It makes me wonder how much worse it actually is. Is looks like most of these were initially listed in the 80s, not too long after Endangered Species Act passed.
Is there some sort of time limit before they officially declare something extinct?
Lots of these species have been long gone. But the landowner of that 1944 sighting probably couldn't turn over a rock on his property without fines and lawsuits coming at him, at least until now.
ETA: If I'm remembering the stories right, either the last or one of the very last IBW sightings was doubted by officials, because the guy was a farmer or something and "not a scientist or expert".
Not getting them to pay him any attention, he went home, shot the breeding pair, and returned to the officials office with proof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pileated_woodpecker
btw, I'm not saying this particular bread is at risk, it is not, but for how long before they are in a similar situation?
Idk why people who can't ID fairly common birds get so certain in thinking they've ID'd a really really uncommon one, but they do.
The endangered species act wasn't enacted until 1973, so I think that landowner had plenty of opportunity to do what he wanted with his property.
I don't know how much "warning" was given for the endangered species act, or if that even matters, since land that's about to be worthless is already worthless.
Also, I have no idea what actually happened in this case. But to speculate/generalize:
IBW were already (obviously) extremely rare in 1944, so there would have been an intense amount of pressure preventing him from "doing" anything with the land, and in a rural, wooded area, there probably weren't many options at the time besides farming it, anyway.
If the guy would have known in 1944 that the endangered species act would be passed in 1973, you'd maybe have a point. But he wouldn't have known.
If the government suddenly told you tomorrow you couldn't sell your house, then claiming it's fair because you could have sold it all the way up to yesterday doesn't do you any good if you had no advanced knowledge of it. And if it were public knowledge, who would want to buy it anyway?
Your argument would have more weight if you'd give facts instead of speculating what could have happened.
What actually did happen?
40 years later a NWR was established on the land.
https://www.fws.gov/ivorybill/pdf/IBW%20Singer%20Tract%20Fac...
The details of how that happened, whether it was their choice, and how they were compensated for it are what matter.
But it sounds like he at least got to harvest his timber first, as far as not being interfered with.
Above, you made some speculative claims that the endangered species caused the property owner to experience increased hardship in using their land. Research in this thread that others have done has shown that wasn’t the case, and yet you persist in pitching speculatively that perhaps they had their property taken away.
What is the statement you’re trying to make, and can you do the legwork to suggest it’s plausible rather than just technically not-yet-disproven?
The original response was that if they were able to enjoy the use of their land before 1973, then there was no harm done.
1) Which doesn't mean the harm/hardship didn't come into play in 1973 once the law was passed. It did. The land would have lost significant value overnight by being declared endangered species habitat.
2) The research showed that the land is now, in fact, a National Wildlife Refuge. The government acquired it. That rarely happens in a fully voluntary way with full compensation, but I don't claim to know the circumstances here.
3) My speculation was merely that harm could have also been done before 1973, which has been turned into somewhat of a straw man.
3b) And I only included that speculation because it's applicable to the state of affairs today, because if the same thing happens to any generic landowner post-1973, it's no longer speculation. Your property value becomes significantly diminished.
>the landowner of that 1944 sighting
can be read in two ways. I assume you meant the person who owned that land when it was taken away, and that's how I read it. But it's not unreasonable to interpret it as the person who owned it at the time of the sighting.
Landowner discovers he has an endangered species, reports it, gets rewarded by having his property restricted, endangered species moves on (or dies), and restrictions remain indefinitely.
Or landowner doesn't report it, "disappears" the animals, and uses it or sells it while it still has value.
Sounds like in this case, it somehow managed to be a bit of both of those.
When your neighbor builds a house next to yours, that's not a taking because it's not the government doing it. If you wanted to control what got built on a piece of property that isn't yours, you should have bought it yourself, or entered into a contract with the property owner where they agree not to do that for a particular period of years and you compensate them for the restriction.
Governments should have to compensate property owners for zoning restrictions and the like. That makes perfect sense, for the same reason they have to compensate for any other takings -- because you're imposing a hardship on a specific innocent third party for a collective benefit, which is unreasonable. If there is to be a collective benefit then it should be paid for out of the collective fund and not disproportionately imposed on unconsenting innocent people at random. And if it turns out that the cost of compensating the property owners for the restriction you want to impose exceeds the value you hope to achieve by imposing it, that's some pretty good evidence that you shouldn't be doing it -- which is exactly why it should have to be paid out.
