arildno said:
Nor would it affect the Earth much if you disappeared.
You obviously didn't read my post well. I said a
whole species of rhinocerous. If all of us poofed away, that would affect the Earth quite a bit.
Daminc said:
All life is precious and deserves to play it's part in nature.
What about the protozoan Malaria parasite, Plasmodium? Or polio, smallpox, influenza? I think the world did just fine without polio and smallpox.
Daminc said:
On the scientific side:
All species of flora and fauna are interconnected in some way. Whether it be fertilisation, food or a myriad of other possibilities. Species are going extinct as we speak: "Levin's column noted that on average, a distinct species of plant or animal becomes extinct every 20 minutes."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020109074801.htm
Extinction is a natural phenomenon; it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. Through the laws of evolution, new species are created by speciation — where new organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological niche. Species become extinct when are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. Conditions on the Earth are
always changing, and dramatically is not rare. It is not something new, caused by humans. Termite mounds, beaver dams, and coral reefs all change their environment dramatically, affecting many other creatures. Are they interferring with nature?
Damnic said:
That, combined with global warming, makes the possibility of a catastrophic breakdown in the global food chain resulting in a LOT of bad things happening.
We may not care much about what we do to this planet but it's our future generations that will curse us for our short-sightedness.
I would love to argue global warming, but that may be too far getting off topic.
Yellowstone Park, the first wilderness to be set aside as a natural preserve anywhere in the world, was called a National Park in 1872, by Ulysses Grant. No one had ever tried to preserve wilderness before, they assumed it would be much easier than it proved to be.
When Theodore Roosevelt visited the park in 1903, he saw a landscape teeming with game. There were thousands of elk, buffalo, black bear, deer, mountain lions, grizzlies, coyotes, wolves, and bighorn sheep. By that time there were rules in place to keep things the way they were. The Park Service was formed, a new bureaucracy whose sole purpose was the maintain the park in its original condition.
Within 10 years, the teeming landscape that Roosevelt saw was gone forever. The reason for this was because of the Park rangers, they were supposed to be keeping the park in pristine condition, and had taken a series of steps that they thought were in the best interest of preserving the park.
The Park Service mistankenly believed that elk were becoming extinct, they tried to increase the elk herds within the park by eliminating predators. To that end, they shot and poisoned all the wolves in the park, of course not intending to kill
all of them. They also prohibited local Native Americans from hunting there, even though Yellowstone was a traditional hunting ground.
Totally protected now, the elk herd population exploded and they ate so much of certain trees and grasses, that the ecology of the park began to change. The elk ate defoliated trees that the beavers used to make dams, so the beavers vanished. That was when manages found out that beavers were vital to the overall management of the region. When the beavers vanished, meadows dried up, trout and otter populations receded, soil erosion increased, park ecology changed even further.
By the 1920s, it was clear there were way too many elk, os the rangers shot them by the thousands. The change in plant ecology seemed permanent; the old mix of trees and grasses did not return.
It also became clear that Native American hunters had exerted a valueable ecological influence on the park lands by keeping down the numbers of elk, moose, and bison. This recognition came as a part of a general understanding that the Native Americans strongly shaped the untouched wilderness white men thought they saw.
North American humans had exerted a huge influencee on the environment for thousands of years, by burning palins grasses, modifying forests, thinning out specific animal populations, and hunting others to extinction - capitulation to a superior species.
The rule forbidding Native Americans from hunting was seen as a mistake, but it was just one of many that continued to be made by the Park Service. Grizzlies were protected, then killed off, Wolves were killed off, then brought back. Radio collars research was halted, then resumed. Fire prevention policies were instituted, with no understanding of the regenerative effects of fire. When the policy was reversed, thousands of acres were burned so hotly to the ground that it was sterilized, and forests did not grow back without reseeding. Rainbow trout were introduced in the 70s, that species killed off the native cutthroat species. And on and on and on and on.
It is a history of ignorant, incompetent, intrusive interveintion, followed by disastrous attempts to repair, followed by attempts to repair damage caused by repairs. Just as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic waste dump, but in these ones there are no evil awful big corporations, or fossil fuel economy to blame. These are disasters caused by environmentalists, the very people who wanted to protect the environement, who made one mistake after another.
Passive protection, leaving things alone, doesn't preserve the status quo within a wilderness any more than it does in your backyard. The world is alive, things are constantly in flux. Species are winning, losing, rising, falling, exploding, bottlenecking, taking over, being pushed back. Merely leaving it alone doesn't put it in a state of supsended animation. Its like locking your son or daughter in their bedroom and expecting them not to grow up.
Humans
do care what happens to the environment in the future, and try hard. Humans just don't know what they are doing, period. We haven't made an action that only had postive consequences yet - banning DDT, Solar panels, Water recycling systems for homes, abolishing CFCs.
Why are we interferring with the course of nature? Why do some try to keep it the way it is? Why do some blame humans for changing it? It will change for better or for worse, if we are here are not here. If humans were in this state of development before the last ice age, we would blame each other for causing it.
