–I belong to the Sierra Club
–I support (voting, donating, volunteering) Democrats, who generally are more environmentalist than Republicans
–I buy organic as much as possible
–I scrupulously recycle, including grey water for toilet flushing
–I support bicycle commuting, bikeshare programs, “New Urbanism” development to support walkable/bikeable communties
–I oppose urban sprawl and support policies that stop subsidising sprawl with zoning and infrastructure
–I support clean energy and sharply increased fuel mileage standards
–I support strict regulation of industry to prevent toxic chemicals from getting into the air and water
–I support mandatory and strict government standards for energy efficiency in appliances and lights
–I support making environmental factors an essential part of any trade agreement
–I support bans on whaling and increased limits on fishing
–I oppose fracking, and (as earlier mentioned) mountaintop or open pit mining
–I oppose logging of old growth forest
–I oppose any further reduction in extant acres of rainforest and support any programme (public or private) that conserves it
Not good enough for your environmentalist purity standards?
It’s just that a lot of the items on your list there involve humans making lifestyle or cost sacrifices to prevent irreversible environmental damages - and some of them involve greater government control or intrusion (for example the one about energy efficiency).
And on the other hand, we have your arguments in this thread, which seem completely contrary to the general thrust of any of that.
While simultaneously (and vocally) opposing any regulation of industry whatsoever to prevent toxic *organisms *from getting into the air and water. :dubious:
No, you don’t. You actually oppose making regulations which prevent the spread of exotic species part of any trade agreement. You said so yourself.
Why? Whales are harvested sustainably, and even if they weren’t, that just proves that they weren’t fit to survive. Right? Whatever species occupies their niche will be fitter, won’t it?
Yet you support the total elimination of old growth forests and rainforests through the introduction of pests such as Siam weed and Dutch Elm disease.
I can’t remember if you were one who said you weren’t American, but I’m also a big ACLU supporter, and the searching of cars without warrants or probable cause is just a giant no-no, a direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment. I can’t see any way in which requiring more energy efficiency violates anything in the Bill of Rights. Requiring manufacturers to follow efficiency regulations before they ship their products to stores does not strike me as remotely comparable to having police stop travellers and rummage through their vehicles.
And even more fundamentally, while I understand that most other environmentalists disagree with me, and YMMV and all that, I just don’t agree that letting critters or plants play with “new friends” from overseas, and working out their differences among them, is “environmental damage”.
There’s another area BTW where I’m even more “off the reservation”: carbon, and global climate change. For my way of thinking (and I think this is kind of a corollary of the view from this thread), CO2 is just not a pollutant. I want clean air and water, for sure: sharply reducing or ideally stopping the release of carcinogenic chemicals and heavy metals into the environment. Meaning: much tighter restrictions on the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides; eliminating or heavily restricting coal power plants, oil refineries, and chemical manufacturers; stopping fracking; cutting back on the use of plastic in consumer goods; etc. But the CO2 itself is not toxic whatsoever and in fact makes for an overall greener world; and even if it causes some disruption, I expect it to end up being a world with more biomass rather than less.
We’re not talking about “toxic” organisms (a deadly disease would count as that, which is something only the most insanely radical environmentalist would shed a tear over if we made every effort to bring about its extinction). We’re talking about organisms that you all presumably want to preserve “there” but keep out of “here”. Segregation, essentially.
Yes, and I think it would be trivially obvious that the kinds of environmental policies I’d want to be part of trade agreements would be, you know: *the same ones I favour for us here in the U.S. * Meaning all that other stuff in my “impressive list”; but obviously *not *policies aimed at preventing the “spread of exotic species”. I mean, really? C’mon.
I consider whales too sentient to be ethically hunted. If OTOH some kind of “exotic” sea creature (funny how you never hear about this happening: the whole world’s oceans seem to just deal with sharing all the critters) came from abroad and was killing them or outcompeting them for food, I’d be sad and make sure we saved some of them in aquariums, but would not try to kill the interloper to make sure the whale survived in the “wild”.
