Loss of biodiversity is a good indicator that something wrong is happening but biodiversity in and of itself is not a particularly interesting aim. The mechanism at play in nature will ensure a return to diversity if things are left to themselves.
Animals evolved to keep each other in check. If you remove one animal, but not its prey, then the prey can cause an even greater loss of biodiversity by excessive proliferation. In the case of Yellowstone’s wolves, their absence allowed elk to proliferate. Elk then ate too much vegetarian, which prevented forests from developing. The lack of forest lead to a decline in song bird and beaver populations. The decline in beavers lead to a decline in dams, which removed key habitats for other animals.
To flip your question on its head: the reintroduction of wolves was clearly beneficial for Yellowstone. What is the argument against reintroducing the wolf, or reintroductions in general?
Ranching is a very different activity which in the west usually involves a cheap grazing lease on thousands of acres of public land... it is the governments land and they balance the concerns of all stakeholders.
Or your city could provide you with better services now that they have five extra millions each year. Better roads would allow you to move your cattle faster or to export your products better. So you lose some, but win some also.
Or maybe you will not need it, now that the new local restaurants opened want to buy your meat to feed the tourists. More competence and lower expenses to put your product in the market will allow you to sell your meat at a better price.
Tourists will want to buy souvenirs also. Maybe in stores owned by members of your family.
Your city will attract researchers. Science has a curious proven effect; each single researcher position creates tens of auxiliary jobs around to sustain their research.
In resume, the young adults in your city will have a range of new opportunities to settle, work and start a live project in their own city if they would desire so.
Or you can forget all of this and keep your cow
Be honest, do you really liked so much that stupid cow?
Wolves had proven again and again that produce more money that they remove. Had proven also that can save human lives reducing car collisions and that they positively protect agriculture and fixate water sources in the area.
Why should a few farmers (I agree that I should be more precise and use ranchers instead) force their will over the whole population and block the development of a local area?. Isn't this a democracy?. Who are this people to decide that their village can't receive tourism and that everybody in the area must be a rancher or migrate?
Environmental services aren't free. Some resources will need to be sacrificed to keep the machine working, and in any case cattle owners can reduce their losses to an acceptable level by several traditional and well tested ways.
To reply to your new point, an important part of democracy is the right of self-determination, and people get very upset when faraway majorities impose their wills despite the local majority disagreeing. Consider Catalonia, or other independence movements throughout history, or any number of instances of imperialism throughout history: should a national majority be able to force a local majority to give up their way of life / national independence / raison d'etre? That's how local residents who've been there for 20, 30, 60 years feel about outsiders coming in to diversify the economy or introduce wolves to eat their lambs -- why are the outsiders coming in and imposing their negatives on their apparently perfectly good way of life?
You need to check again the definition of democracy. This self-determination fairy tale has been repeated a thousand times but is still false.
> should a national majority be able to force a local majority to give up their way of life / national independence / raison d'etre?
Hum, yeeees? This is exactly the point of having a central government making the laws for the entire nation
Why? Because is their country also. Is --their-- land also.
They have exactly the same right to enjoy a well adjusted National park as any local
In the rest of the West (CA, OR, WA, ID, MT) there have been basically zero wolf reintroductions recently. Wolf packs are spreading naturally back to their historical range, and agencies are instead focused on tracking populations and working with local communities to regulate hunting, protect the livelihoods of ranchers, etc.
Also the wolves keep mountain lions, coyotes and other predators in check (through competition and even predation) and wary. I suspect mountain lion encounters in California will go way down if the wolves ever come back.
In the long run. But in the long run, we are all dead. And considering the amount of time it takes for a new species to evolve, not only are we all dead, but so are the next hundred thousand generations of our offspring. This is a personal view, but to me the return to diversity in a few million years is pretty meaningless.
Biodiversity is a goal in itself, for several reasons.
