Short-Sighted Conservation Can Damage the Evolution of Species »
Posted by: jcolman 1 year, 5 months ago110 Comments Report this Story
It seems like a no-brainer: People concerned with saving the environment should protect those places with the most species and that are under the biggest threats, right? WRONG. This scientist argues that such short-sighted conservation actually misses more species than it protects and literally changes the course of evolution... for the worse.
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agentX1 year, 5 months ago
The mangrove forest section of the article could be crucial to preserving coastline here in the southeastern US, what with sea level rise. However, I do not totally agree with his conclusions.
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jordan111 year, 5 months ago
I think I've gone into information overload. He asks more questions than he answers. I'd appreciate more 'for instances' in articles like this, so I can bring things down to the lowest common denominator, as quickly as possible. Not that I'm intellectually lazy, but there's soooo much to keep up with, it would nice if more people used the KISS principle. I'll bet I'm making no sense at all. I think I'll go start supper.
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KingOfTruth1 year, 5 months ago
http://freedom.org/news/200703/06/cunning.phtml
Thus, we are concerned that a listing of polar bears under ESA in the United States may actually be harmful for the conservation of polar bear populations internationally.
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KingOfTruth1 year, 5 months ago
In concluding, a decision on whether or not to list polar bear should be based on what we do know: the fact the species' is healthy in population size and distribution, existing laws and regulatory mechanisms are working, and the polar bear is one of the most protected species in the world. On the other hand, given the highly speculative nature of the climate models and carbon emission scenarios, it is virtually impossible to say with any certainty that polar bears are likely to become extinct in the foreseeable future.
http://freedom.org/news/200703/06/portman.phtml
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jeffery11 year, 5 months ago
It seems that there must be a far more holistic approach to preserving wildlife than either just counting species or ensuring we have wilderness to pillage. The biggest problem is people. There are simply too many people vying for too few resources. If we do not reduce our population at the same time that we recognize the rights of nonhuman animals to exist without our interference and abuse then the environmental movement will forever be merely a marketing program, trying to sell the idea that there is something in nature to benefit us.
We can live with other living things without the carnage but we choose not to, just as we choose to not live peacefully with each other. Most of this conflict begins with religion, that is simply accepted without question. It is here that we must start.
That said, a balance between "hot-spot" conservancy, for example to save orangutan habitat, and greater ecosystem conservancy must be implemented.
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Taganan1 year, 5 months ago
jeffery1 - Please be the first to suicide so we may reduce our population. Oh, you didn't mean to include yourself! Who do you kill or forbid to have a child and what gives you the right to decide that is the correct policy. We and the animals both have a right to exist, but people are more important.
You sound like a PETA terrorist, a Vegan who wants to force it on everyone by law, an anti-hunter [probably also anti-guns], a pacifist and an aetheist.
Christianity says God gave man dominion over the Earth, to use it AND to care for it, which includes plants and animals. In many ways we have not done a very good job. A wilderness area simply means that no people live there, not that they cannot travel through leaving a minimal imprint, not that there cannot be some hunting/fishing. The man has a point that is well taken, we do the wrong things.
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Dionys1 year, 5 months ago
Here's a good article on being God's stewards over the earth. I'm sorry it's not Dominionist. Somehow raping the earth for the benefit of the few doesn't seem very Christlike to me.
http://www.unm.edu/~religion/DrillingCathedral.pdf
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AmpLee1 year, 5 months ago
""people are more important.""
spoken like a true people
I thought the days of us being the center of the universe and the sun revolving around us were done.
We aren't the center, just another filament in the web of existence, and we are interconnected and interdependent. Acting like we are the end all be all bees knees hasn't helped the earth much throughout history. I often wonder how much human illness, especially respitory illness, is caused by a compromised environment thru ages of people acting under the idea the earth is for our disposal-I mean AT our disposal. yeah that's the ticket.
PS pure Nugentian carnivore and fish-killer here.
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Helixbuilder1 year, 5 months ago
Yes anyone who professes the 'rights' of animals has no idea of what a right is or the nature of the environment in which animals live.
As for your nonsense about Christianity the 1st amendment guarantees that I can ignore you and I will.
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jordan111 year, 5 months ago
Taganan, you lost the debate. By calling Jeffery1 a "PETA terrorist, a Vegan with untoward plans, a pacifist (like it's a bad thing), an atheist (like it's a bad thing), you have become the extremist you're trying to paint him to be.
On point, Jeffery1 spoke about population control. Of course coming from the U.S., you wouldn't grasp that population could be a problem. With approx. 76 people per square mile, we're not doing badly. However, in contrast, China has 1040 persons per square mile along its East & West coasts, while it only has 11% of its land suitable for farming. With 1.3 BILLION people, the impact on everything from the dirt to the water 'should' be obvious. You say people are more important. People rely on the environment for their survival. You simply can't separate people from it & count on surviving.
