[transcriptase]

People are really fighting against solar farms because of the potential to disrupt the habitat of some tortoises, sparse plants, and beetles. In the desert.

And they’ll cook up a story about how the loss of these species will cascade into a tragic disaster. The same story that a handful of conservationists trot out every time anyone tries to do anything except build on an existing dirt lot.

The fact is there are ~9 million species of Eukaryotes on Earth. ~5 billion have already gone extinct, long before humans were running around. And life went on just fine following a million prior species of desert beetle, rare plant, and tortoise dying out.

If an organism is so rare and limited in environmental tolerance and geography that a solar farm threatens its existence, it’s an evolutionary dead end anyway.

Keep a founder population somewhere if possible, put a collection in a -80 freezer, do a few lanes of illumina sequencing on them and move on.

It’s terrible, and I’m terrible for saying it, but it’s also more practical than thinking that biodiversity has to or can be held constant from the time of Darwin until eternity.

I know the arguments against what I’m saying, being a biologist for 15 years. It is what it is, and no I’m not advocating for wanton extinction.

[tsuujin]

> The fact is there are ~9 million species of Eukaryotes on Earth. ~5 billion have already gone extinct, long before humans were running around. And life went on just fine without a million prior species of desert beetle, rare plant, and tortoise dying out.

There is a big difference between nature selecting a species for extinction and humans artificially destroying a habitat required for that life.

If you think that human comfort is more important than the turtles and beetles, then be honest about your willingness to exterminate other species. I’m not here to make a statement about the ethics of that one way or the other, but framing the argument here as a natural process is disingenuous.

I think the real question is how do you feel about the intellectually honest framing of your assertion here, which would be something like “I think it is acceptable for us to exterminate other species so that we can continue to live our current lifestyles unimpeded, while potentially making progress towards repairing the existing damage we have done to the climate.”

[transcriptase]

I’m not claiming it’s a natural process. I’m refuting the idea that as-is everything is perfectly balanced and serves some greater purpose in an ecosystem, which is what people offer up as emotionally charged arguments for preserving everything extant in perpetuity.

I’ve been involved in the establishment of several large collections for the long-term preservation of biodiversity. I’ve published on the advantages.

How do I feel about that framing?

It’s fair, and the focus should be on mitigating loss. Beyond never building anything anywhere I don’t see an alternative since the discussion at hand is about sand dunes and that’s still considered problematic.

[kjkjadksj]

Humans arent the only species to do these things. A black walnut tree poisons the earth around it to stymie competition. Grazers prevent forest growth. When photosynthetic life first emerged, the resulting surplus of oxygen nearly wiped out all life on the planet.

In these contexts, what we do to the planet is relatively insignificant. So long as we aren’t jettisoning carbon and organic material into the sun and energy is added to the system from space, life on earth will always be around.

[prepend]

> There is a big difference between nature selecting a species for extinction and humans artificially destroying a habitat required for that life.

Is there though? Humans are part of nature. What’s the difference between human solar farms killing them all and a snake eating them all?

I don’t think we should just go around extincting things, but humans are part of nature’s cycle and not really that much more important than the 5 billion other reasons why other species went extinct.