The fact that courts decided not to do that with zoning is the whole reason we have a housing shortage -- because now we've over-produced zoning restrictions since they can be imposed without accounting for their cost.
This sums up the American attitude to life better than anyone has ever done for me before.
And the purpose for environmental regulation is to discourage extinction in the same way. You are arguing black with one and white with the other...
> When your neighbor builds a house next to yours, that's not a taking because it's not the government doing it.
So when I'm overshadowed, my view is blocked, added noise etc. thats not 'taking'? Only governments can take not private citizens? I don't understand this view at all.
I agree zoning has been completely overdone but its definitely necessary unless you want your neighbour to be a 24-hour chemical plant.
> If there is to be a collective benefit then it should be paid for out of the collective fund and not disproportionately imposed on unconsenting innocent people at random.
Its going to have to be a huge fund to pay for all of this. Where's all this taxation going to come from to compensate me for not being able to build my chemical plant? or skyscraper?
> The fact that courts decided not to do that with zoning
I think you need to look deeper into the history of zoning. For me the new york zoning of 1916 is a good start in the United States - it was obviously needed and lobbied for by all the boroughs, as well as huge numbers of residents and landowners. Nobody could have had the money to pay for the compensation you ask for. The Euclid case I would tend to agree wasn't a proven good and has started a downhill trend.
You should also understand that land has historically always had a communal quality and this is growing more important in the 21st century as a scarce resort. Land use regulation of some kind has always co-existed with land ownership through history.
The difference is the proportionality of the hardship.
If you smoke cigarettes and there is a cigarette tax, you might pay an extra $5/pack, but so does everybody else. It's uniform. That amount might convince you to quit or smoke less, which is the whole idea.
With zoning or environmental rules, they're not uniform. It's not the case that anybody who cuts down a tree has to pay a tree tax. It's that one unlucky soul can't cut down any trees on his property, and the trees there are worth a million dollars, but somebody else is free to log their trees without constraint.
Notice that in the first case, compensating the target for the tax would make it totally ineffective. If you paid $5 in cigarette tax but then that was a taking and you got your $5 back, that wouldn't cause anybody to quit smoking.
Whereas if government had to pay the one guy with the land where the woodpecker lives a million dollars to not cut down his trees, that works fine. All it does is spread the million dollar cost of saving the woodpecker onto the whole tax base instead of unjustly imposing it on only that one guy.
And it forces you to do the accounting. So that if it turns out to cost a trillion dollars to save that one woodpecker, maybe it's not worth that much.
> So when I'm overshadowed, my view is blocked, added noise etc. thats not 'taking'? Only governments can take not private citizens? I don't understand this view at all.
Your view goes through the neighbor's property. So there are two ways to handle this.
One is, you have a right to the view. Then the person who wants to build a skyscraper first has to pay you for the right. But this works very poorly because you can see a skyscraper for miles and if any one person can stop it then everybody has the incentive to demand a million dollars. It becomes impossible to build anything anywhere.
The other is that it's the property owner's view and they just hadn't been charging you for it. If the neighbors don't want a skyscraper there then they can get together and buy the property and not build a skyscraper on it.
Mostly that still causes the skyscraper to be built, because in general the value of a skyscraper is greater than the value of the view, so people aren't willing to pay that much to preserve the view. But that's things working as intended. You want the thing that produces the most value. If people really want to preserve the view that bad, they have to pay the money.
> Its going to have to be a huge fund to pay for all of this. Where's all this taxation going to come from to compensate me for not being able to build my chemical plant? or skyscraper?
It only has to be a huge fund if you're over-using zoning restrictions so that it costs a lot to build certain things.
Suppose you say that 20% of the town is restricted to single family housing. Well, that's fine, if you want a single family house which isn't next to a chemical plant then you buy one there, and if you want to build a chemical plant then you can do it in the other 80% of the town. Since there are still plenty of places to build a chemical plant, the value of the properties where it's allowed is only negligibly higher than the value of the properties where it isn't, and that's the amount you have to compensate for the restriction.
But if you want to zone 90% of the town for single family housing and there is almost nowhere to build chemical plants and skyscrapers then the value of the land where you are allowed to build those things will be really high and so will the amount you have to compensate everyone else for the restrictions.
That would be completely unaffordable, but the solution isn't to pay out the money, it's to increase the number of locations where it's permissible to build chemical plants and skyscrapers so that you don't have to.
