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Comment by sghiassy | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky. When we say that reintroducing wolves led to ecological improvements, what’s our reference point? Are we comparing it to Yellowstone 100 years ago? 500? Pre-human settlement?

Ecological baselines are inherently arbitrary—there’s no objectively “correct” state of nature to return to. The systems we call degraded are often just different, not necessarily worse. So when we talk about progress in this context, we’re really measuring against a value-laden idea of what we think nature should look like, not some neutral truth.

That doesn’t mean rewilding is bad—but I do think we should acknowledge that we’re shaping nature to fit human values, not restoring it to some pure, original state.

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Instead of thinking of this as a benefit of wolves (specifically), you can view it as an advantage of having something in their ecological niche. In this case, the niche is 'apex predator.' It's a niche which is repeated across pretty much every ecosystem. They keep populations of their prey species down, preventing overpopulation and the many indirect problems that come with it.

Perhaps without an apex predator the prey species would evolve out of the overpopulation problem eventually. However, species that evolve with a predator tend to reproduce more quickly, which helps avoid being completely wiped out by the predator - when the population constraint impose by the predator is removed, the prey population explodes, leading to particularly pronounced problems.

(Perhaps if we had to contend with some homo-vampirus, we wouldn't have global climate change...)

Overall, humans already interfered in the shape of the ecosystem by removing wolves. You're correct that there's no objective 'correct' state for an ecosystem. But it is worthwhile to help balance ecosystems, especially when they have been unbalanced by our own interventions. Without restoration work, we're headed to a world with humans, livestock, and the few species that manage to live on our margins.

> species that evolve with a predator tend to reproduce more quickly

As an example of this, a healthy female rabbit will produce anywhere from 20 to 50 additional rabbits in a single year. There have been many documented explosions of rabbit populations due to lack of natural predators which have caused significant ecological crisis.

They've evolved to reproduce so quickly because they are the "food" in the food chain. Without the predators above them, they will _eventually_ stop reproducing so quickly because they are only killing themselves by doing so.

It's worth puzzling about the mechanisms that would lead a fast reproducing species to slow down...

My best guess is that internal competition for scarce resources leads to territoriality, which in turn might select for better resource utilization. Including reduced reproduction, which creates more resource competition. But this doesn't feel super obvious.

Otherwise, we have plague and starvation acting as stand ins for apex predators, which isn't much fun... And apparently isn't generally enough to reduce environmental externalities from over population.

The term of art for everything that includes those factors is "carrying capacity" [0].

It's not as much that the fertility necessarily drops, but that under some conditions the death rate equals or overtakes the birth rate.

And the system is dynamic. So conditions changes, as in some of your examples, even just because the population grows. EG scarcer resources.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity

That is not necessarily the case. Certainly, overpopulation can cause die-offs…

However, species don’t evolve as a unit. Which genomes are most likely to survive a die-off?

All else being equal?

The ones with the most copies. So not the ones that are holding back on reproductions.

What causes them to stop reproducing is the destruction of their natural environment on which they feed on. Which is what you want to avoid.

> we're headed to a world with humans, livestock, and the few species...

It looks more and more like we're headed toward a world where we'll regenerate extinct species in labs; and grow our steaks in meat factories. If we no longer need cattle farms, it's possible we'll vote to preserve more lands.

I’m usually the last person to take this side of a discussion but I don’t see how feasible since:

  - the existence species regeneration does not imply the incentivize to regenerate and manage the vast majority of extinct species  
  - lack of gene samples for vast majority of species  
  - we don’t and are not very close to having a viable model for environment and species fitness so we can’t accurately model what specifies to regenerate  
  - new species populations have to be managed before and after initial release 
  - land and labor capital investment

All completely correct.

It has been extremely difficult to reintroduce functionally extinct species (ie, regenrate populations in zoos, and then reintroduce them to their original habitat). The animal culture piece is really big.

But probably the biggest issue is that, in almost all cases, the problems that led to extinction in the first place - lack of habitat, poaching, etc - rarely get better with time.

Is there any evidence this has any traction, is actually feasible (the reintroduction part), and is not merely a publicity stunt for some biotech startups?

I think a more realistic point of view is that once a species is gone, it's truly gone, and that we should worry about keeping alive those still existing, because there's no "undo" button.

i've always wondered how these plans to bring back extinct species intend to copy the non-genetic factors that made a species what it was.

early life experience learning from parents/siblings are essential for knowing how to properly behave in their environment.

