Why Don't We Hear About More Species Going Extinct? | Hacker News Reader

Why Don't We Hear About More Species Going Extinct?

blogs.scientificamerican.com

82 pointsheadalgorithm42 comments

One of the big things that comes to my mind is that kids who grow up in cities are literally, tangibly cut off from wild natural environments. They often end up not even knowing how to recognize practically any species of plants and animals. So how can you really value a diversity you've barely ever encountered in your own life?

relevant research: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

FWIW I was super lucky to grow up on an abandoned farm with a huge patch of woods, streams, and swamps. It was sad to eventually figure out that there was just no way to make that experience scale to the whole US population (even if they wanted it too). Of course it was also lonely sometimes and required quite a bit of driving, so I'm not going to defend it as an ecological or social utopia.

Nevertheless, I think it was really good to be around so many plants and animals as a kid.

Why do you say it would be impossible to scale it? The US has 330 million people, and 2.3 billion acres of land. That's averages out to 7 acres of land for every man, woman, and child. 700 acres for a little residential area of 100 people. Of course some of the land is barren and other parts have to be used for agriculture, but the numbers are just so large here that I don't think it matters so much.

Of course this is all just pie in the sky since it never will happen, but I think it's interesting to think about. It's easy to forget how huge our country really is. Urban areas only make up 3% of our entire landmass.

I think the issue is not so much that there isn't enough land, its that cities are necessary in order to scale access to infrastructure, cultural institutions, ports, etc.

Much of that land (the western-middle) is not very habitable. There's a reason that almost no one lives there now..

> Urban areas only make up 3% of our entire landmass.

And 80% of our population. Yet our political system was conceived in an era when those numbers were roughly comparable. It amazes me that more people do not see this as a problem.

The US political system isn't trying to use states as a proxy for population measure. The US is a federation of states that only agreed to join the federation on the condition that they get a certain guarantee of clout within the federation.

Does not mean that a political system is a god given commandment that can not change to move to a better system. And if some states did agree to join a model, it would be the 13 original colonies. I suspect (but do not know) that the other 37 were annexed.

The only two states that were annexed are Texas and Hawaii. Most other territory of today's states was purchased although some of it was ceded to the US, particularly much of the Southwest was ceded to the US by Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American war of the 1840s. (This doesn't include Puerto Rico and a number of unincorporated territories which were a mix of annexed and purchased.)

Tomato, tomato: ha ha. A war is a war, the losing side gives up, the winning side gets what the losing side gave

Annex: add (territory) to one's own territory by appropriation

Cede: give up (power or territory)

It's interesting that 40% of the US consists of farmland (according do some google searching). But farm output is only 1% of GDP. I think this is the major disconnect. You need a fair amount of that farmland for producing food (maybe all of it). So if you distributed the people across the farmland and had them farming, then you lose 99% of your GDP. With telecommunications and remote working, people could distribute and still work reasonably well, but you still need the land for farming, so you need to give up the idea of suburban utopia.

Somewhat interesting to consider as I live in a walkup apartment building surrounded by farms, doing remote software development for a living... But even I long for a home with a proper garden... High density housing isn't really that great unless you also have the convenience of city living.

You might be interested in the book The Lost Words.

As children moved to towns and cites and away from the countryside their language changed. This caused children's dictionaries to drop some words and add others.

The Lost Words documents some of these changes.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Words-Robert-Macfarlane/dp/024...

(I haven't got it yet, I keep meaning to buy it and never getting around to it).

I’m never clear in what it means to lose biodiversity. Rainforests are < 10% of the earths land mass but contain a massive proportion of biodiversity. There are many species that live in small segments of a single rainforest. We cut down rainforests all the time. I would assume naively that if we reduce 1% of rainforest area we lose some single digit percent of the earth’s biodiversity.

Reducing biodiversity in other ecosystems would take a lot more effort (not to make it sound like a goal).

It wouldn’t be incorrect to say the earth’s biodiversity is rapidly dropping, purely due to the Amazon. What do we mean?

One use of the term was in reference to novel biological compounds. In that context species diversity means quite a bit with millions of samples not being significantly more useful than hundreds.

With so many medical compounds arising from plant or animal life it’s not an unreasonable idea that a major drug has been lost with the loss of tropical species. Though, this seems to be less important with advances in biotechnology.

The irony though is that the rainforest is actually one of the least biodiverse parts of the world for that particular purpose. Sure, the rainforest is biodiverse for megafauna and, to a lesser degree, megaflora, but if you really want to mine biodiversity for biochemicals, you ought to care about bacteria and fungi, which reproduce and gene-share like crazy. The best places for that are places which drive resource competition and don't have jerk megaflora fumigating the area with simple terpenes -- the desert. However, the desert is less photographically charismatic (in terms of showing 'life') and probably also researchers would rather ask for grants to visit the rainforest or go scuba diving, so that biases the public's perception of where biodiversity exists.

https://www.pnas.org/content/103/3/626.short

In terms of medicine, the further an organism is from humans the less likely it's compounds are directly useful. Bacteria have a huge variety of compounds, but are so alien they have been a poor source of medical compounds. Plants on the other hand while still very separated from us need to interact with animals on a regular basis which closes the gap.

CRISPER is arguably the exception that proves the rule here. Extremely useful, but no need to preserve exotic locations.

PS: Not that I necessarily agree with this, but I have seen this line of reasoning put forth.