> it was obviously needed and lobbied for by all the boroughs, as well as huge numbers of residents and landowners.
Existing landowners like for zoning restrictions to exist on everybody else's property, because it increases scarcity. If you have a single family home and it's illegal to build high density condos anywhere in the city, the value of your home goes up, because you don't have to compete for home buyers with the condos.
Zoning restrictions on your land reduce the relative value of your land and increase the relative value of everyone else's land. So the profit maximizing strategy for a land owner is to have none on your own land and heavy restrictions on everyone else's. The next best, especially if you weren't planning to further develop your land anyway, is to have heavy restrictions on yours and everyone else's, because the increase in artificial scarcity is more than the value lost to the restrictions on your own property.
The cost of this is paid by anyone who wasn't already a property owner when the zoning restrictions were put into place, e.g. people who don't yet live in the city. This is one of the reasons they spread so rapidly -- the victims don't have a vote at the time when they pass, and to get a vote in order to remove them, you have to buy property at the artificially raised price, at which point you have the incentive to retain the restrictions and not lose the money you paid.
> You should also understand that land has historically always had a communal quality and this is growing more important in the 21st century as a scarce resort.
It's growing more scarce because of zoning restrictions. If it was easier to build skyscrapers then the supply of real estate in terms of available square footage would increase and ease the scarcity.
But what gets really interesting is re-introduction of endangered species, like with sandhill cranes being re-introduced to Louisiana (transplants from other surviving populations).
Is government introduction of an endangered species on/near private land, in a way that will certainly incur restrictions on that land (to protect said species), considered a "taking" under the constitution, or should it be?
More practically, as was the case with the sandhill crane, the government had to make concessions to land owners to get them on board and make the project politically viable.
Now they're protected, but it's a "special/experimental program" where farmers and other land owners aren't restricted in the ways they would be if they were still naturally occurring in that location.
(Of course it's still illegal to shoot them, but every few years someone manages to misidentify a 6 foot tall bird as a goose or something else legal to hunt.)
I'm not sure that's really a "perverse incentive".
By hiding, destroying, or not reporting the endangered species, they're going to develop the land and harm the species.
But if there were no endangered species act making them afraid of the endangered species being discovered, they'd have just developed the land anyway, so the end result is the same. But at least with the endangered species act, they face some legal repercussion if they are caught harming an endangered species.
The only fix I can see is making it a worthwhile rational decision: incentives for reporting endangered animals that are worth more than the value in developing the property. But that has it's own pitfalls and potentials for abuse.
Except many of the incentives explicitly state the goal is to protect habitat.
“How does a CCA or CCAA help species? These voluntary agreements reduce or remove identified threats to a species. Examples of beneficial activities include measures for restoring or enhancing habitat, expanding or establishing habitat…”
There aren't maps of some universal truth as to what habitat is protected for what species.
Many habitats aren't "known" and made protected until the endangered animal is actually discovered, on-site.
The land owner has incentive to prevent that discovery from happening, and therefore has incentive to kill the animals before they can be discovered on his property.
Perhaps, but you'd also have to consider Euclidian zoning to be a taking. And that'll never happen.
And land that is already zoned can't be rezoned without the current property owners consent.
So the only thing restricted / "taken" here, is if the property owner wants a re-zoning and is denied.
Yeah, being forced into the system at all is arguably a violation of rights, but I don't think requiring the land to be used in a consistent way (of the owners initial choosing) is at all comparable to not being allowed to use the land.
The owner never consents to endangered species restrictions. For zoning they do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_....
"The court ruled that speculation was not a valid basis for a claim of takings."
Check this report by John Stossel here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubIvbtzVoZM
Citation? Oh I see further down the chain you just made this up.
"Scientists do not declare extinctions lightly. It often takes decades of fruitless searching. About half of the species in this group were already considered extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global authority on the status of animals and plants. The Fish and Wildlife Service moved slower in part because it is working through a backlog, officials said, and tends to prioritize providing protection for species that need it over removing protection for those that don’t."
But it will never be the same! Maybe that land was in the middle of a communication axis, maybe it had the right fungus. If you move all the species around, it’s like when you move all the humans around: They become unrooted, and, ultimately, stress on their lives shows up as obesity or as socially disordered!
We need to stop colonizing more land. We need to limit population in a country.
