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- Hacker News
- It'll bounce back, it just doesn't care how we define "back".
Down the line there is a state nature will be in. More/less plants and animals. Who knows. It might not be a pleasant state for people.
The concern seems to be that it will change faster than we can change. What happens if the climate of an agricultural area changes in a lifetime? or a generation? or a decade?
by oldsklgdfth - That was a pointless source. Which 23 categories? How do I know if I care about them?
Fig. 2 [1] lists them. Fig. 3 I think indicates that 20 of them have positive effect size on biodiversity, which I think was the point. "Learning and inspiration" is an interesting category. Carbon sequestration ranks high, with Terrestrial (as opposed to the larger Oceanic) having quite a few studies behind it.
- I feel like we should do our best to not destroy the environment, for altruistic reasons but also for the very selfish reason that I have children and relatives with children so I want to leave them with a place they can live in and enjoy not a mess they have to deal with.
I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.
Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.
- Senior author here, any questions please ask! As a long-time lurker, it's wonderful to see biodiversity is so popular here!by willpearse
- Here's a study from the southern Appalachian Mountains that found that even in forests that were logged over 100 years ago, species richness and abundance was still lower than in forests that had never been logged:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248428489_Centuries...
by MiguelVieira - I had always assumed this, and my idea of nature bouncing back was more on the millions of years time scale as evolution would result in the refilling of empty ecological niches.
All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.
by zhivota - I think what happened to the cod fishery off North America is really interesting. They overfished the cod then decided to regulate the fishery to let the population come back. But it never recovered - the cod population is stable but at a much lower number. Other 'stuff' (other fish species, jellyfish, etc) had moved into the environmental niche that the cod were in.by comrade1234
- On this topic, I can never end recommending Adam Curtis's series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and on this topic of "bounce back" the second episode in that series.
The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy projected onto the natural world rather than an accurate reflection of ecological reality. We can model the world in the language of system theory, but the models we make there might not have much to say about the real world. We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.
The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning. The parallel with economics based on the "homo economicus" is striking, also there you reason from an ideal model and try to make inductive statements about the real world, which in many places directly conflict with observation. The "eco-system" and "natural equilibrium" stem from this approach of applying system theory to ecology, and are ideas which are now _very_ ingrained in western thinking, but which are obviously off.
Here is the start of that second episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgoereMDUJ0
by 317070