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Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.

Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.

There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.

What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break.

Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."

And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?

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> I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.

FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves.

However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.

>FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem

Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat.

Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.

It's worth noting there are wild pollinators, some more efficient than others. Orchard bees are like 200x more efficient than honeybees on an individual basis when pollinating apple trees, for instance.

The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.

Is it not possible to domesticate other bee species? Surely a x200 increase in efficiency would be a major reason to domesticate orchard bees, right?

Orchard bees are domesticated and used as pollinators. They're solitary bees, which I'm guessing prevents usage for mass pollination of crops.

That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.

Yeah -- individual orchard bees are significantly more efficient, but an individual honeybee hive crams in tens of thousands of bees; you make it up on scale.

Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.

> That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.

Interestingly, we have records of contemporary impressions of tarpans and aurochs, back when they weren't extinct. They tended to be described in terms like "absolutely untamable".

But of course they weren't.

It is possible and was tried (with honey bees) in 1956, then they escaped: https://www.clemson.edu/extension/beekeepers/fact-sheets-pub...

I suspect this is moving around the issue at hand here because it's likely the murder hornets will target orchard bees as well. They just aren't conveniently located in giant boxes by the hundreds.

The main advantage of European honeybees is that they can pollinate introduced European crops efficiently, and native pollinators can't.

The flip side is that European honeybees can not pollinate native crops very well. For that, the native pollinators are very efficient. Native pollinators are threatened by the feral colonies of European honeybees and their introduced diseases like nosema, varroa, mites, and foulbrood. It's like smallpox blankets all over again as infected honeybee colonies are trucked all over the country to spread pollen and disease on various introduced European cops.

As an example, passion fruit has to be pollinated by hand (with swabs or special gloves) even in most of its natural range (South America) because only certain species of Uruçu bees can be pollinate it, and they have become rare

Wikipedia mentions carpenter bees are quite capable. Which probably explains how my neighbor's gets pollinated. I know it's certainly not by hand.

I've found wild passion fruit growing on my farm in East Texas. It had plenty of fruit growing on it.

Passion fruit isn't native to the US. Are you sure it was indeed passion fruit?

This page from the University of Florida disagrees.

https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/p...

I did some more research and I see that there is a Passiflora species (P. incarnata) that grows in Texas, but that isn't what is generally referred to as passion fruit. P. edulis would be what the above commenter is referring to.

The purple passion fruit commonly grown in New Zealand (not native) doesn't need manual pollination. Not sure what does it, though there are many introduced honey bees and bumblebees alongside some native pollinators like butterflies.

I'm sorry, but could you provide a source on this? I know for a fact I grew up eating wild passion fruit from our property in the Ozarks.

Honey bees are naturalized here. They are part of the ecosystem, for better or worse. Insect populations have adapted around them. Taking them away now would be a disruption, especially if it were not planned out.

For instance, if you were trying to reestablish some some native pollinator, reducing honey bee pressure might be part of that plan. Even possible a critical one. But just killing them and walking away? That probably won’t end well. It would be irresponsible to do so.

Even removing invasive species of plants involves a succession plan, so the same thing doesn’t happen again, or something worse moves into the vacuum. I know a couple people who could fill a whole workshop on what people often get wrong here (and I’ve encouraged one of them to do so, but no luck), but they would both agree that what gets done, flawed as it can be (especially in walking away too soon) is better than the status quo, or removal and neglect.

Purely from an economic and argicuktural perspective, is there a way for us to simply raise honey bees in more of a ‘bubble’ that is somehow protected from the giant wasps?

I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops.

That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant population control.

Or is agriculture simply too widespread and complicated (or ‘naturally’ dependent) for such a thing?

Hives are already a protective bubble, if the bees could make it more secure, they would.

We could make lasers driven by ML to identify the hornets and shoot them down as they approach a hive, but that would be really expensive :)

That's actually a very clever idea. I like that.

It would be an excellent grad CSS project. Identifying the Giant Wasps with 99.9% or whatever accuracy and deploying some defensive mechanism.

The problem like you said would be(e) infinitely expensive to deploy to all of the many thousands of randomly placed hives. But maybe useful for the industrial pollinator companies, which is a big thriving industry.

Anyway, I just like these sort of clever tech solutions.

There has to be plenty of solutions to this (major) problem we haven't thought of yet.

> if the bees could make it more secure, they would

I don't think the bees really have any input.

