When One Protected Species Kills Another

It probably wouldn't be practical and woukd require a lot of preresearch and funding to get right but I could see a "buffer" common species to make a more appealing prey. Say getting a huge hatchery full of fish and mass releasing them to boost non-endangered prey numbers for example. Of course doing that without making another disaster would be easier said than done.

Cull the sharks.

So here's a radical idea that's fun to think about. Usually we think of nature as "conditions before humans came along." And we figure that if humans disrupted it, then humans should try to undo the disruption.

But that's just fixing one intervention by means of another intervention, and the fix likely has just as many, if a different set, of poorly-understood and unintended consequences. So lately I've started to define nature a little differently - maybe "nature" isn't what earth looked like before humans, it's what earth would look like if humans disappeared. Or to put it less fantastically, a scenario of minimal human intervention from this point forward.

In that context, the blackberry, kudzu and ivy vines that we introduced, are the new landscape, the new nature, the thing that ends up taking over the sites we disturbed. Similar dynamics would presumably play out in the oceans and everywhere else.

The thing this definition of nature has in common with the more usual one, is that phrase "minimal human intervention." The difference of course is that it doesn't try to undo the recent past, which in general throughout the universe but also specifically in this context, I think is pretty much impossible. So this definition, and the course of action that follows logically from it, has the bonus attribute of being a bit more consistent with current reality.

Of course it'll never happen that way unless homo sapiens really does "disappear," i.e. suffers a dramatic decrease in either demand for intervention (read: population), or ability to intervene, in ecosystems. But it's interesting to think about.

I was listening to an interview of Shane Dorian, a well-known big wave surfer from Hawaii. He was remarking on how, when he was growing, when there was a shark attack the locals would go on a shark hunt, killing numerous sharks. Around the nineties sentiments around these hunts changed, and that combined with the depleting of fisheries, shark attacks in Hawaii have risen dramatically. I think it's time we brought back these hunts in the name of protecting otters. I am obviously not just saying this as a biased surfer...

Thank you for posting this. This is a really good 2-sentence summary of what I have been struggling to put into words. The other approaches to nature seem so anti-human.

I like the idea that somehow the quality of the world is somehow intrinsically better when humans aren't involved. Certainly there are plenty of ways that humans can make it worse, but that is not the same thing as saying that somehow humans are less a part of nature than any other organism or geological feature.