Most selfishly, the greater variety of life, the more raw genetic material there is for humanity to put to use, and the more survival strategies there are for us to learn about. Things like enhancing crop yields, nutrition, and disease resistance. Food, medicines and medical research are just the most obvious practical benefits.
Again, a personal view, but to me diversity is also aesthetically pleasing. Diversity provides interest and a richness to life that combats monotony and boredom. I also find it pleasing to think I might leave a place more varied and interesting than I found it.
Increasing the range of a species, increases its resilience to extinction. That has to be balanced against any negative effects on other parts of the ecosystem (everthing has gotta eat...). Introducing a species to somewhere new has a chance of being quite harmful, but reintroducing a species to somewhere it recently became extinct much less so. It may perturb the new equilibrium (if a few decades is enough time for an equilibrium to establish), but is pretty unlikely to be harmful to biodiversity. It is more likely to be helpful. The recovery of pine martens in Ireland has helped the recovery of red squirrels, for example (admittedly at the bloody expense of the invasive grey).
Where I live in Southern Arizona, re-population efforts for bighorn sheep have been successful in the mountain ranges near cities (Tucson). Access to these ranges from nearby "naturally" populated areas (50+ mile distances) requires crossing the interstate, fenced in train tracks, ranches, and extensive urban development. Since their extermination from certain areas, this has not happened naturally (and is arguably not possible). I think similar arguments could be made for the Mexican Wolf population in the southwest.
I agree in principle that ecosystems will re-equilibrate on their own, but given the current state of human development certain areas would remain off-limits for various animals without human intervention, maybe leading to certain species or subspecies becoming extinct. I'm no wildlife biologist but would defer to one on this topic.
https://www.crazynauka.pl/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/microso...
And that's in a country with 120 people per square kilometer compared to 36 people per square kilometer in US.
Matter of regulation.
That is an extreme case, but sometimes the best way to correct a human-caused error is a human-caused solution. Nature will always find an equilibrium, but probably not an equilibrium that works well for us unless we nudge it. Reintroducing sparrows is clearly better than accepting the natural equilibrium of "locusts are everywhere and we can't grow food anymore".
Meddling is not fixing things we have broken. It's just altering things again but in a way we find intellectually pleasing. I don't think trying to bring back ecosystems to their previous state as inherent value. I don't value nature for nature sake generally speaking. That's a rich urban dweller idea of morality. My issue with the human impact on Earth - climate change and what it does to the biosphere - is that it's unsustainable and will have a massive impact on our way of life if nothing is done.
I don't really care about wild mammals in Europe outside of their rise being a signal that other things are doing better.
OK, I am sympathetic to the suspicion that reintroductions of European mammals might just be a highly-visible gesture aimed at our own enjoyment of "nature", rather than fixing of conserving the fundamentals. But plenty of people do value nature for the sake of nature - so there's just a values difference there.
But attention-grabbing species do make progress visible, and visible indicators of system health are very useful. Larger animals and apex predators can also have larger impacts on an ecosystem, both positive and negative. For example, it is often argued that the reintroduction of wolves to Scotland would reduce the artificially high population of red deer, which in turn would help the recovery of forests and the rich ecosystem they support.
We're not going to start closing up our cities to let animals come back. But we can take steps to make the environments around them more hospitable: bridges under highways, reserved areas for wildlife. Once these are in place, some reintroductions to kick-start the process makes more sense.
A lot of the animals being reintroduced were key parts of the ecosystem before they were eliminated in areas, and their absence can lead to unexpected imbalances. Reintroductions makes sense in this context. Or at least, introducing another animal which fills a similar niche.
Yes, but that takes hundreds of thousands of years, for mistakes we made on the order of a hundred years ago up to now.
And we need working ecosystems now or too many species will go extinct, then we are in danger too and it will become many millions of years before something similar is back.
There's nothing wrong with recovering ecosystem. The Amazon forest was man-made, for example. It doesn't make it any less important.
Was it?
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0122njp [2] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Amazonia-1492%3A-Prist...