That, and also how they expect to keep any species they manage to "bring back" alive (use of quotes because even that is questionable; the recent stunt with the "direwolves" didn't really create direwolves).

Which ecosystem are these species going to inhabit? How can we keep them alive when other currently existing species are at risk or going extinct?

I hope so. In the meantime, we should try to preserve as much natural genetic information as possible, even assuming we can vet the species back.

> homo-vampirus

https://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

The book is great “what if?” in several directions at once including human vampires.

  (Perhaps if we had to contend with some homo-vampirus, we wouldn't have global climate change...)

Humans—like ants—seem to be their own primary predator ;(

“Homo homini lupus”

That’s a strong point. Thanks for the thought

Biodiversity, biomass, and ecosystem robustness are all objective measures.

Human settlement has a tendency to reduce all of them. The story here isn't that reintroducing wolves established some kind of human-centric value system, it's the surprisingly complex and far-reaching effects of just one change in the ecosystem, particularly the re-introduction of a top predator.

Note also that absent extinction altogether, without humans actively killing wolves, their numbers most likely would have recovered eventually, probably with similar effects. In essence, we just accelerated a type of healing process that would naturally take place when our enormous ecological footprint is removed.

This is a great question. We've restored over 20 acres of native ecosystems at our farm in the PNW, and one thing that's clear is that some conservationists are attempting to essentially create a painting of a particular moment in time. Others are more pragmatic and flexible — not seeing all non-native elements as "bad".

I think where I come down is trying to remove elements that threaten to take over and destroy the balance. Or restore elements that will help re-establish balance. And it doesn't have to all be "native".

And there are some natives like poison oak that I'll get rid of because they're obnoxious and will ruin people's experience of nature. And people's experience with nature matters because that's a big part of how you win people over and get them to support nature restoration work.

What is "balance"?

Equilibrium, steady state, stable, self healing/correcting, sustainable, resilient to disturbance...

dynamic state where the interactions between living organisms and their environment are in harmony, allowing for the continuation of essential ecological functions.

I often hear this argument, "oh, but how far can we possibly go??! But deer are pretty?!", especially from farmers and grouse shooting estates here in the UK.

It's wild, because it's so easy to measure and asses: an ecological desert, dying ecosystem, rich in single overgrazing specie is unequivocally bad.

Rich, lush ecosystems sustaining great biodiversity and ecologically unique features (eg chalk streams or temperate rainforests in the UK) are good. Killing everything for the sake of one specie: Bad.

More on that if your position is honest: https://www.monbiot.com/2025/05/12/the-commoner-kings/

> But deer are pretty?!

Deer are simply tall, disease-carrying vermin--basically rats with long legs.

They eat everything. They multiply like bloody rabbits. They host a ton of diseases--especially when overpopulated (effectively everywhere that doesn't have lots of wolves or big cats).

I really don't understand why we don't hunt them aggressively when there is no apex carnivore to keep them under control.

Adult humans are often infected with various forms of the Bambi-Rudolph disease complex. Usually acquired in childhood, and very difficult to cure.

Invasive species in Australia, but it was introduced to hunt.

And hunters aren't sadly dumb enough to wipe the species out. They whittle down their numbers, and then leave them alone to repopulate.

Leading to my shock when I wrote off my car by hitting a deer, instead of a kangaroo as god intended.

Hmm. I live among deer. They're fairly pleasant creatures and interact with other species such as magpies and house cats. We do have pumas and a few human hunters, and high speed motor vehicles, possibly the odd wolf here and there although I've never see one. Over 25 years I haven't noticed an increase in their population.

Oh yeah, but I'm talking about the UK. All the big predators, cats, wolves, have been eradicated. Hell, even bears and boars.

It's this bad.

Indeed. For the UK in particular you clearly can't have "What it was without people" because that's far too long ago, there aren't records so we'd only be guessing. The New Forest - near me - was built about a thousand years ago, it's not "supposed" to be like that, it was built on purpose and it takes considerable maintenance to keep it that way, felling trees, managing trails, maintaining bridges and so on. Things like "The pigs eat acorns, that way the ponies don't eat the acorns and die†" could not possibly work without humans managing the forest. Left to their own devices the pigs would destroy that forest in a few years, and then the ponies die too, humans allow pigs out for a set period, to eat lots of acorns, then bring them all back by law.