We are too small and insignificant to make any true, lasting impact. Nature will heal itself given enough time, and new species will emerge.
Humans will feel the effects of climate change. The Earth will be fine.
You can kind of make an argument from entropy, an extinction cuts off our access to information about a species. But if that were the reason, taking samples for DNA and then killing off the animals would be okay. We care about extinction because we like nature and want to preserve it.
Climate change is a battle against ourselves, for ourselves. We will be the ones to pay the cost (potentially with our lives, or way of life at the very least); nature will persevere whether we win or lose.
Life will always find a way no matter how much humans (or ice ages, or asteroids, or whatever) screw up this planet.
Holocene Extinction?
I guess it depends on the scale we're talking about. If we're talking on a planetary scale and the grand scheme of things, humans are insignificant insects. However, if we stick closer to a relatively more tangible reality, humans are responsible for an ongoing mass extinction event and the climate change crisis.
Most of these wouldn't have been around in any sustainable number well before most of us were born. The real question is whether or not conservation efforts are working on species IDed in the 48 years since. I suspect not, given climate change is bigger than any single species.
Yes climate is changing but did it change that much since 80s?
What if it’s some pesticide? or some food packaging or something
For instance — white-tailed deer are growing exponentially, eating all the underbrush and outcompeting other animals, and they have no/few natural predators left.
I agree that not much has changed since the 80s, I think it's just catching up to us now.
Humans have ruined a lot of ecosystems that had a natural balance. Wolf culling being one of the most obvious examples of our cause and effect.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer#Population_a...
We're at 3x the total population that existed when europeans started settling here, and without an appropriate way to cull the herd I don't see that changing. We have milder winters (so no starvation), less interest in hunting, and again a lack of natural predators.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/01/molokais-fabled-axis-deer-...
I have no idea about exponential growth outside of Hawaii, though.
Yes, and worse, some (uninformed people) see the growth of any species as a positive sign that nature is bouncing back, or whatever. When in reality, ecosystems are hugely out of balance and the vast growth of one species is just a spasm as the system shakes itself apart. The knock-on effect of one species's sudden growth spurt may take decades to play out in the shadows, but it is almost assuredly not a good thing.
What if it was? I don't expect things to change much with corporate's death grip on the government.
Statements like this always imply that if the government ran the businesses (socialism) things like this wouldn't happen. But the evidence is it is worse. The USSR had major problems with their heavily polluting industries, which persist today.
There is plenty of middle ground, including restrictions on corporate election donations, and generally limiting corporate lobbyists access to our legislators.
Socialist governments produced tremendous environmental problems because even though the government consisted solely of altruistic, self-sacrificing, dedicated, incorruptible administrators, the people still needed food, clothing, and washing machines. And the government would try to provide them, rather than face mass starvation.
I am saying corporate interests are not aligned with those of the people at large, they are aligned exclusively with those of their shareholders. I do not want my country’s laws to reflect a small group’s desires to make money.
The notion that profit is the root of the problem is implying that removing the profit will resolve it. History shows that this never works.
Socialism produces more environmental degradation, because it cannot produce things as efficiently as free market businesses can. So, to make up the gap, they pay little attention to the environment.
There is a broad, non-linear spectrum between socialism and unrestricted corporate influence on government.
Here in Seattle, the Council created "democracy vouchers" paid by the taxpayer to give to the candidate of their choice. What it really is is the incumbents using taxpayer money to fund their campaigns. If you're not an incumbent, good luck getting any of those vouchers.
Literally no one thinks that or implied it in this conversation. What a non sequitur. I don't think you're even properly reading the comments you reply to.
There's a bunch of comments saying lobbying makes things worse than not having lobbying.
I don't see the ones saying that's the only source of problems?
I don't know if that's true. I also don't know if what replaced campaign contributions would be better or worse.
I do know that lobbying is itself overstated. In 1999, the GDP was 10 trillion. 3 billion, or 0.03%, of that went into politics, mostly from individual donors rather than companies [1]. If lobbying were an effective way to buy political influence, more companies would shell out. Maybe it's already happening under the table, though.
[1][pdf] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9409.pdf
Your notion that absent corporate lobbying, government control would work out in the best interests of everybody is utterly without foundation.
Your complaint about the profit motive being the root of evil also implies that without profit, things would be better. Without profit has been repeatedly tried. It never produces better results.
