Who Cares About the Diversity and Abundance of Life?

[The Lone Ranger]

In this (http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=919) thread, viscousmemories asked what's wrong with extinction?

Now, while it's true that extinction is a natural occurrence, it's also quite clear that human activities have led to a greatly accelerated extinction rate in the past few hundred years, and that this trend is increasing. There are lots of reasons to find this distressing, not least of which is because if we do sufficient harm to the earth's ecosystems, we may inadvertantly doom ourselves as a species.


I was thinking about this earlier, and in particular I'm mourning the loss of abundance and diversity that our ancestors took for granted and that we can scarcely imagine nowadays -- and wondering what it will be like for my nieces and nephews, and for their own kids.

Consider how things have changed since Europeans first arrived on these shores. Early explorers of the Saint Lawrence waterway described fish runs of such magnitudes that they insisted the fish were so tightly-packed that you could probably have walked from one bank of the river to the other without wetting your feet. Similarly, the 18th-century explorer and naturalist William Bartram, exploring what would later be North and South Carolina, claimed that lakes had so many alligators in them that a brave (and foolish) person could have crossed them by walking on the reptiles' backs. And already Bartram was complaining about how "impoverished" the lands were compared to what they had been like a few decades earlier.

Even if these early explorers were exaggerating somewhat, the abundance and diversity of wildlife that greeted early colonists and explorers was all but unimaginable today. Great chestnut forests covered the eastern half of the country, and supported vast numbers of animals. John J. Audubon watched passenger pigeon flocks fly overhead that took hours to pass and contained billions of birds, by his estimate. A single flock of Carolina parakeets was estimated to contain a million birds. Travelers in the Great Plains encountered herds of bison that literally stretched to the horizon.

Wolves, elk and bison roamed the eastern U.S. Travelers complained that it was difficult to sleep near a pond or lake, because there were so many frogs that the din of their calling was almost deafening. Hunters thought nothing of encountering flocks that contained hundreds of wild turkeys.

In October of 1855, the town of Greenville, Wisconsin sponsored a squirrel hunt that brought in an estimated 500 squirrels in just one day. Bison were so superabundant that people would shoot the animals and cut out their tongues -- the tongues were considered delicacies by some, and so worth the effort to "harvest." It wasn't worth the hunter's time to take the hide or any of the rest of the meat, given how cheaply they could be sold.



"What's the point?" you may be wondering.

As a child, I wandered through swaths of woods that seemed practically endless to me, but would have seemed pathetically small 150 - 200 years ago. I saw Peromyscus, snakes and lizards in the leaf litter. Raccoons and opossums wandered about, hunting for them. You had only to turn over a rotting log to find a snake, lizard, or salamander. I sometimes spent hours just sitting and watching a spider build her web or a pair of birds building their nest. The water in the streams ran clear, and frogs, turtles, crayfish, and salamanders swam through them, pursued by herons, egrets, and the occasional otter. Sometimes, I might see a muskrat or even a beaver. Songbirds sang from every tree, while buteos and accipiters sailed overhead. At night, you'd hear half a dozen different species of owls and a couple of nightjars calling. That's in addition to the crickets, katydids, frogs, and other night-active critters.

Nearly 30 years later -- a blink of the eye, really -- an awful lot of these seemingly-impregnable forests are gone, converted to housing lots or simply paved over. If the streams remain, they're channelized, muddy remnants that bear little resemblance to what they once were.

My nieces and nephews can scarcely imagine the things I took for granted at their age. And what will things be like when they have children of their own? Will they even be able to imagine what it was like to wander through forests and meadows and hear nothing but the wind in the trees, the tumble of water over rocks, and the calls of animals?

I don't want to live in a world where "nature" is restricted to a few fenced-off "preserves" that bear pathetically little resemblance to what our ancestors would have taken for granted. Houses and automobiles and even shopping malls are all well and good, but we need green spaces too! And I don't mean postage-stamp-sized "green spaces" that consist of carefully-mown grass and a few trees (most of which aren't even native), and I certainly don't mean the industrial farms, which are about as "environmentally friendly" as are strip mines. I mean large tracts of land with functioning ecosystems, where people can go to see and experience the natural world on its own terms.

[Thus endeth my rant. Please forgive my indulgence.]

