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edgyquant

>Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions

Should we? Extinctions happen for a reason and open up niches for innovation (new species.) Why prevent this?

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Currently that reason is us. We are destroying habitats faster than species can adapt.

The "why" is to preserve working ecosystems and biodiversity.

Currently? It’s been that way for at least 60,000 years.

We've been hunting species to extinction for 60k years, yes, but we haven't reached global transformation of the environment until the past few hundred.

But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.

Hunting anything near extinction is very solidly at the last inch of the timeline encompassing the last 60k years.

Most extinctions, sure. Some think humans hunted Australia’s megafauna to extinction 50,000 years ago:

https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animal...

We are just another species. Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere. The only thing that will change is their makeup. Organisms that can’t keep up with their environment die and are replaced by new ones that can.

We are another species but we operate more like a disease. We are no longer operating unchecked by the remainder of the biosphere.

> Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere.

If we keep up, they are. We can totally destroy the biosphere in ways that would make it, from our perspective, unrecoverable. Sure, it could recover in a few million years with other species, but that won't matter to us.

> We are no longer operating unchecked by the remainder of the biosphere.

But we aren't, really. Long-term, we will be fully checked. And it will be ugly. In terms of humans, it's better that we check ourselves before nature does it because when nature course-corrects, it will probably look like a cataclysm to us.

What we're actually doing is making the environment less suitable for us and most of the other currently existing species. Long term, that's not a problem. Once we're done trashing the place, life, biodiversity, and working ecosystems will still be here. They will just be very different from what they are now.

Yes, because the current extinction is not “natural”.

How is it not natural? Because people are the species outcompeting the other ones? That’s a weird view of what natural is and it will only cause inefficiencies and prevent organisms that are fit for survival from arising.

The word natural exists specifically to make a distinction between human causes and all other causes. Saying “humans are natural, therefore anything humans do is natural as well” is to render the word meaningless.

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