
Fractured Forests Are Endangering Wildlife, Scientists Find - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/science/forests-fragmentation-wildlife.html
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jacquesm
This is not exactly a new finding, and one of the reasons the ecoduct was
invented.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_crossing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_crossing)

They work just as well for forests as for other biotopes but the countries
where the forests end up slashed into pieces tend not to have the funds to
reconnect them.

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rch
I like the idea of wilderness corridors: narrow connective parks linking
larger undeveloped areas.

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jacquesm
It's a good idea with one major problem, predators soon figure out that other
wildlife has to pass this choke point and they will treat it like a walking
buffet.

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pandeiro
Not sure that's a major problem? Predators are generally the animals with the
larger territorial requirements for a home range, and thus more reliant on the
presence of these corridors to feed and disperse into new territory.

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jacquesm
It negates the usefulness of the concept.

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pcmaffey
Reading The Overstory right now, which is a Man Booker winning fictional
exploration into the survival mechanisms? consciousness? endangered status? of
forests.

Edit: I read the title as “fractured forests are endangered wildlife”... which
goes to show what this book has me thinking about.

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habosa
That book is incredible, and still relevant to this topic! One big thing in
the book is that humans don't understand the complexity of forest ecosystems
and it shows when we try to change or recreate them. If we expect that we can
just put a highway through a forest and not cause damage because the highway
is relatively small (in surface area) we are fools.

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goda90
I remember learning in elementary school in the 90s that cow birds, which are
parasitic breeders(they lay their own eggs in other bird's nests and their
offspring pushes other chicks out), live closer to the forest edge, so
fragmented forests meant other birds were being wiped out.

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erikpukinskis
Doesn’t that lead to the cow birds being wiped out too?

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MiguelVieira
There was a popular book about this written over 20 years ago, The Song of the
Dodo.

[https://www.amazon.com/Song-Dodo-Island-Biogeography-
Extinct...](https://www.amazon.com/Song-Dodo-Island-Biogeography-
Extinction/dp/0684827123)

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bliteben
This was a great book. I live in the pacific northwest and one thing that
boggles my mind is just how cheap forest land is. Weyerhaeuser owns 12.4
million acres and only has a market cap of 21 billion. Crazy to me that for
0.5% of the national budget you could buy out this company and increase the
size of the national forests in the lower 48 by nearly 10%.

Everyone wants to spend mental energy on being green and helping the
environment, but nobody wants to allow wild places to recover. I would argue
any politician proposing a green new deal is proposing a plan that would get
less done than simply using eminent domain to form new national forests out of
timberland. Much of this land was never proved and was simply granted to
railroads, many of which no longer even exist.

If much of the most valuable timberland in North America is this cheap, then
what about deserts with no energy prospects?

There are still places in the US that should even be national parks such as
the Ruby Mountains in Nevada, which the book mentions briefly as having an
island like effect due to how isolated they are from other high alpine
mountains.

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totally
What can I do to make this better? I would really like to stop ruining earth
but it does seem that there is a lot of momentum in that direction.

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zip1234
I've been thinking about this a lot and I think our car-focused construction
patterns are to blame. In my state we have a grid of roads (whether paved or
unpaved) that covers pretty much the entire state. It seems like where the
roads go, people will go build. Everyone wants to have their own quiet area
and when everyone does it (enabled by the automobile), we end up with
incredibly fractured habitat. I think the only real solution is for
governments to stop allowing sprawling, car centric, development and possibly
get rid of some roads in rural areas. Doing that without impacting wealth
might be tough. However, there are plenty of places where roads go that do not
need roads. At a personal level though? People underestimate the impact they
can have in their local government.

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thehappypm
It's only a matter of time before the only places that wildlife can really
thrive, is true wildernesses. National forests, big state parks, dedicated
wildernesses, and the like. Little community forests are just not good
environments and there's little hope for small, isolated ecosystems to have
much diversity.

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chrispeel
I am all for maintaining large true wilderness. Even so, I think it would be
great to have many more "little community forests". My guess is that such
forests would improve the diversity of all animal life the size of (say) a
hawk and smaller. I also guess that the best path to a medium-sized community
forest in an area without one is to start with a "little" one.

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abraae
I'm the steward of a small (10 acres or so) piece of land - small enough that
I can hear human activity from most of it - and my leisure activity is
trapping for introduced pests like rats, possums, stoats and weasels. It's
hard to say exactly how effective my efforts are, but last month I spotted a
wild kiwi on a trail camera which was truly exhilarating
[https://youtu.be/e_9bSw5yniA](https://youtu.be/e_9bSw5yniA). Anecdotally I've
also noticed an increase in birdlife during the day. That's given me the
incentive to try for total pest eradication next year. Rats are the biggest
problem.

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gdhbcc
Cant read this. Does anyone have a working link?