Cheers,

Michael

[viscousmemories]

That was a nice rant, Michael. :)

Isn't that the whole point of National Parks and Nature Conservencies? Is the number of reserved areas shrinking, growing or pretty much staying the same? Do you think there aren't enough such areas now, or that something else should be done?

[Godless Wonder]

That was a nice rant, Michael. :)

Isn't that the whole point of National Parks and Nature Conservencies? Is the number of reserved areas shrinking, growing or pretty much staying the same? Do you think there aren't enough such areas now, or that something else should be done? What should be done is to reduce human birth rate to less than the mortality rate. That is the only thing that will work. Failing that, starvation will eventually kick in. Hard.

[beyelzu]

That was a nice rant, Michael. :)

Isn't that the whole point of National Parks and Nature Conservencies? Is the number of reserved areas shrinking, growing or pretty much staying the same? Do you think there aren't enough such areas now, or that something else should be done? What should be done is to reduce human birth rate to less than the mortality rate. That is the only thing that will work. Failing that, starvation will eventually kick in. Hard.
actually, we could maintain at current levels.

[The Lone Ranger]

Well, the point of National Parks and whatnot is the preservation of wild spaces, of course. And I'm obviously an enthusiastic supporter!

There are a couple of things that bother/worry me. First of all, it seems to me that we can and should be doing better to preserve relatively intact ecosystems outside the parks. Sadly, it's a lot easier (or at least, a lot more profitable) to cut down a forest and build a new strip mall or whatever than it is to rehabilitate an old, run-down and largely abandoned urban center. So, you see this crazy pattern of people fleeing to the suburbs as the urban centers decay, and converting perfectly good forests and meadows to sprawling shopping centers. It seems to me that it should be possible to build a housing complex without first bulldozing down all the trees in the area.

Second, we should be doing a better job of protecting and preserving -- and whenever feasible -- expanding our National and State Parks. The parks are by no means isolated ecosystems, so what happens outside of them affects what goes on inside them. And what goes on inside can be bad enough.

You know what's one of the biggest problems in most of the National Parks? Gridlock! People won't get out of their cars -- and a lot of cars are going through the parks. In my opinion, people should be encouraged to walk or bike through the parks, or at least park their cars at the entrance and take a shuttle service.

Ozone pollution in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (the nation's most heavily-visited) rivals that of Los Angeles, and has violated federal health standards more than 175 times since 1998. The ozone levels have been documented as high-enough to cause damage to at least 30 different plant species. On "Ozone Alert" days, visitors to the park are warned not to engage in strenuous activities, due to the possibility of lung damage from the high ozone levels. Precipitation in the GSMNP is sometimes as acidic as vinegar.

In Shenandoah National Park, visibility is sometimes less than one mile, due to all the particulate pollution in the air.

In Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks, ozone levels exceeded EPA human health standards on 61 occasions during the summer of 2001 alone.


Finally, there's the problem that a great many species won't survive in the long run if they're restricted to isolated parks. Various groups are trying to establish "green corridors" to connect parks, but their effectiveness is debatable at best. And even the biggest National Parks aren't large-enough to support some of the species that are most dependent upon large tracts of relatively undisturbed habitat. According to most studies, for instance, Yellowstone N.P. isn't large enough to support grizzly bears on a long-term basis. If the bears were to be eliminated from the lands surrounding the park, the population left inside the park boundaries wouldn't be large enough to support itself indefinitely. At least, not without aggressive management by humans, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Even if land is set aside, that land doesn't exist in a vacuum. The biggest threats to the survival of native species are 1.) loss of habitat (which setting land aside attempts to address) and 2.) non-native species. Non-native plant and animal species (inadvertantly and sometimes deliberately introduced by people) are rapidly invading wild areas, and often driving native plant and animal populations to extinction in the process.



To a certain extent, I see conservation of wildlife and natural areas not just as a practical duty, but an ethical duty as well. As E. O. Wilson likes to say, "The one process ongoing . . . that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our decendants are least likely to forgive us."

Cheers,

Michael

[Zoot]

I think this also points to the heart of the issue, which is that values are by their very nature contextual, not objective. When someone asks, "What is wrong with extinction?", it's possible they're asking, "What is objectively wrong about extinction?", which is unanswerable because morality is essentially subjective.

Michael says, "I don't want to live in a world where "nature" is restricted to a few fenced-off "preserves" that bear pathetically little resemblance to what our ancestors would have taken for granted." Emphasis on the want. As with all moral judgements, Michael isn't saying that something is wrong, he's saying that he experiences it as lacking value.

