Comment by andrewvc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewvc | Hacker News Reader

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> it’s putting nature back to the way it was before humans altered its course.

This sentiment is appealing, but there's little backing it. Humans have always shaped nature, and regardless of people, ecosystems are dynamic (1). We should be asking ourselves what sort of world we want to live in, and what we want our impact to look like. We should not harken back to a pre-human influenced time that never really existed. (Most restoration plans don't plan on restoring ecosystems to a fully pre-human state, but rather to some time where humans were present, but not as numerous).

We should instead say things like "this ecosystem was better 300 years ago, and we should try and return to something closer to that". That's wholly different from the narrative of natural being everything but human. It does, however, force us to qualitatively analyze what we're doing. Instead of saying "we changed it, now we have to restore it", it forces us to think about what the costs and benefits of restoration are.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_ecology#Human-media...

Two book recommendations (not to you specifically) that come to mind are "Changes In The Land," which discusses the types of "wildlife management" done by native Americans, and "Against The Grain," which may not be the best source for this, but does describe agriculture near the beginning of human "civilizations."

It does, however, force us to qualitatively analyze what we're doing.

The problem is that can be a decades or centuries long endeavor. So in the meantime, striving for a pre-human or early-human stable state is often beneficial for us, even if it isn't optimal & even if we can't draw the cost-benefit table yet.

>> Humans have always shaped nature

Tell that to Antarctica, or to Everest, or to the vast oceans. Until the last century mankind's presence was slight. We lived in the nice places that we convenient for us. Now we live everywhere, or at least our trash does. The idea that humans are part of the natural world, that we need not curtail our behavior because we were put here too, is quasi-religious dogma promoted by climate deniers. Humans are different. We have abilities vastly beyond any other species. That comes with responsibilities, responsibilities that cannot be sidestepped by declaring us just another mammal looking for food.

It's true, more or less depending on region. In Europe we have shaped the landscape for millenia, and the ecosystems have developed accordingly.

Without humans, almost everything would be covered by forests and swamps, not the wide range of biomes we now find, with open fields, grasslands, and patches of forests. Many local insects, birds and plants need these. Our responsibility here is not to stop, but to keep everything in good condition (not like now where there is far too little slack in the system and no space left for this wildlife).

Humans do this to a different degree than other animals but other animals also shape the environment; beavers can redirect rivers, some bird purposefully spread wildfires and so on.

Even the Amazon Rain Forest is a human creation: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou...

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