Meh. I think we’re a lot less sloppy than we have been in the past, and have no interest in suing for past deeds. The passenger pigeon and dodo might be interested, but they have very little standing at this point.
This. Or perhaps it’s never in balance. Even the most stable of periods in the history of life on earth has been rife with new speciation and extinction.
But yeah, “objectively better” is a human conceit. I’m a fan of the balance we’re at now: the one that sustains human life. I want to keep it more or less as it is, sustaining me and my species and nearly every other extant species, with some minor tweaks…which is why I’m an environmentalist. I want cleaner water and air (or at least don’t want it getting worse), I want greater biodiversity (or at any rate don’t want it to decrease), and I very, very much want the global ecology to remain supportive of the particular set of life we currently have.
But that is an entirely subjective perspective, is all.
That’s a pretty weak justification for ruining the ecosystem. By ruining it, I mean making it bad for lots of species (most importantly, humans and the species we depends on most).
In any case, I agree with you that it’s a matter of value judgment. Without humans, there’s not much of a value system to speak of (perhaps one that philosophers might be interested in debating, but I’m not interested.)
With humans, there are a bunch of different value systems, so it’s still not simple. Some people value cuddly critters. Others feel that all species are sacred (yet are unlikely to want to personally host a case of malaria.) Others don’t give a rat’s ass for anything that doesn’t improve their next quarterly reports.
As a group, we have to come to terms with each other enough to establish shared values to guide public policy and ruin the fewest things for the most people. Of course, what really happens (lacking a consensus) is we ruin the fewest things in the short term for the most powerful and rich people, and well, too damn bad for the long term and the rest of the people.
Aren’t 99 percent of the creatures that inhabited Earth extinct?? If so, I’m nervous. Nature does what it wants when it wants. There’s no thought process involved. Maybe thinking is our bane…
As far as creatures where the Earth benefits, I’ll go with earthworms.
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting your meaning, but that seems to me to be a statement of incredible collective arrogance, the kind of hubris that ultimately dooms civilizations to well-deserved extinction. It seems to say that we need have no concern for endangered species, that we have the moral right to hunt species to extinction for fun and profit and destroy their habitats just because we can; it seems to say that such things as protected wildlife refuges are childish naiveties that can be destroyed with impunity so we can drill for more oil with which to poison the atmosphere and pollute the oceans.
I suppose it’s fitting that such civilizations, if such beliefs were truly widespread, would be the authors of their own doom. It would happen for any number of reasons – for failing to be proper stewards of the environment without realizing the long-term implications, for failing to understand the importance of the balance of nature, or for using the same moral code under which they kill animals with impunity to kill each other in institutionalized conflicts for the same self-serving reasons.
The good news is that in most first-world nations, at least, wiser counsels generally prevail, though not often as much as they should.
Imagine being able to understand why the climate changes, imagine inventing a discipline called “science” to help us understand it, and imagine being wise enough to know that we are now altering it at a dangerously unprecedented rate by drastically disrupting the carbon cycle. Imagine that.
No, balance has an objective definition. Ecological balance, just like climate balance, means a relatively stable condition, as opposed to one that is rapidly changing toward some new equilibrium. Drastic imbalances are fraught with peril for all life forms experiencing it, and in the past have led to mass extinctions.
This post contains my opinions about the future of life on Earth and it may well be frightening to younger people. If you or your loved ones find that sort of thing frightening, I suggest you avoid reading this post. I will try to use a SPOILER tag and hope I get it correct.
It seems to me the future of mankind is doomed on this planet.
The human race is using up its resources far too quickly and is bound to run out. At the rate we are going, we will run out of food before we ever figure out a way to replenish that food.
If we don’t all die out from food shortages, there is a real good chance someone will start a thermonuclear war and we will blow ourselves to smithereens. Either that, or the effects of nuclear war will wipe us out.
I’m so sorry to say this, but I fear we are all doomed. There is just no chance we will survive the next 100 years.
This is only my opinion. I hope that I am wrong. But I just can’t see how we will still be alive in 100 years from now.
You misinterpret me. I support environmental policies, wildlife refuges, habitat protection, the protection of endangered species, etc. I just support these policies because these are good policies for humans, rather than for some reason like “saving the planet”.
I believe that the best arguments for conservation and environmentally friendly policies are selfish arguments; that is, arguments that (truthfully) point out that no matter what we do, in the long run, life and the planet will be absolutely fine – but if we are careless stewards, we could have a seriously negative effect on humans’ abilities to survive and thrive on Earth. We can never be as damaging to nature as natural phenomena (like meteors, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc) are.
This is not a flippant remark – I think letting an endangered species go extinct is a very unfortunate and tragic event. But it’s bad for people, and in my opinion, that’s why these things (environmental destruction, etc) are so dangerous and so wrong.
But objectively, at this point humans are a blip on the history of life on Earth. Earth and Earth-life have survived far, far worse than us. And if we want to survive on Earth for a long time, we need to collectively change our behavior.
That would be true only if humanity is better off after having hunted rare species to extinction and destroyed habitats without regard. I think you’d have a much easier time making arguments refuting that than supporting it.
No, only the recent ones. Humanity probably holds the record for the species that undermined the most other species in the shortest time. Meanwhile, I doubt we hold a candle to just one or two prehistoric extinction events, and we’re nothing compared to billions of years of evolution caused by climactic and geological changes etc.
