| > 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. |