Biodiversity: Life – a status report
nature.com
nature.com
If the upper rate values are true, we're headed for an extinction event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event on the level of the Triassic-Jurassic transition in within centuries (75% species loss)
Already 41% of amphibians face extinction.
1. Is this a bad thing for humanity?
2. If it is, how can we stop it?
I'm not sure the answer to 1 is, "Yes." If an organism is useful to us, we domesticate it. The rest of nature (while sometimes pretty) doesn't affect our survival, actively harms us, or is too hardy to unintentionally destroy (cyanobacteria). Nature is an extremely complex system, but let's not pretend it was a precariously-balanced eden before we came along. Most of nature is animals suffering; starving, dying of disease, or being eaten alive by others. Nature visits unnecessary suffering upon animals on a scale that we cannot imagine. When humans do the same, it's animal cruelty. I see no reason why we should try to prevent one but not the other.
But let's say nature is worth preserving, at least until we understand it better. How can we preserve it? I know of no civilization that has voluntarily reduced its resource consumption. It seems the only solution is to invent our way out of the problem. That means advances in agriculture, biotech, and energy.
Turns out, this actually happened. 100 years ago, the American Chestnut tree accounted for 25% of all trees in north america. There used to be over 4 billion of them, then 99.9999% were killed by a blight. Today, only a few thousand exist in isolated groves. Few in the US know about this. People go hiking in the Appalachians and think, "Ah, such pristine nature." It is telling that such a profound extinction scarcely registers on any national measurement of health, quality of life, or economic prosperity.
As I said, most of the species we need to survive are domesticated. And most of the others we need are so prevalent and resilient that they'd survive a nuclear apocalypse. Moreover, this problem corrects itself. If a wild species we use becomes scarce (or demand increases), people start growing it. This has happened with paper farms, aquaculture, and even truffles. When it comes to existential risks, lack of biodiversity is not worth worrying about.
The problem with extinction is that you are throwing away a working code base that took 3 billion years to write. Every organism that goes extinct before we sequence its genome is an absolute tragedy.
With the story of the American Chestnut and the biologists' assessments of mosquitos, I hope I've presented some convincing evidence that lack of biodiversity is not an existential threat. Is it a loss? Assuming genomes aren't sequenced, yes. But the same is true for the destruction of old books. While regrettable, I don't lose much sleep over either.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_control#Proposals_to_e...
Mosquitoes and chestnuts notwithstanding, the fact that there are species that we can miss does not automatically extend to 'we can miss all species except those that we can domesticate'. Ecosystems are complex, not very well understood and messing with them typically has disastrous and unforeseen consequences.
Because of this species going extinct should worry you because one day a species might go extinct that you directly depend on without knowing it. It's like playing Russian roulette, only you don't know how many holes there nor how many bullets.
So far nature has been able to patch the holes in an admirable way, life tends to re-inforce. But there is a critical point at which that re-inforcement no longer holds. Of course sticking your head in the ground and singing 'lalala' will not make the problem go away but it at least affords you the luxury of ignoring it. This is a very large problem and it is sad that clever people like you won't lose sleep over either a lack of bio diversity or the destruction of old books. Resilience is a good thing to have, not a liability. Our dependence on nature is as large as it possibly could be and our knowledge of nature is surprisingly limited, especially of the intricate interplay between species.
A single species so obscure as to be unknown to us could very well be crucial to our survival. Let's hope that such species become known before we find out they were crucial after all.
This is not a game of single datapoints invalidating theories, this is gambling on a scale that we can't even begin to afford until we've moved off-planet and have multiple, completely independent biospheres capable of supporting complex life forms. And once that's established we could try to reduce the biodiversity in one of them on purpose to see how far that envelope could be reduced.
All of these positions should be challenged.
The natural world changes constantly, even absent humanity. The natural state of predator-prey relationships is not stasis, the natural state of bacterial evolution and disease is definitely not stasis, and neither is the natural population or experience of individuals of a species in any given geographical area.
Further, and more importantly, the natural world is a state of constant, terrible suffering. Everything that can suffer does. Things that would make you flinch if they happened to your pets happen to animals everywhere, constantly. Pain, death, disease. The ethical future is one in which all of that suffering is removed, and the entire natural world replaced in order to enable that removal. Where naturally evolved machines without capacity to suffer cause suffering they should be removed, replaced, or altered: plants, fungi, viruses, bacteria, other free-roaming cellular organisms. Where higher organisms suffer they should be placed into managed environments where they can be protected while living as they would in the natural world, and where that life involved inflicting pain, they can inflict it on machine simulations that cannot feel.
We should not be looking to let things remain the same, or create areas where the horrors of nature continue unmolested. That is a repulsive and unethical position: requiring countless living beings capable of pain and suffering to undergo terrible experiences just because it makes you feel good.
The sooner we live in a completely unnatural world, the better. But I think a culture that is fine with the mass farming of animals for food and materials is a culture that is unlikely to buy the concept of eliminating nature in order to eliminate suffering. As a species we still have a lot of growing up to do in order to reach a bare minimum state of ethics worthy of the name.
That is false. I can think of countless examples in my own life where I have encountered wild animals in states that I would describe as happy, peaceful, tranquil and exuberant. Watch any nature documentary and you'll find the same.
Yes, there is suffering in the natural world, but suffering is a fact of existence, both human and animal. Many of us are free from most physical sources of suffering, and I'd wager that every person who reads this comment is well-fed, but we still suffer, mentally and emotionally, and I think it's childish, naive and dangerously utopian to think that we can make all of that go away.
Nature is harsh, but what is happening to the planet right now is the physical manifestation of every ugly and unfortunate characteristic of the human race: greed, recklessness, selfishness and short-sightedness. What we are losing right now is irreplaceable.
I disagree with the idea that we should seek to completely control every species' environment in order to avoid suffering. IMO, the goal of species preservation is a selfish one, but it's not to make us feel good. It's about knowledge: the more biodiversity there is, the more case studies we have from which to learn useful things.
From this perspective, constructing viable artificial environments implies that we either a) already know all there is to know, so keeping those species around doesn't make sense anymore (unless they're cute or useful in some other way) or b) those artificial environments lead to different behavior, therefore disallowing the aquisition of knowledge that could be gained from a natural environment.
After all, we're currently driving most everything alive extinct.
Which is to say I don't think it's completely hopeless. I think there are things we can do.