet until the biosphere collapses around our ears.
The extinction of animals caused by humans has been ongoing and increasing since the stone age. There's no way that not having petroleum would have stopped it.
> this planet has finite resources
No matter is being destroyed or is escaping the planet, aside from a solar system probe now and then. Energy can repurpose and reconfigure existing resources.
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, and no industrial process we have destroys it. If released into the atmosphere it will escape into space, but it still exists. Right now we have no reason to venture out into space to acquire helium because we still have vast reserves here, but if we had sufficient demand to justify the expense then we could.
When you hear about a helium shortage, that's not a shortage of Helium on Earth, that's a shortage of Helium in the strategic helium reserve, which has been a source of extremely cheap helium for decades and made helium extraction uneconomical. When the reserve eventually runs out, and the price of helium subsequently increases, helium extraction will resume.
No amount of "cleaning up our act" will undo damage already done. The solution is always technology because that's what technology is - solutions to problems. Changing behavior can allow you to avoid a problem, but only technology will fix a problem you've failed to avoid.
I think what OP was implying is that the solution is always posited as in some future technology just on the horizon. We will save the day in the final act of the trilogy, this is just the empire strikes back, right?
Except that's not where our solution to this problem lies. We have all the technology we need to be carbon neutral today, namely in the form of nuclear power. In fact, Nixon planned on 1000 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. by the year 2000. The reason why we don't have that reality today has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with behavior and choices we've made. We chose to protest nuclear power, we chose to close down power plants that were generating electricity carbon free, we chose to do this because we decided that it was nuclear power that was the enemy of ecology, in the face of this misinformed public politicians found it easier to keep their jobs by walking back plans for nuclear power than to educate the populace.
Decades later today, we find ourselves forced to sleep in this bed of coal and natural gas, but we ignore that this is a bed that we ourselves willingly made by choice, and continue to maintain by choice using bullshit excuses such as cost or time or profitability to bury any practical alternative (in a society where for the first time since the invention of currency, government mints can generate money out of plain air no less).
> I think what OP was implying is that the solution is always posited as in some future technology just on the horizon.
That shouldn't be surprising. New problems present themselves all the time and it then takes X amount of time to develop a technology solution to them.
I wasn't trying to imply we can just "let it be" because we can undo it later. I actually follow Hawaiian Ecosystem conservation and I do what little I can to help. But I understand where you are coming from. Simply consider my original post hopium.
>"Hawaii has got to be a really fascinating and challenging case study for conservation vs. consumerism."
Indeed, and it is actually something I personally struggle with. The situation is actually much more dire than people realize. I myself am actually part Native Hawaiian and it is so disheartening to see fellow locals actively protest conservation measures. I do what I can to testify in public meetings but local pushback on things like ungulate eradication or land use laws are intense.
I don't want to dismiss them entirely because the concerns come from a real place, but those reasons are all economic in nature. And, you end up in the unenviable position of being a relatively privileged person telling a disadvantaged community they can't have the economic advancement they want. It is genuinely difficult.
There are far less bugs than there were 50+ years ago. Without bugs birds and other small animals have to struggle more to eat. Work that all the way up the food chain. Its very sad and it will only get worse.
All these extinction woes boil down to irrational fear that one day the wildlife will disappear from the planet.
Evolution itself works through extinctions. Number of extinct species are billions and billions. Species do not disappear leaving an empty space—their places are taken by other creatures. People who wish that a certain ecosystem and its species remain intact forever grossly contradict the theory of evolution.
To mourn a unique coloring pattern on a bird is like mourning a unique random number disappearing from a computer screen. It is only a loss if you believe that God planted a predefined number of species that can only go down from now. Unless we make the habitat useless to any bird at all, there will be new, differently colored birds, alright.
If you ever want to bawl your eyes out, listen to the second half of Episode 20 of the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed: “QWERTY Keyboard and the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō Bird.”
Absolutely destroyed me, and I tear up everytime I just think about this episode.
20 years ago we were 6bn humans, today we are very close to 8bn and in a little more than 20 years ahead we are 10bn.