My father grew up a socialist. Then he joined the military, and spent years living on military bases. There is zero profit motive on a military base. But there was no end of ridiculous problems, enormous waste, glacial bureaucracy, etc. This thoroughly disabused him of his socialist notions.
For one small example, on a new base, furniture for the base housing had to be supplied. The base commander delegated the selection of furniture to his wife (men rarely care about these things). She picked all the furniture, confident in how great her taste was and what a big favor she was doing to the ignorant masses on base.
The servicemens' wives all hated that furniture. My dad would always have a huge laugh at how much they loathed it.
P.S. When my parents got married, my mom hated all of his furniture. He had to buy all new stuff to her specifications.
There are important functional distinctions between a government run enterprise, a government regulated enterprise and a completely unregulated enterprise.
There are different types of inefficiencies in heirarchical systems and market systems. Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games. Heirarchical systems have trouble routing around incompetence and corruption.
If you pay attention you'll notice that the systems that work best are hybrids that layer market and heirarchical systems.
While the army seems like a purely heirarchical system, it is really a hybrid system since interfaces heavily with the market systems which we call the military-industrial complex.
That has nothing to do with how things are run on a military base.
Besides, if you've got any evidence that the military worked better in a non-market system, like the USSR, please present.
> Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games.
Another word for that is "competition". Competition makes them efficient. Eliminating competition leads to gross inefficiency and incompetence, making things far worse than the duplication ever did.
It can, especially if poorly managed. However, there is a reason why most companies are heirarchical systems.
If markets were truely the "one true way to do things" you would see markets all the way down. That simply is not the case. In fact, instead we see that "vertical integration" can be extremely successful and can multiple companies linked purely by markets.
Similarly, you don't see very many successful truely free markets. It turns out that you need the rule of law and a regulating authority to minimize unproductive competition that would otherwise swamp the benefits of the productive competitive.
We don't want companies competing for sales by blowing up each other's stores. We want companies to compete for sales by making better products.
Deciding when and how to mix markets with heirarchical and other systems is extremely complicated and hard. But it is simple minded to pretend that pure markets are always the best solution when reality so clearly shows the benefits of hybrid systems.
It's been very successful everywhere it's been tried.
And yet, the military is one of last institutions that the American public still has faith in. It's almost as if people realize there can be many motives, beyond profit, that drive people to act in a certain way.
I'm fairly blown away on a regular basis by how otherwise smart people revert to utterly simplistic models of the world.
The back and forth like this would go on for a while.
Thoughts and prayers, ivory-billed woodpecker, thoughts and prayers.
There can be government regulation without reverting to socialism. There can also be systems of checks and balances to both the ills of unfettered free-market economics and government power structures.
Which pretty clearly makes the alternative socialism / communism, depending on how you want to define them.
Lobbying is about the right to petition the government; I don't see the direct line to socialism/communism, which is generally more concerned with the means of production. I don't think there is "clearly" a connection but rather one used to shoehorn a divisive and emotional topic.
Free markets do not imply being free to hurt others or destroy others' property. A proper function of government is to protect people and property.
For example, I would not ban gasoline. I would tax the carbon content of fuels to reflect their true cost to the environment.
There is a world of difference between Social Democratic (i.e. socialism) countries like Finland, Sweden, Norway for example and the USSR.
The hint is right there in the title, democratic.
The USSR never had a functioning democracy.
Norway pumps 20% of its GDP out of the ground.
As to being 'competitive in free markets', I would suggest that is more of a measure of capitalism than socialism.
Socialism is about equality and a better measure of equality would be something like 'standard of living'.
When you look at which countries lead the world on that measure it should come as no surprise Social Democratic nations dominate:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-...
Thus calling it "socialist" is a pretty gross error. Indeed the foreign minster of Denmark had to plead with uninformed Americans to please stop calling his nation "socialist" when it is a social democracy - this was back when Bernie was running as a democratic socialist and his schtick to try to normalize socialism was by saying Denmark had it which lead to this mess of misinformation.
The idea of social democracy is that you have social welfare programs. That is, you tax private industry and give the money to people for things like pensions (which is exactly what Bismarck did, and this basic model has not changed since it was developed in 19th C Germany).
Socialism is the idea that private ownership of the means of production be banned (thus you cannot own your own business). In communism, all private property is banned (thus you don't even own your clothes, or car, or apartment).
