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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

If you're planning to have children, they might not be able to see a giraffe in their life. Think about that for a moment.

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While I understand (and agree with to some extent) the sentiment, I hate that this is the first and most prevalent argument. Instead of worrying about the loss of individuals that make up a species, the concern always seems to be what humans are going to miss out on being able to look. If we focused more on valuing the individual organisms and how we interact with them, then maybe we wouldn't get into this position so frequently.

Definitely agree with you, but if people can't even change their lifestyle for their own children I don't think they're going to do it for giraffes.

In "What You Should Know About Politics ... But Don't", these two points of view are labeled "environmental moralists" and "environmental utilitarians". For the most part, the goals remain the same, but the reasons given for those goals are different.

Things tend to break down a bit when utilitarians try to force moralists to adopt their view, or vice-versa. In the end, it should just be sufficient to have some reason to care about the environment.

Why should we mourn the loss of a species?

We lost species all the time, it's a normal part of evolution.

Also, why is it sadder that humans lead to their extinction than when other species extinct each other?

The ridiculous rate at which it is happening is not a normal part of evolution. It is the 6th great extinction event known. [1]

Its "sadder" because its preventable. Humans are self aware and know that we are causing this. If we change our behavior it wont happen.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

There is nothing "normal" about evolution, unless you include everything in it. Humans are a results of evolution, like any other species. And great extinctions are completely natural.

Generally mass extinctions weren't directly caused by the actions of one particular species, though…

Except that isn't necessarily true. Wasn't one of the first major extinction events caused by over-oxygenation of the environment?

1. Cyanobacteria aren’t one species and 2. on the whole, oxygenation didn’t work out so well for the anaerobic bacteria that caused it, did it?

Great extinctions are "natural" where natural means "part of the universe." There is enormous debate as to which and by how much great extinctions were "natural" where natural means "resulting from the system level dynamics of the ecosystem in question."

It's not sad by itself. Life on earth will recover eventually, as it has done after previous periods of mass extinction. On a geological timescale everything will be all right.

But let's be clear, right now, we are sh*tting where we eat. There will be consequences for us as a species if we carry on the way we're going. At best our civilization will be greatly reduced in advancement, quality of life, and many will die in the process. At worst we'll join all the other extinct species.

I don't think we should. I don't see any rational argument for the inherent moral value of a species. And we should keep in mind that species is just one rung on the taxonomic ladder. It's also an arbitrary grouping with multiple, competing definitions.

I'm saddened by the pain and death of individual organisms, but not the loss of a species that they make up.

I strongly doubt we would let giraffes as a whole go extinct. There are many species (mostly birds) we have kept around for over thirty years now that went extinct in the wild since invasive species have rendered a lot of habitats uninhabitable for native fauna.

It would be an undesirable state of affairs to see giraffes go extinct in the wild, but zoo populations can maintain themselves and would probably expand to compensate if they were the only populations left.

I don't see any reason to see that as implausible. There used to be so many passenger pigeons in North America that they blocked the sun. Now there aren't any.

Except the Passenger Pigeon died off in 1914. A lot of noteworthy fauna died in the 19th and 20th centuries from the combination of mass human expansion, industrialization, and globalization. The difference is that in 1889 there weren't passenger pigeons in every zoo and an active awareness they were critically endangered. Even if people knew they were endangered back then, the US might didn't do enough to keep the species alive - our awareness as a species of the danger we pose and our responsibility to preserve other lifeforms is something that is fairly new to the last couple decades.

Today, we have the IUCN, which didn't even exist until 1964, fifty years after the Passenger Pigeon was gone. We keep track of at risk populations and have a vast infrastructure of care facilities and a lot of interested parties and money in keeping species from dying out. We have an interconnected global communication system to always know what is at risk everywhere. Whereas bans on the hunting of passenger pigeons in the 1880s and 90s weren't enforced and few were aware of them it would be much easier to spread information on and enforce such bans today.

The only captive population of passenger pigeons in the early 20th century was at the Cincinnati Zoo, which slowly died off because they only had an unsustainable population starting out of 20. Today, there are thousands of captive giraffes around the world, and the news of their endangerment should promote more preserves to adopt giraffes to make the species can be kept stable if they die off in the wild.

A lot of those same factors still apply. If the giraffe becomes a species that exists only in captivity, I suppose it's better than it not existing at all, but it's basically a failure from a conservationist standpoint.

I can't imagine how much worse my life would be without ever seeing a giraffe.

zoos?

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