I'm not a beekeeper, and sure, the modern hives are also optimized for productivity and easy access(bees are forced to produce more honey than they would naturally produce) -- but hives entrances have certain dimensions taken from nature so the bees can cool the hive -- you cannot make the entrances smaller or the hive will overheat.

> Insect populations have adapted around them.

Odds are, insect populations would also adapt to their disappearance.

Of course. But not necessarily in a way you'd like.

Large scale agriculture was not part of native US ecosystem either.

I’m replying to a paragraph about ecosystems here not agriculture.

The honeybees have largely displaced many native bee species. It's not just agriculture that will suffer if honeybees disappear.

I cannot agree more. If i could upvote twice i would.

We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned.

This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now.

And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.

If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved.

By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...

  > And no one says a world. No one even dare spending
  > 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.

Recommend something that I can give to people that they can read in 5 minutes and be convinced.

We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience of their favorite bars being closed or having to wear a mask. There is no document in the universe of any length that will convince them.

> We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience

Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims.

On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the response; this person responded so badly to the lockdown that they had to be committed.

It's possible that the existence of a pandemic isn't what people are denying...

> Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus.

Don't worry, considering how things are going, that will change this winter.

Unless you are in New Zealand.

If we're going with anecdotes, my SO's parents both had it with her mother spending 10 days in hospital during which they started her on dialysis, which she will need for the rest of her life.

We're living in an age where people deny the existence of jurisdictions that have gone without arbitrary closings and they're doing just fine, if not better than many jurisdictions that have had harsh lockdowns. But no document in the universe of any length will convince them that population control is not the answer.

Harsh lockdowns are the last-ditch effort when everything is out of control. The places that didn't do them didn't need them because they had a good initial response or have very favorable demographics or culture

I recommend Steffen et al, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene (2018) [1]. You can’t read the whole thing in 5 minutes, but you can read the three figures and their captions, which say a lot, and it’s open access, peer reviewed and recent. Maybe your point is that the Earth system is too complicated to explain in 5 minutes, and that’s fair enough, but I do think the climate change policy debate would be a little more sensible if you were expected to spend at least 5 minutes reading this kind of literature before participating.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252

Thank you, but this is not for the layman. I have no problem recommending something that takes longer than 5 minutes to read, but it does have to be readable.

It's longer than 5 minutes, but David Attenborough's new film: A Life On Our Planet [1] presents the issues were facing from unsustainable growth and offers solutions in maintaining robust biodiversity on our planet.

[1] https://www.attenboroughfilm.com/

We need to be teaching systems theory in high schools.

is it bad if we go extinct?

> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.

At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.

I feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.

The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.

there must be some science fiction series in which humans are called chaos monkeys!

It's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.

> it'll still be running some code.

This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.

Yup, with one addition

>> It'll still be running some code...

until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction

There's no particular reason that small fragments should rebuild. Multicellular organisms (beyond biofilms) were kind of a quirk of nature in the first place. (Not that I think all multicellular organisms are likely to die off – but if they did, why would they re-emerge?)

Indeed!

Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms.

One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).

It is very fault tolerant over evolutionary and geologic time scales. The question is what the very short term effects might be and how it may impact us.

As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves.

Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.

Bingo, this is exactly what I was going to say. The Earth sure is fault-tolerant, we just might not enjoy what PIDs get the kill signal to repair the system.

Homo Sapiens would almost surely survive as a species. Humans are like cockroaches. It might be horribly nasty though, and definitely not something we should invite.

I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?

If that's Elon's position then he must have a huge load of cognitive dissonance if he still thinks prioritizing colonization of Mars is a worthwile contribution.

I'm rarely one to defend Elon, but that isn't cognitive dissonance, it's trying to have a plan B in face of reality.

He certainly can't personally stop climate change, but maybe in theory he can get a step closer to building an ark.

Hope/push for the former, prepare for the latter.

I disagree. If we bring earth into a state where Mars looks like the better alternative, then we deserve to go extinct.

Have you seen how Mars looks like? What the conditions are like? Temperature? Atmosphere? Radiation? Ecosystems (none)? Water (none)? Breathable air (none)? How could that ever be more inviting than earth?

Over a geological timescale, the Earth will cease to exist once consumed by the Sun.

I've always thought of "saving the earth" as referring to the millions of intelligent and sensitive non-human lifeforms that we are currently obliterating. But I agree, the earth will continue to have life regardless of what humans do, it just won't include anything we currently know and cherish at the rate we're going.