[wildernesse]

It seems to me that it should be possible to build a housing complex without first bulldozing down all the trees in the area.

It is possible, but it's more expensive. Also, even in places where there are tree ordinances mandating that x number of trees shield the new development from the road (that's just a random example that I made up, I don't know that this is a real ord anywhere), often it's not required that these be original trees. So the developer can bulldoze everything, and then replant new, teensy trees and still follow the letter of the law. Tree ordinances need some teeth.

Second, we should be doing a better job of protecting and preserving -- and whenever feasible -- expanding our National and State Parks. The parks are by no means isolated ecosystems, so what happens outside of them affects what goes on inside them. And what goes on inside can be bad enough.

This is a good point. Especially because our parks are underfunded. They don't have enough staff, and can barely keep up with the maintenence to keep individual parks open. For example, nat'l park budgets were cut in 2003 and park responsibility for homeland security was increased. How helpful. I'm going to have to stop walking down this path, because I could explode into NPS rant. And that's not really what this is about.

You know what's one of the biggest problems in most of the National Parks? Gridlock! People won't get out of their cars -- and a lot of cars are going through the parks. In my opinion, people should be encouraged to walk or bike through the parks, or at least park their cars at the entrance and take a shuttle service.

This is a good idea, but we seem to be too car addicted. Or individualistic or something. I've been part of that problem, though--family vacations consisting of driving through parks and hitting the highlights. What highlights though! But I think people are going to need to be more comfortable going without cars in general, for this to catch on.

Another point that I think is important is that people who have more contact with the diversity of biological life or the outdoors in general, seem to have a greater curiosity about what caused those things and what makes them tick. I think that our science education in this country suffers because there is so little natural diversity available to children on a day-to-day basis, and where there is a bit, it can be hard for them to access (whether this is due to lack of transportation, lure of video games/tv, parental protectiveness). For kids whose only interaction with "nature" is their cat and houseplants--well, what's to be all that curious about? How many questions can you think up about the cactus? Especially when it's not interacting with anything? But if you've got a yard full of bugs/plants/birds, or a nature center/green space with a variety of plants and animals and little ecosystems, you can think up a lot of questions.

So one of my reasons that we should encourage biodiversity is because it inspires people to think and ask questions--to seek out knowledge and to become interested in biological life. And even if we manage to kill off everything and still survive, we're going to need some people who are interested in, and inspired by, biological life.

[viscousmemories]

I think this also points to the heart of the issue, which is that values are by their very nature contextual, not objective. When someone asks, "What is wrong with extinction?", it's possible they're asking, "What is objectively wrong about extinction?", which is unanswerable because morality is essentially subjective.
That's a good distinction to make, but as it happens in the thread he's referring to the question - albeit phrased poorly and in the wrong forum - was intended as a scientific one. It would have been more accurately phrased: From a naturalistic viewpoint, what are the negative ramifications (if there are any) of species being driven to extinction?

First it was pointed out that the problem is not that species have been driven to extinction per se, but the accelerated rate at which it has been happening over the last ~30,000 years. Then it was argued that this threatens the stability of the food chain, and therefore hastens the approach of another mass extinction phenomenon like that which wiped out the dinos.

Michael says, "I don't want to live in a world where "nature" is restricted to a few fenced-off "preserves" that bear pathetically little resemblance to what our ancestors would have taken for granted." Emphasis on the want. As with all moral judgements, Michael isn't saying that something is wrong, he's saying that he experiences it as lacking value.
That is an accurate assessment of his comments in his OP here, but note that he also referenced that other thread as the basis for this one. And since he was the one in that thread who made the argument I mention above, it's clear to me that he's not only talking about his personal preference for natural envrions, but also his concern for the preservation of life on Earth in the long term. In that sense of course you're right, he does presuppose that the preservation of life has value, but then few are as nihilistic as me.

[Farren]

While its impossible to form an objective argument for the value of biodiversity and abundance, it seems to me that any study specifically targeted at determining if the presence and diversity of other life forms makes people happy would probably answer in the affirmative.

My evidence for this supposition is anecdotal, but its a fair number of anecdotes (I've known and intimately observed a hell of a lot of people in my life). 95% of ll the people I've ever met would rather have a garden than none and the majority of those would rather have a lush, bird and squirrel-filled garden than a flat stretch of grass.

