[another-one-off]

I'm going to live a little dangerously here, partly because I have a job in mining, partly because of who I am.

I don't have the foggiest idea why it is important to protect endangered species in and of itself, and I don't think there is a good reasons to.

Famously, pretty much every species that has ever existed has gone extinct. Every organisation, formation, species or what have you will, statistically, some day no longer be. The nature of time is to bring change. We can't preserve everything anyway, and there is nothing to be proud of in keeping a dying species in the world.

I can understand requiring extractive companies to restore land after they use it to something that isn't hostile to life, but I don't understand why the fact that the near-extinct colour-crested-hopping-possum is endangered should impede human progress. We need to face up to the fact that human endeavor is more important than animals and that being rare does not make a species somehow important. It certainly shouldn't be a cover for NIMBY types to shut down mining activity.

[jbreckmckye]

I can think of two reasons to protect species: one practical, one moral.

The practical one is that humans rely on ecosystems being the way they are, and that unbalancing them disturbs our interests, particularly in agriculture. We also rely on a diverse plant ecosystem to discover and develop new medicines.

The second argument is more values-based: that ecosystems and animals have value in and of themselves, axiomatically. If you don't appreciate this argument perhaps you never will: it's not something that draws on more fundamental principles, it just is a principle itself. Similar are arguments about speciesism and the active right of sentient animals to survival: it's probably one of those things that can't be deconstructed into more basic, falsifiable arguments. I'd suggest the same applies to the claim that human progress is necessary and valuable - it doesn't seem provable, just an instinctual belief.

There might be a third argument: that protecting the environment helps economies optimise for longer term gains. One of the things holding back sustainability has been the relative cheapness of dirty alternatives - so restricting mining might encourage more creative means of manufacturing. And frankly, if all you're doing is mining cadmium for smartphone batteries, you may not be doing the human race much good to begin with.

[black_puppydog]

Extra points for the explanation of point two!

Personally I subscribe to the notion that animal life (just like human life, by the way) has an intrinsic value. On a related, yet more pragmatic level: even if you don't see the value in the plant/animal itself, you might find value in them in that they make life more pleasant/interesting. Personally at least, I'd much prefer living in grasslands over living on a parking lot, even if they both have fiber to the home...

[throwawaymath]

I disagree with your second point, but I upvoted your comment for the exceptional way you argued it. Saying that the argument from morality is axiomatic is a good way to put it - there is nothing falsifiable to decompose the argument into. Those who agree and those who disagree are separated by a gulf that cannot be traversed by logic.

[StavrosK]

There's another argument: For aesthetics. It's nice to have variety, we like diverse environments more than the alternative, and we want to preserve the beauty of the natural world as much as possible.

[ethbro]

Variety has a non-aesthetic value as well -- more complex ecosystems have greater resilience to shock (e.g. climate change or invasive species introduction).

A broader variety of species allows for the loss / decrease in a particular function to be more quickly replaced by a similar species. As opposed to a simpler, more limited ecological system, where there may only be a single species fulfilling a given role. A single species that might be highly vulnerable to a new toxin / predator / fungus / virus / different average temperature.

[another-one-off]

> that unbalancing them disturbs our interests

I've talked to farmers on trains, I've lived in cities, I've worked in mines. This doesn't reflect my experiences, we have shredded the natural environment to our benefit in all those places. Farms are a long way from a natural environment, the modern farming process is awash with chemicals and such. Lab grown meat is an exciting possibility. Our success as a species have come through striving to transcend the limits of nature.

Nearly all humans are urbanised. Urban environments are as far from natural ones as we can reasonably make it. There is almost no fauna larger than a dog, flora is controlled. When given the choice, as a mass, we choose to be as far from nature as possible and visit it for short and very controlled periods of time.

The moral aspect I suppose we shall agree to disagree.

Are you sure the cadmium isn't going to be used for solar power? Or that the 'creative means' that you would like to see won't benefit from it when the science comes in?

[siosonel]

"Farms are a long way from a natural environment, the modern farming process is awash with chemicals and such."

