[0xBombadilo]

>ecololgy

Why were there tens of millions of bison in North America before human development?

>value

This entire discussion is about the proper use of land. That discussion is impossible without some notion of value, or highest and best use. Any other consideration just ends in "all humans should die". If that's your position then its a waste of time even discussing the situation with you.

[__MatrixMan__]

I'm not saying that grazing animals are a problem, I'm saying that markets and regulators are doing a bad job of managing their location and population size, and that wolves would do it better. Those markets and regulators have a certain values system: they want certain numbers to go up, certain people to be re-elected, etc.

Most humans also want their grandchildren to grow up in an environment that isn't teetering on collapse--which is not something that the dominant values system is considering. So my issue with "value" is not that it's useless, but that we're using it in a way that fails to acknowledge that different people value different outcomes. We're instead encouraged to seek value of an unspecified type and leave it to other people to decide which outcomes actually result from that seeking. It's a sort of blindness and it's leading us off a cliff.