Global trade killed bananas? Without it you would not know bananas exists.
Would you rather ban all unprocessed food imports and eat only local fruits and vegetables? Limited by season, soil, water and probably overpriced
Biodiversity is an intrinsic aspect of ecosystem stability. The earth's functioning ecosystem is literally necessary for life on earth. All that "free" value in the form of plants and animals that produce our food, photosynthesizing organisms that produce air, decomposers that produce soil, etc is the result of coevolution of diverse organisms. When that system becomes unstanble or unbalanced then mass extinction follows.
The human economic ecosystem is built on top of a functioning biosphere. You can't just replace what the biosphere provides with industry or trade.
There is benefits, but there is also cons.
I’d say the bigger issue is the commodification of corn syrup and reductionism of product for addiction rather than trade itself.
Please point me to alabamas vast wine country or nuts or avacados. Just because Alabama theoretically has potential doesn’t mean it has everything California does.
Alabama Ag is alive and well. Not everything is avocadoes or California nuts.
No one was saying that other than you.
Without more qualifiers, that misses the point. Most local crops are still big ag varieties. The "local" crops you buy are likely the same ones sold in grocery stores anywhere in the US because so many things are grown in California.
But there are some things that can only be grown locally, because they aren't suited to shipping or because they have short shelf lives. And there are lots of varieties that are not on big ag's buy list, so large operations are very unlikely to grow them.
Even corn (which you mention) and soybeans need to be certain varieties to be turned into everything from high fructose corn syrup to the "shrimp shapes" made of soy I remember from grade school. They are part of the problem the GP is talking about, not the problem instead . . .
Big ag forces out diversity in crops and, frankly, forces a blander palate on the populace, who doesn't know better anymore.
> Biodiversity does not directly benefit everyone
Jfc. Plants aren't just for food. Lots of medicines are derived from plants. As indigenous people dwindle from the planet, their knowledge of useful plants disappears and their potential becomes lost on us.
https://www.thoughtco.com/drugs-and-medicine-made-from-plant...
And if they did it then there's absolutely no reason to think that modern pharma can't produce the same knowledge. And the whole assumption that there is a body of invaluable knowledge somewhere, held by indigenous people but somehow unavailable to modern science is very strange.
The plants that are being neglected aren't unknown, they are just not as useful
> Jfc. Plants aren't just for food.
Nobody said they were. Stop inventing strawman arguments
> indigenous people dwindle from the planet, their knowledge of useful plants disappears and their potential becomes lost on us.
Source required. What important plant knowledge is being lost?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putumayo_genocide
When rubber industrialists wiped out the people living in the area, those that remained lost generational knowledge. Ethnobotanists like Shultes explored the Amazon afterwards.
There's even a movie made on the subject of exploring the Amazon for medicines with Sean Connery, Medicine Man. Also, the more recent Embrace of the Serpent.
Just a bonkers nonsense statement, I am stunned by this perspective. Do you think you could live in an antiseptic paper envelope? Biodiversity doesn't "benefit" anyone so much as it comprises, entirely, the world from which we're inextricable.
Absolutely bonkers modernist anthropocentrism.
Is it though? There's been several extinction events that wiped out the biodiversity of the planet and they were all natural too. We might be inextricable from the world but we can and do manipulate it to our benefit.
I don't understand what is the problem with anthropocentrism. Given the chance, I'd prefer more biodiversity for sure, but if it's objectively bad for human beings I think human interests should come first. It's just that the current cycle of overproduction and global warming isn't benefiting humans either. That's not the fault of human-centered thinking, it's the fault of profit-centered short-term thinking.
But global trade is helping them to become richer by selling avocados to americans. Growing an avocado is devastating to local biome, but I bet people would rather destroy it than live in poverty.
I have never seen an edible chestnut tree and really don't care about how many species of them are all over the world.
I'm not talking about antiseptic envelope, it is not related to biodiversity. It is sad that biodiversity is decreasing, but we can live with smaller amount of species on the planet.
Will you fill the difference if there will be 20 instead of 60 species of ash tree?
It can result in “health” via symbiotic relationships, just as much as it can result suffering, war and hardship via the introduction of pests and diseases.
The point is it’s daft throw around biodiversity as some kind of absolute idea of virtue. It is not equitable with “goodness”.
Some species help to transmit diseases over long distances. Some diseases cause extinction of some species. Nothing is new on the face of earth.
If you think that humans have some sort of a mission to preserve biodiversity then it's just arrogance, nothing more.
If you think that it's optimal problem-solving for humans to just ignore any and all evidence that they would be healthier if they interacted differently with their environment at scale, that's just arrogance.
It's absolutely nothing more, although I predict you'll keep assigning primacy to your gut feelings because engaging in thorough analysis would involve admitting you were wrong, which would make you feel bad.
If the goal is the prosperity of humanity then I'm all for it. However, if that's the case two things must be noted beforehand:
1) This is an anthropocentric approach. The parent comment seemed to imply that anthropocentrism is bad for some reason, so it might be an issue on your end too.
2) Prosperity of humanity as a goal is at odds with biodiversity. I don't regret the extermination of smallpox for one thing. I also appreciate for example that we largely replaced natural ecosystems with agricultural monocultures that yield more tons of food per square kilometer. This is great, we won't be able to sustain 8 billions of humans otherwise.
If you agree with these points then this means that we agree on principle. The rest are implementation details that can be figured out. E.g. your question of whether "would be healthier if they interacted differently with their environment at scale" -- probably yes, there are many things that can be improved.
I roundly refute this frankly riduculous assertion. It shows a grave lack of understanding of the actual mechanisms that maintain the natural world in a state fit for human habitation.
You may argue that at some point we have to stop and I agree. However this doesn't contradict the fact that up until now reducing biodiversity (e.g. by replacing forests with monoculture field crops) worked out extremely well.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=biodiversity+and+human+...
my mitochondria, and gut flora, politely disagree