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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.
I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest, and the central type of domesticated species is perhaps the goat, whose precursor today lives in a region from the south of Turkey to Pakistan. Or take the genus Oryza from which rice was derived is found in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia.
Classical targets for domestication are generalists who thrive under a wide variety of conditions. Of course, for luxury food we might domesticate less resilient plants such as cocoa (which was doing ok in South America but can not really claim being native on multiple continents) or spices or drugs.
The other thing is that we don't have a long memory. I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them. As you say, capitalism goes on, and if I can't buy the tastiest bananas any more, I sure want the next tastiest.
In general, I would say that there is a big difference accidentally between extincting a domestic species through monoculture+infection and the typical 'depraved-heart' extinction of a wild species through loss of habitat. I am sure that the former can happen to specific cultivars, but are unlikely to affect the important staples where we have some diversity. I place the odds of a virus which wipes out all domestic rice plants at even lower odds than a virus which wipes out all the humans.
We’ve got a bunch of more impactful recent extinctions than that.
A few that come to mind:
The passenger pigeon, whose flocks were so large they used to black out the sun for days on end as the billions of birds passed.
Stellars sea cow, the largest sirenian ever known to exist and the only which existed outside of warm tropical waters.
The dodo, one of the dozens of quite unique Australian animal species which went extinct in the past couple centuries, and which has become synonymous with extinction.
The thylacine, another Australian example. The largest marsupial carnivore on the planet. Not only its species but the entire family it represented is now extinct.
The carolina parakeet. The only parrot species native to the USA.
Of course there are a lot more which are not fully extinct but have been reduced so drastically it’s sort of similar.
The American buffalo. The right whale. Much of the range of the wolf, of bears, the general abundance and size of life in the ocean which has decreased over time, etc. etc.
But how are these impactful? What's the negative implication for humans from them being extinct?
Natural beauty is eroded, and the world is less interesting. No, these species did not make number go up, but that doesn't mean they meant nothing. What are the negative implication of humans living in a pod and not knowing what a tree is?
I guess I propose that they might mean close to nothing, when there's still 10 to 30 million other species that remain that easily fill the gap left.
I specifically chose species which don’t have others that easily fill the gap.
There aren’t birds that blot out the sky or native parrots or cold water manatee creatures in the US anymore, personally I think that’s something of value that disappeared.
We don’t miss them because of shifting baseline syndrome.
But for example, let’s say I’ve seen the manatees in Florida.. I have, they’re really beautiful. These huge gentle warm water mammals that just float up into the river systems and natural springs. You can be on a paddle board above a group of them and pet them, they just hang out underneath.
It would be sad if we lost these. Wouldn’t you agree?
Quite possible, btw
I find it hard to understand people’s attitudes towards nature sometimes. It’s typically, “sure we could lose that and we’d survive fine!”.
A lot of things could be lost and we’d survive ok. Just pick a dystopia from fiction. 1984, Brave New World, humans survive! We’re doing fine!
Should the response be then “who cares?”, or, are there other things in the world that matter than just human survival?
There a very big gap between an existence without manatees that a few people ever see on a recreational voyage, and living in a pod devoid of sunlight and subsisting on nutrient paste, or whatever other dystopia you might want to bring up.
And so because of that, we’re likely to keep reducing the web of life on the planet.
Yeah, it doesn’t affect you much if the manatee disappears. There may be some complicated knock on effect like more frequent algal blooms that make the beach a shitty place to be and affect the fishing industry. But we’re good at ignoring this type of thing.
Heck even if our cousins the chimpanzees (between 100k - 300k still exist in the wild), or the orangutan (~50,000 are left) disappeared, doesn’t really matter to you.
Ultimately it’s a spiritual principle. Either non human life on earth has value, or only human concerns do.
I have a foundational semi religious belief that the biota of the planet has innate value, so for example, if someone destroyed the rainforests of the planet tomorrow, even if through some magic this was made to have no impact on human wellbeing, I’d be forced to consider it unspeakably tragic.
Apparently not all humans share this belief.
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