I don’t think biodiversity is good, in fact it’s probably bad. If we replaced natural ecosystems with curated ones, we’d have much less of a problem with zoonotic transmissions creating new diseases and pests, probably better nature aesthetics, and maybe some ability to use ecosystems to remove pollutants that are currently hard to get rid of.
It’s important to remember that most of the US population was exposed to a significant amount of environmentalist propaganda as children, before they were able to think critically, and that there were falsehoods embedded in that propaganda. Ecosystems do not spontaneously turn into wastelands when they’re perturbed; they mostly turn into boring forests and things like that.
I think there are so many bad assumptions going into this comment. From thinking the short list of issues you mentioned are the only, or most important, thing diverse ecosystems provide, to thinking we could reliably plan and run them when we don’t even know most species involved in them, to the idea that natural aesthetics are somehow inferior to human aesthetics?
Not to mention thinking smart people are only worrying about biodiversity because of claimed partly-false propaganda in one country.
thinking we could reliably plan and run them when we don’t even know most species involved in them
This argument seems symmetric to me. If you support decreasing biodiversity, you’re claiming that we can reliably decrease it. If you support increasing diversity, you’re claiming that we can reliably increase it. So the parent comment and OP are both making the same assumption—that it’s possible in principle to reliably affect biodiversity one way or the other. (Which I think is true—we have a pretty good sense that certain activities affect biodiversity, eg cutting down rainforests decreases it.)
We can reliably increase and decrease biodiversity, though not necessarily control the magnitude of change. That’s not the argument I was replying to—rather, that we could create curated ecosystems that would do what we expected them to (edit: which I think is false and dangerous).
I don’t think biodiversity is good, in fact it’s probably bad. If we replaced natural ecosystems with curated ones, we’d have much less of a problem with zoonotic transmissions creating new diseases and pests, probably better nature aesthetics, and maybe some ability to use ecosystems to remove pollutants that are currently hard to get rid of.
It’s important to remember that most of the US population was exposed to a significant amount of environmentalist propaganda as children, before they were able to think critically, and that there were falsehoods embedded in that propaganda. Ecosystems do not spontaneously turn into wastelands when they’re perturbed; they mostly turn into boring forests and things like that.
Strongly downvoted.
I think there are so many bad assumptions going into this comment. From thinking the short list of issues you mentioned are the only, or most important, thing diverse ecosystems provide, to thinking we could reliably plan and run them when we don’t even know most species involved in them, to the idea that natural aesthetics are somehow inferior to human aesthetics?
Not to mention thinking smart people are only worrying about biodiversity because of claimed partly-false propaganda in one country.
This argument seems symmetric to me. If you support decreasing biodiversity, you’re claiming that we can reliably decrease it. If you support increasing diversity, you’re claiming that we can reliably increase it. So the parent comment and OP are both making the same assumption—that it’s possible in principle to reliably affect biodiversity one way or the other. (Which I think is true—we have a pretty good sense that certain activities affect biodiversity, eg cutting down rainforests decreases it.)
We can reliably increase and decrease biodiversity, though not necessarily control the magnitude of change. That’s not the argument I was replying to—rather, that we could create curated ecosystems that would do what we expected them to (edit: which I think is false and dangerous).