It seems you are viewing industrial, monoculture farming techniques as a justification for what humans should be able to get away with as far as land or resource use. It is not at all self-evident that such an approach works best. There is an opposite viewpoint that traditional, diverse crop farming could produce higher quality, higher nutrition output without using too much inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

My point is that you seem to conveniently accept the "obvious superiority" of a modern approach and ignore other viewpoints or approaches wherein biodiversity fits in naturally.

[JudasGoat]

With robotic advances to deal the higher labor intensity of diverse crop farming, I think it could be cost competitive in the near future. The question I think is: Who will be behind funding and developing? I think it would take a "Tesla" type commitment to complete.

[icebraining]

Regarding urbanization, I think that argument works in the other direction: by living in cities (particularly dense ones), we can leave much more space to undisturbed Nature, including those endangered species. It's rural life that is spread out over everything and everywhere.

[specialist]

As an actual tree hugger, your #3 is my primary reason:

Protecting the environment protects the economy.

My secondary would be the precautionary principle:

Don't muck with things we don't understand.

Which will be mightily tested as we wrestle to mitigate climate change. Which feels like double-or-nothing to me.

[quotemstr]

I've never understood why the precautionary principle gets so much circulation. Followed to its logical conclusion, it prohibits experimentation and technological progress, since nothing can really be proven safe before it's tried.

The idea that we should not "muck with things we don't understand" is anti-technology, anti-progress, and anti-human.

[ethbro]

It might be apt to rephrase that into "Don't muck with things we can't fix."

When faced with ecosystem change, our ability to fix ills is extremely limited. Cane toads, kudzu, pythons in the Everglades, Asian carp, Emerald Ash Borers, and wolf depopulation have permanently changed habitats for the worse.

[ajmurmann]

It probably matters if we can unmuck something. Once whales are extinct we cannot bring them back.

Edit: typo

[specialist]

Maybe because it's ignored so routinely?

I'm fully aware of the tradeoffs in making hard choices, the sacrifices made for progress.

Any person who is unable (or unwilling) to do an honest accounting (pros vs cons, ROI) is unqualified to participate in any decision making process, especially on behalf of the rest of us.

Engineering and product design comes down to balancing needs, constraints. These shouldn't be foreign concepts for us geeks. And yet...

[gepi79]

I agree with your last sentence (although mining cadmium might be useful, I do not know) and this is also related to your second argument.

What is worth being protected ?

IMO life and diversity (except e.g. harmful mosquitoes) and health and wealth and not fossil fuel related jobs.

Investment in science and progress should be promoted.

Removal of poverty should be promoted.

Not foolish austerity and protection of harmful activities and traditions.

[chriskanan]

The "background" rate of extinction, i.e., pre-humans most of the time, is estimated at about 1-5 species per year. Currently, humans are causing 100 - 1000 times the background rate (10+ per day) [0, 1]. Do you feel that it is reasonable to allow any animal that isn't adapted to having its habitat destroyed by humans, go extinct?

In my opinion, given that these animals took millions of years to evolve, and if their threat of extinction is directly related to our activities, it seems reasonable, that as a progressive, intelligent species, we make efforts to preserve them for many worthwhile reasons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/el...

[quotemstr]

So what if something took a million years to evolve? It doesn't follow that this long timeline ought to create any sense of obligation, moral or otherwise, by itself. We don't owe anything to non-sentient organisms.

[pavanred]

We don't owe anyone anything. I agree. But, no one owes anything to us either. If you think about it, we really aren't doing it for other species, are we? A few among us are being cautious to foresee something that could affect us.

Sure, we can call it save the planet and feel important but say if the ecology balance is broken down, food chains are broken up, its humans who get adversely affected, with perhaps lot of other species but there are going to be lots of species that will do just fine, some will perhaps even thrive. In other words, life goes on, without humans, no one cares.

Disclaimer: Few ideas borrowed generously from George Carlin's take on save the planet. Funny but wise, I think.

