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I remember a links post by Scott from like 8 years ago where he asked, given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture? I guess I have a pet theory I've been working up in my mind for a while
Epistemic status: I know close to nothing about agriculture, except some basic historical facts I've heard about previous food industries changing.
Essentially, I think that capitalism and human industry may be what has saved us and prevented catastrophic changes. As someone who works in engineering, I know you always have to deal with changes to your plans, and nothing ever goes right. When you do deliver systems that work, nothing ever stays non-broken, and you always have to come up with new fixes. However, you have goals, and as such you keep finding tradeoffs and workarounds so you're still able to deliver and fulfill the customer need consistently. If you don't, then you lose the customer's business and someone else ends up fulfilling their need instead. Perhaps almost all human-impacting ecological sectors have essentially already been turned into self perpetuating industries.
Is there some fungus which is going to kill all the Gros Michel bananas in the world? Banana farmer moguls absolutely do not want that happening, and they're not stupid. They will end up employing experts that help them set up systems to delay that eventually as long as possible, so they can still meet their quarterly earnings projections, whether by developing new farming methods or new antifungal treatments for the plants.
Does it finally get to the point that the Gros Michel banana can no longer hang on? Either the Gros Michel banana moguls have already started setting up systems to farm new varieties of bananas in preparation for this eventually, or else some until-now specialty supplier of bananas that used to be not as popular (like the Cavendish banana) ends up rising to power by fulfilling the now-unmet demand for bananas, capturing the market and supplanting the old industry leaders as the new head of the industry.
For the record, Gros Michel bananas did taste different, and maybe even better, than Cavendish bananas. But I guess Cavendish bananas are a sufficiently good workaround because they've been the norm for 70 years now.
Is it still bad that humans cause so many changes to the ecology? Yes, but maybe not THAT bad. I postulate two situations.
There might be aspects of ecology that would have been ripe for eventual human exploitation that have not yet been industry-ized. What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology? Well, then we are out of luck in exploiting that fuel source as a new industry. However, this still doesn't impact current industries, only potential future ones. We may never realize what we could have achieved and what we lost the opportunity to do had that banana not gone extinct, and as such this isn't viewed as a catastrophe.
There might be negative effects to the environment that are so detrimental that there is no mitigation possible, and it will make non-viable even other related industries that might have come in and filled the gap. This is the catastrophe scenario that is typically pushed by environmentalists to make laymen worried. But really, I'm not certain I know of any examples of this catastrope scenario coming to pass (not that that means it cannot happen in the future). I guess I've heard that in pre WWII France, they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability. As such, truffles need to be hunted and gathered these days by specially trained pigs, and the price of truffles went sky high. I'm not too clear on how this happened, and I'm not sure if it has to do with ecology or just loss of human knowledge.
I speculate that this model of "ingrained industries as a shield" may also apply to other non-agricultural scenarios as well.
What sort of catastrophes? I'm interested to know, I know little about this.
Kudzu. What used to be a useful plant when planted, farmed, and cultivated became a natural version of The Blob when released into the wild. Because it grew uncontrollably, it's literally smothered millions of acres of other plant life by blocking out the sun. It's almost impossible to kill chemically without also destroying the natural habitat. While grazing by farm animals can help control the problem, it does not kill the plant itself. Even burning the plant doesn't solve the problem because the vines can grow back from the roots themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States
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Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.
The chytrid fungus pandemic has taken a staggering toll on amphibian life around the planet. Probably the most impactful invasive species in the world from the standpoint of affected species and proportion of global biodiversity.
White nose syndrome is another fungal epidemic that has decimated bat populations across North America.
Fun finding, there’s a study connecting the collapse of bat populations to increased infant mortality. Bats consume copious amounts of insects. When they disappear, farmers have been found to increase their use of pesticides in affected counties. These pesticides have medical implications for humans.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344
Another example with a more direct human impact, the disappearance and near extinction of the American Chestnut. Once was among the most prized and useful tree in North America for both its wood and its nuts. It was among the most common tree across eastern forests. In the early 1900s, chestnut blight arrived from Asia and essentially erased the species from the North American landscape within a decade.
Other invasives like cheatgrass generate much higher fire risks in the west, and aquatic invasives such as zebra mussels are extremely expensive for management organizations to deal with. The latter can reorganize entire food webs when introduced and end up having impacts on local economies such as fisheries.
Makes sense. But, yeah, I guess the core of my hypothesis is that human ingenuity and the human drive for survival is what keeps industries afloat in the face of ecological adversity, due to humans' vested interests. So it needs to be an example where humans have a large vested interest.
And that's not to say that there aren't problems which develop which make the agriculture harder or more expensive. It's just that I suspect people keep coming up with ways to overcome these problems, which results in much less impact to everyday people. Perhaps I'll edit that onto my post when I get a moment.
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The most obvious case seems to be potato blight which somehow got from the New World to Europe in the 1840s and killed millions of people due to famine.
That couldn't happen today of course because our agricultural systems are not dependent on a single crop and we can easily transport food from all over the globe.
Phylloxera is another example. There is still no way of controlling it even with 21st century technology - if it wasn't for the good fortune that vitis vinifera grows well when grafted onto the rootstock of American vine species with natural resistance (but which produce undrinkable wine) we would have lost >95% of our ability to grow wine.
As a (technical) Irishman and an oenophile, I am genuinely conflicted about whether potato blight or phylloxera is the worst thing to come out of America. But both make high-fructose corn syrup and The Phantom Menace look like nothingburgers.
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Cool. I wasn't sure of the cause of the potato famine. But if it is a case of human-caused invasive species of disease, then I would definitely call it one example of a catastrophe.
Complicating this is that it isn't just the potato blight which got from the New World to Europe via human action, it was the potato itself.
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Here's a fun example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia
Uh, that's a big toad.
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Well, I'd certainly never heard of this before, but I am still wondering, after quickly skimming the article, what the catastrophe is.
This also might depend on your definition of what a catastrophe is, but I guess I'm referring to large loss of human life, or drastically decreased living conditions for tens of thousands of humans, as the end-result of an event like this in order for me to consider it a catastrophe.
It has been fairly devastating. I grew up camping around Australia's top end, across the Litchfield tabletop plateau and Kakadu escarpment and floodplains. True frontier country. Before the cane toads made their way up from Queensland, we often saw quolls poking around the firelight edge. When the cane toads first arrived, they were scarily thick on the ground, you couldn't go for a piss in the night without seeing four of them (and this is in remote, wild areas -- not constrained to places with human activity). You see fewer cane toads now, since the monitors, kites and wedgies learned to flip them over and eat them safely, but I never saw a quoll again.
I am perpetually surprised by how many of your animals sound fictional.
He’s using colourful nicknames, I believe- wedgies are probably wedge tailed eagles, for example.
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Australia’s got a whole continuum of them.
Cane toads, as you observed, mostly poisoned dogs and local wildlife. They’re also notorious as speed bumps for cars. I get the impression that more speculative harms (ecological collapse, cattle diseases) are scientists fishing for a justification.
Rabbits: erosion, which matters a little more for countries relying on grazing animals. Serious enough that the government built a fence across the continent to slow them down. There were obvious upsides in terms of meat and pelts, though.
There’s also a Dingo Fence! I mention it mostly as evidence that predator populations are worth keeping out. Also, it’s the only time I’ve seen native populations blamed for introducing a species.
All in all, we’re not terrible at mitigating the direct economic consequences. But is that really a worthy goal? Letting an annoying, messy species tile the continent just because it doesn’t do enough damage to get a corporation involved? There’s something sad about a decline so slow, so soft, that it can’t be called a catastrophe.
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