
Push to Weaken U.S. Endangered Species Act Runs into Roadblocks - draenei
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/push-to-weaken-us-endangered-species-act-runs-into-roadblocks/
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another-one-off
I'm going to live a little dangerously here, partly because I have a job in
mining, partly because of who I am.

I don't have the foggiest idea why it is important to protect endangered
species in and of itself, and I don't think there is a good reasons to.

Famously, pretty much every species that has ever existed has gone extinct.
Every organisation, formation, species or what have you will, statistically,
some day no longer be. The nature of time is to bring change. We can't
preserve everything anyway, and there is nothing to be proud of in keeping a
dying species in the world.

I can understand requiring extractive companies to restore land after they use
it to something that isn't hostile to life, but I don't understand why the
fact that the near-extinct colour-crested-hopping-possum is endangered should
impede human progress. We need to face up to the fact that human endeavor is
more important than animals and that being rare does not make a species
somehow important. It certainly shouldn't be a cover for NIMBY types to shut
down mining activity.

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jbreckmckye
I can think of two reasons to protect species: one practical, one moral.

The practical one is that humans rely on ecosystems being the way they are,
and that unbalancing them disturbs our interests, particularly in agriculture.
We also rely on a diverse plant ecosystem to discover and develop new
medicines.

The second argument is more values-based: that ecosystems and animals have
value in and of themselves, axiomatically. If you don't appreciate this
argument perhaps you never will: it's not something that draws on more
fundamental principles, it just is a principle itself. Similar are arguments
about speciesism and the active right of sentient animals to survival: it's
probably one of those things that can't be deconstructed into more basic,
falsifiable arguments. I'd suggest the same applies to the claim that human
progress is necessary and valuable - it doesn't seem provable, just an
instinctual belief.

There might be a third argument: that protecting the environment helps
economies optimise for longer term gains. One of the things holding back
sustainability has been the relative cheapness of dirty alternatives - so
restricting mining might encourage more creative means of manufacturing. And
frankly, if all you're doing is mining cadmium for smartphone batteries, you
may not be doing the human race much good to begin with.

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another-one-off
> that unbalancing them disturbs our interests

I've talked to farmers on trains, I've lived in cities, I've worked in mines.
This doesn't reflect my experiences, we have shredded the natural environment
to our benefit in all those places. Farms are a long way from a natural
environment, the modern farming process is awash with chemicals and such. Lab
grown meat is an exciting possibility. Our success as a species have come
through striving to transcend the limits of nature.

Nearly all humans are urbanised. Urban environments are as far from natural
ones as we can reasonably make it. There is almost no fauna larger than a dog,
flora is controlled. When given the choice, as a mass, we choose to be as far
from nature as possible and visit it for short and very controlled periods of
time.

The moral aspect I suppose we shall agree to disagree.

Are you sure the cadmium isn't going to be used for solar power? Or that the
'creative means' that you would like to see won't benefit from it when the
science comes in?

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siosonel
"Farms are a long way from a natural environment, the modern farming process
is awash with chemicals and such."

It seems you are viewing industrial, monoculture farming techniques as a
justification for what humans should be able to get away with as far as land
or resource use. It is not at all self-evident that such an approach works
best. There is an opposite viewpoint that traditional, diverse crop farming
could produce higher quality, higher nutrition output without using too much
inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

My point is that you seem to conveniently accept the "obvious superiority" of
a modern approach and ignore other viewpoints or approaches wherein
biodiversity fits in naturally.

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JudasGoat
With robotic advances to deal the higher labor intensity of diverse crop
farming, I think it could be cost competitive in the near future. The question
I think is: Who will be behind funding and developing? I think it would take a
"Tesla" type commitment to complete.

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nanis
The Endangered Species Act is not a good way to protect endangered species. It
bars consideration of cost at any level, and basically destroys the property
rights system thereby providing incentives to preemptively destroy habitat.

Anyone who wishes to understand effective ways of protecting species needs to
think a little about cows and elephants.

See also the classic
[http://www.masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/Manne/2014.12...](http://www.masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/Manne/2014.12.06/LueckMicheal_Class%208.pdf)

~~~
ceejayoz
> It bars consideration of cost at any level

What would an Endangered Species Act that considers cost look like to you? It
seems unlikely "a few thousand owls" versus "a giant iron mine" is ever going
to be sustained _on cost_.

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jeffdavis
Why aren't endangered species protections treated more like eminent domain? In
cases where cooperation is more efficient than completely taking the land, the
restrictions can be added to the property deed and the owner compensated.

Putting arbitrary and unpredictable costs on landowners seems like a bad
system.

EDIT: by "bad system", I mean "less effective and less fair".

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gweinberg
I remember reading a few years back that the extinction of a species is worse
than we think because it likely also leads to the extinction of exclusive
parasite species. For example, if the California condor goes extinct then
(maybe) that would also lead to the extinction of some louse species that
exclusively parasitizes condors. The author seemed to think it obvious that
this would be a bad thing, that the extinction of any species must be a bad
thing, but I can't imagine why anyone would think that way. I want to save the
condors, but I think the world is better off without the condor mites.

~~~
rickycook
unless they have an as-yet undiscovered property that, for example, cures
cancer... i’m sure before we realised bacteria can be super cool when they
work for us, people would have been fine removing them all for medical reasons

it’s what we don’t know that we need to preserve, because there’s no going
back

