While humans have no doubt accelerated their demise, the overall problem stems from "rising sea levels that submerged the land bridges connecting the islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra to the Malay Peninsula and mainland Asia, subsequently fragmenting suitable habitats for the rhino."
Finally, Sumatran rhino populations are so small, remote, and fragmented that poaching is less of a concern for this species than issues like land use.
Payne also noted that the findings reinforced the importance of supporting efforts to prevent the species from going extinct.
“Animal species do come and go over periods that can be most conveniently measured in units of tens of thousands of years,” he said, but added, “To say that we should just let some species go extinct because it is ‘natural’ is nonsense.”
It is nonsense that we should accept any negative outcomes simply because they are natural. If we accepted this form of argument, we'd still have people dying from smallpox and polio, both of which are "natural". The whole point of technological civilization is to be the masters of our own fates and not to meekly accept whatever happens to be "natural".
Ok, but why do we need to do anything to keep certain animal species around? It might be nice to have Sumatran rhinos around so you could see something new and cool, but there are hundreds of thousands of cool species to see. I would guess that the Sumatran rhino does not hold a crucial position in any ecosystem. It's certainly not the same to us as having people die out because of smallpox etc. People mean much more to us than animals. If we have the money, the means, and the time to preserve the Sumatran rhino, then let's save it. If we have better things to do, let's do that instead.
I guess if you try to quantify a species’ value by looking at its utility, either to the ecosystem or for our amusement, you may arrive at the conclusion that some species are not worth saving. Reasonable even if a little cold.
I tend to take the view that life — all life — is extremely rare in the universe, and that alone is enough to warrant as much action as realistically possible to preserve it. A species might never be useful for anything, but it is the unique product of countless generations before it; a story of complexity and beauty that, it could be argued, dwarfs any of humanity’s greatest achievements.
>I guess if you try to quantify a species’ value by looking at its utility, either to the ecosystem or for our amusement, you may arrive at the conclusion that some species are not worth saving.
If you included our own species in that evaluation you may reasonably conclude that ours is not worth saving, above all others.
What would one reasonably label a species that hyper-populates, spreads itself spatially, destroys the other species and their habitations in the spaces it expands to, consumes at a rate far above utility, hordes whatever resources it can gather and spends its efforts calculating how to increase these efforts?
Unless the intelligence we evolved with is used to benefit the rest of life which flourished with our own, then it is hard to call it a virtue, or even deem us any more worthwhile, or worth preserving, more than any other life form.
There are some days I definitely don’t disagree with you. For all our intelligence, we spend an awful lot of it being senselessly destructive. Hard to argue that’s worth keeping around.
Unless all species naturally end up at that stage and the only way to the next stage of evolution is to rise above it.
Or if every animal life is net more pain than enjoyment.
Or if it's the only way to have any lifeform exist into perpetuity. Then we're net beneficial to all other life on the planet as long as any of it survives along with us; disregarding that we're perpetuating a boatload of genes just by continuing to exist.
Any individual animal has a survival instinct. We have a survival instinct that encompasses much larger groups than that of any animal.
It’s a survival instinct when there’s two mouths to feed, and one meal to do it.
When there’s enough for everyone and more, and we take enough resources for 50 because then we get it faster, cheaper, and shinier... well, I wouldn’t personally describe that as survival instinct.
This is fair. I would say though that I am not suggesting that "species are not worth saving". Rather I would define my view as "all species are worth saving, but as human actors, and not gods, we need to pick and choose".
Again, I would love to see nothing go extinct. Only reason I left my first comment is that I think it is unfair to classify the extinction of species during our lifetimes as "meekly accept[ing]" as opposed to "sad but rational given our limitations".
I hear you, and FWIW, I didn’t construe your meaning negatively.
I am Malaysian. I wish I could say that despite our best conservation efforts, we just couldn’t save the Sumatran rhino. Instead, both within Malaysia and without, we hardly give even a moment’s thought to the damage we do as we do it.
If only our quandary was, “which species won’t we be able to save?” instead of “what species are we going to sacrifice so we don’t have to change our lifestyle?”
> Ok, but why do we need to do anything to keep certain animal species around?