It's an alarming growth rate, and considering how much each person use resources and produce waste during their lifetime, I'd say we are looking at quite a bit more extinct species in the future.
The human population is expected to flatten out at around 10-11 billion in 2050 or so, and then decrease. Bringing people out of poverty decreases the amount of children they tend to have without having to go to any extreme measures.
I could have sworn there was something I read when I was young that way more than that goes extinct every year.
Is it really that big a problem? Extinction happens all the time, even before humans came around. It's just what happens when environments go through change.
Once a species is declared extinct, is it legal to hunt?
I realize this may sound like a weird question, but I'm curious if there had ever been mistakes like this, with a lack of protection leading to actual accidental extinction.
Hunting laws in general vary state by state but for the most part you can’t just go out and kill any random thing flying around. There generally has to be some sort of formal designation that a species can be hunted. Otherwise don’t kill it.
There's absolutely nothing stopping me from killing ants, or even stopping my cat from killing rats. Hunting is regulated, but it's not all species by default.
If there's not already a case in the books, that simply goes to show that we have done a good job not mislabeling species as extinct. The Endangered Species Act surely still applies, if anything the punishment would be more severe.
My favorite example would be Przewalski's horse, also known as the Mongolian wild horse. In the 1960s it was believe extinct in the wild, with a couple dozen in zoos. Zoos began a breeding program and eventually began reintroducing them to their previous habitats. Today there are something like 1,900 Przewalski's horses, and over half of those are in the wild. It's really a testament to the good that zoos can do for conservation.
In California, pelicans nearly were killed off by DDT but are quite common now. Santa Cruz Island foxes almost went extinct but are now very abundant. Bald Eagles are coming back to the Channel Islands as well.
I am probably just a horrible person, but I just don’t care about the extinction of such specific species. Often a member of one species is practically impossible to tell from a member of a different species save for where the individual was found. I care a lot more if “crows” are endangered than if “efitz’ southeastern marble crested crow” is endangered. [ed: spelling]
Also, I suspect that such narrowly defined species go extinct rather frequently; it’s sad that human destruction of habitats contributed but as a species we Homo sapiens outcompeted them and made the world better (in someone’s point of view) for Homo sapiens, or we wouldn’t have been developing the land in the first place.
In policy setting I would strongly prefer that we look at things less granularity than the species, at least for small animals.
Yes, I agree. Counting species is a terrible metric. We discover something like 15,000 new species every year. We really have no idea how many species are vanishing each year, because we're only examining a tiny percentage.
Another way to frame this is to ask: How many new species are created each year? Well, we don't really know-- but we do know that a new species can form in just two generations [1]. There may be thousands of species being created and destroyed every year for all we know. Not a useful metric.
A more useful metric is how common a species was before extinction. Using an example from the article, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was very common before its extinction. Native Americans used its skulls as decoration and currency. Its eradication is a pretty big deal - BUT - I see some other HN comments lamenting how much things have changed "in my lifetime" and I think people may be unaware that these extinctions basically occurred approximately 200 years ago. There have not been sizable populations of this species for a very long time [2].
Again, the presentation of data and metrics appears to be painting a misleading picture.
These living creatures can't be brought back. Do you have the wisdom to tell which creatures are pillars of their biome? Further, do you alarm when the match is lit and the flame is spreading or do you wait until your home is already aflame?
I don't think you are a bad person. I suspect you and I grew up in a time where species dieing out is the norm as opposed to the exception, so it simply doesn't stick out for you. Its just how the world works to you. But it is recent, and I'd argue we're making a poor trade as a species, trading bio-diversity for.. frequently, strip malls or strip mining.
They're mostly on islands so it's very unlikely they matter at all outside of their island. If Hawaii had never been discovered, we wouldn't have to worry about losing them.
I live in a country filled with endangered "native" species but after I grew up, I learned that many of them are basically the same as common species in nearby countries, so similar that even the experts keep disagreeing on whether they're the same species or not.
If their numbers are already extremely low for a long time and everything else is doing fine, it's unlikely they're "pillars of their biome".
Do you believe that the process will slow? You seem to think that losing a couple species is fine. Have you thought about where this leads to, unchecked? Like, you don't lose 'crows, fucking all of them' except by losing a subspecie at a time.
