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Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

I'm leaning to agree. Europe has half the number of endangered species as do other continents.

Asia has 2,100+. Africa has 1350+, America has 1600+, and Europe has only 700.

It seems to be that the in previous centuries, Europe gained much human progress at the cost of its ecosystem--particularly niche species (e.g. instead of 20 variety of mouse in a forest, you'll see just 3). Yet we don't consider Europe incredibly ecologically impoverished.

If every continent were to reduce the number of species to mere European levels, I doubt that anyone would mind---especially if everyone could live at European quality of life.

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That is a very reductionist view. You can ignore lots of factors and make up a simple equation with the only ones that help your case. Europe has better quality of life now. Europe has fewer endangered species and didn't care about the environment back then but progressed. Hence, if we don't care about endangered species, life everywhere in the world will be better. Well, among lot of other things Europe didn't care about things like human rights either back then, should we stop caring about that too? This is the equivalent of picking and choosing words in an article and making up your own sentences.

Surely there are things like latitudinal gradients of biodiversity, historical context of the same European countries colonizing and stealing wealth from all these other countries not too long ago. And, of course there's also the fact that European quality of life is perhaps better now, in 2018, move the needle back or forth by like few hundred years (that's a microsecond in scale of ecology) and see how things change.

> This is the equivalent of picking and choosing words in an article and making up your own sentences.

I would appreciate it if you at least presumed that I tried to think about the scenario, rather than made up fantasies to live in.

The core idea I am exploring is that quality of life is seemingly unrelated to the number of species in totality within a continent.

The strongest argument usually made for saving endangered species is that if a niche goes unfilled, the entire ecosystem is damaged and in the worst case may suffer from localized collapse. However, if you look at entire continents, multiple species exist within the same niche, merely separated from inter-breeding by distance, so no niches go unfilled (i.e. wipe out the wolves, and the foxes will step up to eat the possums).

England once had lions, and when they were gone other species filled their niche, and human life went on.

OK, let's consider your view point. Perhaps England had lions a few thousand years ago, they went extinct and perhaps some other predator took its place or may be it didn't, maybe the predator that was above it (if there was one) in the food chain went extinct too. But, yeah human life went on.

Now, here's where I disagree. The effects of extinction perhaps seem more pronounced with some species, rather than others. For instance, take coral reefs and how these could trigger a cascade of events affecting a bunch of species like small fish all the way up to human industry and life. Same with say bees, where they potentially can affect agriculture and humans in a huge way considering they are instrumental for pollination.

I suppose people don't like the idea of incurring the cost of efforts to prevent a species from extinction when they think its simply a moral thing to do, but in reality I suppose everything from climate change to saving endangered species is all just an effort towards self preservation for humans, perhaps simply branded differently.

> The effects of extinction perhaps seem more pronounced with some species, rather than others.

I agree, and hence why I essentially say we should target our efforts towards preserving species that we know are a linchpin for a particular ecology, and whose replacement is problematic.

Currently the discussion isn't nuanced, you can either be for "saving the planet" or "for profit". I'd like to believe that you can be for both.

Though I urge caution, I also would allow for experimentation with ecology.

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