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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

All the vultures suddenly died because farmers began treating their animals with a new drug that was harmless to the animals, but which was deadly to vultures that ate animals who had been treated with it. After all the vultures died there was less efficient scavenging of dead animals, more polluted water, and more disease.

The delicate balance of Nature was upset.

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> The delicate balance of Nature was upset.

Fascinating stuff. A subtle build on this that just struck me: "The delicate balance of Nature moved to a new equilibrium point that involved a lot more human deaths"

I think it's interesting because it strikes me that Nature is actually a pretty resilient system, it's just that a lot of its stable-states are hostile to human life, to varying degrees. Then again, maybe I'm painting too much of an anthropocentric picture.

It is incredible how humans are incredibly resilient, but also very fragile.

The collective is resilient, it's individuals that perish.

The collective perishes, it's individuals that persist.

> it's just that a lot of its stable-states are hostile to ~~human~~ life

FTFY. We humans are part of nature too.

FTFY: here’s a nature’s nature article on nature (pun intended) [0]. There’s 4 main definition which are exclusive to each others and guess what, your “fix” is within the same definition as GP:

> The whole universe, as it is the place, the source and the result of material phenomena (including man or at least man’s body)

Furthermore I think his point wasn’t about the definition of nature but instead going further on the classic argument “nature will be fine”. Of course universe will always be fine! But your descend may not be part of it. So yes, we should preserve the current equilibrium to preserve ourselves and that’s what this article is all about.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0390-y#Tab1

I'd add a couple of points:

1. Nature isn't an 'equilibrium' and doesn't have 'stable states'. It's a constantly changing complex system that can produce catastrophic changes without any external triggers.

2. What people view as 'nature' is often itself a situation that humans have created. For example in this post the preexisting situation was vultures feeding on livestock, but the vultures weren't doing that before humans were around.

Also vulture were probably consuming other mammals before human replace most of them with livestock.

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline

> "The delicate balance of Nature moved to a new equilibrium point that involved a lot more human deaths"

As OscarCunningham has pointed out, nature does not have a balance or an equilibrium. That's the concept of "evolution".

This drug (diclofenac) is partly covered in Arundhati Roy's novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness".

More here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/aru...

And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis

> less efficient scavenging of dead animals, more polluted water, and more disease

The first one, yes, but for the others isn’t it kind of hard to evaluate the counter factual? How do we tease this apart from all the other factors contributing to polluted water and disease?

> The delicate balance of Nature was upset

So what ? If Nature is upset you can submit it to Cell or Science. If its of interest to the medical community JAMA or Lancet might pick it up. At a 5% significance level, h-index of Nature is not that much different from these other peer reviewed publications.

Not even that delicate, usually quite robust really. The interventions humans throw at it are just too massive.

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