[quotemstr]

Sure. Nobody's arguing against responsible stewardship. What seems to rile people up is the idea that protecting the environment is an instrumental, not a terminal value, and that we can and should trade off environmental protection (here, endangered species) for other things that people find important.

Lots of people see environmental protection as a terminal value instead, and few things offend people more than proposals to trade off terminal values for instrumental ones.

[rickycook]

that might be true, but what’s definitely true is that the environment is not winning... we regularly trade environment for industry, and rarely do the reverse. only recently have we decided that sustainable sources of electricity/industry are worthwhile, and still many times have to use economic arguments to justify it.

[ethbro]

It means its replacement would also take at least 1,000 years to evolve (depending on closest living ancestor).

Which is terrifying if you just knocked out a keystone of your ecosystem.

[quotemstr]

We are not foragers. We are not that dependant on natural ecosystems, which tend to be very robust anyway.

[dyeje]

Even if you don't value the lives of animals, biodiversity is important to human survival.

[YaxelPerez]

"We can't preserve species over millions of years, so we might as well make them go extinct now" is not a good argument. It's like saying "we can't stop people from dying eventually, so it doesn't matter if I murder someone".

Even if you don't care much for animals, which is fine, you should still be worried about preserving biodiversity. We don't fully understand all the systems at play in an ecosystem, and killing some "useless" possum can have cascading effects that humans won't find favorable in the long run.

You can put a mine somewhere else, but you can't bring an extinct animal back to life.

[true_religion]

Europe's lack of biodiversity comparative to other continents hasn't caused an ecological collapse yet. Ecosystems are not that fragile, multiple species occupy the same niche and are only termed different because we human beings have decided to call them so.

For instance, a tiny difference in a stripe pattern and breeding zones is enough for us to call two different groups of voles, a difference in species. Yet, all the wildly varied dogs in the world are still considered one species.

Are we really losing genetic diversity when one vole species becomes extinct? Perhaps, the difference is merely incidental, and the genes for the different stripe pattern are contained in all vole sub-groups, and they are truly a single species.

[rickycook]

huskies aren’t going extinct any time soon, and we do have plenty of biodiversity issues with dogs. inbreeding of terriers and such for dog shows is a huge problem that has pretty much destroyed entire breeds, and many people are working to fix it

[granshaw]

This is one of the big reasons to me. It’s similar to the mass use of GMOs argument, in that in toying with nature, we don’t fully understand or know what consequences there might be, some of which might not show up until a generation later

[another-one-off]

That is mischaracterising what I said in a very specific way.

Humans are different from animals - not in some intrinsic way, but because you and I are humans and our success is more important than some animal's success.

I'm saying that letting species go extinct is critically different from "we can't stop people from dying eventually, so it doesn't matter if I murder someone" because no humans are involved. That is the distinction that I am comfortable with.

If a human is inconveniencing progress, then they should be treated with respect and dignity. If an animal is inconveniencing progress, it's wellbeing isn't especially important.

[nrb]

> our success is more important than some animal's success.

Why?

[m_fayer]

You know how you have a self-image and work to maintain that? And your self-image probably has a mirror-image that's deeply distasteful to you? So for example, if you think of yourself as practical and industrious, and your partner accused you of being a lazy magical thinker, you would have a particularly bad day. Well I have a self-image and a mirror-image for mankind. I want to see us as prudent, elegant, deliberate. I know we're highly evolved apes, but I want us to be so highly evolved that we're more enlightenment-ideal and less monkey. And the mirror image of that? Something like a highly intelligent locust. Expanding wildly, consuming everything in its path, leaving not a single thing as it was, and eventually undermining the ecosystem that supported it.

That mirror image? That's how I see humanity if I think from a semi-hypothetical bird's eye view, where our progress can look like human flourishing from one perspective, but blink and it becomes a swathe of destruction, everything converted either intentionally (wilderness to farmland, suburb, or city) or as wanton collateral damage (spreading desertification, dead oceans, mountains naked without their glaciers). And the only non-human species remaining are those that figured out how to be effective hangers-on to humanity. That's the version of humanity that I find nauseating, so I fight it.