I for my part also care about the thousands of species that are going extinct because of our behavior. I don't care tht much about the human species. It's our fault, we deserve to suffer. But the polar bear does not.

I agree. But to have an even small glimmer of hope of changing people's behavior, you need to sell the idea to them like successful companies do. Tell them how THEY're going to benefit.

As we have seen in this pandemic, even selling it like that isn't a recipe for success.

I just hate when people refer to that specific part of his standup as anti-environmentalist. I think he didn't meant it like people are quoting him to approve destroying nature. The planet will be fine (c), sure, this stone rock will be fine. Humans won't be, animals won't be, plants won't be. We probably won't be able to exterminate all living things on Earth, and some plankton and bacteria will evolve into something new again. But again, current snapshot of "nature", the one we are all living in will be lost if it continued to be destroyed.

Fault tolerance is a concept relative to a desired functional behavior. Relative to "everything should stay as-is", nature is not fault tolerant at all. But relative to "_something_ will keep existing and evolving" it is very fault tolerant. But that may not be the way we'd like.

This is backwards. Nature is incredibly fault tolerant, it's our systems that are disconnected from nature that are incredibly fragile.

Nature will be fine. It's us that won't be. Let's stop pretending that it's the same thing.

>I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking".

Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong").

It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.

So if technology was used to eliminate murder hornets, maybe hn would be more in favour of the practice?

Oh, absolutely. The more genetic engineering and radiation the better. With a bit of machine learning you've got a pitch deck for murder hornet removal as a service.

Shut up and take my money!

What is this strawman that you are attacking even proposing? Since you’re not replying to anyone or even quoting it seems like a vague bogeyman that hates nature?

The early comments on this thread were skeptical of the value of using government dollars to remove murder hornets

To me, this seems like similar thinking that we should just go for herd immunity - possibly even more ill contrived.

Yep, genetic diversity is a resource. It's painstakingly written natural code that solves various biological problems. We're just now getting to the point where we can start to understand this massive legacy codebase that creates the biosphere, and it's like we're just deleting huge swathes of it without analyzing it because we want more space to store cat jpgs or something stupid like that. So goddamned shortsighted.

Reminds me of an old adage I heard in high school: If you take the frogs out of the environment, you don't have the same environment minus frogs, you have an entirely new ecosystem.

The classic example is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone: https://sites.tufts.edu/tuftsgetsgreen/2018/02/27/wolves-cha...

Wolves in Yellowstone are a "keystone species" [1].

A year ago, there was a fascinating episode of "Nature" on PBS about keystone species. It's available for free online streaming here [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/2...

The sad thing with this "keystone species" concept is that people see it as "oh but this weird insect that's about to go extinct in south-east asia is not a keystone species, so whatever."

True, but it's also good to remember that the new system isn't "worse" or "better" than the old one.

A lot of people seem to think that if you "destroy" an ecosystem it is a step toward a lifeless environment.

We are experiencing this in parts of the ocean - a switch from fishes to jellyfish. One is edible, the other, not so much.

Here's some comments: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6

In the short term it's reducing the diversity of the ecosystem, yes. And the effect of that tends to pull in quite a bunch of effects that contribute to that effect even more. Only in the long run will there be more diversity again. But by that time we'll all sit in Musk Kingdom on Mars with oxygen masks and radiation suits and legends of ancestors who used to know what a summer breeze at a lake felt like, cause we succeeded to colonize another planet and that was totally worth it!!!11

What does this have to do with an invasive species? Do you assume that we allow Murder Hornets to spread and displace multiple native species? I'm confused about the intent of your post.

Remember, a lot of people on this forum hate their own biological heritage and want to "upload their memories" into silicon super-computing chips and seek to escape the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The biological world and interdependence are repugnant to them. They are wannabee versions of Skynet essentially.

> Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.

We have honey bees in Japan. While I agree it will have huge implications, it’ll hardly be the last of them.

That said, I’d rather murder hornets go away everywhere.

I think those bees learned how to fight them, which is probably untrue for the rest of the bee population elsewhere. There might also be birds that eat them.

I love having hornets on my property if their nest isn't located in a path I have to cross. They also eat wasps and you won't have any problems with them throughout the summer. They don't try to eat your cake or drink you lemonade and you can peacefully chill in your garden.