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jeffery11 year, 5 months ago
Why do you right-wingers immediately resort to slaughter to resolve problems? There is no need to slaughter anyone, including having anyone commit suicide. All that is needed is to not create someone who already does not exist.
Also, why do you consider those that are concerned for the well being of those you obviously don't value, except as objects for your use and abuse, terrorists? Nonhuman animals are terrorized and slaughtered everyday for your pleasure.
I am not a Christian and do not believe in god. I do, however, subscribe to a morality that includes all living things because we are purportedly moral beings. As moral beings, we have a universal obligation to do the least harm to any living thing, without applying our personal value system.
Compassion is not mutually exclusive; We have the capability of caring for others and meeting our needs, without abusing any other living thing. All we need to do is change the way we live to account for their existence.
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HomeGManComment removed: User banned.
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bill29361 year, 5 months ago
"There are simply too many people vying for too few resources. If we do not reduce our population at the same time that we recognize the rights of nonhuman animals to exist without our interference and abuse then the environmental movement will forever be merely a marketing program, trying to sell the idea that there is something in nature to benefit us. "
Jeffery1,
Who do you want in charge of the decision? Would you agree with that persons decision if they decided YOU need to go?
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jeffery11 year, 5 months ago
Everyone should make that decision. there is no need to decide who is "to go" because all we need to do is stress that simply NOT creating people who already do not exist is preferable to creating them. So, all people have to do is "sacrifice" creating a baby that does not exist for the benefit of people and nonhuman animals that do exist.
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jovial1 year, 5 months ago
It's simply impossible to know what effect saving a species will have on our ecosystem. Our ecosystem is so complex and so fragile that any change done in one area almost certainly will have a ripple effect in other areas in ways we may not totally understand.
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Amazing11 year, 5 months ago
I agree with jovial. It's impossible to know what will have the least effect, but that does not mean that we should do nothing. Surely we can attempt to look at the problems from both paradigms and choose a middle course.
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Dharma1 year, 5 months ago
This guy makes sense. Its a penny wise pound foolish sort of thing. Saving a bunch of species doesn't make sense if the ecosystem no longer supports them. Some of the most innovative evolutionary changes have come about because of extremes. But extreme ecosystems are not as biodiverse. I think that as Jefferey1 says there needs to be a balance between the two methods. Otherwise, like the article says, the only place we will see the species we manage to save is a zoo because there won't be a functioning "wilderness" left......
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KingOfTruth1 year, 5 months ago
For instance..... Heh-he. I just love treehuggers. It's always a blast to watch them sputter in denial when I point out to them that most of the trees they're trying to save (conifers; some evergreens) do more harm than good for the environment, because they don't produce oxygen. In fact, the three most bountiful conifers in the US (Ponderosa Pine, Loblolly Pine, and [I forgot the name of the third!?]) actually produce Sulphur Dioxide, aka "acid rain." In fact, practically all Pine trees actually consume far more oxygen than they emit.
If they really gave a crap, they'd be calling for us to use up all those pine trees to build houses, and plant Oaks, Maples, and other leafy trees instead.
That's what Ronald Reagan told everyone in the 1980s and people made a Reagan joke about it, like he was senile. But conservationists know it to be true.
As for the rain forest, there are plenty of myths about that, too, I'll bet. Can you believe anything these nutcases claim?
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mivadar1 year, 5 months ago
It's actually very simple, when You think about it.
The carbon taken out of the atmosphere (and hydrogen from the water) is equal to the total weight of the tree (or any photosynthesizing plant).
During photosynthesis sugar is produced - the sugar is used for two more or less distinct things. For metabolism - i.e. it's burnt, so the CO2 is again released, and for "building material", i.e. the carbohydrates that the tree is made of.
When You burn a tree, You release into the atmosphere exactly the amount of carbon dioxide that the tree has bound in its lifetime.
(One of the reasons why e.g. sedge grass binds solar energy more efficiently and is better for biofuel - it's obviously lighter than a tree, but it has a fast lifecycle, so over time it binds much more biomass, equivalent to CO2.)
Sorry for the simplified explanation - I'm sure You get the point.
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jordan111 year, 5 months ago
KingOfTruth, you need to change your 'name.
' http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ask/index.ht
That link is for teaching children. It should suffice.
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Taganan1 year, 5 months ago
They say deforestation, of broadleaf trees, has made CO2 in the air 20% worse. Trees breathe in CO2 and give off Oxygen.
GW is a danger to the Polar bears? Between 10,000 and 3,000 years ago the earth was much warmer than today. Did they just evolve in the last 3,000 yrs.? Doubtful. They just adapted to the cooler weather of the last 3,000 yrs. and they can bloody well readapt to warmer weather.
