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Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

The conservation biology world has some interesting philosophical problems to wrestle with.

On one hand, despite the best efforts, biodiversity loss is accelerating. We're losing habitats and species faster than earth has seen in 60 million years. Ecosystems are so degraded that they require intervention.

On the other hand, what sort of intervention is appropriate? Are we trying to conserve things as is today, or restore to a vision of the pre-industrial landscale, or the pre-agricultural landscape? Or do we try to build a new ecosystem to handle anticipated climate shifts? Do we introduce new species? Do we focus on all biomass, just flora or fauna, insects, fungi too? Do we bring back extinct keystone species like the mammoth?

There is no ethical compass that can tell us the "right" intervention.

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"On one hand, despite the best efforts, biodiversity loss is accelerating. We're losing habitats and species faster than earth has seen in 60 million years. Ecosystems are so degraded that they require intervention."

If an alien was looking at the earth they would conclude that humans are actively trying to destroy the eco-systems we live in for just a tiny bit more profit than we would have made otherwise.

I don't aliens that could come here would recognize profit as something real. They would see us destroying the world to eat meat. To pointlessly travel at high speeds. To drive cars around in pointless errands. To collect pointless knick knacks for social stature.

The penguin gives a stone to his mate. The human buys an F150 to attract social attention and a mate. To a hypothetical alien species, the gap between the intelligence of these two species is not large.

Collectively, we act in accordance with our biology.

There's good evidence to suggest that most mammals and other K-selected species (long lived with few offspring) will always expand to fill the productive capacity of their niche, and keep doing so until negative feedback pressure kicks in.

Consider the reindeer on St Matthews Island. 20 of them were introduced in 1944 and left to fend for themselves. With plenty of food and no natural predators, by 1963 there were 6000 reindeer (300x population boom!). By 1966 the population had dropped to 42. By 1980, no reindeer left.

Mammals seem particularly prone to this "eat everything is sight and multiply" strategy. Which works, until it doesn't - the herd migrates, adapts, or the population collapses. The problem with the human enterprise is that we've gotten really darn good at engineering solutions to these negative feedback pressures. There's nothing (yet) that can restrain our growth. Which means we're in a St. Matthew's Reindeer situation - dwindling resource base, exploding population, and nowhere left to go.

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