They always leave their nest after a season and it can make quite a mess. But nothing is better than having them in a remote location in your garden. It is better than any insect spray.

But you still might seriously want to get rid of them because they could indeed do a lot of damage in another ecosystem that needs to sacrifice several species until it adapts.

I completely agree with what you're saying here, but I'm going to just discuss one thing that you said:

> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."

I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).

We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.

I think this statement makes a point opposite what you intended:

> We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history

That's exactly the problem. We're causing massive changes on a much shorter timescale than evolution operates on. I think it's likely the global ecosystem will struggle to adapt.

In general, I find people, probably due to the sheer difference in timescale that is beyond palpable understanding, to appreciate that our collective environmental impact precludes other species the evolutionary time to adapt to our impact and to fill gaps in "species web" to fill all the extinctions that are occurring.

Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt.

Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.

Just to add on this, pollinators cannot replace each others. Some plants can only be pollinated by specific species, like red clover and bumblebees in the uk.

> How could you honestly take this position?

What position do you mean? Your comment is not replying to anybody.

I don't see anybody in this thread who is arguing that we should do nothing.

This is in no way a rebuttal to your points, but merely out of interest: how does pollination by honey bee work in countries where the hornets are endemic?

Japanese bees have developed a strategy to defeat the hornets so they're better able to protect their nests. Bees in the US don't have that strategy.

Pretty cool to watch actually: https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185

I'd recommend this book, it explains a few interactions between species of animals / insects / plants and shows how everything is more of less connected in ways we can't imagine

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...

Nature is full of pollinators. The reason we need to carry around bees to pollinate crops is because we have dedicated vast areas to monocultures where no insect diversity can be established. They become diversity deserts. So a known and tried solution: mixed crops, crop rotation, and insect oasis. We keep paying in environmental health so our food is cheaper and easier to produce. That needs to end.

Calorie crops mostly self pollinate or similar (wheat, corn, soy, etc). Bees don't matter there.

For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'.

And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.

It's clear you are mixing up vanilla and most every kind of fruit tree. One is a high-value, low-volume speciality crop, the other is the exact opposite. Pollinating a cherry orchard! Dude, you go first!

I'm not saying it would be a good situation to end up in, I'm saying it is economically viable (so we'd still have fruit).

Hand pollination of apples is already sometimes done in China.

Dude you need to look up the definition of "economically viable".

You seem to be speaking from an unquantifiably elevated position of privilege.

It's okay, we can just get cheap Chinese labor to manually pollinate all the fruit.

https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-be...

Wonder how the economics are now!

"anti-environmentalist position that pops up"

Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.

"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."

Yup.

In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.

Who are you arguing with?

> we still need nature to sustain ourselves.

There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves.

We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.

> And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?

Mars, apparently.

I generally agree, but could you further define what Nature means to you? especially when you say "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."

The problem is that people think environmentalism is about preserving the environment. The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.

>The planets gonna be fine

I see this line a lot but everyday humans are doing irreparable damage to ecosystems. Taking millions of years to heal from events is not ‘fine’.

But what is "heal"? There's no such thing as the "right" or "fine" ecosystem. In 100 years, I'm nearly 100% certain that this planet will still exist and something will live on it.

His point was that we're killing ourself. An ecosystem and a planet will continue existing, the question is whether humans will exist on it.

I think an appropriate definition of the right ecosystem is the one that would be here without the vast narcissism of humans. Yes, humans are animals, but we have broken out of the natural balance of things and relished in that fact by destroying everything in our wake in the name of so-called progress.

I think it’s similar to how we view viruses.

I agree, but when dealing with a narcissist, the only way to make progress may be to play to their narcissism. If that's what it takes, sure, let's do it and pretend that we need to live sustainable livestyles to save humanity.

Humans (and every other species we cause suffering to) are gonna have a bad time.

> The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.

And the almost uncountable plants and animals that are already extinct. At least when we go the others will be able to stay.

> The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.

This sentiment is too simplifying. Yes, the planet, as in a spinning celestial object with a molten core, solid surface with water, and an atmosphere will be fine, so to speak, but the vast amounts of flora and fauna will not and haven’t been. Some will make it, but I don’t define that as “fine”.