Is it your actual contention that if humans were to cordon off all the remaining old growth forests and old growth forests, keeping humans from logging or otherwise developing them but otherwise leaving them alone, they would face “total elimination”? Sure that’s not just a *tad *hyperbolic?
I kind of think this is almost like some “white man’s burden” complex. Like Mother Nature just can’t survive without our careful tending, “weeding” the garden of Eden, almost literally. The hubris inherent in this viewpoint is staggering.
I think you’re trivialising the issue specifically in order to dismiss it as trivial.
Introduction of alien species can wipe out other species in the invaded area - not just displacing one thing with another similar thing, but disrupting entire food chains and vectoring diseases. Not to mention threatening agriculture.
The kind of thing I talked about working against in my “impressive list”. Stuff that actually reduces the net amount of biomass, or poisons it with anthropogenic toxins. The reduction in green space, or the replacement of untended green space with highly controlled monocultures (farms, orchards, or golf courses). This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of possibilities, but it seems to me like it covers a lot of ground.
BTW, do you really not believe an “invasive” species (which, as noted in that book *Where Does the Camel Belong? *is a slippery category) is *part *of the environment? What about its descendants? Is it like Saudi Arabia, where an immigrant can arrive as a “guest worker”, have children that live all their lives there, and even (AFAIK) grandchildren etc., and none of them are Saudi citizens, because all successive generations carry this “guest” status in perpetuity? What about when a new equilibrium forms in the ecosystem? That can happen relatively quickly–removing the “invasive” species at that point will itself be disruptive, and there’s no guarantee it will bring you back to the equilibrium you had before the new kid arrived in town.
Sure, the invader is part of ‘the environment’ in the same way it’s part of the universe, but its artificial introduction as an alien into a new ecosystem can be destructive either through immediate effect, or can cause a cascade of effects.
Sure, some kind of new equilibrium will probably eventually emerge - in some cases, that new equilibrium will be less convenient or more costly for humans - if, for example, it involves crop damage (either direct or because the invader acts as a vector for some pathogen, etc), or a number of other scenarios including loss of beneficial organisms (pollinators etc).
Or more usually, the cost is manifest in reduced biodiversity. Do you really not believe it matters whether we cause the extinction of species, just so long as the environment is full of something?
Well, for certain values of “something”. I’m not happy if that “something” is a pile of discarded batteries and Happy Meal toys!
Here’s what I think. That “invader” is mighty impressive in my book. The established species should have a “home field advantage”, yet this upstart, already successful somewhere else, comes in to a totally foreign landscape, with different flora and fauna, and not only manages to maintain a foothold, but actually kicks ass and outhustles the home team. I’m a big Darwinist, and to me that newcomer totally deserves that new turf (just like we do: I assume you don’t want us to withdraw from the Western Hemisphere, or everywhere besides Africa?).
Conversely, a species that only managed to maintain itself in the past because it was playing way out in the boonies of single A ball, and struggles mightily when trying to hit major league pitching, does not deserve to just be coddled forever in an artificially maintained playpen of second rate competition. Sink or swim, Jimbo! (Not sure why he’s named “Jimbo”, LOL.)
OK, at this point, I think I just agree with what Blake concluded - you haven’t thought this through at all.
At the very most, your argument above might apply to examples where one species is displaced by another quite similar, but more competitive species (e.g. red squirrel vs grey squirrel), but that is not the only possible format of scenario (and in fact, I suspect it’s not even the most common). How is a tree supposed to have a ‘home field advantage’ against a beetle or a fungus that it has never previously lived alongside?
Is it your position that the newly arrived beetle or fungus will always win? Fine, take some beetles and fungi from here and bring them back over there–it’s a swap.
Another reason I see this as all very silly is that I view the whole surface of the planet (including the oceans) as a single “Gaia” biosphere–when you zoom out, a thin layer of blue and green slime coating a spinning rock. The obsession with individual species, other than the highly sentient mammals that make up a tiny fraction of that slime, seems rather beside the point.
