There are so many problems in this world that could be solved if only we could "get everyone to do X." The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X." So when a small team comes up with a plan and says "we (small team) are going to do Y (something very technically difficult)", it's not helpful to reply "but wouldn't it be easier if we just got everyone to do X?"
Sure, but if X results in Z and Y is 0.00001 Z, it's not without merit to point out that perhaps that doesn't really accomplish Z, the nominal goal of Y.
It's worse than that, since it may give the lazy or disingenuous an opportunity to muddy the waters by pointing out that... "hey Y reverses Z (or 0.00001 of it) so we don't need to worry about it any more!".
> The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X."
In most cases when we are bad its simply because we don't know any better, or because we are unaware of facts. Something has to tap into the roots of our motivation
Nobody has figured out how to stop everyone else from extincting species. These people may be able to de-extinct some species themselves. Whichever thing you can actually do yourself is the solution [1].
I see. I guess that it could also help biodiversity efforts from a PR standpoint to have wildlife reserves for a 'charismatic' animal like the dodo, similar to how everybody wants to protect the panda bear.
Could do. There's zoo pandas. There's the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone where they're less likely to get shot by farmers protecting livestock. Anti-poaching guards for wild rhinos. Seagrass restoration for manatees. Programs for people to grow baby mussels in fish tanks so they can be relocated to the ocean. Hunting programs for deer culling. Giving out free native plants and seeds to help native birds. Lots of options depending on the needs of each species.
On extinction this [1] is an extremely informative article on how estimations are made, and why they vary in such extreme ways. Observed extinctions are many orders of magnitude less than 6 per hour. The article (2015) references a total of about 800 observed extinctions in 400 years. And some number of those extinctions were not actually extinctions.
So where do the big numbers come from? Obviously we don't know about every animal in existence, so it's safe to say if we have observed 800 extinctions, then many more than that have actually happened. But how many more? And there is no good answer. The most extreme numbers come from taking a sample of one thing you know (e.g. land snails), looking at the extinction ratio there of known_extinct:known_nonextinct land snails, and then extrapolating that to an estimate of the entire number of species on the entire planet. And you end up with a really big number.
Of course if your estimate of species counts is off, if somehow land snails aren't a representative sample of all species, or any other countless factors turn up to be off - then you have problems, easily on the order of many magnitudes. You end up trying to solve a problem with no idea if you're having any effect at all. In the best case scenario, everything works - and you notice no change since the species you are affecting are almost entirely ones we don't even know exist. In the worst case scenario, we've turned into Don Quixote.
In other words, those estimates are as reliable as Drake's equation output. Someone who can't say "I don't know" when they know they don't know, is either a fool or a con artist.
It’s not just that the critical bit for the 800 number is: “That’s because the criteria adopted by the IUCN and others for declaring species extinct are very stringent, requiring targeted research. It’s also because we often simply don’t know what is happening beyond the world of vertebrate animals that make up perhaps 1 percent of known species.”
A great number of species have been described by finding a tiny number of members in a small geographic area. For many of them we just don’t know if they are still around or not and nobody is funding research to check.
well if we're taking into account microorganisms, every mall parking lot ever paved has likely caused the extinction of at least some endemic microorganisms
That is so ridiculous. What is the “usual” rate and how would we even justify such a thing. People are so caught up in environmentalism they don’t realize how anti-nature and laughably ignorant of scientific reason they end up being.
To quote from the article that I linked, "Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year."
And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate.
Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.
> Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions?
Who is "we" in that sentence? The human species? Some groups are already trying to prevent further extinctions. This group, composed of different people, wants to try to bring back extinct species. "We" aren't a single group with the same leadership and goals, but a bunch of different groups with different members and goals.
Should we save that person that we have in front? After all, thousands are dying every hour around the world. Distribution matters, you can't be everywhere.
It is a good proof of concept, but that won't change that we are in the sixth big mass extinction in the history of the planet, and that we are the main drivers of it. And that, after we finish even with ourselves no one will be left to de-extinct us.
The world uses Uber an similar apps to bring an stranger's car at your location to pick you up, shouldn't we instead have a network of fast trains in every single city given that it would be much faster and less damaging for the environment? Well yes, but unfortunately that would require huge policy changes and major coordinated efforts unlikely to become reality, just like the changes needed to stop extinctions.
I’m not even sure how we know that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is something non obvious about it … like it’s an estimate of insect species presumed to be lost based on Amazon deforestation per year or … who knows.
We are just another species. Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere. The only thing that will change is their makeup. Organisms that can’t keep up with their environment die and are replaced by new ones that can.
We are another species but we operate more like a disease. We are no longer operating unchecked by the remainder of the biosphere.
> Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere.
If we keep up, they are. We can totally destroy the biosphere in ways that would make it, from our perspective, unrecoverable. Sure, it could recover in a few million years with other species, but that won't matter to us.
> We are no longer operating unchecked by the remainder of the biosphere.
But we aren't, really. Long-term, we will be fully checked. And it will be ugly. In terms of humans, it's better that we check ourselves before nature does it because when nature course-corrects, it will probably look like a cataclysm to us.
What we're actually doing is making the environment less suitable for us and most of the other currently existing species. Long term, that's not a problem. Once we're done trashing the place, life, biodiversity, and working ecosystems will still be here. They will just be very different from what they are now.
We've been hunting species to extinction for 60k years, yes, but we haven't reached global transformation of the environment until the past few hundred.
But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.
How is it not natural? Because people are the species outcompeting the other ones? That’s a weird view of what natural is and it will only cause inefficiencies and prevent organisms that are fit for survival from arising.
The word natural exists specifically to make a distinction between human causes and all other causes. Saying “humans are natural, therefore anything humans do is natural as well” is to render the word meaningless.
Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions? Also it seems rather unlikely that they can scale their approach to 6 de-extinctions per hour...