Many animal species, if they haven’t already gone extinct have been suffering deeply. Take a look at the southern resident orca population. We captured, killing many in the process, and enslaved them, all of which served to torture those enslaved and break up the matriarchal hierarchies that existed. This left new, untrained leaders in the population. Before then and since then, we have poisoned them and have completely decimated their food source. These are direct consequences of unneeded, self serving actions of humans. We also harass them sonically. This is a population that is already and has been having a “bad time”, and it’s likely the population will go extinct. The cause of all this is 100% humans. Now take this example and multiply it by the thousands if not millions of species also going extinct and having bad times. Humans and our technological development combined literally form an extinction event.

Bee careful when talking about wiping out invasive species. Honeybees aren't native to north america. Nor are the majority of crops that they pollinate. "Invasive", by government definition, means not just foreign but also economically dangerous. Conversely, screwworm is native but we chose to wipe that species from north american because it was economically dangerous. I haven't heard anyone talk of allowing it back.

Let's not bring back the screwworm: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-reasons-flesh-eating-...

If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.

There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee

Sorry, what?

https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-bette...

I haven't got it out for honey bees, but as your comment makes clear, native species are underappreciated.

The article you cite doesn't seem to really agree with you:

> So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees.

> ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating.

From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity.

So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.

I know where I live most native pollinators are very selective and, as a result, in very small numbers since their habitat doesn’t resemble what it did even 100 years ago. They’re a drop in the bucket compared to what we require... And even if we made enormous efforts to boost their populations, I think they’d largely only pollinate fruit trees.

Not disagreeing with you just curious why they would largely only pollinate fruit trees?

Good question. I should have specified that I was saying that in the context of conventional crops. From what I've read, they don't pollinate many conventional crops but they are drawn to fruit trees. Otherwise mostly native plants which humans don't cultivate for food.

In some places I know similar species are actually grown for commercial pollination, so it'll vary from place to place for sure.

Capitalism doesn't know how to account for things that have no dollar signs attached. The only answer to anything in capitalism is: let's create a market for that. When you elevate capitalism to an ideology (which is what is happening for many people) instead of an economic tool that you need to use when necessary, then you lose focus of the real world outside markets.

As opposed to the Communists draining the Aral sea?

It's not about socialism or capitalism here, scarce resources and humans need regulation

Why you assume that non-capitalism is the same as communism? Capitalist ideology and communism are extremes, in my opinion there is a healthy balance between them.

I agree with this viewpoint. A more non-statist communism (re: unions and local area orgs that manage 90% of all needs), worker coops, less power for D.C. more for states and local municipalities.

healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union then don't and if your employer still has their own health ins. use that, or maybe they use ours anyways cause it'd be better... Either way options still exist with the best ones rising to the top like normal capitalism, just CEOs and execs wouldn't be paid as well, because their value is a lot less than they think it is.

Exactly. Extremes of capitalism and communism are bound to lead to conflict and destruction because there is no way to convince everyone of something. But a well balanced society should be able to combine market based solutions with community based solutions where it makes sense.

yeah, I'm also a bit anti-authoritarian, so I feel smaller community initiatives shares power more, with less of it concentrated in power brokers who's only goal is money and power, and thus gives a little boost to more people willing to work for it as volunteers, or coop members, or part of the local community efforts.

A balanced society as you say, can only come from something that's not capitalism or communism both of which are authoritarian or oligarchical at the very least.

Ancom, I think is the best solution with the least amount of friction. I mean all it requires to get started is for people to form a union, start some union-owned businesses, put the profits back into healthcare for all members of the union. Anyone can become a member who wants to (might have a dues though), then they'd be encourage to buy from union businesses, who will in turn use that $$ to pay medical bills for all union members. If there's surplus everyone gets dividends, and workers get big bonuses.

Because communist apologetics usually come from people who are communits, not people who think there is a healthy balance. Which is already in law. The US, just like every other healthy functioning country in the world, is socialist. They just suck at it horrendously in certain fields. The capitalist ideal is talked about, but mostly because of the innovation aspect, not the worker exploitation aspect. In fact, and especially these days, manual labor is so expensive, people are getting into DIY just to avoid it.

Not really, these days this position is more frequent in people who want a healthy balance and see policies purely motivated by free-market ideology. For example, it is very clear that the Trump administration is shock full of free-market ideologues, in issues ranging from health care to education and the environment.

Propaganda and wishful thinking doesn't replace facts. Governments will build transportation and hospitals until the last day of our extinction.

>The US, just like every other healthy functioning country in the world, is socialist.

No, they're absolutely capitalist. Workers own the means of production in no "healthy" "functioning" government in the world.

