[amatecha]

I would never use the phrase "ideal state", but rather "natural state". Though, even that is not quite accurate as humans are naturally-occurring too, but the things we do (and do to the planet) are not quite so "natural".

While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than they probably would have if we weren't here), and they are powerless to prevent that. I think this is what people are intuitively feeling a sense of when they say things like "or we die out and the planet recovers on its own".

[refurb]

A beaver dams a river, flooding the shores and killing off the ecosystem. That’s natural.

A group of humans do it and it’s unnatural?

[okcando]

Yes.

It's just what the word means. It's fun as a philosophical exercise to consider humans as natural and so too their interventions but at the end of the day, "natural" is a word that in most cases means not caused or created by humans. It's relative to us.

That's without assessing the goodness or badness of it. Any interventions we pursue to correct climate change and restore biomes will be every bit as unnatural as the ones that caused those things but they can also be good.

[chousuke]

I think it has more to do with responsibility. Humans are capable of understanding the harm caused by our choices and that brings responsibility.

[NeoBasilisk]

It's a question of scale. There aren't 7 billion beavers. If there were only 300 million humans, we wouldn't be having these issues.

[frutiger]

What do you think of cyanobacteria and the poisonous oxygen they emitted hundreds of millions of years ago?

[Jweb_Guru]

They were hugely disruptive and set off a massive extinction event... not to moralize the actions of cyanobacteria (who obviously act without agency), but the only reason we think what they did was fine is that we breathe oxygen!

[rectangletangle]

This is the brilliance of natural selection. If it were any less robust life would probably have already gone extinct. It's "easy" to devastate the ecosystem and wipe out say 90% of biodiversity, but that remaining 10% becomes increasingly difficult to root out, as you're increasingly dealing with the hardened survivors. The massive bust leaves open ample under exploited niches, which then spurs rapid disruptive selection, and then subsequent sympatric speciation. Long after humans are gone something will probably be thriving feasting on our garbage.

[Jweb_Guru]

Well, sure, there's stuff like anoxic life that lives off dissolved hydrogen in rock and will be mostly unaffected by anything we do. But the vast majority of life on Earth is exploiting the huge energy gradients created on the surface by sunlight and exploited by photosynthesis, and that's what most people are thinking of nowadays when we talk about "life on Earth".

[amatecha]

Beaver dams don't kill off the ecosystem. Tons of other life forms make use of the newly-flooded area. I've personally watched herons perch upon the dam to catch the fish that are now swimming through the now-deeper waterway, for example.

[refurb]

Same thing when humans build dams, right? We're creating new ecosystems.

[amatecha]

Is that a rhetorical question? There's quite some difference between a 200m tall concrete dam that holds 1m+ cubic decameters of water[0][1], and a bunch of twigs and logs jumbled in a creek that might be 2 meters high on average and actually house life like beavers, frogs, birds etc.[2]

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reserv...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_dam#Benefits

[refurb]

So whether something is natural is a matter of scale?

If we cut down 1,000 acres of trees for wood, is that natural?

What about if a beetle infestation destroys a million acres? Still natural?

[arbitrary_name]

1) Was the beetle introduced to the area by humans (which is the case for a number of pests)

2) Were the trees killed made susceptible to the beetle because of heat stress, possibly caused by human driven climate change? (this is the case for some large scale infestations)

Overall, the point is; yes, where imbalances in nature are triggered by natural causes, there is no issue with that (earthquake, hurricane, long term climate oscillation).

Where imbalances in nature are triggered by humans, (IMHO) we should quite naturally regard that as a negative since a) we are intelligent enough to find ways of avoiding environmental degradation and b) Environmental degradation has both consequences to other forms of life as well as other humans.

I guess you're playing devils advocate here, but you're hardly adding to the conversation.

[anonymou2]

Actually yeah, it's all a matter of scale. Of course we are animals and what we do is perfectly natural, like a volcano blowing up, any other species that had been so successful evolutionary speaking as ourselves would be doing the same thing. But that does not mean it is good for us or that can keep going on forever. It is probably what made us successful that will destroy us.

