[VikingCoder]

I once had someone on Reddit comment back to me, "Why should I care about biodiversity?"

As someone who grew up watching "Life on Earth," I could not relate to their question at all. It was like if someone asked me, "Why should I care about oxygen?"

And of course, I had the shame that if I can't explain something simply, then I don't really understand it.

I still don't have a great answer that I can offer. But wow, this seems like another footnote I should add to my answer.

[ecshafer]

I think there are some really good responses from the polyculture movement in agriculture. I am not a biologist or farmer or chemist, so this is at best my five year old explanation. But different organisms use different chemicals, and produce different chemicals as byproducts. Polyculture farming is when you plant multiple types of plants in a single field. So one row might be beans, one row corn, one row squash (the classical example is the "three sisters" plants from native american agriculture). These plants make use of different chemicals, so there is less destruction of the soil, and requires less fertilizers and chemicals to successfully grow, because the plants aid each other instead of fighting over the same resources. The ecosystem itself, which is impossibly complicated, is a large scale example of this. There are cycles of different organisms consuming resources, and creating new resources which are then consumed, etc.

[pvaldes]

I heard about a man at his forties that found some insects in their room. He was not interested on entomology. No time to study their family or type. Just dosed them with a generous dose of insecticide, and got to sleep in the same room.

That man was unable to walk on the next morning by a 'mysterious' irreversible nerve damage, and is still in a wheelchair since that day. Bad things happen, sadly. But happen more often to those that don't care about biodiversity

Maybe people should start to care.

Maybe if something kills animals is in our best interest to understand that we don't want this stuff around. We are animals too.

[radicaldreamer]

Do you know what insecticide he used?

[RoyalHenOil]

Many common insecticides work through a neurotoxic effect, particularly general insecticides that kill a wide range of insects and arachnids. You want to be very, very cautious using neurotoxic insecticides because most of them can cause neurological damage in mammals as well.

The safest insecticides tend to be slow-acting and target only particular species, but most of these are rare outside of agricultural use. The average homeowner does not want to whip out a magnifying glass and a field guide to identify the species, sort through a broad collection of specialised insecticides to select the one that targets it, and then wait a few days for the bug to die. They just want a basic spray that will kill everything, and fast.

Unfortunately, such sprays come with a risk of neurological injury to yourself, your children, and your pets if you don't follow the safety instructions to the letter. You don't want anyone eating any of it, breathing it, or getting it on their skin/fur.

I recommend just getting a flyswatter instead.

[pvaldes]

Obviously a neurotoxin, but I don't know the specific product. He is a relative of friends of a friend; and happened some decades ago.

People don't need to know if an insect is harmful or inoffensive, but just "it has more than four legs, kill it with fire!" is a moronic way to deal with this planet of arthropods. And it can destroy your life.

[nyc_data_geek]

Because we are all interdependent, and monocultures fail. Loss of biodiversity means you are more likely to die of starvation. Loss of habitat means you are more likely to die of disease. Loss of biodiversity means less resiliency to a changing climate and world.

We get a lot of our medicines and medical treatments from plants and animals, historically and to this day. If not for those creatures, these avenues of progress may well be inaccessible dead ends.

Life is a unique information form given rise through evolution. Elements are plentiful in the universe, but as far as we know, the information in the DNA of a species exists nowhere else. Thus, every species unique in the universe - we don't even know what we don't know about life yet, but we do know that every species extinct is an irreplaceable loss to the frontiers of knowledge we mostly haven't even managed to explore yet.

Some reasons offhand.

[ffsm8]

You're making it sound a lot more straightforward then it is.

We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!

Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?

The medicine is a valid point, but I don't think random people on the Internet would prioritize that higher then cheap food, which we just established is enabled by sacrificing biodiversity.

While I'd agree that biodiversity is probably important, finding reasons for why - which actually matter to the average Joe - isnt quiet as easy

[jandrese]

> We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!

But we have almost lost Florida as an orange producer due to the fragility of a monoculture against disease. So in some ways it is even worse. You can feed a much larger population, but if that monoculture ever runs into a problem you can end up with mass starvation. See also: the Irish potato blight.

[kergonath]

> We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!

Even those monocultures depend on a working ecosystem around them.

Regarding yields, it’s a risk assessment. They can be great in the short term and then crater when the soil is destroyed. At this point fertilisers are required just to keep production level. And if there is a disease that wipes out a species, then it’s game over. And it happens occasionally, from the Irish potato blight, the almost-complete destruction of European vines, whatever is destroying olive trees near the Mediterranean. There are several examples. Lack of flexibility in the long term means lack of resilience.

> Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?

There are philosophical problems with this (those species are not less deserving than we are), but let’s put them aside for the sake of the argument.

The problem is that there is a lot that we don’t understand about the world around us, and we occasionally discover that a species was useful when it disappears. Or the contrary, that it is an invasive pest if we introduce it somewhere. Or that useless things like mangroves are actually critical to avoid unchecked erosion. Or that burning that useless Amazonian forest is actually terrible on at least 3 levels (direct emissions, that forest is not available anymore to absorb other emissions, topsoil erosion and degradation that makes it terrible agricultural land over a generation).

