Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 243 posts

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#91

Post by _gmnw »

jakemauer wrote: post #68
_gmnw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article it sounds like invasive species, plus the fact that we have royally screwed up the local ecosystem. For instance — white-tailed deer are growing exponentially, eating all the underbrush and outcompeting other animals, and they have no/few natural predators left. I agree that not much has changed since the 80s, I think it's just catching up to us now.

White-tailed deer have only recently recovered from over-hunting and returned to their pre-colonization population levels.[1] Do you have a source that frames their growth as exponential? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer#Population_a...

Apologies, I'm based in Pennsylvania and it's definitely more noticeable here. I expect it will become more apparent elsewhere too.

We're at 3x the total population that existed when europeans started settling here, and without an appropriate way to cull the herd I don't see that changing. We have milder winters (so no starvation), less interest in hunting, and again a lack of natural predators.

https://extension.psu.edu/white-tailed-deer

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#92

Post by whymauri »

titzer wrote: post #78
shakezula wrote: post #17

Someday we’re going to hit the cascade point, where we’ve simultaneously and severely damaged or disrupted so many ecosystems that they won’t be able to recover and it all just collapses.

The future is here already, it's just not evenly distributed. There are countless examples of local ecosystems that have been entirely decimated as a direct result of human activity. It's been going on for millenia. The Tigris/Euphrates river region used be a lush, fertile paradise. Thousands of years of human agriculture has turned it into what it is today. Clear-cutting of forests throughout North America, Britain,…

I can't recommend david attenborough's "a life on our planet" enough to gain some perspective on this. You're completely right: it's already happening.

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#93

Post by underbluewaters »

mrfusion wrote: post #58

It would be cool to see a list of all the species that have recovered from near extinction in the last 50 years. (Just to balance out the doom) Off the top of my head: bald eagles, other birds of prey?, various whale species, what else?

In California, pelicans nearly were killed off by DDT but are quite common now. Santa Cruz Island foxes almost went extinct but are now very abundant. Bald Eagles are coming back to the Channel Islands as well.

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#94

Post by WalterBright »

shkkmo wrote: post #87
WalterBright wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unrestricted corporate influence on government Your notion that absent corporate lobbying, government control would work out in the best interests of everybody is utterly without foundation. Your complaint about the profit motive being the root of evil also implies that without profit, things would be better. Without profit has been repeatedly tried. It never produces better results. My father grew up a socialist.…

Please try responding to what people are actually saying rather than inventing endless strawman arguments. There are important functional distinctions between a government run enterprise, a government regulated enterprise and a completely unregulated enterprise. There are different types of inefficiencies in heirarchical systems and market systems. Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games.…

> While the army seems like a purely heirarchical system, it is really a hybrid system since interfaces heavily with the market systems which we call the military-industrial complex.

That has nothing to do with how things are run on a military base.

Besides, if you've got any evidence that the military worked better in a non-market system, like the USSR, please present.

> Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games.

Another word for that is "competition". Competition makes them efficient. Eliminating competition leads to gross inefficiency and incompetence, making things far worse than the duplication ever did.

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#95

Post by _gmnw »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #41
_gmnw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that the answer is always more technology will save us. Whether it's carbon removal advances or cloning, we just look towards future advancements instead of cleaning up our act. I understand that expecting some sort of big shift in how we live is not feasible, it's just a shame.

I wasn't trying to imply we can just "let it be" because we can undo it later. I actually follow Hawaiian Ecosystem conservation and I do what little I can to help. But I understand where you are coming from. Simply consider my original post hopium.

Sorry I wasn't trying to downplay your response, I agree it is the only hope we can actually have these days.

It's awesome that you are giving back though, Hawaii has got to be a really fascinating and challenging case study for conservation vs. consumerism.

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#96

Post by WalterBright »

titzer wrote: post #89
WalterBright wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love that the answer is always more technology will save us. The solution to extincting the whales for whale oil was petroleum. The solution to denuding the landscape of trees was coal. The solution to coal is natural gas, solar, nuclear power. The only alternative to technology is to shrink the human population by about 95%.

You do realize that the switch from whale oil to petroleum caused a massive, orders of magnitude increase in human footprint and ecological destruction? Had we not discovered petroleum, or had it not been there, human civilization would have plateaued or even declined, right after the extinction of these beautiful animals, because we would have absolutely hunted them to extinction unless they were protected. We would…

The extinction of animals caused by humans has been ongoing and increasing since the stone age. There's no way that not having petroleum would have stopped it.

> this planet has finite resources

No matter is being destroyed or is escaping the planet, aside from a solar system probe now and then. Energy can repurpose and reconfigure existing resources.

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#97

Post by daveslash »

mhalle wrote: post #35

Well know species, such as the Monarch butterfly, are candidates for extinction, but don't make it to the list because other species are "higher priority": https://www.fws.gov/savethemonarch/ssa.html

Does the list have a maximum quota? I would have thought that the list could grow to accommodate any species that meet certain criteria?

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#98

Post by rubylark »

jakemauer wrote: post #68
_gmnw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article it sounds like invasive species, plus the fact that we have royally screwed up the local ecosystem. For instance — white-tailed deer are growing exponentially, eating all the underbrush and outcompeting other animals, and they have no/few natural predators left. I agree that not much has changed since the 80s, I think it's just catching up to us now.

White-tailed deer have only recently recovered from over-hunting and returned to their pre-colonization population levels.[1] Do you have a source that frames their growth as exponential? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer#Population_a...

Deer population growth during that recovery period (of white tail deer at least) seems pretty exponential. [1] However in the absence of natural predators it seems that disease and human culling have pretty effectively kept their population to stay at about pre-colonial levels rather than continuing upward to the point of over population.

[1] http://www.deerfriendly.com/decline-of-deer-populations

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#99

Post by mhh__ »

WalterBright wrote: post #96
titzer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that the switch from whale oil to petroleum caused a massive, orders of magnitude increase in human footprint and ecological destruction? Had we not discovered petroleum, or had it not been there, human civilization would have plateaued or even declined, right after the extinction of these beautiful animals, because we would have absolutely hunted them to extinction unless they were protected. We would…

The extinction of animals caused by humans has been ongoing and increasing since the stone age. There's no way that not having petroleum would have stopped it. > this planet has finite resources No matter is being destroyed or is escaping the planet, aside from a solar system probe now and then. Energy can repurpose and reconfigure existing resources.

Helium is a counterexample to that notion even if it is vaguely true for most other things.

Re: U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

#100

Post by ogaitnas »

efitz wrote: post #74

I am probably just a horrible person, but I just don’t care about the extinction of such specific species. Often a member of one species is practically impossible to tell from a member of a different species save for where the individual was found. I care a lot more if “crows” are endangered than if “efitz’ southeastern marble crested crow” is endangered. [ed: spelling] Also, I suspect that such narrowly defined spec…

This is the type of proud indifference that is going to lead us down the path of no return in no time.

The world is not made better by shrinking biodiversity especially in the long term. But screw posterity right?

I hope you don't have kids.

Post reply on HN