Should we somehow use up all the available resources, we suffer a massive die off and restabilize at a much lower population. That’s catastrophic, but the species survives. It’s not like a video game where there is a limited supply of food, X, and we subsist from it. We can generate new food supplies. Enough to feed 50 billion? Probably not. But certainly enough to sustain some portion of the worldwide human population.
As for global thermonuclear war, it’s certainly a possibility, but the sort of large, nation-wide exchanges of nuclear weapons are less likely now than before. Isolated terroristic uses of nuclear weapons are, again, catastrophic, but hardly human species ending.
This thread is kind of funny. The people accusing others of anthropocentrism are the ones massively inflating the impact human beings can have on the earth. There’s no doubt we could make earth uninhabitable to our own kind (and to thousands of other species) and in short order, but the earth has and will suffer much greater climate/geology/extinction events. It’s just probability. At some point, we’ll get hit by a massive meteor, and that’s that.
This is exactly the sort of anthropocentrism I’m talking about.
This statement isn’t even remotely true. Not even within several orders of magnitude. There have been several extinction events, each of which have each killed off vastly more species than the human race. As quickly as we have managed? Yeah, actually. The hit that took out the dinosaurs killed off more species more quickly than we could hope to manage short of global nuclear war.
This pre-supposes that biodiversity is a desireable thing. An alien intelligence could assess the conditions as being beneficial or detrimental to biodiversity, but that biodiversity is a good thing is a value judgment, and where can that come from besides ourselves?
Exactly. The world is just atoms. Whether these atoms are configured in the form of plants or configured in the form of dust makes no difference to the universe.
Or the cosmos itself? Of course not. That makes me want to see a sci-fi movie in which the human race will have conquered the Universe and employ stellar engineering on such a wide scale that humans trigger the imploding of the universe sooner than it is expected. Well, the universe may be imploding as we speak and we simply have no way of knowing it yet. Who cares about Earth.
That, and it’s difficult to imagine a human race sufficiently technologically advanced to do this but not able to detect it ahead of time. Whatever “imploding” of the universe even means.
You might bring up the case of earth, but as noted, we aren’t capable of destroying the earth, even if we are capable of making it uninhabitable for human beings.
We do. That’s the point. We care that we have a sustainable habitat for our continued existence.
But it’s a mistake to conflate this with the overall health of earth itself. Earth doesn’t care, but the tiny creatures living on top of its skin DO care.
Thank you for the clarification. I’m still not entirely comfortable with that rationale because it seems far too narrow. Can we really demonstrate in the short term that, say, the extinction of the snow leopard or the blue whale is harmful to us? Can someone build a “business case” for saving the California condor? Who cares, one might ask, if polar bears suffer and starve to death on their way to extinction, as long as we, the masters of the universe, are better off?
The problem of course is that as much as we all like to think that we’re rational, moral, and compassionate, when the rubber hits the road and we have to deal with costs and direct self-interest, our immediate self-interest tends to trump everything else including morality and our own long-term self-interest.
I would rather propose a framework for a sort of ecological morality where we govern ourselves by a universal respect for other forms of life, particularly the more sentient forms that experience pain and suffering. It’s not only about disrupting ecological balances on which our self-interest depends – there’s a larger moral code, IMO. It would behoove us to consider our place in the universe in the words of Clifford Geertz: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”
Oh, yes it is. And it may actually collapse sooner than expected. See the article here. Here’s a quote from cited article:
*In their study of the universe, scientists located at the University of Southern Denmark explained an occurrence known as “phase transition”. The idea is basically a scientific name for *the imploding of universe. Phase transition might happen when the Higgs particle changes value and consequently makes each particle in the universe heavy by millions of billions of times.
Of course we do. My remark (i.e. Who cares about Earth.) was an irony meant to point out that even if the planet itself doesn’t care about our detrimental activity, we should. I guess I’ve read Swift’s “Modest Proposal” too many times.
You’re going off an article quoting the “International Business Times” as a source for scientific knowledge? That’s ill-advised.
The current consensus is that it will continue expanding forever. Here’s the wiki article, which has a link to the NASA web page (frankly, I trust NASA more on cosmology than IBT).
The possibility of an “implosion” depends on certain models of the particle physics, which are not themselves confirmed yet. And those models state it could happen right now or billions of years from now. So, bringing it up the possibility we could push it up to “before right now” is a little silly.
Ok. But that hasn’t been in doubt at all in this thread.
I should add, once again, that “detrimental” is in the eye of the beholder. Our actions aren’t detrimental to Earth itself. Only to our ability to live on it.
In the sense of preferences (i.e. “I like snow leopards and blue whales”), then yes, we can make this case for short term harm (“you’ll lose something beautiful and interesting!”). But we don’t need to – it’s easy to make the case that in the long term, the loss of biodiversity might be harmful to us.
And I don’t have a problem with “save the whales because they’re majestic and beautiful, etc” – I just think there are more effective arguments. I think the selfish human-centric arguments are better arguments that might convince more people, but the “let’s save the natural beauty” arguments are fine and probably help too.
Silly arguments, though, like “humans are the worst thing that ever happened to Earth”, are counterproductive.
With education, I believe people can make better long-term decisions. Fiscally, with the right education, people really do make better choices in the long run.
I don’t have a problem with this; I just think other arguments are better.
How so?