A good many people buy a house then chop down half the trees in their garden for the sake of keeping their frigging swimming pool clean, but even that evidence doesn't necessarily contradict the rest when you dig deeper. I've asked a fair few people about this and many people who act in that manner would rather have the lush greenery and full time gardeners taking care of the difficulties involved.

I do know that its an established principle in industrial psychology that plants and natural sounds make people more comfortable in their working environments, which is why many upmarket corporate headquarters (at least in my neck of the woods) pay people to tend vast numbers of potted plants often in addition to relaxing gardens outside. I encountered something absurd in one business park. They sprayed the lush greenery with something that kept the birds away (they didn't want bird shit on cars and such), but piped birds sounds all over the park.

So there's already scientific evidence that we have a reflexive desire for nature's shapes, sounds and the anecdotal evidence I've seen suggests the psychological effect on us is substantially more than even industrial psychologists cautiously suggest.

Human beings are like icebergs. 99% of what we are emotionally is beneath the surface, shaped not by our reason and culture but by primitive desires and fears that were in turn largely shaped by the period of our history when we didn't have civilisation, a period far longer than the brief period we've enjoyed dense urban environments (at least ten times if only modern humans are considered and considerably longer if all our ancestral homonids are considered.

We're only beginning to understand our subtler emotional relationships with the rest of the natural world and the effects of the vast variety of foodstuffs and medicinal plants available to us. But we're wiping things out at a massive rate, monoculturing the world without knowing what we're losing and almost certainly losing something.

A caveat: the controversial statistician and former Greenpeace member, Bjorn Lomberg, points out in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" that the most commonly and widely cited rate of extinction (in species/year) is based on a single thumbsuck by an eminent scientist in the 70's and has no foundation in research or math whatsoever. Nonetheless, if the evidence of the destruction of local habitats in each of our areas is taken as evidence for the worldwide trend, we must be moving at a fair clip.

The other, less emotional loss we experience when species go extinct is the loss of valuable information, if value is pegged on the finding of new compounds and understanding of ourselves as an organism.

If you were to ask me, as a programmer, to come up with the most comprehensively adaptable program I could imagine - one that would learn and adapt to any new requirement or role - I would use a genetic algorithm. A random walk is the only way of ensuring that you traverse all of the available phase space and, all other things being equal, arrive at a solution to any problem that is solveable.

Nature has been doing this for millions and millions of years, so we find in nature a vast amount of the phase space of useful chemistry already covered. That's the reason pharmaceutical companies have such an interest in highly diverse biological environments. In many cases we can't even improve on the production method. The best way of creating a particular compound is to grow a certain plant and harvest it, or extract the compound from a specific animal's gland. Nature has achieved exquisite efficiency in the production of many things.

Where a mass manufacturing method is established, it often utilises methods that look more efficient in the short term but are unsustainable in the long, thus being less efficient if an adequate amount of time is considered.

The most sensible models for environments for lengthy space travel all involve biological ecosystems. Looking forward at things like the colonisation of inhospitable planets, most plans involve using many different plants and bacteria to build up complex biological ecosystems in steps. In the quest to establish the feasablity of such ideas, we've been forced to look for new, as yet undiscovered life forms. Specific efforts were made to find exotic single celled life forms for the inital phases of terraforming (and were successful).

I think this latter item ably demonstrates how we continue to turn again and again to the bounty and diversity of nature for answers.

James Lovelock has pointed out that we simply do not have the technology to produce enough of the mixture we call "air" to breath without the assistance of the rainforests, the kelp forests and the vast amount of cyanobacteria in the oceans.

So we have both dependency and opportunity as arguments in favour of treasuring and fostering an excess of both biodiversity and biomass - and only short-term benefits in choosing the opposite way.

[Darren]

only[/i] thing that will work. Failing that, starvation will eventually kick in. Hard.

If the birth rate falls below the mortality rate the result will be an aging population. As people grow older they will be less able to work and there will be fewer and fewer youngsters to replace them. ultimately, such a situation will result in a failure to maintain existing infrastructures and a socio-economic crisis will arise. Many countries in Europe are finally being forced to face up to this fact as their population growth rates remain below replacement level.
Despite the fact that population growth rates are lower in the so-called developed world, this does not nesessarily entail that land degradation and other biodiversity reducing processes are lower in the former than the latter. For example, Europe and Africa are reckoned to have similar percentages of land degradation, despite the vast difference in PGR between them. A greater PGR has been shown in some studies to result in less land degradation as there are more hands to work and heads to think. The land degradation and over use or poisening of resources like water is linked rather to factors such as corruption (rainforest logging), poverty (occupation of deforested areas by impoverished populations thus preventing natural regrowth of forests) and "structural adjustment" by the IMF crushing the tertiary economic sector in poorer countries and thus closing off the pressure valve for the rural sector.
In short, population increase, by itself, is not the problem.