> Why you assume that non-capitalism is the same as communism?

Free market propaganda often sets up a black/white dichotomy between capitalism and communism/central planning, then uses the failures of regimes like the Soviet Union to attempt to train readers to think that any deviation from capitalism will lead to similar disasters.

> people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them

This whole idea is very batshit insane too.

It's useful to note that system's thinking is such an outdated model of looking at the world. Basically modeling the world as a fancy mechanism, with mechanistic explanations about every aspects of the world. Very reductionist about organisms, nature, societies, etc.

Why is it outdated? Do you have any souces for that?

What do you propose instead?

I think its a good start to learn about chaotic systems instead. For most systems, minute parameter changes can have dramatic effects on the predictability of the system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo

Well, one of the reasons is that a lot of systems theory was basically trying to apply notions, concepts and mathematical analysis from physics, firm management, and game theory to contexts where they just didn't apply: ideal rationality of agents, information flow diagrams, and even notions like equilibria. The notion of equilibrium in ecosystems, for example, came from the physics of gases in vacuum chambers, neither organisms or populations of organisms exhibit such tendencies. There are many more examples of why mechanistic explanations simply don't work for many phenomena in the philosophy of science. Weiner, Simon, and others were just trying to use the maths they knew to solve some bigger more complex problems and in the process ended up stretching the metaphor of the system a bit too far.

> There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.

This is solely due to the industrialization of agriculture.

Leaving fallow portions of the field and growing native crops winds up with an assortment of pollinators--including a lot of native bees.

The problem is that they are less efficient. So, a farmer who does this will lose to a farmer who uses industrialized honeybees.

This is a standard case of privatize the profit and socialize the risk.

> Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves.

Working towards reducing that reliance sounds like a better investment than hoping that a fragile system keeps stable if we undo the changes we noticed we cause (a system that had multiple extinction events in the past)

Extinction events don't happen that often. Meanwhile the massive changes we've made to our environment (in a relatively small time frame) are having a serious impact on our ability to survive on this planet.

We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.

> We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of.

Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc.

There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.

Closed system biospheres on Earth have proved impossible to date. Mars is vastly less tractable.

Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.

None of those things protect you from an extinction event.

I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress.

Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth.

Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.

> Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes

Heating and cooling necessarily heat the exterior of the heated or cooled environment more than they do heat or cool the interior. As the temperature warms, you need to cool your interior space even more, pumping yet more heat into the surrounds. For one, all that energy has to come from somewhere. For two, hopefully you don’t drive the system beyond a point where your heating and cooling can keep up.

> There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.

There is a huge, vast, expansive, unimaginably large, ridiculously wide chasm between “working on plans to colonize Mars” and “actually colonizing Mars.” In the meantime, we’ve got ~10 billion people dependent on the existing ecosystem we’ve got here. Keeping that global ecosystem healthy enough to support those people without massive die-offs or total chaos, without the benefit of any globally organized effort to speak of, is deeply and profoundly not trivial, probably much less trivial than supporting a very small population on another planet.

Plus, even if we do manage to colonize another world without first learning how to maintain the one we have, what exactly is the end game? Hop from planet to planet, destroying any life we find or create along the way?

> Extinction events don't happen that often.

That's a matter of perspective. I would say they happen all the time.

Individual extinctions and extinction events are usual considered as different things. The former is commonplace, the latter rare and results in massive shifts.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to living in a world made out of dust deserts and domed cities - but we managed to keep the 9-to-5 bullshit jobs and the stock market alive! Awesome!

Short-sighted "environmentalist" thinking will let this invasive species take over all of North America and South America. We aren't willing to sacrifice, even temporarily, the local insects. You have to be willing to do that if you expect to stop this invasive species, because you can not possibly find all the nests fast enough.

If we were to think long-term, we could stop this invasive species. Crop duster planes spray everything within at least several generations or years of insect migration. That might mean 10,000 square miles gets completely soaked in a mix of Sevin, Malathion, and neonicotinoids.

Compared to the roughly 16,300,000 square miles at risk of being irrevocably harmed by an invasive species, that local and temporary ecosystem damage would be practically nothing.

We'll argue a bit and do nothing. The wasps are here to stay. Say goodbye to bees.

I'll try and explain the "anti-environmentalist" position as best I can.

Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem.

Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon.

Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect.

And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power.

This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people.

What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot.

The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking.

The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities.

But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.

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