I think it's already slowed. We've stopped completely disregarding conservation and now it's a factor in any major works project that might disrupt the environment.
>we Homo sapiens outcompeted them and made the world better (in someone’s point of view) for Homo sapiens
I think what's coming into focus for a lot of people nowadays (i.e. the last 50ish years w.r.t eco conservation) is the idea that we are actually making the world worse (for humans) - that actually making the world better for ourselves necessarily includes limiting or reversing our out-competition of other life. While it may not be noticeable to humans that a single species has been driven out (even just out of a region and not necessarily to full extinction) over the course of 10 or 50 or 500 years due to human activity, that does still represent a change to the established biodiversity, which (many people believe) is likely to be net-negative for humans.
Reasons for these beliefs likely vary according to people's experience and interaction with the physical world. Personally, I find great joy experiencing wildness and nature, and I worry that my daughter will not have that. Others might be concerned that the loss of species incurs the loss of some aspects of nature from which we might be able to learn - that there was an opportunity to better ourselves that is now gone forever.
What's important is biodiversity. Diverse biological life is more resilient, and it takes a really long time in human years for that diversity to come about in the first place. So if we're destroying it faster than it develops naturally, ecosystem health as a whole declines.
I think that's a valid point though about "how often does this naturally happen?" Surely a certain amount of extinction is natural, and we have little frame of reference for what the magnitude of that is (at least we as laypeople; maybe even scientists, I don't know)
You're indeed a horrible person, but at least an honest one. Seeing planetary scale habitat destruction and the wiping out of the complex web of life that took hundreds of millions of years to evolve, all in a single century, really is quite a win indeed.
Besides individual extinctions, most of the 2 millions or so other species are in deep decline. The IUCN's most positive status for a species is "least concern", really quite telling.
You'd have somewhat of point if a reasonable quality of life would only be possible at the direct expense of other species and habitats, which is not the case.
We sacrifice the world's jungles and its massively complex and old wildlife systems for palm oil. Which is absolutely not an essential requirement for human life at all.
Most other forests are sacrificed to plant crops. Not for us, to feed cattle. So that we can eat beef, the least efficient food. There are alternative meats, less eating of meat, or none at all.
We scrape the ocean floors, use electricity or even dynamite to fish in such a way that collateral damage is off the charts.
We spread our filth (plastics) across the world, it's now found at the poles and even at the bottom of the deepest oceans.
We do trophy hunting on already rare animals for superstition or a quick profit.
None of the above things are required for us to have a reasonable or good quality of life. They are short-sighted, careless and aggressive profit optimizations with disastrous and irreversible consequences. And even if you still don't care, those profits won't end up in the workers pocket or in yours.
No, wildlife habitats do not have to be stripped bare or otherwise we'd go hungry. It's bullshit.
Splitting is a known tool of conservationists, would you agree that all the prairie chickens that live in Texas aren't important because we have them in other states? The lesser prairie chicken is probably the best example I can think of to what you're arguing, but honestly the splitters while maybe somewhat dishonest seem to have good intentions. Another example might be the Gunnison Sage grouse, both of these are kind of the case of us as a culture not valuing desert landscapes.
I really can't think of a case like you are mentioning where its just egregious splitting that serves no purpose, most of the time its to make a case to preserve the habitat of a bird in a specific place.
You do seem like you might be on the side against the spotted owl since the barred owl is just a better adapted equivalent that due to changing fauna of the great plains was able to migrate west and displace the native spotted owl.
I do agree with one part that you seem to be harping on that sometimes species are sometimes split for seemingly inane purposes, often probably to promote someone's career, but I don't think that is really the case when it comes to conservation, often these are last ditch efforts for landscapes that nobody is paying attention to or caring about since they aren't charismatic. Notice nobody has to split up the resident orcas to get support for them.
In this case its a good proxy for understanding what's going on with ecosystems in response to change. Caring about crows as a whole will probably mask the point. You might see that this year there are 1% less crows in an area and think all is well, maybe that's within your measurement error. If you noticed however that all crows are doing fine, but efitz’ southeastern marble crested crow numbers have declined significantly, then you have some evidence here. Maybe you look at the particular ecological niches that efitz’ southeastern marble crested crow occupies, whatever they might be, and see that there is something bad affecting that particular niche that you would have not had enough statistical power to see if you considered all the crows in one big bag.
