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Naturalism vs Post-naturalism
Topic Started: Apr 11 2016, 11:13 AM (4,216 Views)
HangingThief
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Scrublord
Apr 14 2016, 09:52 PM
I never denied that.
Never said you did
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Kamidio
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Stop double-posting. Use the edit button you've been given.
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HangingThief
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Kamineigh
Apr 14 2016, 09:56 PM
Stop double-posting. Use the edit button you've been given.
I can't figure out how to do multiple quotes in one post. I've double posted before and nobody's hassled me, now suddenly when we happen to be arguing it becomes important? Seems a little passive aggressive.
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Kamidio
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There's a little white box next to the quote button. Click it when you want to quote a post, and a checkmark will show up.

When you're ready to reply, hit the quote button on the last post you checkmarked, and you'll have a bunch of quotes in one post. If you're ever having trouble figuring out how the site works, you can just ask us, kiddo.
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Sheather
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And we'll probably survive it. All the unsustainable practices will eventually burn themselves out and we'll be forced to change our methods of doing things. We'll go the point of least resistance, quickest short-term gain. Eventually we'll run out of destructive ways to live and have to adapt a more sustainable lifestyle as a species or die out ourselves, and we'll do the former. We might not have the Amazon rainforest at that point, or the elephant, or pandas or manatees or guinea worms, but we'll still have more individual species of plants and animals than we did after any other mass extinction.

The human extinction event looks really bad, but on the big scheme of things it's really quite minor. We cut biological diversity with our practices, yet we tend to leave quite a few members of every group, more than most natural events would. It's extremely unlikely we'd ever be so destructive as to cut back animal diversity to the extreme extent of "After Man" where we have only rats and rabbits left to inherit the Earth and replace carnivorans and antelopes and everything else. We aren't like the meteor that kills almost everything and destroys whole clades; we might kill off the wolf, but we'll surely have the similar coyote, which could become more or less exactly like a wolf in every meaningful way both aesthetically and behaviorally in a very short time if the opportunity again arose, since it's basically what the ancestor of the wolf looked like. We might lose a lot of the less common ungulates but we'll probably always have some sort of deer, goat, cow, and small antelope like duikers or impala which between them could diversify again to replace all the takins and kudu and sable antelope that might not survive us in a few million years. All the flightless island birds are probably toast, but in 10 million years we'll have a whole new assortment of them as new islands form, and we'll get a bunch of even stranger creatures, too - terrestrial mammals on small islands where they'd never get naturally. Maybe the stoats on New Zealand will one day diversify into a strange and wondrous clade of new animals like the Madagascaran lemurs or Australia's wallabies, all because of us. To someone in the far future who'd find them, they wouldn't be invasive, but charismatic natives, just like we view the new world monkeys or really almost any animal that evolved somewhere else before moving to where it lives now, like horses, camels, and lions.

Some sort of nature will persist no matter what we do, the only issue is that in our lifetimes, it won't be very exotic. If we end up with only generalists that's just fine for mother nature, but it might be boring for us to trade giraffes and polar bears for whitetails and badgers.
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HangingThief
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Sheather
Apr 14 2016, 10:04 PM
And we'll probably survive it. All the unsustainable practices will eventually burn themselves out and we'll be forced to change our methods of doing things. We'll go the point of least resistance, quickest short-term gain. Eventually we'll run out of destructive ways to live and have to adapt a more sustainable lifestyle as a species or die out ourselves, and we'll do the former. We might not have the Amazon rainforest at that point, or the elephant, or pandas or manatees or guinea worms, but we'll still have more individual species of plants and animals than we did after any other mass extinction.

The human extinction event looks really bad, but on the big scheme of things it's really quite minor. We cut biological diversity with our practices, yet we tend to leave quite a few members of every group, more than most natural events would. It's extremely unlikely we'd ever be so destructive as to cut back animal diversity to the extreme extent of "After Man" where we have only rats and rabbits left to inherit the Earth and replace carnivorans and antelopes and everything else. We aren't like the meteor that kills almost everything and destroys whole clades; we might kill off the wolf, but we'll surely have the similar coyote, which could become more or less exactly like a wolf in every meaningful way both aesthetically and behaviorally in a very short time if the opportunity again arose, since it's basically what the ancestor of the wolf looked like. We might lose a lot of the less common ungulates but we'll probably always have some sort of deer, goat, cow, and small antelope like duikers or impala which between them could diversify again to replace all the takins and kudu and sable antelope that might not survive us in a few million years. All the flightless island birds are probably toast, but in 10 million years we'll have a whole new assortment of them as new islands form, and we'll get a bunch of even stranger creatures, too - terrestrial mammals on small islands where they'd never get naturally. Maybe the stoats on New Zealand will one day diversify into a strange and wondrous clade of new animals like the Madagascaran lemurs or Australia's wallabies, all because of us. To someone in the far future who'd find them, they wouldn't be invasive, but charismatic natives, just like we view the new world monkeys or really almost any animal that evolved somewhere else before moving to where it lives now, like horses, camels, and lions.

Some sort of nature will persist no matter what we do, the only issue is that in our lifetimes, it won't be very exotic. If we end up with only generalists that's just fine for mother nature, but it might be boring for us to trade giraffes and polar bears for whitetails and badgers.
But first, there's gonna be a lengthy battle against climate change denier- types.
Hey.


