…and there a buckets full of examples of non-conservation-induced extinction, so don’t be trying to equate the two.
I’m not trying to equate the two, that is you (incorrectly) reading between the lines.
Perhaps the probability of a sustained and variable ecosystem? i.e., the big asteroid strike was “bad” in that value system. Extinction would be “bad” just in general (especially for the species directly involved!)
Why is a sustained and variable ecosystem good?
Anyone who blithely says, “extinction is part of nature” and doesn’t notice that (a) other than when a giant asteroid hits the Earth, it doesn’t happen anywhere near this rapidly, and (b) in those previous instances, we weren’t around to suffer the effects of an environmental collapse, has some serious blinders on.
IMHO, McMansions and sprawl are more effect than cause. There’s a lot more demand for urban living than available housing exists to meet that demand. Zoning and NIMBYism make it hard to build more densely in urban neighborhoods, and the result is that a lot of people who’d be happy to live in cities, get pushed out into the comparatively affordable 'burbs, which of course pushes the 'burbs further out than they would otherwise have to be.
Right, but the earth has recovered from mass extinction events before. Even if we were wiped out, it wouldn’t really matter much on a global scale. It might, in the long run, be good for the earth’s ecosystem.
Here’s the thing. I do hear you on these points. However,
(a) I’ve heard the argument advanced multiple times that the reason we need to preserve the rainforests is that the next cure for <some disease> might be found in nature there.
I do not find this likely, or a compelling argument. At the present state of the art, organic chemists can basically make any small molecule, naturally occurring or not. Other researchers who deal with genetically modified bacteria and yeasts can generally make any small peptide, though this is currently more difficult than organic chemistry is.
The next cure is going to come from either an exhaustive search that involves synthesizing billions of possible molecules and testing them and/or a rational search, where knowledge of the target narrows down the search space. Nature is no longer needed or helpful, because some random plant in the rainforest is not going to have the exact thing we need for people*.
*I’m making a probability argument : the plant could, but the odds are against it.
(b) We don’t actually depend on that many species to remain living as humans, and due to our new ability to edit genes, we could depend on a whole lot less. For instance, instead of the complex mix of agriculture and lifestock we keep our people alive using, we could probably do it all with just gene edited algae. (though the taste…)
So no, Czarism, these points of yours are not correct. The reason to preserve species - and natural areas - is because they are irreplaceable in the same way that the Mona Lisa is not replaceable. Paving it all over with McMansions will mean that these more interesting species will all have disappeared, and some areas that have dramatic physical natural beauty - like mountainous regions, parts of yellowstone, etc - would be destroyed if we pave it all over or fill it with condos or blow up the mountains in order to gather a little temporary dirty energy from the coal buried inside.
But there are inherent conflicts. Anti-environmentalists have pointed out that there are various rare species that are almost identical to their more successful cousins, and you can lose the right to develop land you own because the red spotted tree frog happens to live on it or whatever.
I don’t understand how there can be a “good” or “bad” ecosystem, absent human judgment. Does the moon have a good or bad ecosystem? How about Mars?
The loss of a few thousand random species is no big deal, except sentimentally. However attention on endangered species can focus attention on on-going habitat loss. A few thousand species here, a few thousand there … soon you’re talking of ecological catastrophe.
Our close relatives, gorilla and orangutan, are both endangered. The Asian elephant and the blue whale are both endangered — intelligent creatures. The Monarch butterfly — a creature so “sentimental” it was bred on the space station(!) — is suffering severe losses from pesticides and habitat reduction. Many other flying insects are also in danger.
But the real fear is not the loss of a few dozen “sentimental” species or a few thousands of random species. It’s the ecological collapse which is both cause and effect of these extinctions. The robust collection of cereal crops which spurred the Neolithic Revolution has dwindled until we’re now dependent on the continued viability of a few specific crops.
It’s silly to speak of “Great Extinctions” millions of years ago and say “mass extinction is no cause for alarm; it happens every 100 million years or so.” That would be like saying “What’s the big deal about Hurricane Harvey? There were millions of worse storms in the Jurassic Era.”
Modern man is changing habitat violently. Even the oceans are undergoing huge man-caused change: there are vast swathes of the ocean where jellyfish are taking over the dominant role from fish. Some already refer to our era as the Sixth Great Extinction.
Perhaps a valid point, since “good” does tend to imply a human-centered value judgment. But I think what was meant there is that one could posit an objective standard where mass extinctions and things that diminish and destroy life are generally “bad”, while its opposite, a thriving and diverse variety of life, is generally “good”. After all, an ecosystem implies life, and the systemic interaction of its biotic and abiotic components.
