Push to Weaken U.S. Endangered Species Act Runs into Roadblocks

The practical one is that humans rely on ecosystems being the way they are, and that unbalancing them disturbs our interests, particularly in agriculture. We also rely on a diverse plant ecosystem to discover and develop new medicines.

The second argument is more values-based: that ecosystems and animals have value in and of themselves, axiomatically. If you don't appreciate this argument perhaps you never will: it's not something that draws on more fundamental principles, it just is a principle itself. Similar are arguments about speciesism and the active right of sentient animals to survival: it's probably one of those things that can't be deconstructed into more basic, falsifiable arguments. I'd suggest the same applies to the claim that human progress is necessary and valuable - it doesn't seem provable, just an instinctual belief.

There might be a third argument: that protecting the environment helps economies optimise for longer term gains. One of the things holding back sustainability has been the relative cheapness of dirty alternatives - so restricting mining might encourage more creative means of manufacturing. And frankly, if all you're doing is mining cadmium for smartphone batteries, you may not be doing the human race much good to begin with.

In my opinion, given that these animals took millions of years to evolve, and if their threat of extinction is directly related to our activities, it seems reasonable, that as a progressive, intelligent species, we make efforts to preserve them for many worthwhile reasons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/el...

Even if you don't care much for animals, which is fine, you should still be worried about preserving biodiversity. We don't fully understand all the systems at play in an ecosystem, and killing some "useless" possum can have cascading effects that humans won't find favorable in the long run.

You can put a mine somewhere else, but you can't bring an extinct animal back to life.

That mirror image? That's how I see humanity if I think from a semi-hypothetical bird's eye view, where our progress can look like human flourishing from one perspective, but blink and it becomes a swathe of destruction, everything converted either intentionally (wilderness to farmland, suburb, or city) or as wanton collateral damage (spreading desertification, dead oceans, mountains naked without their glaciers). And the only non-human species remaining are those that figured out how to be effective hangers-on to humanity. That's the version of humanity that I find nauseating, so I fight it.

If every species goes extinct, and if there is no reason to protect any species in and of itself, then what makes human endeavor so damn important?

This is the logic of the powerful, a pure might-makes-right argument. I see what I want, and I take it. It's easy to kill things, or at least hard to avoid killing them, when they get in our way, so don't worry about it.

In fact, profess to not having the "foggiest notion" why you might want to worry about it, even though the arguments in favor (biodiversity, makes life more wonderful, we don't know how the web is connected, etc.) are part of mainstream culture, and not at all hard to discover if you honestly wanted to try.

For the example of the beetle:

> “Without burying beetles, we’d be knee-deep in dead and decaying carcasses,”

Which is probably not strictly true, because ants and other insects would likely take over a lot of that. But then you're artificially expanding one population over the other. This affects the food chain for larger animals. If you hit the wrong combination of natural incentives, one day your huge farms (which due to other incentives are close to monoculture) get eaten by insects pushed out of their previous environment. And they won't care about the human endeavour or how special we feel about ourselves.

We already proved how small changes impact everything. Bringing a few rabbits to Australia resulted in a huge population causing other species dying, vegetation for grazing livestock reduced, ground erosion, etc. Same could happen if a predator regulating some species dies. But the chain could start with some beetle.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...

Lack of understanding the importance of species shouldn't be an automatic justification to destroy them.

But have you ever played pick-up sticks? That's basically what we're doing with an environment we don't understand as well as we might want to believe. Sure, your particular possum might not be important. In all fairness, it probably isn't. But remove enough sticks, one at a time...

There's no seed bank for animal species. If they're gone, they're just gone.

For e.g. lets consider hunting or poaching, if a species has a population of a few thousands, and even if we kill a handful a day, we will wipe out every one of the species in a few months. And, sure, you might argue a species I never knew existed went extinct, why do I care? Well, simply because the at the this high rate of change, this is equivalent to simply eliminating a species from the ecology overnight, and that has consequences in food chains, ecological balances and frankly, consequences that we can't completely foresee.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but since you invoke a corporation example, protecting endangered species is like anti-trust laws. One species/company has dominance, power and greed, but we make laws to level the playing field for the currently weaker/smaller species/companies, which in turn benefits all ecology/consumers/markets better.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. And many of these dying species are a result of our rape of the land [0].