For the same reason the Internet Archive is worth keeping: Sumatran Rhinos (and all other species) contain irreplaceable information accumulated over millions of years of evolution. You never know when or how some of that information might turn out to be useful. But once the last backup is gone, it's gone forever.
Unlikely, but possible, so fair. Again though, not really comparable (for us) to human loss. And I'm fine sacrificing "you never know" if we end up using that time and effort for something more pressing, as alluded to by BurningFrog below.
If you take on the perspective of holding the world as temporary ward, preserving it for the use and pleasure of future generations, then that easily dismissed single person missing experiencing something becomes an uncountable number of humans no longer able to do so. While there is certainly a balance to be struck between using our resources for our current needs or amusements and using them to safeguard the needs and amusements of those to come after, your perspective of dismissing it out of hand veers far too much to the side of disregarding those that will come after us entirely.
It's an act of extraordinary hubris to view the global ecosystem through the lens of human entertainment. If there is one lesson we should learn from the last 100 years it's that our species understands very little about the complexity and healthy functioning of ecosystem upon which we depend.
We can make some pretty good guesses. We make this kind of judgement call about species all the time. Like it or not, we pick the winners and losers in this world. That's why there are lots of dogs, cows, and chickens, and no smallpox viruses (at least not in the wild). It's because we've decided that dogs, cows and chickens deserve to live because they make our lives better, and smallpox viruses don't deserve to live because they make our lives worse.
It seems to me that a Sumatran Rhino is a lot more like a dog or a cow or a chicken than it is like a smallpox virus. It's true that we can't eat them or keep them as pets, but just the ability to go see one in the wild has value IMHO.
> just the ability to go see one in the wild has value IMHO.
Two thoughts:
1. A common mistake is to think that just because something has value, it's good to do. This reasoning ignores cost! Only by comparing cost and benefits can we make informed choices.
2. This value is specific to you. Others assign less or more value for this.
3. Causing a species to go extinct eliminates all possibility of anyone extracting any value from it now or in the future. That has an unknown and potentially enormous cost in the long run.
Sure something like that, although I'd say it's to save every species that's practical to save rather than merely possible. Whether or not they're "viable" seems irrelevant.
I don't think it's purely rational. It's probably the case that loss aversion[0] or some combination of psychological phenomena play a huge role. But I suppose the rational component is: If it's practical to save a species, and that species may provide some useful knowledge or inspiration in the future, why not save it?
> If more species is best, should we bread or genetically engineer new ones? Is that “better”?
I get what you're saying, but you have to draw the line somewhere. For example, if more money is better, why not work 3 jobs?
> I don't have a problem with valuing human life over pretty much anything
OK, but then you still have to decide whether you value quantity over quality. Is it better to have N people living comfortable fulfilled lives, or 10N people living in poverty and misery?
Even if you decide to cast your lot with quantity over quality, you have to decide whether the quantity you're going to value is head-count of person-years: is it better to have N people with a life expectancy of 100 years, or 10N people with a life expectancy of 20 years?
OK, but then you still have the problem of how to balance the needs of the people who already exist. For example, I really like animals. I place a very high value on the possibility that I might some day see a Sumatran rhino in the wild. If Sumatran rhinos go extinct then I, a human who already exists, will be very sad and have a lower quality of life. How do you balance that against the needs and desires of others who don't value Sumatran rhinos as much as I do?
One also has the question the impact. Sure it’s a separate species of rhino. But it’s a separate species because humans designated it as such. Sometimes the difference between species is pretty marginal and one might wonder what the impact is of losing it.
Not at all. I think humanity engineering things for its own benefit, including biology, is good. But evolution as a force of nature has been proceeding uninterrupted for millions of years and many species have gone extinct when their niches disappear, or their adaptations become less advantageous. Humanity has evolved to be able to create technology beneficial for us. I don't necessarily see how it immediately follows that using that technology to preserve other species is beneficial.
That niche specie that we let go extinct because of 'naturality' could have evolution advantages over humans that would prove very useful in biological research. They could be especially hardened against cancer for example, but end up being wiped out by disease and famine rather than old age.
Not to mention humanity has a global effect on species population, it would be hubris to assume a species going extinct nowadays is separate from that, even if they have been in a steady decline for quite some time.
When referring to a species no longer existing in a region, it is usually referred to as being extirpated. The title taken literally, claims Malaysia has announced the species extinct, when in fact, it is not. It has been extirpated.