[dmlorenzetti]

I don't have the foggiest idea why it is important to protect endangered species in and of itself... Every species that has ever existed has gone extinct... Human endeavor is more important

If every species goes extinct, and if there is no reason to protect any species in and of itself, then what makes human endeavor so damn important?

This is the logic of the powerful, a pure might-makes-right argument. I see what I want, and I take it. It's easy to kill things, or at least hard to avoid killing them, when they get in our way, so don't worry about it.

In fact, profess to not having the "foggiest notion" why you might want to worry about it, even though the arguments in favor (biodiversity, makes life more wonderful, we don't know how the web is connected, etc.) are part of mainstream culture, and not at all hard to discover if you honestly wanted to try.

[viraptor]

This doesn't necessarily apply to all species on the list, but generally changing the existing balance in the environment is a bad idea.

For the example of the beetle:

> “Without burying beetles, we’d be knee-deep in dead and decaying carcasses,”

Which is probably not strictly true, because ants and other insects would likely take over a lot of that. But then you're artificially expanding one population over the other. This affects the food chain for larger animals. If you hit the wrong combination of natural incentives, one day your huge farms (which due to other incentives are close to monoculture) get eaten by insects pushed out of their previous environment. And they won't care about the human endeavour or how special we feel about ourselves.

We already proved how small changes impact everything. Bringing a few rabbits to Australia resulted in a huge population causing other species dying, vegetation for grazing livestock reduced, ground erosion, etc. Same could happen if a predator regulating some species dies. But the chain could start with some beetle.

[Sharlin]

Endangered species are a proxy for biodiversity as a whole. A fairly objective Schelling fence [1] people can agree on. (But we should—and do—have other metrics as well to avoid Goodhart's law.)

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...

[dghughes]

>I don't have the foggiest idea why it is important to protect endangered species in and of itself, and I don't think there is a good reasons to.

Lack of understanding the importance of species shouldn't be an automatic justification to destroy them.

[maxerickson]

Which mine that didn't get opened is really, actually impeding human progress?

[another-one-off]

Pretty much any mine? I've seen proposed mines get shut down by that sort of environmental activism.

Bar a bit of recycling, everything that is metal or stone and most of our energy comes from some sort of mining activity. The cheaper it is to extract, the better it is for rich & poor alike. If I have to choose between losing a species of beetle and people freezing in winter, the beetle is in trouble.

Technology is lovely, but at the end of the day the more natural resources we extract, the better the quality of life of people everywhere.

[maxerickson]

I think you'd find I'm on the pro-extraction end of things.

I'm just not convinced that the costs of restraint are particularly high, especially given the capability of modern industry.

[Buldak]

I could be more easily convinced that loss of endangered species is trivial than that enterprises like mining constitute "human progress."

[frgtpsswrdlame]

>If I have to choose between losing a species of beetle and people freezing in winter, the beetle is in trouble.

Yes but which mine is it that's 'keeping people from freezing' exactly? I would totally support a mine if it kept people from freezing to death, I just don't see any evidence that one or two or three new mines are actually going to do that. Commodities becoming cheaper is good, but it's not infinitely good and other things, like preserving just one weird beetle species, are important as well.

[another-one-off]

Why do you think we mine things? Do you imagine the 1% have basements full of oil that they swim in and laugh about? We don't stockpile this stuff, we use it. :)

These resources are for people to live their lives in comfort. I know a woman who doesn't turn her heating on in the winter because she can't afford to; there will be a lot more I don't know, and some of them are going to get very sick. Cheaper oil will help these people on the margins. Similar stories can be made for any commodity, these are literal building blocks of modern society.

Sure cheaper commodities aren't an infinite good, but the marginal utility of some creature that is so rare it is almost extinct isn't going to exist for anyone but the keenest nature goer. They are by definition rare. Cheaper commodities will probably be more good to more people than that.