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lpellis
[https://outline.com/4FBeKG](https://outline.com/4FBeKG)

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rob74
>Animals in places with a long history of disturbances are relatively
resilient, the researchers found.

Figures... the species that were less resilient are probably already gone, so
the remaining ones are the resilient ones.

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Dumblydorr
Yes, this would be natural selection in action, with the selective pressure
being human disturbance and incursion.

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gerbilly
Right, but I bet very few new species have emerged in the last few hundred
years because of habitat fragmentation.

More likely we caused the population of many animals to decrease or extirpated
them entirely (if not drove them to extinction).

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Swizec
Would we even call them new species within a few hubdred years or would they
be seen as “just variations”?

Many species are absolutely thriving under human invasion and forming new
behavioral and breeding patterns that in some cases are even leading to
physical changes. Many burds like crows and sparrows _love_ human
environments. Trash pandas love us too. Hawks love cities almost as much as
mountains. So many tall places to survey from.

There’s also fish who have started being smaller in adult size due to sports
fishing and size regulation. Stuff like that.

Oh and crowd are known to have branched into novel food sources because they
can use cars to break hard nuts they otherwise couldn’t open.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Nature is hella robust.

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gerbilly
This is a well written article on the topic.

It argues that human pressures may be selecting out only the hardiest most
adaptable species such as rats, mice, pigeons, sparrows, etc...

If this goes on unabated, we'll be left with an ecosystem with much lower
diversity.

[http://www.davidquammen.com/sampler/18-planetofweeds](http://www.davidquammen.com/sampler/18-planetofweeds)

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tcd
Why do WE need forests? All WE need is roads, and houses and buildings for
businesses and transportation networks covering air, land and sea to ensure
capitalism can reach every corner of earth. How else will Amazon Prime thrive
and make boatloads of cash?

Fauna and Flora, aside from humans, are not relevant, we are the superior
species and can cut down entire forests, bleach the coral reefs and decimate
habitats so we have our nice luxurious houses because THAT is what is _really
important_.

So these "scientists" are clearly not too caring of how important capitalism
is and how it must take priority over anything else. Masses of species will
likely go extinct but as long as we can keep buying stuff it'll all be okay.

/s

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aivisol
What it is to do with capitalism? Are (existing or former) communist states
better to wildlife? Do you have any facts?

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nicoburns
Capitalist systems give power/status/wealth to those who generate the greatest
profits, and none currently in existence price the costs of environmental
exploitation. They therefore incentivise environmental destruction.

You could in theory (if capitalists weren't so opposed to regulation!) price
these things into a market, but it is unclear that it is a good idea to do so.
You are effectively setting up a world-view based on money/profit being the
only motivating/guiding factor, and then trying to blacklist certain things
within that by artificially changing their monetary value. It might well be
better to build ethics into the system from the start, rather than trying to
map ethical value to monetary value, which is almost certainly doomed to be an
imperfect mapping in practice, and implicitly gives people the "ok" to exploit
any loopholes they can find.

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mc32
Ive been to ex “2nd world countries. They’re attitude towards the environment
was a bit more man vs nature than what we see in the West. See the gigantic
sometimes failed exercises in diverting rivers building dams etc. one of the
more spectacular examples is the Aral Sea, connecting the Arctic rivers and in
China the three gorges dam... which while a twinkle in Yatsen Sun’s eye,
became a windmill in Zedong Mao’s policies, and finally realized by the
current regime.

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nicoburns
I think we need to get out of this "capitalist" vs "communist" mindset. There
are not just two economic possibilities: "everything is an unregulated market"
and "everything is top-down planned".

There exist possible future economic systems which use markets where
appropriate. Centrally plan where appropriate. And regulate where appropriate.

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mc32
Sure but people seem to have the impression that the “bad things” happen
especially in capitalist systems of the west and that other alternate systems
like communism would have s different attitude toward the same issues. My
experience tells me they had the same attitude but with fewer safeguards and
oversight.

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nicoburns
Well my view is that both capitalism and communism have these problems, but
that other alternate systems (which are neither capitalism or communism) could
have better solutions.

Specifically:

\- Pure capitalist systems all but rule out strong market regulation. It's not
technically incompatible with a market-based system, but in practice people
tend to start shouting "but that's not capitalism" as soon as you start
proposing regulation as an expected norm as opposed to an unusual exception

\- Communist systems all but rule out market-based solutions, which is just
dysfunctional as it centralises power too much, and makes it difficult to
efficiently distribute resources

I think it's unhelpful (bordering on obtuse) to assume that people criticising
capitalism in 2019 are advocating for communism. Very few people would
advocate for communism. What people are calling for is:

\- A recognition that market failures are not an exception: they are common.
And strong regulation is needed to counteract that.

\- Large wealth equalities distort markets, and that we need limits on the
amount of wealth individuals can control.