> made the world better (in someone’s point of view) for Homo sapiens
The capitalist ideological trick is: "are you happy houses were built? Do you enjoy the convenience of modern living? Then don't get mad at us for the tradeoff."
Don't forget that there have always been better ways to accomplish these goals - more equitable, safer for the environment - but they were not done because they did not achieve maximum profit for the individual who, through various historical factors not related to their merit or wisdom, could control the capital necessary for the project.
Those narrowly defined species might be the only thing keeping other species alive either directly (eg, pollinators) or indirectly (eg, biome creators). When individual species disappear, we often lose much more as collateral damage.
This seems to the basic understanding most people have. At school, they teach you about food webs and how breaking one link can ruin everything. That's an enticing idea but is it really true? I'm sure there have been some known cases or it wouldn't be in the text books, but is it common enough to get worried about every obscure species?
How about vanilla going extinct in the wild? Any real vanilla you have ever had was likely hand pollinated (and probably not from Mexico) because the bee that pollinates the vanilla orchid is thought to be extinct and the orchid that depended on it is now on its way out.[0]
No. You've been indoctrinated to believe that environmentalism is like a religion so that you're a bad person for being an infidel and must not question the flimsy claims that the authorities make.
So much bigotry and ad hominem in this comment yet you have the gall to accuse me of the same. Environmentalism is nothing like religion - it's science based on empirical evidence and not on blind faith. I struggle to see what is so flimsy about the findings of this article.
How is what I said a personal attack? I sincerely hope that someone with such little regard for the environment and therefore the future of this planet isn't someone who is willingly bringing more humans to it. That isn't a personal attack but rather my personal belief on the matter.
How absolutely pathetic is it that the above 3 comments, all showing care and empathy for non-human life, are massively downvoted? The state of this community.
Conservation absolutely is nothing to do with care and empathy for non-human life. The proof is that one of the main tools of conservationists is mechanical and chemical killing machines to help them kill and even exterminate all the non-human life that they deem unworthy. Please don't confuse caring about life with caring about the environment. The two feelings are in direct conflict.
Someday we’re going to hit the cascade point, where we’ve simultaneously and severely damaged or disrupted so many ecosystems that they won’t be able to recover and it all just collapses.
The future is here already, it's just not evenly distributed. There are countless examples of local ecosystems that have been entirely decimated as a direct result of human activity. It's been going on for millenia. The Tigris/Euphrates river region used be a lush, fertile paradise. Thousands of years of human agriculture has turned it into what it is today.
Clear-cutting of forests throughout North America, Britain, New Zealand are other examples. Recent collapses of kelp forests off the coast of California. Not to mention coral reefs dying and the great desertification of western China.
I'm in NZ, and we have very large (I'd wager true wilderness) forests with native trees and fauna. Even cutting native trees on your property can be pretty bad (people get convicted for this). Unless say, the tree is about to fall on your house. We have a lot of national parks, I just would like us to get some more national marine reserves considering we have a pretty large EEZ zone around the country: https://teara.govt.nz/en/map/33830/exclusive-economic-zones (which is the forth largest in the world).
There's so much we can do better, and we are trying. Pine, etc we don't care about cutting down. Ngāi Tahu a South Island Maōri tribe actually own a lot of these forests and the idea is that when they're felled for timber, natives are grown in place. I hope they keep that up, and to be fair, they're not really in need of much more money considering they are the richest tribe in NZ as they've re-invested everything they got after the Treaty of Waitangi.
We should do more though, always.
If you ever visit, there's places in Stewart Island for example that have been completely made rodent free - and things are blooming there. On a school camp (we stayed on a yacht for a week), we got to experience a magical full moon-lit beach and got to witness all the wee kiwis come out and play. It was the most magical sight I've ever seen.
NZ is doing some impressive things in conservation. If there is any country on earth that can clear out most pest species, then it is NZ. It would be the combination of wealth and the isolated geopgraphy if you do pull it off.
