
The Fatal Shore, Awash in Plastic - blondie9x
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/the-fatal-shore-awash-in-plastic/
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maddcastles
That's really awful. Glad he's going through he effort to make this public.

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sneak
Why is it awful? Species that can't tell plastic garbage from food are
obviously unfit for Earth in 2015.

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erikpukinskis
To be fair, there's nothing wrong with exctinction, just as there is nothing
wrong with "invasive species". These things are as old as the hills. A certain
amount of genetic turnover is, as you point out, just the fitness function
making its judgements.

The trouble we have is the _rate_ of extinction and invasion. A typical
ecology can support a certain rate of species loss... A single species will be
replaced by other organisms that can occupy the same niche. They will fill in
the gaps and the same level of biodiversity can be maintained.

However these things take time. And if, while the replacement species is
adapting to fit the old niche, another several extinctions happens, we start
to have problems. Organisms that could've adapted to fill out the niche are
themselves under stress. Once you have several key species under stress
simultaneously, you run the risk that an entire segment of the food chain...
possibly double digit percentages of the metabolic chain, will collapse
simultaneously.

With a slow enough rate of extinction, you can just keep filling in the holes,
but once you cross a certain threshold, you can trigger a regression to a more
primordial state. Like desert. You end up with orders of magnitude less
complex of an ecology.

If think we can get by on a planet with an ecology that is an order of
magnitude less complex, with an order of magnitude (or two) fewer species,
then none of what I'm saying is a problem for you.

I am scared of dramatically decreasing the number of species just because it
seems really hard to predict the effects of that. So I'd like to delete the
species as slowly as possible to mitigate our risk.

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ddeck
From 2012. Submitter or mods, please update the title

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knieveltech
"How do we get to hope from here?"

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hariis
Starts with you #startswithyou

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knieveltech
It _really_ doesn't. My cynicism is capable of inflicting permanent damage on
innocent bystanders when not kept quietly in check.

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JoeAltmaier
A problem; deserves attention. Yet I can't help but believe the article's
title image was fake; that lighter looks clean and unworn. Was the image
staged? The photographer is an artist after all. I know he claimed it was all
unmodified. I'm just not buying it.

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kwhitefoot
I live by the sea and often walk along the beach and often see things like
lighters bits of plastic construction materials, garden chairs, all sorts of
things and they appear in all sorts of conditions.

You might be right of course but not because the lighter looks clean and
unworn. Plenty of things emerge from the sea clean and it might have been
there only a few days or even hours.

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JoeAltmaier
The dead bird looks very old and weatherworn. I'd expect the stomach contents
to be in the same vein. Other stomach contents (a shocking amount in fact)
look as expected. So I was just suspicious that it might have been 'curated'.