We could try to build what was there before the forest, but it would be extremely disruptive to all the people who live there, and what for? The Forest isn't very useful today, but it's pretty and we know it's stable, and it has some uses, we grow some trees there, we farm some pigs and ponies, tourists come to see it - there are many worse options.

† Acorns are poisonous. Don't eat acorns without proper preparation. Unless you're a pig or a squirrel or something. In which case how are you reading this note?

Something I learned recently, acrons (properly prepared, they are indeed poisonous otherwise) used to be a human staple food in the Americas. It was displaced because it is annoying to prepare and the taste is relatively bland.

When I was a kid my family spent a day on a Native American Culture experience at Yosemite National Park. It was really cool! Flint knapping, and brain-tanning, and basket-making, and beadwork, and dancing, all led local tribe-members. Pitched at tourists, of course, but real content, and genuinely interesting.

Anyway, one of the deals was pounding and preparing acorns with a group of the older ladies. We went through the whole process, including cooking the mush with hot stones in a basket. It was... terrible. Bland, with astringent, tannic overtones. I remember my mother (not the most culturally-sensitive of people) asking incredulously if they really eat this. The woman who'd done it with us laughed, and said "No!", but that her grandmother always had, and for the kids (her), she'd always added lots of butter and brown sugar!

Sidenote: that woman was probably seventy, in ~1985, so her grandmother must have seen some shit. I wish I'd been old enough, and educated enough, to have appreciated that at the time.

I think one approach would be; restoring it to a known stable equilibrium. Meaning, if without wolves things continue to deteriorate and clearly hasn't reached a stable equilibrium but you know that with them things were stable over some long term period then you should reintroduce them

That does have the slight disadvantage that a glassed parking lot, utterly uniform and totally devoid of all life, is quite stable.

I agree that it'd be lovely to have a definition that is devoid of subjective (human) judgement, but I don't think "stable" is a useful direction to go for such a definition. It's way too easy to reach stability by ending up at some hellhole ecosystem that is lifeless or exceedingly uniform with nothing interesting. Which, yes, is entirely subjective. That's my point.

Alternative ways to go that seem more suitable to end up at a worthwhile definition that most ought to be happy with:

* Diversity. An ecosystem with more lifeforms is better than less, and complex lifeforms count extra. How much extra is for somebody to write down in detail at some point.

* Utility to humans. An ecological system that constantly causes issues to humans, for example by flooding out a town, spawning plagues that ruin crops, and so on is 'bad'. An ecosystem that humans like spending time in is 'good'.

We are humans and ought to be able to come together and find definitions close enough to what we want without falling into smashing each other's heads in because our definitions of 'nice to walk through' differ slightly. Part of what annoys me about 'modern' political thought is that it presupposes: Everybody hates everybody and we're all infantile morons who are utterly incapable of finding any common ground (and thus only solutions that work despite that state of affairs are worthwhile to think about). This isn't hard to determine. We don't need to eliminate human subjectivity from it.

It's never been stable, that's the arbitrariness op is talking about.

There is absolutely stability if you zoom out to the time scale that permits evolutionary adaptation (and of course, if you zoom out much farther it all devolves to noise again). But it’s specious to say that “the only constant is change” and then declare all comparisons moot.

That’s a rather idiosyncratic definition of stability. Evolutionary adaptation is literally change over time.

I think it’s an elementary definition of stability. Just because the derivative of the function is never zero doesn’t mean it contains no useful information.

> When we say that reintroducing wolves led to ecological improvements, what’s our reference point?

Ecological diversity and utility to humans.

The GYE is more diverse thanks to having wolves check grazing populations. And the physical structure of the riparian environment is more stable, which means better (and cheaper) infrastructure and water management.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what the goals are, it's not just to go back to some arbitrary time in the past. Often reintroduction of keystone species like wolves lead to increased biodiversity and resilience of the ecosystem, which is useful especially since we are currently going through a mass extinction.

I saw a PBS nature episode on keystone species (maybe you did too?), and how they keep ecosystems in balance. Was one of the most interesting documentaries I ever saw. Am glad to see that in wolf species actually did help rebalance the ecosystem, really amazing to see the theory in practice!

Another example: mosquitos. We can and should drive them to extinction. The species that feed on humans are nowhere food-web-critical. It's an arbitrary and wrong judgement that we should preserve mosquitos just because they happened to evolve with us. So what if eradicating them would be unnatural? So what if it would technically be a reduction in biodiversity? Not everything natural is good or optimal.