It’s the BBC News site, not a top-tier zoology journal. Given the one thing rarer than the Sumatran rhino is popular press readers who know what “extirpated” is, “Extinct in $location” is entirely appropriate phraseology. #KnowYourAudience
The title originally posted on hacker news was reflective of my original comment. BBC did not use the term extinct in their headline, but in the bold preface of the article. I appreciate and expect esoteric language in hacker news. I suspect the audience here does as well.
Sadly, startups innovations did not find (or even tried) a way to save animals and wild life. If Disney would contribute 1% of all income they got from animals based movies? If Docker would contribute 1% to save whales?
As someone who works in conservation tech, there are a lot of issues. You need to have influence with policymakers (ie the people who can crack down on illegal habitat destruction, or agricultural policy).
It requires a mixture of educating local people about sustainable land use, better environmental monitoring (this is what I do), changing consumer habits so we don't need to deforest to satisfy our food needs, and so on.
There is a lot of money already involved and there are lots of startups doing good work on sustainability which indirectly is beneficial. For example lab grown meat might reduce pressure on livestock farming.
I think it’s an interesting idea we’d need to have someone like gates, focused on how to use that money for effective impact otherwise likely that money would just go to waste... hence nice idea but lot of work to back it up for real impact...
"Its death was a natural one, and the immediate cause has been categorised as shock," Sabah State Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Christine Liew is quoted as saying.
The cause of the death is categorized as "shock", it is hard to not feel the potential for self-reflective sadness here whereby the cause of shock could be dramatically extrapolated to be shock for the violence of humanity and whatever their desires were that warranted killing these rhinoceroses and not protecting and coexisting with them.
The usage of term 'Extinct' in the content is confusing. There are no more Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia, there are about 100 expected to live in the islands of Indonesia.
The submitted title ("The Sumatran rhino is now officially extinct in Malaysia") was taken from the article's subheading, which is a great place to look when a title is baity or misleading. In this case, though, the article title seems more precise, so we've switched to that above.
The use of the "extinct" in this context seems disingenuous then. Probably explainable by the likely fact that "extinct" in a headline will attract clicks.
To whoever downvoted the above, I don't think we view a town becoming a ghost town as an "extinction". As long as the species still exists, it seems inaccurate to use the term extinct. "Dwindling", "near extinction", "increasingly endangered" all seem more accurate in this context. Only reason I call this disingenuous is that it was probably a "cynical" decision to decrease accuracy in return for clicks.
True, but at this point are the main issues I believe are. Land use, people need to farm and live somewhere. Poor people need to feed their kids, and poaching is rather lucrative for them when their children is starving. Issues it seems the world will never fix, thus wildlife suffers :(
The interesting bit is that the people that are most vocal about this all live in countries that have far less diversity than the ones they berate for not properly protecting their wildlife. We have one wolf here in NL, it is all over the news.
From everything I have seen, people in poaching-affected countries take it very seriously. Wildlife is a symbol of their culture and an important source of tourism revenue. Poaching is also a criminal enterprise, and breeds violence in the same way that drug trafficking is not generally a peaceful exchange of goods and services.
The rest of the world see the standard of living of Europeans and North Americans and want the exact same standard of living. If this means they have to do the same thing that the Western world had to do to reach those levels, then so be it. Go through an industrial revolution with polluting factories and industries. Subjugate nature and move all wild animals into zoos. Have a few world wars. Create terrible working conditions that require the need for unions. Overthrow government after government until one that is good enough to allow personal freedoms comes along. Etc.
This. Meanwhile us westerners are so determined to hang onto what we already got, we won’t lift a finger to help them raise their own standards of living any less destructively.
Oh well, let’s hope the next species to come along once we’ve driven our own dumb selves to extinction is much better at learning from others’ mistakes.
Yes it’s okay. People are more important than animals. Europeans cut down all their forests and killed most of the native wildlife, and now live wonderful lives driving around in cars and drinking lattes. The people in the rest of the world have the right to do the same thing.
> Europeans cut down all their forests and killed most of the native wildlife... we want it too.
This is a fallacy. The forest in Germany covers 11 million hectares, 32 percent of the total area of the country
The forest in Ethiopia covers 4 millions of hectares, a 4 percent of the total area of the country.
