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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.
Chimpanzees steal and eat human babies when given the opportunity. If they go extinct I’m subsidizing their going away party for some African village that hates them the same way all the other African villages do.
That doesn’t mean I won’t shed a tear if manatees or sea turtles go away. But being endangered isn’t enough to earn my sympathy. Some animals deserve it.
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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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