[__jal]

Get back to me when beavers are causing the extinction of thousands of other species and arguing about how to warn their descendants about radioactive waste.

[frutiger]

Many species have caused widespread extinction on a level humans have barely approached. Cyanobacteria, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event.

[Scarblac]

The problem is that beavers didn't suddenly start doing that, the ecosystems they live in co-evolved around the existence of beavers.

On time scales relevant to evolution, human civilization is happening in an instant and nothing can adapt as fast.

The result is a gigantic loss of biodiversity.

[refurb]

Bacteria can mutate quite quickly and wipe out an entire species pretty fast, reducing biodiversity.

[saagarjha]

Can they wipe out thousands of species?

[yqx]

The point that's missing from this discussion is that beavers have been building dams for an eternity because it's part of their natural behaviour. The ecosystem has had ample time to adapt to it. An ecosystem is a delicate balance between systems that results from these systems co-evolving in the same environment for millions of years. The systems (plants animals seasonal change, climate) are all highly fine tuned to each other. Yes, this balance is sometimes abruptly disturbed under "natural" circumstances, but this is rare. What humans are doing in the last couple hundreds of years involves much more sudden changes to which eco systems have no time to adapt. It's the suddenness of the changes what's unnatural about it. Whether you call it natural or not is besides the point though. The point is that human dam building is a phenomenon very different from beaver dam building because, besides scale and impact, it did not gradually co-evolve with an eco system, but is an abrupt and disruptive change.

[akvadrako]

Actually beaver dams can be terrible for the ecosystem if you measure them the same way as human dams. They certainly can cause lots of death and flooding.

[baddox]

I think if beavers were intelligent and capable enough to have other ways of surviving, and could talk to each other about it, I think it would be pretty reasonable for them to discuss possible ways to reduce and/or isolate their impact on the environment.

[mdavidn]

I loathe to point out that birds which never existed cannot suffer more than birds that do exist.

Perhaps a better measure would be genetic diversity? A more diverse gene pool is more likely to survive the unexpected.

[rdiddly]

In my ponderings on this, I tend to think of a "post-human state." If the influence of homo sapiens on a place or ecosystem were to decrease dramatically, and insofar as any place or ecosystem would tend toward anything resembling equilibrium rather than constant/continued change, most of them will probably stabilize around a discernibly post-human state, rather than the pre-human one that prevailed throughout most of our history until the industrial era. It's just the lowest-energy and most likely outcome. So like, all the kudzu, rats and other wacky species we've introduced here and there, would have a go. Though they might not all make it. Pretty much impossible to predict, because it's a chaotic system, but also because the effects of the heat we've introduced have only started to play out.

[tgarv]

I was actually wondering recently if there has ever been a huge spike in, say, a new species of algae or something, that caused a large change in the atmosphere. I know that what we're doing as a species isn't "natural", and we know better and could avoid it if we really wanted to, but it still had me thinking about what kinds of things the planet has gone through before that would have been alarming at the time if someone had been around to monitor it.

[AprilArcus]

The Azolla Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event) was a cyclical bloom of duckweed-like ferns in the Arctic Ocean about 49 million years ago which drew down atmospheric CO2 by an order of magnitude, from 3500 ppm (responsible for the warm, verdant climate you think about when you imagine the Mesozoic era) to 650 ppm (responsible for the cold, cyclical glaciations you think about when you imagine the modern world), and in which vicinity it has remained ever since.

[saagarjha]

(FWIW, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels pre-Industrial Revolution were about 280 ppm, and today are just over 400 ppm.)

[Donald]

Species are created on geologic timescales. Human activity is, in comparison, instantaneously destroying biological diversity. Evolution simply doesn't have enough time to adapt species to the sort of exponential changes we're seeing in their environments.

[frutiger]

Evolution is like gravity. It doesn’t have to adapt to anything on any timescale that is important to our anthropological ideas of “change” or “environment”.

[Scarblac]

The Great Oxidation Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event) was exactly that. Oxygen-producing organisms caused the extinction of almost all life, over two billion years ago.