Ethiopia had the same 30 percent of forest than Germany in the previous generation, but.. huh, they chosed to distroy it.
And now, here comes the bad drought and bleached bones, and the next rock concert for collecting european money for Ethiopia, and ONG projects, and the money spent in fire weapons and endless wars because nature is not here anymore to save the day...
It seems in retrospect that exercising your "right to press the self-destruction button because cavemen in Europe killed european rhinos long time ago", is not a wise move.
All of them. With $100/ton carbon recapture, and a nuclear grid country like France could be at net zero at around $500/per person annually. (They might have to be vegetarians, but Indians have that covered.)
Since the western lifestyle produces 17 tons/person/year, even if that $100/ton we're a scalable reality it would still be way too expensive. One way to pay for that would be a carbon tax, but it's becoming pretty obvious at this point that environmentalists are going to lose the argument for doing anything at the coordinated global governments level, so that means the only possible salvation is going to come if someone can figure out how to make money from it. The price needs to be negative per ton. Let's hope that capitalists can save us.
Thanks to nuclear power France is at 5 tons per capita per year. About 1.3% of French GDP. Way cheaper than the economic damage that will be inflicted by “doing anything at the coordinates global governments level.”
Capitalists don't like nuclear, it only works if it's subsidized by governments. But due to your ideological position about the damage that governments cause, which is also the most powerful ruling ideology in the world, nuclear plants are not going to be built.
I don’t have a problem with government subsidizing capital intensive technology, especially technology like nuclear that has military applications. Subsidies (or taxes) are relatively straightforward and transparent. I have a problem with government planning of the economy and international government coordination.
I think the point is that it's hard for Western civilization to understand the true hardships people face in other parts of the world, and the fact that they are killing animals for single body parts is absolutely absurd to us, but to them, it's a last resort for survival in a society that seems quite hopeless.
I don't think many of us know what we are capable of when it comes to actually trying to survive and provide for our young when there is little to no opportunity outside our front doors. We have computers in front of us where we type and complain online, but I can be honest with myself, and I'll be doing absolutely nothing with my day today to stop this from happening.
You know what makes birth rates drop? Higher standards of living.
Families who don’t have to raise their kids to work a harsh unrelenting subsistence living, who don’t need to birth twice as many infants knowing half of them will die of malnutrition and disease long before they reach adulthood, who have access to family planning and reliable birth control, have the luxury of choosing quality rather than quantity. Others don’t.
Look back in your own family tree (or stump, in your case), and it’s only three or four generations since us westerners did the same, for the same reasons. So if you’re going to sit up there on your high horse, consider what your ancestors had to go through to put you there, and show some basic consideration for others still struggling on that road.
Basically yea. Swallow your privilege and accept that people and their families need to eat, and they can’t wait decades for their situation to get better, they have to eat now. And if that means a species must go extinct, so be it.
Unless you want to say the lives of some obscure animal you only see in photos and will probably forget about after a few days anyway is more important than human beings like you and me, maybe you shouldn’t judge.
People are just another form of animal life living on this planet, nothing more and nothing higher.
If someone is going to drive another form of life to extinction for the sake of an erectile disfunction remedy that _doesn’t work_ ...sorry but I am going to judge them for that.
The arguments being made here that not just poaching a bit but to full on extinction is fine because people are poor is just nonsense.
That’s not true. I live in a place where people actually believe it. If you are not aware of the lack of efficacy of something, it’s not exactly a fraud.
The people who peddle it are claiming to know that it is efficacious. Either they don’t know, in which case they are fraudulently claiming knowledge they don’t possess, or they do know it doesn’t work, in which case the are fraudulently claiming it works.
Those aren't the two possibilities. What if they do know that it works? Or think they know? People have been doing crazy things that don't work for thousands of years, to say all of that stuff is a fraud is a little myopic.
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/12/dna-analysis-shows-sumatra...
While humans have no doubt accelerated their demise, the overall problem stems from "rising sea levels that submerged the land bridges connecting the islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra to the Malay Peninsula and mainland Asia, subsequently fragmenting suitable habitats for the rhino."
Finally, Sumatran rhino populations are so small, remote, and fragmented that poaching is less of a concern for this species than issues like land use.