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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

> It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences.

To me, the things that he avoids mentioning in this understatement are pretty important:

- "stable position" seems to sweep a lot under the rug when one considers the scope of ecosystem destruction and species/biodiversity loss

- whatever "sharing" exists is entirely on our terms, and most of the remaining wild places on the planet are just not suitable for agriculture or industry

- so the range of things can could be considered "stable" and "sharing" must be quite broad, and includes many arrangements which sound pretty bad for many kinds of intelligences, even if they aren't the kind of intelligence that can understand the problems they face.

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NZ is pretty unique, there is quite a lot of farmable land which is protected wilderness. There's a specific trust setup to help landowners convert property, https://qeiinationaltrust.org.nz/

Imperfect, but definitely better than most!

> there is quite a lot of farmable land

This is not really true. ~80% of NZ's farmable agricultural land is in the south island. But ~60% of milk production is done in the north island.

And virtually none of it is arable. Pastoral at best, suitable for grazing at varying intensities ranging from light to hardly at all.

Yeah totally, I have read that the total biomass of cows and dogs dwarfs that of say lions or elephants

Because humans like eating beef, and they like having emotional support from dogs

That seems to be true:

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%

https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/environment/weight-respons...

Wild land mammals weigh less than 10 percent of the combined weight of humans

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

I mean it is pretty obvious when you think that 10,000 years ago, the Americas had all sorts of large animals, as Africa still does to some extent

And then when say the Europeans got here, those animals were mostly gone ... their "biomass" just collapsed

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Same thing with plants. There were zillions of kinds of plants all over the planet, but corn / wheat / potatoes are now an overwhelming biomass, because humans like to eat them.

Michael Pollan also had a good description of this as our food supply changing from being photosynthesis-based to fossil-fuel-based

Due to the Haber-Bosch process, invented in the early 1900's, to create nitrogen fertilizer

Fertilizer is what feeds industrial corn and wheat ... So yeah the entire "metabolism" of the planet has been changed by humans

And those plants live off of a different energy source now

That is only mammalian biomass, though.

> And then when say the Europeans got here, those animals were mostly gone ... their "biomass" just collapsed

A lot of species had long been extinct, but the biomass of the remaining ones fell.

Megafauna extinctions always follow 1. the mere arrival of humans and 2. agriculture and growth in human populations.

Places the humans did not reach until later, kept a lot more megafauna for longer - e.g. New Zealand where flourishing species such as moas became extinct within a century or two of human settlement.

Yeah I actually meant that the first extinction happened 10,000 years ago when humans first arrived on the continent! Humans arriving is what caused the biomass of animals to collapse

And then Europeans arriving basically finished the job ... that one probably affected the plants more, due to agriculture. (but also the remaining animals)

Yeah New Zealand is a good example.

By stable I think he might mean ‘dominant’.

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