A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
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Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#2Ireland feels the same. A lot of the green spaces have absolutely no indigenous species. You can only find them in places that are being rewilded.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#3> O'ahu, at least, is teaching us important lessons that can help protect other environments not yet so degraded
The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it. So it's just an article of faith that whatever series of major evolutionary catastrophes led to to an ecology are morally or aesthetically preferable to those of human design and intention?
This disneyification of nature is a great stupidity. Nature is just a series of major crises, punctuated by periods with some novelty -- that this process should be preferable to any other, reads quite implausibly to me.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#4> O'ahu, at least, is teaching us important lessons that can help protect other environments not yet so degraded The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it. So it's just an article of faith that whatever series of major evolutionary catastrophes led to to an ecology are morally or aesthetically preferable to those of human design and intention? This disneyification of n…
While I get where you're coming from and agree to some extent, the cost of introducing new species is often the eradication of native species that can't compete. The moral argument is that those species deserve to be protected because they're valuable as is, while the utilitarian argument is that if native species die, we're losing access to genetic diversity that could be exploited now or in the future for medical treatments, innovations in science, etc.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#5It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural".
Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.)
My hypothesis has long been that this view of human activity as "unnatural" was actually born of the religious perspective that some religions hold that humans were implanted into the universe from the outside.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#6An example specie over here would be Canadian goldenrod. It completely dominates other plants and creates monoculture.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#7A good book about the related topic of novel urban ecosystems is "Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution" by Menno Schilthuizen. For urban ecosystems Schilthuizen argues we should accept it; cities are a new habitat anyway, and we should treasure the novel ecosystem that forms in them.
For non-urban places where thriving existing ecosystems get changed completely due to introductions the picture is more complicated; we should not ignore what has been gained by accident, but also mourn the loss.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#8> O'ahu, at least, is teaching us important lessons that can help protect other environments not yet so degraded The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it. So it's just an article of faith that whatever series of major evolutionary catastrophes led to to an ecology are morally or aesthetically preferable to those of human design and intention? This disneyification of n…
The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it
Isn't the point rather that the novelty itself isn't the degradation, but the disappearance of the other native species as they get replaced by other species which already exist elsewhere, thereby decreasing overal number of individual species should the native ones go extinct? You could then argue that less species isn't a degradation because on a huge timescale that might not matter. However on a more 'current' timescale, I'm not sure how else to treat the man-made huge biodiversity loss other than a degradation.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#9> O'ahu, at least, is teaching us important lessons that can help protect other environments not yet so degraded The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it. So it's just an article of faith that whatever series of major evolutionary catastrophes led to to an ecology are morally or aesthetically preferable to those of human design and intention? This disneyification of n…
While I get where you're coming from and agree to some extent, the cost of introducing new species is often the eradication of native species that can't compete. The moral argument is that those species deserve to be protected because they're valuable as is, while the utilitarian argument is that if native species die, we're losing access to genetic diversity that could be exploited now or in the future for medical t…
They're being replaced by ecologies useful to humans, here a variety of crops and the like. I'm unconvinced that the land should exist for some specific species of mice and birds, but not for us.
All I really hear is that some very small group of aesthetically-minded human apes are precious about one more variety of bird, against the interest of very many other human apes that need to eat.
If the new ecology were really extremely desolate, we might weigh up this a little differently, sure. But the article's entire analysis is that these new ecologies are genuinely "natural" in the sense of self-sustaining, and varied, and so on.
Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
#10It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural". Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.) M…
Was it George Carlin that joked something like “maybe the earth conjured up humans in order to put all this plastic in its crust for some purpose we don’t understand”?