Mosquito introduction is an historical event (1820) in Hawaii (New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc). This devastated local bird populations driving many to extinction and halving the avian population in approximately a year due to virus propagation. The death of the birds led to less seed dispersal, loss of forest, and increased susceptibility to invasive plants.

Some are ancient, but have adapted to thrive in some human environments, but have spread well past their original areas by colonialism, slave trade, shipping, and war. The idea that modern mosquitoes are some "natural" ecosystem element is pretty funny. Perhaps they have destroyed the habitat that once existed and driven out competing species which once fit into the niche, but they are in most places relatively modern in ways other biting flies are not. The growing effects of malaria are not only on humans, but other animals including both chimps and reptiles as well.

Anopheles/Aedes/Culex mosquitos are the grey goo of insects, driving other flies, midges, and even mosquitos (which local fish and larval predators have evolved with) to exinction. Treat them like the infection they are.

I remember when it was announced that smallpox was eradicated (Yeah, I'm old enough to have a smallpox vaccination scar).

I remember someone moaning about how we had driven a species to extinction.

We're a funny lot, really. I've learned not to take us too seriously; especially the folks that take themselves very seriously.

It is questionable whether smallpox is alive and so whether it can go extinct. If in some sense it can go extinct it seems both the Americans and Russians are determined to keep it alive "just in case".

Nobody was much concerned when we eradicated another infectious virus. Unlike Smallpox there was no "military rationale" for keeping copies on ice, so Rinderpest is gone. It appears that its close human relation, Measles, will be around for a long time though because "I don't believe in facts" trumps "My child has died of a preventable disease". So that's certainly evidence for you're "We're a funny lot" theory.

A fairly common horror movie trope, is some Eocene zombiemaker virus, being thawed out of the permafrost.

I've heard talk about getting rid of a few species of mosquitoes; eliminating all would be an ecological catastrophe. They are pollinators and an essential food source for many species, like birds, bats, and frogs.

The interesting version of this is to exterminate the malaria carrying mosquito species. Only 40 of 3500 species can carry malaria. If we wipe them out, non malaria carrying species will likely take their place in the ecosystems.

250 million people have malaria, and 600k, mostly children die from it yearly.

And yet, I see a lot more people defending the mosquitos than the humans.

You seem very well-informed on the matter.

If only we had a whole group of experts who study this as their life work to make these choices instead of thinking our random speculations are the best we can do.

I wouldn't say pre-human settlement, since Natives were in these areas for many years, but they didn't have the desire to mass hunt wolves (and culturally, would not do so). So pre-US colonialism, perhaps.

Philosophically though you're correct- humans very easily see themselves as "apart" from the environment, when really we're just another mammal doing our thing. We are nature as much as we are in it, even for all of our tools and manufacturing.

One way to measure this that isn't moral judgements is the ecological depth of an environment. If one part of the system is destroyed (e.g. a blight on plant A) how devastating to the rest of the system will that be?

One of the hallmarks of human engineered environments is how shallow and fragile they are. Changes, like the reintroduction of wolves, are "good" because they give us deeper and more resilient environments

"I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky."

Me too, however I think that making an ecosystem functional, rather than dysfunctional is the goal, rather than actual restoration to a nominal "correct".

The thing is that diversity, fecundity and like measures are really important when it comes to ecology, not historical accuracy - that's for aircraft museums.

Ecosystems are dynamic by nature, so "make them like where 222.22 years ago" is a little meaningless.

But biodiversity is a good target and as unbiased as you can get. More biodiversity means more adaptability and resilience of the system.

I’ve also had this feeling when conservation of particular species comes up. Species come and go. Why conserve this particular species?

So, inevitably, the answer must be that people want to conserve them either because of sentimental reasons or because a given ecosystem suits human flourishing, or because it maximizes some metric like species diversity.

> we’re really measuring against a value-laden idea of what we think nature should look like, not some neutral truth.

I will remark, that “value-laden” is not opposed to “neutral truth”. All knowledge is value-laden. Value itself is part of reality. The fact-value dichotomy is a fiction.

> I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky.

I think you're confusing "arbitrarily meddling in wilderness" and "restoring ecosystems". The latter would be something like demolishing a Walmart and its parking lot and putting soil and trees in its place.

