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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to be downvoted but I think this is actually kind of cool. Just something that makes the world a little more interesting. Similar to wild horses living in chincoteaque. Sure the hippos harm some species but they may be helping other species.

Life is about change. Maybe our goal shouldn’t be to keep ecosystems static.

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Upvoted you, mainly because you echoed my own sentiments about the hippos perfectly. Ever since I first heard about this I thought it was more fascinatingly delightful than anything unfortunate, and in terms of damage, nature itself is full of species collisions, so this is hardly the sky falling. It's also absurdly amusing that the ferociously bloody crime giant Pablo Escobar's single most enduring, still growing material legacy has been this of all things: the small herd of hippos he decided to import one day as a casual, probably barely considered gesture of showing off his wealth.

I can appreciate your alternative viewpoint.

I know we are not supposed to talk about downvotes, but I find it a little sad that HN has become predictively aggressive to dissenting views.

In terms of technology and business, we are only starting to learn that we may be the new Pablo Escobar, creating large ecosystem changes that are hard or impossible to reverse for our own pleasure and gain. Disruptive change is inherently good for business efficiencies, content creation, information access, etc; Disruptive hippos are inherently bad?

>Maybe our goal shouldn’t be to keep ecosystems static.

I'm not sure who's goal this is. Can you elaborate on this? Who says this?

AFAIK, the ecological preservation argument is against human changes, to allow the ecosystem to evolve on its own, not to keep it static.

"Leave No Trace" if you will.

> I'm not sure who's goal this is. Can you elaborate on this? Who says this?

You cant stop physics so "static" can be interpreted to mean "mainain" over an arbitrary amount of time...although I am not sure why you have focused on to that term.

Leaving aside the troublesome reality of humans being part of the global ecosystem, any forest/wildlife/etc preserve is implicitly maintaining a localized ecosystem over multiple human generations.

I half agree with you. Ecosystems are not static but we should try to mitigate the human impact. At the same time, we shouldn't spend so much fighting against this. For example, we should move away from flood prone areas rather than build higher and higher levees. Fighting against nature.

Agreed. "Inheritors of the Earth" by Chris Thomas is an entire book on this subject.

It’s say life should be more about harmony which yes, it can bring change. But change brought without consideration is just one force ruling indiscriminately over others, and that is bad.

Really? Because nature itself, as a vast unconscious force of constant movement, brings forth gargantuan currents of rapid and slow change both, with absolutely no consideration of any kind for anything that's already the case. Yet things seem to balance out and learn to thrive in some way or another over time. We are no less a part of nature than any other productive and destructive thing it has created, I'd even say we're much less catastrophic than some others in fact. We only delude ourselves in thinking otherwise.

When I said consideration it was obviously referring to us as conscious beings. Still forest fires happen, species invade other spaces (people think it’s only human-triggered), and other things happen, but we can most of the time at least try to assess what it would mean for US to introduce such drastic changes. The only delusion is thinking it’s cool for Hippos to forcefully co-exist in another habitat different from where they came from.

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