[milesskorpen]

Not all uses are equal. Are we NOT going to build something valuable because the output of a few mines are missing? I think the price of the material would go up, some of the least economically valuable things might not get built ... or we'd figure out how to build things more efficiently.

I'd love to see estimates for how significant the price impacts are of the ESA for key raw materials. I'd be surprised if it is truly significant on a global scale.

[true_religion]

> Are we NOT going to build something valuable because the output of a few mines are missing?

Actually, yes. Instead of producing 2000 widgets, we produce only 1800 and fire one worker. That worker who was already living at the fringe of survival, now suffers far more than you'd expect. Perhaps they survive, but their 2 month old child dies of malnutrition as the family scrounges for food.

Minor bits of economic disadvantage can have great cost to people.

Now, of course, it'd be better to simply subsidize people so they won't die regardless of if a mine is built or not. That's the solution that I support, as I'd err on the side of caution when it comes to ecological damage as it is hard to fix, and susceptible to being a classic tragedy of the commons since no one owns it.

[karl_gluck]

Conservation is tricky. One can usually make the argument that things will probably fine without <insert species> or that dumping a little more <insert environmental toxin> won't cause immediate disaster.

But have you ever played pick-up sticks? That's basically what we're doing with an environment we don't understand as well as we might want to believe. Sure, your particular possum might not be important. In all fairness, it probably isn't. But remove enough sticks, one at a time...

There's no seed bank for animal species. If they're gone, they're just gone.

[maxerickson]

Always remember, some scientists are mad. We've managed to gestate quite a few different animals in the wombs of different species:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy

Which of course is no panacea, but it's increasingly likely that genetic samples will be used to sustain species.

[ceejayoz]

That'll work for things like insects, but there's a good chance an elephant raised without its tribe won't be the same sort of creature.

[maxerickson]

Yeah, it's probably not the right topic to just make a short comment about.

[ceejayoz]

Perhaps your definition of "human progress" could expand a little, to include "learning to be ecologically responsible"?

[quotemstr]

Why should it? The environment is there for the benefit of humanity. When preserving it helps people, preserve it. When it doesn't, don't. It makes no sense to value ecological responsibility in itself divorced from human interests.

[maxxxxx]

"The environment is there for the benefit of humanity"

I don't agree with that. Humans are just one participant in the environment and we should respect the others.

[quotemstr]

Are you suggesting it's illegitimate to prioritize the interests of your fellow human beings above those of non-human creatures?

[siosonel]

I am one of your fellow human being. What you describe is not a prioritization of my interests, so you are not necessarily speaking for your fellow humans. My interests, and those of countless others, are best served by an ecologically diverse and sustainable future.

My viewpoint is that those who are quick to trample on the weakest, including endangered animals, will likely find it easy to trample on the rights of the poor. It is not in my interest to support that potential future where might makes right. Both my interests and non-human interests can be served at the same time, with no conflicts if viewed in the long term.

[maxxxxx]

Nicely said.

[maxxxxx]

I know you are trying to push the argument to the extreme. At a minimum we should consider non-human creatures. This is to our own benefit. We have shown repeatedly that we are doing harm to ourselves by destroying the environment. As of now we are part of an interconnected ecosystem and we need the other parts of it.

[pavanred]

The answer is simple, the rate of change is too rapid for any species to evolve soon enough or cope.

For e.g. lets consider hunting or poaching, if a species has a population of a few thousands, and even if we kill a handful a day, we will wipe out every one of the species in a few months. And, sure, you might argue a species I never knew existed went extinct, why do I care? Well, simply because the at the this high rate of change, this is equivalent to simply eliminating a species from the ecology overnight, and that has consequences in food chains, ecological balances and frankly, consequences that we can't completely foresee.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but since you invoke a corporation example, protecting endangered species is like anti-trust laws. One species/company has dominance, power and greed, but we make laws to level the playing field for the currently weaker/smaller species/companies, which in turn benefits all ecology/consumers/markets better.