Basically giving back human development spaces back to nature and letting nature take care of itself. This involves things like cleaning up waterways.

Agree but more species is definitely better than less species. We are not aiming to get dinosaurs back, but pre industrial era levels of wildlife is not a bad thing.

When I wanted to get into aquariums, I stumbled upon some old man calling himself "father fish"

Basically his take on the whole hobby is that we should stop measuring, changing water and generally stressing about keeping the system as is.

Instead you create a good substrate, add lots of plants and just watch how life will evolve. Fish and plants might die, but that's ok because it's part of the natural process.

Using restoring less of IT term (like restoring from a backup) and more of a way of improving compared to current state is the key here.

>I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky.

It's not even "tricky". It's purely a subjective political football if you live anywhere that was formerly glaciated because humans were there from day 1 and so it's basically a subjective question of which time period you want to restore.

One point I rarely see made:

When you "destroy" an ecosystem, a new one will take its place. The remaining animals and plants will converge on a new balanced state.

The ecosystems we admire today are often that new balance after humans destroyed the natural one.

This is pretty naive take. We have turned eras of lush forests into essentially deserts and killed water sheds. These things don’t default back to a thriving ecosystem. Lots of the time they are just dead. Pre tree planting, after clear cutting, there’s a lot of “forests” in bc that are just one canopy hemlock swaths. They need to be thinned and diversified because the are essentially “dead” forests. A lot of work needs to be put into these areas, as the water sheds are falling apart and dying as a result.

That’s because it’s a bad point. An ecosystem can collapse for multiple reasons, e.g. collapse due pollution will not create a thriving ecosystem.

In almost all cases, when a collapsed ecosystem reaches homeostasis again, the result is a more fragile and less diverse balance than what was there previously.

It's a question of timescales and degrees and magnitudes, not of binary "did or didn't destroy". If we hadn't stopped redwood logging in the 20th century, yeah, the ecosystem would be replaced... But probably by something smaller and faster growing. Victory! Redwoods got replaced by smaller trees, mission success.

Monocultures are a scary thing (I'm sure you've heard about how we had to completely switch banana varietals), and having resilient ecosystems is important. I think ATM the consensus is having an apex predator does actually help the stability of these sorts of ecosystems and leads to outcomes most would consider favorable (greater diversity, better density, closer to an equilibrium). Now, we could surely fix this problem by doing it ourselves (eg by subsidizing deer and rabbit hunting and venison), but wolves are probably cheaper.

> The remaining animals and plants will converge on a new balanced state.

There's no guarantee that this be a stable equilibrium.

If it doesn't stabilize, we get mass extinctions. We have had five large ones and are rapidly moving towards the sixth ones by all accounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

> are rapidly moving towards the sixth ones by all accounts

The scientific consensus isn't that we're "moving towards" a mass extinction. It's that we're deep into one, and accelerating.

"Current extinction rates are estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates [13][14][15][16][17] and are accelerating."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Often ecosystem quality is measured by diversity, eg number of species. Diverse ecosystems are considered more resilient.

It doesn't have to be exact, but pre-anthropocene is typically a good reference point, considering we are an extinction event.

> we’re shaping nature to fit human values

Biodiversity is a good measure of ecosystem health, no? Is it really a human value?

If "restoring" is tricky, does that mean going in the non-restoring direction is less so?

I've got to agree. I like Aspen trees, but I like Elk better.

It sure sounds like we're just choosing the species we like. It's like a big walled garden.

The Aspen trees provide ecosystem benefits to animals other than Elk-- birds, etc. Shorter grasses allow smaller animals to live and hide.

It's not choosing species we like as much as that there was previously an equilibrium all ecosystems trend towards, and our influence (killing the wolves) lead to significant ecosystem imbalances that hurt more than just wolves.

>I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky.

..we’re shaping nature to fit human values,

You’re right to question it, because the philosophy itself is based on the emotionally satisfying but ultimately unscientific “Gaia” theory of “balance” and “self-sustaining” / “self-correcting” systems.

> because the philosophy itself is based on the emotionally satisfying but ultimately unscientific “Gaia” theory of “balance” and “self-sustaining” / “self-correcting” systems.

I’m certain some have used those ideas, but that is not what the philosophy itself is based on.

There is a "correct" state of nature: one without modern humans.

Why do you hate yourself?

It's not hate, it's love.

"But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves." ―Rachel Carson

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