Always knew I didn't like pine trees except for lumber and Christmas. They fall down easily too. Maybe the "acid rain" they contribute to is a way to make more space for pines to grow by killing broadleaf trees.
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amazed1 year, 5 months ago
to say nothing of the devastation that the absolute prevention of forest fires out west has wreaked.
In the natural course of events, Southern California, Arizona and other areas subject to frequent forest fires, periodic burns consumed the choking underbrush, but happened often enough that there was not enough fuel to burn the canopy and harm the trees.Most of the forest animals could get out of the way. Many of the trees and other plants will not germinate unless the seeds have been burned firs.
By micromanaging forests and preventing all burns whenever possible. We have set the stage for the wild fires of the past decade or so. When you see this land, it is barren and takes a long time to repopulate.
In many places of FL where the fires were several years ago, where the land had been mostly cleared, you cannot even tell what burned, but where the forests were protected, it is still burnt out several years later.
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KingOfTruth1 year, 5 months ago
Sort of like how the Caribou had an explosion AFTER the pipeline was built despite all of the insane rantings of environmental whackos.....oh...I almost forgot....around offshore drilling rigs is the newest spawning ground for millions of fish and other form of sealife....and where we have stopped limited harvesting of sea kelp, it is starting to choke things off....
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amazed1 year, 5 months ago
I get really sick of hearing about how I'm anti-environmental because I think Al Gore and Greenpeace and, for the most part the DEP (or EPA)are a bunch of dangerous whack jobs.
I believe in protecting the earth, minimizing pollution and generally taking care of the environment. I am NOT in favor of trying to micro-manage it (we don't know enough) ex-post facto environmental regulations and new regulations that cost big dollars for tiny, incremental improvements.
To hear most "environmentalists" talk, we are on the eve od distruction and the earth is filthy and getting worse.
If we look back on just on our lifetime, the improvements that have been made are staggering. Long Island Sound was just about dead in the 70's, now it's teeming and clean and beautiful again. The Cuyahoga River in PA caught on FIRE in the late 70's or early 80's for crying out loud! I understand you can even fish it again. The Hudson still has problems, but it's improving.
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jeffery11 year, 5 months ago
The problem was that many people wanted to create a "park" for recreation and allow for development of housing and so fought wilderness fires. Naturalists and other scientists said this was not good but politicians and those that wanted to visit wilderness and build in it ignored them and had the power to fight fires. This of course because people consider the earth their playground, that is to be dominated for their use.
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ETproductions1 year, 5 months ago
The article makes perfect sense. Form time to time, there have been in the past and probably will be natural culling of species. This is good. The most adaptive survive to breed even more adaptive species.
The problem is that we know there has been a massive upswing in species extinctions in the last 100 years, and there is not much but human intervention, climate changes and loss of habitat to explain it. The change is dramatic. Where 100 species typically went extinct over the last 10,000 years, 1000 drop out every 100 years now.
We can't fix this if we just concentrate on rain forests and tropical coral reefs, important though they may be. We need to take a holistic approach to the health of our mother planet.
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IAmMine1 year, 5 months ago
"The problem is that we know there has been a massive upswing in species extinctions in the last 100 years..."
Thats exactly what I was thinking as well, nicely said. One must conclude that species do not have enough time to evolve.
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amazed1 year, 5 months ago
((The problem is that we know there has been a massive upswing in species extinctions in the last 100 years, and there is not much but human intervention, climate changes and loss of habitat to explain it.))
actually, we DON'T "know" this.
We have no idea what was going on before we started studying it intensely. Many of the species that we know have gone extinct in the last hundred years were also discovered in the last hundred years.
Maybe extinctions are up, maybe they're not. There really is no way to tell --especially when you're talking about things like the darter snail and various bugs. Small things generally decay completely before they get a chance to become fossilized.
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ETproductions1 year, 5 months ago
Aha, "amazed". Bones don't exist. There is no such thing as fossils. I fact, there isn't even anything called history. We can't read what people wrote 200 years ago, much less the heiroglyphics of 5,000 years ago or the cave drawings of 30,000 years ago.
I'm not surprised that you are "amazed". Every day dawns for you without any connection to a past. The sky is blue today. What an amazing surprise. How could we have known that might happen?
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KingOfTruth1 year, 5 months ago
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Brrrrr! Coldest March day since 1950
By Bill Fortier
A meteorologist in the Taunton office of the National Weather Service today confirmed what anybody walking outside quicky realizes, which is, it is about as cold as it can be for the month of March.
At 11 a.m. it was 3 degrees above zero with a wind child of about 20 degrees below zero, Meteorologist William Simpson said.
