Oysters used to be so abundant they were a poor people's food. It's hard to understand how overfishing, overhunting, and habitat destruction have destroyed ecosystems.
Some people think we can just pretend we're not part of an ecosystem if we pour enough concrete. It doesn't work, it just makes everything worse. A damaged ecosystem is not just unpleasant but physically dangerous to us. A flooded coastal base will soon be the least of our concerns. We need to fix damaged ecosystems and replace destroyed ones
> It's hard to understand how overfishing, overhunting, and habitat destruction have destroyed ecosystems.
I like to bring up the sad example of Passenger Pigeons, since they're a species someone in North America could imagine seeing--or even having a hard time avoiding--walking around in daily life at one time, yet they disappeared relatively recently, even leaving a strange linguistic hole because many people have still heard of "Carrier" pigeons.
They’re not the same as carrier pigeons. In the WWII Musueum in New Orleans you can see the exhibit about how many British carrier pigeons were sourced from Shahjahanpur, India.
I never said they were, hence the word "linguistic", as opposed to something like "biological". Both were named mostly for appearances and behaviors, not rigorous phylogenetic analysis which hadn't been invented yet.
Perhaps a similar pairing might be "badgers" on each side of the Atlantic, which--like the pigeons--have some similarities in appearance and were assigned the same taxonomic family, but are certainly not "the same as" one-another.
Some people think we can just pretend we're not part of an ecosystem if we pour enough concrete. It doesn't work, it just makes everything worse. A damaged ecosystem is not just unpleasant but physically dangerous to us. A flooded coastal base will soon be the least of our concerns. We need to fix damaged ecosystems and replace destroyed ones