What? Every single compound that ends in -mycin/-micin comes from bacteria.

Erythromycin Azithromycin Tobramycin Kanamycin Clindamycin Clarithromycin Gentamicin Streptomycin Vancomycin Lincomycin Telithromycin Fosfomycin Doxorubicin

Etc...

That’s from something like 1 trillion bacteria species vs 300k plant species. Considering we have 120+ important medical compounds from plants we would need ~400,000 from bacteria for each species to have equal weight.

Further, fighting bacteria is a connection between us and bacteria so deriving an antibiotic is an obvious connection. Looking for say an anti cholesterol drug on the other hand and your stuck with random interactions.

normalizing by number of species (which is a vague concept anyways, most species nomenclature in bacteria is driven by the need to publish - salmonella and e coli are basically the same) is completely irrelevant concept for this discussion.

When you're looking for 'random interactions' most chemists reach for combichem anyways. Look at all of the drugs that treat CML - (gleevec eg) none of them come from any biotic source.

Loss of biodiversity is like throwing away millions of years of the results of the execution of a blind search algorithm running over an unimaginably high dimensional space. Human civilization will forever be trying to recall the dream from which it has awoken, but the details are gone and every second we are awake they slip further away. Who knows what questions we could have answered if we still had the record of that search?

So what metrics are there for biodiversity? Which metric should the media adopt?

I would rather the media not be involved. The media presents biased perspectives on behalf of powerful interests to mislead the public. If the media got behind one measure or another then I would be immediately skeptical of it. For the integrity of science we should keep the media as far away from this as possible.

How are people supposed to learn about a problem if not by the media?

I assume the vast majority of these species are insignificant insect species almost no one has ever heard of?

Because most people don't actually care about biodiversity, and efforts to make them care have failed.

Your evidence regarding 'most people'? Pew Research last year report that 63% of Americans say the the government is doing too little to protect animals and their habitat. They evidently do care about these matters.

If you look at their actions, they do not care. You aren’t gonna vote or consume change into the world.

EDIT: to be clear, voting is useful, but politicians facing a complacent population will follow their own agenda—you need to act outside of the voting booth to push them in the direction you want.

"Look at what people do not what they say" is the common phrase I believe.

It's very easy to blame others and tell them to improve, whether they be politicians/foreign nations/corporations. But when it comes down to any personal impact on the individual it's very clear how most people react to even tiny price increases or inconvenience.

Seems most likely to me that the public doesn’t know what to do or how to help. The things that are most publicized are often the least impactful (e.g., plastic straws. All we hear is that the house is burning but there’s no discernible authority telling laypeople what they can do about it. And we need an authority to weigh in because misinformation is rife and reasoning properly isn’t possible for laypeople (e.g., what uses more carbon, the shrink wrapped vegetables that stay fresh longer or the ones that go bad sooner but don’t use plastic? What about local organic produce that isn’t shipped as far but has much lower yields than its GMO counterparts? Etc etc). Personally I want to make a difference but I don’t know how and I am probably more in-the-know than the average layperson. I firmly believe that environmentalists and scientists need to build a credible information pipeline—it’s not enough to proclaim fear, they need to communicate what we should do. “Use less carbon is not actionable”.

We need strikes in america. I don’t see any other way. This is a fairly useless action yourself. I also don’t have great answers, obviously.

Strikes only work when the media portrays them sympathetically. The media will never even report a strike happened if powerful interests are against it.

Ugh. Sorry for the typos. Missed the “edit” window...

What matters is not what they say government should do, but how much weight they put on that when it comes time to vote.

Shallow expressions of preference aren't worth much.

Also, if you add up all the "goverment should do X" recommendations from polls, the results are inconsistent with what people say they want to pay in taxes. Polls that ask comparisons (should $ be spent on X or Y? Would you supprt spending $N on X if it meant raising taxes by $N?) are more informative.

One example over the years was support for NASA. Asked "should the government spend money on NASA", most showed some support. But in comparisons with literally anything else, including crop subsidies and military spending, NASA comes out the loser.

Those are always nonsense polls.

What percentage of that 63% will actually do something or agree to give some money? It's easy to say that the government is not doing enough about X when saying that costs you nothing.

Why does me wanting someone else to STOP doing something require me to do a thing or give money to someone? Just stop doing the thing!

If you don't want them to stop enough to do more than comment on the internet, can you really say you feel strongly about it? Nobody is going to stop doing anything because of a post on HackerNews.

Ask people if they care, they will say they do. Ask people to give $100 a month for conservation out of their pocket and it will be 1%.

Our own survival takes precedence in the situation you laid out.

When trying to make people care about biodiversity, the "our survival depends on it" argument was made. This apparently wasn't a convincing argument. I personally don't find it convincing.

they don't vote like it.

I wonder if Chinese Medicine would know? They seem to extract medicine from anything that lives on the planet, so perhaps they would notice if supply dries up?

Probably because extinctions aren't actually occurring at the rate they're being claimed to, that's why. Population collapse from large numbers down to much smaller numbers is one thing (and is probably what's really happening here), but outright extinction is something else.

I've lost track now of the number of times some species has been declared "extinct", only to have it pop up again later. And IIRC, lately there have even been claims that a species can actually go extinct, only to have a closely related species then morph into that extinct species, almost like nature has a "reboot" button for when a species does go extinct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com