[EarthIsHome]

> We can't preserve everything anyway, and there is nothing to be proud of in keeping a dying species in the world.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. And many of these dying species are a result of our rape of the land [0].

As more species die, more will starve. We live in an interconnected environment, and harmful effects to even the smallest of species have repercussions for others and even us humans on the top.

We need to be better stewards of the land we use and share.

[0]: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History --- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unn...

[dmitriid]

It's easy: you, yes you, will starve. It's that simple.

Biosphere is an intricately interconnected system, largely self-balancing and self-correcting. If you take humans out of the equation, that is.

A bee pollinates a flower that feeds a rabbit that feeds a fox that feeds a worm that feeds a flower for the bee to pollinate. Remove one factor and the whole thing collapses. "All for want of a nail". It's slightly more complicated than that, but unfortunately not much.

Once you've overfished to extinction and created desserts out of forests, there's not much time that you can keep your cows alive or salmon farms running.

[JoeAltmaier]

...except making new kinds of fish, or making meat in factories, or bioengineering crops that don't need bees.

[dmitriid]

We are not anywhere close to having any of that at required scale.

And when we do, it will be nowhere near existing biodiversity for a long-long-long while (if ever).

And we are also nowhere near doing that at scale from scratch. We need existing living breathing species to do anything.

And even then it's a problem when "new kind of fish" ends up destroying a different kind of fish [1] etc.

I won't even go into how bees are needed for so much more than just crops.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/farmed-and-danger...

[sly010]

Where do you think that new kind of fish would come from if not from finding and adapting exicting genetic materials? We don't even have proper understanding of how our body works and we have been looking at it for a long time. We are naive to think we can invent ourselves out of a vacuum. In all likelihood the current progress of humanity is leading us to a local minimum.

[neikos]

The issue is usually less what species gets endangered or faces extinction, but the fact that this is not done for progress but for greed (be it humanity or corporations).

Destructively changing anything should be approached with extreme care, since you cannot un-extinct a species.

I'd illustrate it like what happens on Linux when you are approaching OOM situations. You can either kill other processes, not knowing what they did or if they were vital, or just stop doing what you were doing. And so far societies have usually decided that mines are not as important as raw materials at some point.

[DanBC]

I used to work making mining machinery. (Chock control interfaces among other things).

Coal mining is not human progress. Coal mining is a throwback to old technology, and hinders progres to cleaner, safer, better technology.

[guntars]

Off topic, but why do people here try to “erase” controversial opinions? It literally happens when people downvote something enough, the comment gets lighter until it’s impossible to read.

If something gets you thinking deeper about an issue, how is that not a positive thing? Are people here worried that if they upvote something they disagree with, someone else might mistakenly believe that it’s their opinion? Is it a way to let someone know that they’re not welcome here? I honestly don’t understand it.

[naner]

Humans seem to have the ability to make things extinct at a much quicker rate than would happen otherwise. Due to the permanence of extinction maybe there is some worry we will cause damage to the ecosystem that can't be undone.

Same thing with CO2: there have always been varying rates of CO2 but with pollution from vehicles and industry we're worried our affects on our habitat are too large and negative consequences will result.

[gerbilly]

Your argument simply defends the status quo which has so much momentum behind it that it does not need defending.

Put an other way, the way humans exploit the environment is based on such narrow short term considerations that by default, as humans increase in number, we risk destroying the the biosphere that supports us.

Your viewpoint is already the human default.

[projektir]

I think it's important to protect species variety to some extent because a given species is an opportunity for science to discover something new. Basically, the more variety, the more information can potentially be extracted, either now or in the future.

[ajmurmann]

"We need to face up to the fact that human endeavor is more important than animals"

Where does this fact come from? I certainly don't universally agree with this value presented as fact.

[true_religion]

I'm leaning to agree. Europe has half the number of endangered species as do other continents.

Asia has 2,100+. Africa has 1350+, America has 1600+, and Europe has only 700.