The temperature at midnight was 16 degrees which is the March 6 record for the lowest maximum temperature for the date, according to Mr. Simpson.
The record low maximum temerature for the month of March is 10 degrees, set on March 3, 1950. With a high temperature of 9 degrees predicted for the rest of the day, today will rival that record even though it won't show in the record book because the high temperature was recorded at midnight.
"Certainly, today is the coldest March day since 1950," Mr. Simpson said.
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DesertFlower1 year, 5 months ago
I think conservation should be gone at globaly not just in Hot Spots. I personally dont want to have to go to these places just to enjoy nature because we let the rest go to crap, not that it will in my day but i have hope for future generations. in the mean time I will keep planting more plants and trees on my land. Not forgeting to treat other animals with as much respect as I do humans animals.
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nostalgia1 year, 5 months ago
Interesting article
One area of environmental damage often ignored is the border
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Coronado National Forest and San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area - fires caused by immigrants have destroyed 20% of the riparian vegetation along the San Pedro
vehicles of smugglers leak oil & fuel into streams & endangered species habitat
http://www.desertinvasion.us/reports/hull_border_e
People from the area have asked for help but as the article notes "We have not heard even the mildest of peeps from the Sierra Club"
George Diaz Orlando Sentinal wrote "Battered border"
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/columnists/orl
Native water drained dry or so foul that animals won't drink from it. Animals with cans on their muzzle suffocating to death. Trash & human waste scattered everywhere, clean-up crews wear hazardous disposal suits Why is this ignored?
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tryingtofindmyway1 year, 5 months ago
For the sake of argument, I'm going to take up the standard position of PETA and animal rights activists: that we are no more important than other animals and that we should limit our own population for the benefit of other species. Is this Natural? Besides humans, there is not one single species that sacrifices its own survival for the sake of other species. Animals look out for their own, and the survival of the fittest law of the jungle is very much the rule. We are dominant by right of conquest. Animals dominate other species to the extent that they are able, and do not willingly limit that dominance. We are the dominant species on the planet, and by natural law we have the right to do as we please. Humans are the only animals that commit suicide, seek to limit their own population, and look out for other species even more than our own. So who are the real freaks of nature: humans who embrace their dominace, or humans who want to self destruct for the sake of other species.
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bonaroo1 year, 5 months ago
I recomend that you go to the jungle, and see how long you last. You might do fine with the larger preditors, but in the jungle eocsystem its the things you can't see( microbes) that are more dangerous. I think that is what this article is really about, the need to see the whole system and not single species.
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bonaroo1 year, 5 months ago
Any jungle where malaria can be found. We have been trying to "dominate" that organism for as long as man has lived in the jungle. We continue to fail. It is estimated that over a million people a year die from that desease (World Health Orginization 2002), just under the amount killed in car accidents.
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IAmMine1 year, 5 months ago
"So who are the real freaks of nature: humans who embrace their dominace, or humans who want to self destruct for the sake of other species"
Humans who embrace their dominance, are the ones causing the destruction.
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fishoutofwater1 year, 5 months ago
In a holistic sense, we are no more important than any other species. It is impossible for us to know which species are most important as co-inhabitors for our long-term survival, so the only practical thing to do is preserve as many as we can.
As Aldo Leopold once noted, the first rule of tinkering is to keep all the parts!
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fishoutofwater1 year, 5 months ago
I don't see him arguing that at all. If he is, he is simply wrong.
I think he is arguing that a broader approach is needed, rather than singling out particular species or areas as more important.
No one, to this day, can confidently say what an intact ecosystem is -- except, perhaps, the entire planet. Everything has an impact -- we all live upstream and we all live downstream.
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fishoutofwater1 year, 5 months ago
If we eliminate habitat at a rate faster than species can adapt, we can have a profound impact on evolution called extinction acceleration.
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LABELDUDE1 year, 5 months ago
"The hotspot concept has been very effective at attracting funding for conservation..."
AH HA! A DO-GOODER Job Creation Machine.
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Skeptic1 year, 5 months ago
An interesting article. I believe the main point (not stated) is that humans can, and have, become so conceited in their beliefs that they think they have the answer to all the world's woes. I give you Al Gore as an example.
Some are predicting an extinction event when an asteroid hits us in 2036. Perhaps nature has it's own way of correcting errors.
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fishoutofwater1 year, 5 months ago
Nature absolutely has a way of correcting errors. The problem is, there is no way of knowing whether that solution will be compatible with human existence.
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IAmMine1 year, 5 months ago
"is that humans can, and have, become so conceited in their beliefs that they think they have the answer to all the world's woes."
It can also be said that those who have become so conceited in their ways go about dumping billions of tons of toxins and pollutants into the ground, water, and air without thinking of the environmental consequences...
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