As for biodiversity, ecological studies show clearly how species in particular biomes show various finely developed dependency relations both with each other and with the characteristics of their environment. The problem we are facing is the increased rate of biodiversity-loss and it's implications for our quality of life and even our survival as a species. There are so many examples of symbiosis around that it it shuld be considered the rule and not the exception - and there is not enough data to fully predict the consequences of knocking out this species and that habitat - so we shouldn't be so cocksure of our continued existence if we pay no attention to the equilibrium of the natural systems upon which, ultimately, we depend. So, I suppose I care about the diversity and abundance of life!

[Johnny Pneumatic]

Why I'm for biodiversity in addition to what has already been said, is that we don't know what knowledge we are destroying. The mowing down of rainforests so we can have christmas wrapping paper, the filling in of estuarys so rich pricks can have a beach home, and the dumping of crap into the oceans is equivalent to us burning huge librarys of books that have been proofread and added to for hundreds of millions of years. What chemicals aren't we going to know about for centuries because the beatles, fish etc. etc. etc. were wiped out last year without us even knowing they existed.
What if we have, and we must have, destroyed things that have or made things as amazingly useful as spider silk, setae adhesive, mussel glue (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-01/nsf-ccs010704.php) etc. etc. etc. etc. :( We know not what we do.

[dave_a]

Hmm, my previous post, which was supremely excellent didn't show up here. I must have clicked Preview again and then not submit. Oh well, to condense it:

I agree there is value in preserving habitat for all life forms. I do care about it, but I don't know any practical way to do it beyond what we are already doing and possibly some expansions of existing policies.

We have large areas set aside where development may not occur and human access is regulated. There are the parks, there are the desert areas that park or not don't get much traffic from humans, there is the Boundary Water area in Michigan with millions of acres of forrest and water when only non motorized boats can enter most of it and a comparable sized chuck of land on the Canadian side as well.

One problem I see with species extinction is that some species are simply incompatible with humans. Grizzly bears and humans aren't great pals, neither are bobcats and wolves. To the extent that these creatures can be contained in their own areas I think a compromise can be reached, but not always.

In Wisc we reintroduced the wolf. Previously it was hunted to extinction in the state. The state's plans didn't work out as they did on paper and we now have wolf packs migrating from the sparsely populated north and taking up residence in the more densely populated south. Trouble with wolves is they are smart and they are pack hunters which means they don't fear much. They definitely do not fear humans and don't see any problem with attacking children or even adults. Despite heavy, heavy penalties for killing a wolf, they are turning up dead with holes in them. Can't blame folks for shooting them. It's comparable to encountering a pack of pissed off Rottweilers. What are you gonna do?

So, regardless of the amount of habitat available, I just don't see many of the extinct/endangered species being able to make a comeback due to their incompatibility with humans. Of course this certainly doesn't apply to every extinct/endangered species.

Something I do wonder about is cloning. I really know nothing about it from a scientific perspective, but I wonder if it is possible to (someday) use it to reintroduce a population of a near extinct species or maybe even species that are extinct? From a self preservation standpoint it would seem like a good idea to take some DNA from currently endangered species and store it in case we one day find out the species holds the cure to cancer or something.

[Johnny Pneumatic]

Something I do wonder about is cloning. I really know nothing about it from a scientific perspective, but I wonder if it is possible to (someday) use it to reintroduce a population of a near extinct species or maybe even species that are extinct? From a self preservation standpoint it would seem like a good idea to take some DNA from currently endangered species and store it in case we one day find out the species holds the cure to cancer or something.

The problem with this is that unlike Jurassic Park one more thing is needed for an embryo to develop into a baby whatever. Momma. The mother has genes that control development also. Since males are XY they have half of the genome of a female. If you took an X and put it with another X then you'd have the genes needed to tell the embryo how to develop into the right organism wouldn't you? There must be some high tech way around this problem. There always is. But yes I think we should preserve DNA cryogenically just in case.