As more species die, more will starve. We live in an interconnected environment, and harmful effects to even the smallest of species have repercussions for others and even us humans on the top.

We need to be better stewards of the land we use and share.

[0]: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History --- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unn...

Biosphere is an intricately interconnected system, largely self-balancing and self-correcting. If you take humans out of the equation, that is.

A bee pollinates a flower that feeds a rabbit that feeds a fox that feeds a worm that feeds a flower for the bee to pollinate. Remove one factor and the whole thing collapses. "All for want of a nail". It's slightly more complicated than that, but unfortunately not much.

Once you've overfished to extinction and created desserts out of forests, there's not much time that you can keep your cows alive or salmon farms running.

Destructively changing anything should be approached with extreme care, since you cannot un-extinct a species.

I'd illustrate it like what happens on Linux when you are approaching OOM situations. You can either kill other processes, not knowing what they did or if they were vital, or just stop doing what you were doing. And so far societies have usually decided that mines are not as important as raw materials at some point.

Coal mining is not human progress. Coal mining is a throwback to old technology, and hinders progres to cleaner, safer, better technology.

If something gets you thinking deeper about an issue, how is that not a positive thing? Are people here worried that if they upvote something they disagree with, someone else might mistakenly believe that it’s their opinion? Is it a way to let someone know that they’re not welcome here? I honestly don’t understand it.

Same thing with CO2: there have always been varying rates of CO2 but with pollution from vehicles and industry we're worried our affects on our habitat are too large and negative consequences will result.

Put an other way, the way humans exploit the environment is based on such narrow short term considerations that by default, as humans increase in number, we risk destroying the the biosphere that supports us.

Your viewpoint is already the human default.

Where does this fact come from? I certainly don't universally agree with this value presented as fact.

Asia has 2,100+. Africa has 1350+, America has 1600+, and Europe has only 700.

It seems to be that the in previous centuries, Europe gained much human progress at the cost of its ecosystem--particularly niche species (e.g. instead of 20 variety of mouse in a forest, you'll see just 3). Yet we don't consider Europe incredibly ecologically impoverished.

If every continent were to reduce the number of species to mere European levels, I doubt that anyone would mind---especially if everyone could live at European quality of life.

Sure, so we might as well just go scorched earth, I guess. Nothing lasts forever, better destroy the environment then. Hey, clean water? Nope, just a fantasy. Clean air? Impossible. Living in balance with the other species that share this planet? Untenable, so we’d better just kill them all and get it over with in the name of profits.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Especially since we're on the verge of creating whatever creatures we desire. If we can make a pink-spotted unicorn tiger than will fetch your slippers and do your taxes, what matters the Siberian albino tiger?

Let's admit, we've taken over nearly every square mile of our planet, essentially remaking all ecosystems already. Its far to late to capture many details of what came before people started creating deserts and clearcutting forests. What remains is a remnant anyway. If its an 'ecosystem', then apparently ecosystems reform themselves continuously. Since we've taken little or no care of them up to now.

There is a consensus among biologists that the Act has been successful to a significant extent. Barring cost consideration at any level does seem unreasonable, but cost consideration can lead to really perverse arguments; more dollars can be had by killing and harvesting and elephant that not, so therefore...etc.

The existence of other methods of conservation beyond this legislation doesn't make for a compelling argument to weaken it, nor does the fact that some people will prematurely harvest timber before endangered birds move in.

What would an Endangered Species Act that considers cost look like to you? It seems unlikely "a few thousand owls" versus "a giant iron mine" is ever going to be sustained on cost.

It's better to just include cost up front.

it’s what we don’t know that we need to preserve, because there’s no going back