I understand what's happening all over, but those are the small collapses I'm saying will eventually all string together and start to cause wider collapse that we won't be able to stop. Right now, we can still rewild an ecosystem fairly easily, but that won't be feasible when multiple ecosystems are collapsing all around us.
Don't get me wrong, I think we should be in panic mode and start a full redirection of public funds towards serious preservation of natural species and habitats, with carbon sequestration implementations, both short and long term solutions, and a serious jobs program to implement all of the above.
But it won't happen because the public is too removed from the problem. Most people haven't felt any real impact, and we probably won't be able to get massive legislation passed until that point, and I fear it will be too late once they do.
I can't recommend david attenborough's "a life on our planet" enough to gain some perspective on this. You're completely right: it's already happening.
It will hit us like a brick wall when we start experiencing actual environmental ramifications for this, too.
Ocean acidification, the methane clathrate gun, some of the most serious climate issues that we've identified aren't even within the window of public discussion. The Green New Deal isn't even close to being passed.
I can't even imagine America pulling together to pass a boring infrastructure bill right now. I honestly can't fathom how previous presidents got anything done at all, let alone the massive public works projects that shaped America in the middle of the 20th century.
It's even worse. Fighting climate change, which seemingly already is controversial, is purely about human self preservation. It doesn't address biodiversity, pollution, habitat destruction, the oceans being empty, none of it.
I guarantee you that when the technology exists to bring back some of these species via cloning or genetic engineering, they will have some habitat restored once they are ready to re-introduce them. Otherwise it would be a complete waste of time and money.
Tens of thousands of naturalists (e.g. birders) have been looking for evidence for decades. It's a pretty wide net, particularly with citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist and eBird.
As for whether it's possible, I would say yes. Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling can be used to see if a particular species is present even if you don't visually or audibly observe the species:
> eDNA is increasingly being used for biosurveillance, species occupancy studies, and the detection of endangered and invasive species, particularly in aquatic ecosystems [0]
There's a very recent paper that has demonstrated that animal DNA can be obtained from the air and used to identify animals present in a given space. [0]
> Clare set up vacuum pumps with filters in 20 locations in Hamerton Zoo Park and let each run for 30 minutes. [...] The team identified 17 species kept at the zoo and others living near and around it, such as hedgehogs and deer. Some zoo animal DNA was found nearly 300 meters from the animals' enclosures. She also detected airborne DNA likely from the meat of chicken, pig, cow, and horse fed to captive predators indoors. [1]
In the near future we'll probably see fairly widespread use of this kind of tech in the search for rare and evasive species.
I'd argue that definition 2 is also a decent fit, and definition 1 is acceptable if you permit mild hyperbole. (Which I'd advise doing, as mild hyperbole is more-or-less the default register of Standard American English.)
> mild hyperbole is more-or-less the default register of Standard American English
Well as a speaker of British English, I suppose that's where I fell down.
They're very much not synonyms as far as I'm concerned, my 'exhausting' was a joke, being 'very tiring, causing exhaustion' vs. the 'every possible element, comprehensive' from your Wiktionary link for 'exhaustive'.
You can't possibly check everywhere. I don't say that out of some sort of extinction denial! I assume there are standards in the field for time since sighting over certain number of known habitats or percentage coverage of land or whatever that indicates extinction.
I just wouldn't call that 'after exhaustive search', personally. 'Extensive', sure. 'Sufficient to meet criteria for extinction' is what matters.
It seems believable? I definitely don't intend to accuse you of extinction denialism. But I would believe it's one of those subtle differences between American English and other dialects. I frequently get the impression that, when it comes to range of expression, my native dialect is a bit like music mastering in the CD era: no medium intensity anymore; instead everything's pushed up against - and being clipped by - the upper limit of the dynamic range.
This is a dialect where "awesome" doesn't mean anything remotely like "awe-inspiring", except in books that were written prior to the late 20th century.
It makes me wonder how much worse it actually is. Is looks like most of these were initially listed in the 80s, not too long after Endangered Species Act passed.
Is there some sort of time limit before they officially declare something extinct?