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I specifically chose species which don’t have others that easily fill the gap.
There aren’t birds that blot out the sky or native parrots or cold water manatee creatures in the US anymore, personally I think that’s something of value that disappeared.
We don’t miss them because of shifting baseline syndrome.
But for example, let’s say I’ve seen the manatees in Florida.. I have, they’re really beautiful. These huge gentle warm water mammals that just float up into the river systems and natural springs. You can be on a paddle board above a group of them and pet them, they just hang out underneath.
It would be sad if we lost these. Wouldn’t you agree?
Quite possible, btw
I find it hard to understand people’s attitudes towards nature sometimes. It’s typically, “sure we could lose that and we’d survive fine!”.
A lot of things could be lost and we’d survive ok. Just pick a dystopia from fiction. 1984, Brave New World, humans survive! We’re doing fine!
Should the response be then “who cares?”, or, are there other things in the world that matter than just human survival?
There a very big gap between an existence without manatees that a few people ever see on a recreational voyage, and living in a pod devoid of sunlight and subsisting on nutrient paste, or whatever other dystopia you might want to bring up.
And so because of that, we’re likely to keep reducing the web of life on the planet.
Yeah, it doesn’t affect you much if the manatee disappears. There may be some complicated knock on effect like more frequent algal blooms that make the beach a shitty place to be and affect the fishing industry. But we’re good at ignoring this type of thing.
Heck even if our cousins the chimpanzees (between 100k - 300k still exist in the wild), or the orangutan (~50,000 are left) disappeared, doesn’t really matter to you.
Ultimately it’s a spiritual principle. Either non human life on earth has value, or only human concerns do.
I have a foundational semi religious belief that the biota of the planet has innate value, so for example, if someone destroyed the rainforests of the planet tomorrow, even if through some magic this was made to have no impact on human wellbeing, I’d be forced to consider it unspeakably tragic.
Apparently not all humans share this belief.
I believe that to some degree. But you have to stack rank. At the end of the day, not everyone can survive, and we're all dead in the end anyway. So I consider human life far above most else.
I think almost everyone does as well, but when you ask how much relative value nonhuman life has that’s where you get the difference between the “this is something to be concerned about and aim to address” people and the “this doesn’t affect humans so why should I care” people.
There's a large continuum between those two positions. I probably fall pretty much in the middle, myself. But environmentalists have been banging the "we are going to cause the extinction of the human race any day now" drum for 30 years, and quite frankly I'm sick of it and their dishonesty. I'd rather no manatees die, and I think we can try to save them, but that's a far cry from pod living.
They’re perhaps too certain about the probability of severe outcomes, but I also would be careful about overcorrecting and not giving them enough consideration.
Earth history shows that the climate system we live in is frequently capable of erratic behavior far beyond what current dialogue about climate change tends to consider. The tail risk of triggering such a state has unknown probability, but it is important enough that it should enter into any discussion about the human relationship with our environment.
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