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Ànraich
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HangingThief
Apr 14 2016, 08:49 PM
Kamineigh
Apr 14 2016, 08:28 PM
Look, if you truly believe that system is better, sell all of your belongings, including your clothes, and move to Ethiopia. We'll see which one of us dies in the middle of nowhere from starvation/exposure/thirst/dysentery.
Don't you get it? That's not an option anymore. Farming literally ruined the chances of anyone living happily and independently.

Also, cave men definitely did not die of exposure and dysentery. Unlike us pale, sickly farmers that have bred for ages and ages with little to no natural selection, they were tough. They could survive and thrive like wild animals, which they were. We basically domesticated ourselves into the disgraceful, shriveled shells of humanity we are today.
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Scrublord
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Sheather
Apr 14 2016, 10:04 PM


Some sort of nature will persist no matter what we do, the only issue is that in our lifetimes, it won't be very exotic. If we end up with only generalists that's just fine for mother nature, but it might be boring for us to trade giraffes and polar bears for whitetails and badgers.

The problem with that is that even if it make sense from a purely objective standpoint, people like having exotic, unusual animals and plants around. It's an aesthetic pleasure, but it's a powerful one that drives the way we see the world. Even if we accept that the earth's ecosystems have become an artificial "garden" by this point, the rare and exotic species are essentially the most precious "flowers" in that garden. In our capacity as the gardeners of the planet, it would do us well to see that they do not die.
Edited by Scrublord, Apr 15 2016, 12:32 AM.
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Sheather
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And we'll probably have as many in captive collections as we can convince to breed there, but we're certain to lose many in the wild at current rates of human expansion.

Many charismatic animals fortunately do well in zoos. It's unlikely that tigers or lions, zebras, anything like that will go entirely extinct in the foreseeable future because they do so well in our care, though we'll lose subspecific diversity. Elephants don't thrive, though, the issues pandas experience are very well known and whales can't be kept properly in aquaria with current technology, save for the smaller dolphins.
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Scrublord
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So are you saying we should just pull the plug?
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Sheather
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No, I'm saying only what I have written in the above posts and absolutely nothing more than that. I thought I wrote them out as clearly as was possible.

Captivity isn't a perfect solution. It will work, but a big issue with captivity-dependent conservation of course is that over time you're going to change the essence of what an animal is. Even without intentional selection, after enough generations in a zoo you're going to change the animals since the environment is radically different from nature. You'll get tigers that cope better and better with the boredom of an enclosure, who have reduced predatory instincts. Antelope that are more and more habituated to novelty and low-fear. Most zoo stock these days is just a few decades from the wild and not too far changed yet. I hypothesize that in a few centuries, their descendants won't be the same sort of animal anymore. They'll have become, to an extent, domesticated, which may eventually result in animals that can only survive in artificial conditions. It would be much more desirable to preserve the animals, at least in small numbers, in a wilder environment, but this may become impossible in the future for many of them.
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Scrublord
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If there's any wilderness left for the, to live in, that is.
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Kamidio
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We could pull a rhino, and relocate them to environments that are similar to their own, but lack their causes of endangerment (poachers and such). Like releasing African Elephants out into Texas.
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Sheather
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Today the two major sources of funding in the developed world for the preservation of wildlife habitat rather than more homes, farms, or industry, are hunting, followed by tourism. As long as the world isn't in total societal collapse, any huntable and non-threatening animals - deer, elk, foxes, antelope, etc - will probably always have a place to live. Carnivores are trickier because though because they need much larger wild areas. If they're too close to cities, they'll occasionally eat someone or destroy something looking for food and cause a lot of trouble. Some carnivores can adapt to urban environments well enough, including animals as large as leopards and mountain lions, but true African lions as well as tigers, jaguars, every bear but the American black bear and virtually every other large carnivore simply don't mix well with cities. For now most of these are hanging on, but as more habitat is cleared, we may see them decline pretty suddenly. Hunting and tourism are very rich fields, but if it comes down to more farms to feed the hungry or a patch of woods to watch bears in, the bears are going to have to go; if we don't end up eating them (in the unfortunate but not entirely impossible situation of a future societal breakdown, we would eat anything we could, which could be a very bad situation for endangered animals dependent on protection to survive) they're still going to be displaced, end up moving into settled areas, and end up either euthanized or in a zoo.

~~~

Personally, I think the idea of rewilding and moving endangered animals from one comparable habitat in an unsafe area to another in a more developed country with the resources to to protect them could help save a lot of animals, but there isn't much support behind it yet. Australia could provide an excellent backup population for endangered African animals even if they were restricted to preserves.
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Flisch
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Sheather
Apr 14 2016, 10:04 PM
Maybe the stoats on New Zealand will one day diversify into a strange and wondrous clade of new animals like the Madagascaran lemurs or Australia's wallabies, all because of us. To someone in the far future who'd find them, they wouldn't be invasive, but charismatic natives, just like we view the new world monkeys or really almost any animal that evolved somewhere else before moving to where it lives now, like horses, camels, and lions.
I wanted to mention this, but you beat me to it. It should be remembered that literally every species is an invasive one if you just go back far enough.

Also, for everyone who loves to play the moral card: Invasive species are most often brought to new environments by man nowadays. How would it be "morally" justifiable to wipe them out? How is their life worth less than that of indigenous species? Just some food for thought.
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