
Biodiversity: Life ­– a status report - oskarpearson
http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report-1.16523
======
oskarpearson
I find this one of the most depressing articles I've read for a long time.

If the upper rate values are true, we're headed for an extinction event
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

~~~
manachar
The depressing part is how "invisible" this extinction rate is to most people.
It's happening just slowly enough to barely register in people's memories.

~~~
hoggle
Imagine never hearing any birds chirping outside, something we had been
witnessing here in Vienna - a silent but profound feeling of horror when I
first realized it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usutu_virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usutu_virus)

------
ggreer
I think it's important to ask two questions:

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.

~~~
jacquesm
Of course the answer to 1 is 'YES!'. We're at or near the apex of a very large
pyramid of species that in concert form the ecosystem that supports us.
Without the pyramid the apex has nowhere to go except for going extinct
itself. We need those 'lower' species a lot more than they need us.

~~~
ggreer
How much harm do you think would be done if a popular species of tree in the
US went extinct over the course of a few decades? Do you think ecosystems
would collapse? Do you think the economy would suffer?

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.

~~~
jacquesm
The problem is that we do not know which species are critical and which are
not. You'll know it when it's too late.

~~~
ggreer
That's not true. We know enough about ecosystems to assess the importance of
various organisms. For example, biologists say the 30-or-so malaria-bearing
mosquito species can be eliminated without causing trouble.[1] Doing this
would save at least 1,000,000 lives (mostly children) and tens of billions of
dollars per year. Like the American Chestnut, these mosquitos are massive
populations that serve important roles in nature. Yet killing them would not
cause problems for their ecosystems, let alone humanity. Our dependence on
nature is not so great, and our knowledge of nature is not so small. A single
species so obscure as to be unknown to us simply cannot be crucial to
humanity's survival.

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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_control#Proposals_to_eradicate_mosquitos)

~~~
jacquesm
I'm not sure if I'm making my point in a way that it is clear enough, so let
me re-try.

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.

------
exratione
There is a tremendously conservative impulse inherent in the way people look
at the natural world. The basic assumption for near all discussions is that
all change is bad, the exact present situation absent the touch of humanity is
good, and that the natural state is good.

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.

~~~
scribu
I agree with the first part of your comment, about change being the natural
default.

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.

~~~
acadien
A diverse system is more robust to threats of all kinds. The more species
there are the more likely they are to survive a threat. Biodiversity is not
vanity it is a strong defensive position to ensure long term survival.

------
Mz
This makes me feel better about giving up my car a few years back and mostly
walking everywhere.

Which is to say I don't think it's completely hopeless. I think there are
things we can do.

