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.
Yes climate is changing but did it change that much since 80s?
What if it’s some pesticide? or some food packaging or something