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Comment by jfeighery | Hacker News Reader

The headline sensationalizes a bit. It's not the 6 fish that are at issue, it's the balance between human activities and ecosystem degradation that we as a society are willing to accept. The Endangered Species Act has saved dozens of beaches and wetlands in Texas from being overrun by oil and gas development. Often a few fish or frogs were the only thing standing in their way!

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Thank you. Its not a matter of do we spend 4 Billion gallons of water to save 6 fish. The point is a deeper question about the human race's resource consumption in the larger picture of things. Another facet of this is 'flushing' as if flushing in it of itself is some natural phenomena. In reality, its also a compromise between our need for reliable water and a natural watershed. Given how much water is going into animal based agriculture in California (not Almonds like so many people like to scape goat), it will be interesting to see if there is any real change in behavior from humans. For instance, there is this big push to reduce lawn watering and car washing, both things that are wasteful in a desert - but if we eat beef at every sitting, it might be just as much water consumption. There needs to be a comprehensive breakdown of individual/household water consumption where you can put in what you do/eat/where you live etc. This should be compared to top down approaches that are more common and then there should be a campaign/effort to dessiminate statistically based information that suggests where and why you should cut down on your resource consumption. It needs to be data driven.

Wait, how is that a useful way to think about this at all? Right now we are talking about six fish. In what way are they not at issue?

I don't know, they might hold the cure to cancer... We destroy our ecosystem at our own peril.

In this time of drought, this seems like a no-brainer, but I would rather spend water on fish in an actual river (where tens of millions of other creatures live) than for cattle or almonds.

Thinking about these actions in aggregate, it can be about losing X gazillion gallons of water to save a species, instead of 4B for 6 fish. I think the point is that these actions add up.

Think of it as the cost of these six and all future fish of this species.

In addition to the difficulty of measuring the cost of losing an entire species forever, as others have pointed out, the question is really do we want this to be an actual functioning river? The more sensitive species are indicators that something has been fundamental changed in the ecosystem.

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