It seems to be that the in previous centuries, Europe gained much human progress at the cost of its ecosystem--particularly niche species (e.g. instead of 20 variety of mouse in a forest, you'll see just 3). Yet we don't consider Europe incredibly ecologically impoverished.

If every continent were to reduce the number of species to mere European levels, I doubt that anyone would mind---especially if everyone could live at European quality of life.

[pavanred]

That is a very reductionist view. You can ignore lots of factors and make up a simple equation with the only ones that help your case. Europe has better quality of life now. Europe has fewer endangered species and didn't care about the environment back then but progressed. Hence, if we don't care about endangered species, life everywhere in the world will be better. Well, among lot of other things Europe didn't care about things like human rights either back then, should we stop caring about that too? This is the equivalent of picking and choosing words in an article and making up your own sentences.

Surely there are things like latitudinal gradients of biodiversity, historical context of the same European countries colonizing and stealing wealth from all these other countries not too long ago. And, of course there's also the fact that European quality of life is perhaps better now, in 2018, move the needle back or forth by like few hundred years (that's a microsecond in scale of ecology) and see how things change.

[true_religion]

> This is the equivalent of picking and choosing words in an article and making up your own sentences.

I would appreciate it if you at least presumed that I tried to think about the scenario, rather than made up fantasies to live in.

The core idea I am exploring is that quality of life is seemingly unrelated to the number of species in totality within a continent.

The strongest argument usually made for saving endangered species is that if a niche goes unfilled, the entire ecosystem is damaged and in the worst case may suffer from localized collapse. However, if you look at entire continents, multiple species exist within the same niche, merely separated from inter-breeding by distance, so no niches go unfilled (i.e. wipe out the wolves, and the foxes will step up to eat the possums).

England once had lions, and when they were gone other species filled their niche, and human life went on.

[pavanred]

OK, let's consider your view point. Perhaps England had lions a few thousand years ago, they went extinct and perhaps some other predator took its place or may be it didn't, maybe the predator that was above it (if there was one) in the food chain went extinct too. But, yeah human life went on.

Now, here's where I disagree. The effects of extinction perhaps seem more pronounced with some species, rather than others. For instance, take coral reefs and how these could trigger a cascade of events affecting a bunch of species like small fish all the way up to human industry and life. Same with say bees, where they potentially can affect agriculture and humans in a huge way considering they are instrumental for pollination.

I suppose people don't like the idea of incurring the cost of efforts to prevent a species from extinction when they think its simply a moral thing to do, but in reality I suppose everything from climate change to saving endangered species is all just an effort towards self preservation for humans, perhaps simply branded differently.

[true_religion]

> The effects of extinction perhaps seem more pronounced with some species, rather than others.

I agree, and hence why I essentially say we should target our efforts towards preserving species that we know are a linchpin for a particular ecology, and whose replacement is problematic.

Currently the discussion isn't nuanced, you can either be for "saving the planet" or "for profit". I'd like to believe that you can be for both.

Though I urge caution, I also would allow for experimentation with ecology.

[unixietube]

> We can’t preserve everything anyway...

Sure, so we might as well just go scorched earth, I guess. Nothing lasts forever, better destroy the environment then. Hey, clean water? Nope, just a fantasy. Clean air? Impossible. Living in balance with the other species that share this planet? Untenable, so we’d better just kill them all and get it over with in the name of profits.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

[JoeAltmaier]

I have similar misgiving. We came to intelligence in a world with essentially a random sample of all the creatures that came before. The 'ecosystem' has reformed itself countless times through prehistory. Why are the creatures around at this instant particularly important, or interesting?

Especially since we're on the verge of creating whatever creatures we desire. If we can make a pink-spotted unicorn tiger than will fetch your slippers and do your taxes, what matters the Siberian albino tiger?

Let's admit, we've taken over nearly every square mile of our planet, essentially remaking all ecosystems already. Its far to late to capture many details of what came before people started creating deserts and clearcutting forests. What remains is a remnant anyway. If its an 'ecosystem', then apparently ecosystems reform themselves continuously. Since we've taken little or no care of them up to now.