This is not an anthropocentric view. It reflects the fact that as far as we know, lifeforms don’t seem to exist in isolation but rather, rely on complex symbiotic dependencies. So from that standpoint the kind of ecosystem that supports the most diverse and populous life with the most robust chances of survival should classified high on the “goodness” scale. Which ironically allows us to posit, with cold objectivity, that an earth without humanity would almost certainly be a superior ecosystem.
Of course you can ask why life is “good” at all and whether a universe without life might not be the best kind of all, but that’s outside the scope of what an ecosystem is, and it’s just a philosophical dead end that gets us nowhere.
Even that we do not know.
Take pandas for instance. They’ve been the touchy-feely preserve poster boys for as long as I can remember because they’re cute as hell AND they’re majorly disturbed by disruptions to their environment, because the fuckers suck at adapting. Plus they just won’t fuck - not in captivity, not in the wild, they’re just not making the effort. Two factors which have made them the fodder for endless jokes. Right now, beyond looking cute and causing taxonomic controversies on whether they’re really pandas, or bears, or both, or neither, pandas have no fucking use whatsoever. We could burn the last panda at the stake and it wouldn’t mean a fucken thing, practically speaking.
But here’s the humbling thing : we have NO FUCKING CLUE how we could possibly benefit from pandas in the future. Maybe nature has “gifted” them some sort of unexpressed genetic trait that could cure cancer but we haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe someday they’ll be the only species to keep some invasive species at bay. Maybe some will mutate an heretofore unseen, useable trait. The point is : biology is at the same time a wide, deep, dark sea we have just dipped our toes into ; and something that evolves over time. And it’s unpredictable.
So the REAL question isn’t whether or not we should strive to save species, but what the opportunity cost for doing so is while knowing that an important part of that equation is opaque to us. It’s like playing a casino game without knowing the odds and only knowing half of the rules : I don’t care what your idea or strategy is, you’re going to regret it, son. Howsabout don’t do that instead ?
Plus I mean, humanity’s history is a tale of fucking itself for hubris and lack of foresight. **All **of it. Howsabout we try and not do that ? For once ?
Indicator Species … if we had ignored the crashing populations of the birds-of-prey, we would have continued dumping oceans of DDT on our farmlands …
To start with, because I defined “good” that way, which you said couldn’t be done…and I did it.
Such ecosystems appear to promote survivability, with parallel paths for such things as pollination. When you get down to only one keystone species, the risk for overall collapse is larger. Humans generally, as a VERY broad consensus, define “survival” as good.
I did not say you couldn’t define “good” that way.
But had I said that, and meant it literally, and if you can define any word to mean anything you like (Hello, Alice), then we’re equally free to define the thing as “bad”. Seems like a silly semantic game, but suite yourself.
By these arguments, it was morally impermissible for us to remove smallpox from its natural habitat.
Both of your arguments are the naturalistic fallacy in somewhat prettier language. They’re an argument, not only from ignorance, but demanding ignorance, in that they insist we can never know certain things. If you follow them, you must conclude that any action is morally impermissible, and humans are an unnatural intrusion into the natural world, as you’ve rendered all human action impermissible on the grounds of being dangerous to nature and, therefore, against nature, unnatural.
(It’s a converse of Creationism and the Dominion Over Nature philosophy espoused by some Creationists: The Deity Created humans, and gave He him dominion over all Creation. Both arguments presuppose that humans are special, and outside nature, only one follows that logic into imagining humans as above nature and the other follows it into imagining humans as beneath it.)
So, what’s the logical, non sentimental argument for why we should care about future humans?
Sorry, but an argument that states that there is no ‘non-sentimental’ argument for conserving species for their own sake, and they are only important in how they affect humans really needs to explain why caring for humans is somehow non-sentimental, otherwise it’s just silly waffle.
Something akin to that viewpoint was actually taken into account, and given serious weight. Many suggested we should keep frozen samples of smallpox, specifically to avoid extinguishing the species forever.
Sure. But we dont know what to synthesize, so finding a amazing cure in nature will give the lab scientists a place to start from.
That doesn’t answer Czarcasm’s objection: If a species is no longer in its habitat, it no longer contributes to the complex web of interactions of that habitat, so it is extinct in a fairly strict sense, even if it still exists in some form.
And if we were to take this radical ignorance (epidemiological epistemological agnosticism?) further, we might well say that changes in the human condition since the eradication of smallpox were due to this shift in the human microbiome. Heck, autism diagnosis rates have risen precipitously since the mid-1970s; maybe the smallpox vaccine (and the resulting extinction of smallpox) causes autism. Saying “we aren’t knowledgeable” as an absolute renders you unable to refute this, BTW.
I said that? :rolleyes:
BTW, neither did I insist(or even imply) that “we can never know certain things”.