This is very bad because we have only one planet and we cannot shrug, write it down, and do it better next time.

[nyc_data_geek]

Fair point about monocultures increasing yields. That said, they are also more susceptible to being wiped out by black swan events (see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease)

Resilience of your food supply should matter to you, as an organism that needs food to live.

[ffsm8]

But the reality is that whenever such an event happened... There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas. Once again, hard to convince anyone under these circumstances

[nyc_data_geek]

There was an impact to consumers! The Cavendish is not equivalent to the Gros Michel, it is supposedly an inferior fruit as far as size, texture and flavor. Granted a slight degradation in quality just may not grab people, but they should see that climate stresses increase the chance of their favorite food being next lost, or of missing out on a vital cure yet to be discovered. These things have immediacy.

[kergonath]

> There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas.

… in the US. You left that critical bit out, and even then you have things like the dust bowl. Even to this day, without going back to the potato blight, there are famines regularly. It’s really hard not to see that as a direct effect on consumers.

[hollerith]

During the Dust Bowl, there was no welfare, so the families in Oklahoma and nearby who were relying on a harvest and had no other plan for getting income and no savings ended up without food and without money with which to buy food.

There's never been a time in US history or a place in the US such that there was a shortage of food for people who had money to buy food unless you count situations like the Donner Party in which a caravan spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The US not only has the most productive chunk of farmland in the world, but also much fewer natural barriers to efficient transportation compared to productive farming regions in the rest of the world. Certainly during the Dust Bowl, there was plenty of food grown in places like Iowa and Illinois that could easily and reliably have been shipped to Oklahoma, but no one did because no one (not even the federal government) considered it their job to help the hungry people in Oklahoma.

Part of the reason it took so long for the US to grow a welfare system is the American ethic of individual freedom and distrust of government, but another part is that it was easier for people to get the basics of survival than in places like Germany where the welfare system developed many decades earlier (the Dust Bowl being of course an exception to the general easiness).

[Teever]

On a long enough timeline it is that straight forward.

These monocultures and the carbon-based energy systems and the capitalist systems that depend on will fail and millions will die.

We are heading for a cliff.

[goda90]

A reason I like to use for biodiversity is pests. Pests thrive off of human activity. They don't really need biodiversity to continue being around, because they have us. Getting rid of pests is hard, and totally annihilating them is very very hard. Really it's only worth the effort to keep the population low. Biodiversity gives us predators. Predators can keep the population in check. We don't have to put in the effort if there's enough predators to kill the pests themselves.

But our efforts to kill the pests can often harm the predators. The poisons we use might kill the predators too. The cycles of taking the pest population really low and then it jumping back up might leave the predators without enough food.

If you spray your yard for insects, the first things that will rebound in population are mosquitoes and flies because they eat us and our trash. Spiders and dragonflies will also be killed, but they'll rebound slower because their prey has to rebound first. Then what if you spray again before they fully rebound?

[webnrrd2k]

On the rare occasion that I explain it, I tell people that it's important because I want my kids (and others) and their kids to be able to grow up in the same world I did, and to be able to have the same sort of experiences I did. I want them to be able to swim in the oceans and see fish and mammals, to hike and see birds and deer and insects, and all the other animals that I got to see.

[bdjsiqoocwk]

I think to a curious person, "because it's interesting" should be enough.

[AmericanChopper]

If you care about something so deeply that you can't tolerate people questioning it, but don't really understand why, then you probably have some other problems to address as well. I'm not trying to be judgemental, but that surely implies you've been taken in by a dogma without proper scrutiny.

[VikingCoder]

I thank you for your perspective, and if you don't mind - I'd like to ask in return...

Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that humanity not go extinct.

Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?

[AmericanChopper]

Great response. Your guess is close enough, and it's simply because there's things I like about humanity, and following on from that I would consider anti-humanity views to be heretical towards what I consider to be respectable values. In truly objective terms though, I don't believe objective truths exist.

But what is it about biodiversity that you like? Your comment seemed to imply you believe it has some provable value or utility that you were unable to articulate (which I'm not saying it doesn't). But if value or utility isn't why you appreciate biodiversity, then why do you feel a need to justify your position?

[VikingCoder]

I think biodiversity supports humanity in ways that I like, and I'm actually strongly suspicious that a great many humans would suffer if biodiversity were harmed, and in really chaotic ways.

Let alone the harm to many other species, in a horrific cascade.

I think within the bounds of some assumptions that objective truths exist. Within the Natural Numbers, 2 + 5 = 7.

[pvaldes]

> "Why should I care about biodiversity?"

The stupid question.

No matter how much time you spend answering it, they will ask exactly the same question a month later. Is a trap for grabbing time. The goal is that --they-- will be served with by --your-- attention, so is an ego boost move.

The best move here is oblique: "You are part of it, but is perfectly Ok if you aren't still ready to find the answer by yourself and benefit of that knowledge. Your live, your choice".