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Comment by macinjosh | Hacker News Reader

I don't really care. Environmentalists will never happy until the world's population is so low that they feel like 'nature' is unaffected by humans. In reality that means they want the world to themselves and anyone with any other interests to be plant fertilizer. There haven't been a specific kind of fish there for _eighty_ years and it hasn't impacted human life so why do we need to spend tax dollars to have them there now? It is complete lunacy based on a fetish for a 'natural' state that isn't real. News flash, humans are natural and I don't loathe them like some environmentalists do. People are starving and dying of viruses (both 'natural' states I'll add) but we need to spend our time and money building a fucking ladder for a fish? I speak truth even though I will be downvoted into oblivion. Worth it.

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We are biological creatures, and part of the biome.

All of the artificial things we've created do nothing to sustain our existence, only to facilitate our connection with the biome.

If, in the process of facilitating this connection, we eliminate the biome's ability to sustain itself, most of us will be dead very quickly.

That's one of the reasons people care so much.

Another reason, if you suspend your human-centric worldview, is seeing other creatures as our relatives on the biological tree of live, admitting their ability to have feelings and desires and suffering, and caring for their plight and happiness alongside ours.

We don't have to kill the biome to sustain ourselves. In fact, the opposite is true.

Who are you responding to? Nobody in the article or the comments is advocating for reducing the human population.

Besides that, it's obviously not zero sum. Increasing the salmon population does not decrease the human population. Arguably, in the long run, what is good for the salmon is also good for the human.

Take a look at this: https://imgur.com/gallery/9v4HV2p

There are nearly 8 billion humans on Earth.

Can you see the disparity?

And here is a slice of the result: https://xkcd.com/1338/

If you feel like learning more about „The Great Forgetting“, read this: The Once and Future World, by J B MacKinnon (http://jbmackinnon.com/books.html). Contact me if you want the ebook.

I'm curious why someone would downvote this. Care to write a proper reply instead? I'm stating facts - why do you disagree?

I suspect it's being downvoted because the pixel resolution on the various species included have little to do with how healthy their populations are or are not. For example, it's simply impossible for large predators like tigers to exist by the billions. In short, the presentation is a pure play to emotions with little regard to any actual facts.

Thanks, but I disagree! Most of the pixelized animals number in the hundreds or thousands - horrifyingly low. What diversity and ‚culture‘ can exist within those numbers? There can be a ‚healthy‘ population of 1, but it's still extinction for the species.

I wish the downvoters would have the courage to speak up.

> There are nearly 8 billion humans on Earth.

Yes, and there's roughly a quadrillion Cyclothone on Earth, a vertebrate fish with 13 species. [0]

That's 1,000,000 billion fish vs. 8 billion humans: the fish are winning the population game, and it's not even close.

Furthermore, human population projections cap us out around 15 billion in the next century because birth rates go down as population increases—we are naturally self-limiting, like every other species on earth.

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

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