No, we’re not. Invasive species can and do destroy local wildlife, flora, fauna and biodiversity as much as a good ol’ mercury spill would. People have been telling you this over and over again ITT. Listen to them, why dontcha.
Sometimes they’re even more dramatically and Hollywood-friendly than a toxic spill, too - a poster upthread mentioned invasive active pyrophytes. Meaning plants that “deliberately” start wild fires to get rid of other plants and predators in their general vicinity. You don’t think that might could be something to maybe exert token effort to keep in check ?
No, of course that’s not my position, and I can’t really believe you would suggest it is, but we do have real-world examples of where an introduced pest can devastate a native species.
Solve the problem by potentially making it worse. Great idea.
When you zoom out that far, all of the things you listed as caring about in post #121 don’t matter either, so what’s your point here?
Not in many years, no; but as long as they have other ways to get into a state without being searched, I’m okay with airline passengers getting the TSA treatment. It’s a well established and understood distinction that we have a much greater expectation of privacy when travelling in our cars, as long as we are not violating any traffic laws.
Only to replace them with even more robust flora and fauna. It’s like the difference between swallowing an antibiotic vs. a bowl of organic yogurt. One wipes out everything indifferently; the other simply crowds out one type of life in favour of itself.
You are axiomatically privileging “indigenous” species. That “invasive” species may or may not directly or indirectly kill other species; but there is no doubt that when you go and hunt it down in an eradication programme, you are killing it. Who is to say it does not deserve a chance to live there, just because it didn’t before? Are you anti-immigration too?
And the line between “invasive” and “indigenous” is often arbitrarily drawn. The author I was listening to on the BBC pointed out that many of the species so vehemently defended in the UK as “indigenous” only arrived a few thousand years ago, which we hopefully all understand is a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. Why freeze things as they are now?
I get the impression that some environmentalists make it their mission to never let any species go extinct for any reason ever again, despite the fact that extinction is a natural part of evolution. I’d like to see much more attention paid to the total amount of living biomass (not counting anthropogenic forms like farms, gardens, orchards, and lawns) and fight primarily against “paving paradise”. Can you at least admit that compared to this, the invasive species issue is a lesser evil?
I’ve cited highly credentialled experts who disagree with your position. Why don’t *you *listen to them? Or maybe we could both drop the argument from authority and just present our positions. Just a thought.
Which is not intrinsically A Good Thing, particularly from an anthropocentric perspective. I’m sure it’s bully for the zebra mussel to have killed off half the fish species in the great lakes and to now be free to cling to every-fuck-thing and reproduce exponentially, but they are a gigantic pain in the arse for people trying to run hydroelectric plants, sewage processing facilities and the like. I’m also sure the Australian acacia is super pleased with itself when it fires out the competition; and that’s cold comfort for the guys who just saw their entire livelihoods go up in smoke.
You’re also talking about replacing 50 different species, each having a specific niche and role in the ecosystem, with a single obnoxious one. Again, that is not A Good Thing.
I am not. Hell, I’m not even eco-friendly. I simply recognize, as a complete and terminally uninvolved outsider, that you have a poor understanding of what the hell you’re talking about.
Of course I’m killing it. Because it’s noxious to the continued existence of, well, me. And I was there first !
Christ, listen to your absurd self for a minute. I kill mosquitoes, am I a serial killer too ? Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
Because we know things as they are now work for us. And we’d like to keep that state of affairs going. That’s pretty much was ecology is about, ultimately : keeping the planet ticking for our own sake.
OTOH when you throw entire ecosystems out of whack, you absolutely can not predict how things are going to work out, including for us, because they are stupendously complex and intricate self-updating systems with plenty of room for side effects and butterfly effects. And it does not matter if the thing that threw a wrench in the works was a radioactive spill, the seed of a fire-happy tree or a bug larva in your suitcase.
Can you at least admit that this has fuck all to do with anything anybody is talking about ITT ?