Obviously the utopia of banning all private property was impractical, but seizing factories was more practical. Thus even those nations that were controlled by communist parties officially declared that they had not reached communism, they were in the state of socialism, and were working towards, or "building" communism. This led to many jokes in the Eastern Bloc about when the building of communism would be completed and how could it be done with all the shortages, etc. That is why all the communist nations called themselves socialist. Now you know the difference between communism and socialism.
What about socialism versus democracy. Here the problem is the enormous amount of totalitarian government control needed to organize production based on political concerns rather than concerns of price -- e.g. market concerns. Even if you are just a painter, you need paint. How do you get the paint? You have to requisition it based on some political justification. Now the government needs to plan how much paint is produced each year. Then you need to plan how many paint buckets and paint brushes. It goes on and on. There were mathematicians working full time on these linear programming problems in the soviet union, just trying to figure out how to plan their economy. Imagine all the inputs you need, imagine writing them down, and requisitioning them, as part of a big five year plan.
This requires a vast array of secret police and government micromanagement and that is what makes socialism not free. Whereas the genius of Bismarck is that he understood that workers just wanted pensions, and did not care so much about political organization of the process of production. So it's a lot easier to tax private enterprise -- something that was done even in ancient Mesopotamia -- rather than trying to control the process of production. Thus social welfare states are more "free" than socialist states, and no socialist state can be free, it must be micromanaged by the Party. Nevertheless they all called themselves Democratic. E.g. the Democratic Republic of Germany.
Thus we have these two types of economies, the social welfare state and the "democratic" socialist state, but they are not gradations on the same scale, they are two rival approaches to the problem of providing a basic safety net for the people.
In one approach you do it by taxing and giving people money who then go out and buy what they need on the open market, and in the other by political administration of production and then political distribution of production to those groups you believe "deserve" the output the most.
It is not two ends of the same scale.
In several cases, it was a combination of human activity and (relatively) fragile initial population conditions. 11 of the species are native to Hawaii and Guam, and when human expansion puts pressure on your ecosystem, there's nowhere to move to. One of the fish species lived in one particularly slow-flowing section of one river.
When your whole universe is one island, there's a lot of things humans can do that would render 100% of your habitat unusable.
Who exactly do you believe should be studying causes of species extinction but is not doing it?
For most of these creatures they only existed in one particularly small region or area. The San Marcos gambusia, for instance, historically only lived in a single 1km stretch of the San Marcos River. Species with that tiny of an area can be driven extinct by a single bad weather event or epidemic. Or because some real estate developer decides they want to build a couple apartments. It doesn't even necessarily have to be something big. It's unfortunate, but sadly something like the San Marcos gambusia would probably have gone extinct within a few centuries, human activity or not, unless it was able to adapt to expand its range.
While climate change is definitely something to be concerned about, it is not, currently, the main driver of extinction events like this. The far bigger cause is more direct human activity, like poaching and land development.
The funny thing about Hawaii though, is that there are only two or three (extremely isolated) places that remain with any true Hawaiian plant habitat, because Polynesians brought their own plants with them that almost universally outcompeted the native plants.
Birds on islands are some of the quickest animals to specialize and differentiate into new species.
Which makes Hawaii incredibly interesting, from an island biogeography perspective.
Something as simple as the fact that no mosquitos made it to Hawaii until Captain Cook accidently introduced them, means no native fish, frogs, birds, lizards, or anything that specialized in eating them.
Now extrapolate that to wiping out all the native flora and replacing it.
That so much biodiversity remains in Hawaii today ought to actually give us some comfort in nature's ability to quickly adapt to significant change.
But what's interesting is: the same possum is extremely endangered in it's native habitat in Australia because of so many introduced predators.
So do you go to war to kill the invasive species, even if that contributes to their extinction?
Does it matter that as an invasive species, they might cause multiple species of birds to go extinct?
Lots of interesting ecological, biological, and ethical things to consider.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/insects-pa-state-wire-ap-top-news...
Though probably in the next couple of decades we'll be seeing waves of extinctions caused by global warming.
I.e. look at e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9922189,-97.664741,145755m/d... , and it's just patches of fields no matter which way you go for hundreds of miles. Areas that once was wild forrest (or praerie), and housing numerous of of species having enough space to live and reproduce.
Give it some more years, perhaps a few hundred, and e.g. this https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9922189,-97.664741,145755m/d... , will look much like the above map, with fields for hundreds of miles in all direction. With it goes the home of many, many species.