Of course the staff were all furious at hearing this, which he seemed to enjoy. I asked the other owner if he was serious and he said he 100% was serious. So I approached the owner dumping the oil why he did this, why he didn't just empty the oil into a container, etc. Long/short he said it didn't effect him and couldn't care what any of us hippies though of the practice.
I would say that there is a fundamental difference in the way people are; they either view things in the long-term and strive to ensure the best for all of us. The other side of the coin are people that just want what's best for themselves and maybe their family. They don't care or want to believe such actions have long term effects on them directly.
There's a certain personality type that derives more pleasure from the loss of another than a gain of their own.
Gore Vidal's vversion is well-known: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
I guess people tend to believe that everyone else is like them, including those of us that aren't sadistic. And if a full 33 percent are sadistic, is it something that even should or can be corrected?
Now that's terrifying.
However, it is much better to simply look at a flower and meditate on how amazing it is that it exists at all than ruminate on the facts of how cruel the world is.
It's not merely selfishness, it's sadism.
NY for example:
"Thus, for example, even a spill of a gallon of oil into a ditch is covered."
https://ag.ny.gov/environmental/oil-spill/oil-spills-homes-a...
California:
"California Penal Code 374.3 makes illegal dumping on public and private property punishable by a fine up to $10,000. Also, pursuant to Section 117555 of the California health and Safety Code, a person who dumps illegally is punishable by up to six months on jail."
https://pw.lacounty.gov/epd/illdump/penalty.cfm
Calcycle page on illegal dumping:
Doesn't sound like a nice guy.
Even guys that are seemingly nice have very odd beliefs. It really opened my eyes as to what to talk about at work, even if the topic didn't seem 'fringe' to me. Older dudes out west/here in Colorado in particular grew up with a sort of cavalier notion of what freedom and America means to them, and telling them what they can or cannot do on their own property is the heart of the matter.
Most people believe crazy things, even those that don't tend to not behave in consistent alignment with what they believe to be true or good.
Yea, but their property doesn't exist in a vacuum. They have neighbours and there's always downstream effects.
I'd say part of this attitude is an effect of rights becoming disconnected from responsibilities. Like, sure, one may "own" the land, but it better be well take care of, be a good steward. Not because there's immediate bad effects, but because those effects diffuse into the real non-human world.
This is the only type of correct answers for those cases
Different organisms have come up with different solutions to the same problem, and because of that they can break in different situations. The 'service' they provide will be affected differently by an environmental shortage or excess. If twenty microbes are responsible for recycling organic matter and dust or drought or some chemical affects 10 of them, the others will expand to pick up some of the slack.
How the humans invented something so incredibly useful? Most probably after watching "useless" social wasps to mash bark to make its nests.
Aspirin occurs naturally in Willow bark; morphine and codeine from opium poppies; ephedrine and amphetamine is derived from Ephedra sinica (Ma Huang); quinine and it's derivatives from Cinchona calisaya; digoxin from foxglove (Digitalis lanata).
And botox from the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and related species has medical uses primarily for muscle spasticity conditions and migraines.
Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. It's also a prodrug of salicylic acid, but it has additional anti-inflammatory and anti-thrombotic effects, because unlike salicylic acid itself, it can irreversibly inactivate COX enzymes (enzymes that synthesize compounds needed for inflammation and blood clotting) by acetylating them. It's also less irritating to the digestive system.
No, seriously -
We are destroying not just other species' natural habitats; those natural habitats are our own, that's where we evolved. In billions of years of natural history, we and our ancestors have led a "modern" way of life for a few thousand at most.
We're so adaptable that we can thrive in highly technologically altered environments as well; but I'm quite sure that anyone can experience the feeling of recognizing that those aren't truly home for us.
I've spent a lot of time trying to formulate my reasoning and unfortunately, the easiest explanation is the most clinical and least likely to inspire: diversity is necessary (but not sufficient) for long term survival of any nontrivial system - be it a species, civilization, tribe, or business. Dynamic environments driven by random events and emergent phenomenon like weather/climate, food chains, and sentient beings are going to be chaotic and unstable in the short term. Diversity allows better suited individuals to exploit the current environment while preserving a diverse minority contingent that is far more likely to be able to adapt to the next change in the environment without a catastrophic collapse of the system. Without that minority group, the medium to long term probability of survival for the whole is zero and without the majority, the minority group wouldn't survive long enough to make it the next environmental shift.
It's as close as you can get to an abstract natural law of complex systems. It applies to a company's talent pools and its ability to survive pivots or changing market conditions, an ideology's ability to survive the realities of geopolitics, a religion's ability to survive schisms and protests, and much more.
A current example would be the ubiquitous banana. The cavendish banana (the most common variety you'd encounter in your produce isle) is under attack globally and is at risk of being wiped out. And this isn't the first time that's happened. The banana your grandparents grew up with, the Gros Michel, while not extinct is no longer commercially viable.
Not so. Ireland was a net food exporter for the duration of the famine. The problem was political and economic.
Bananas are kind of a weird case for multicropping, because they are all sterile clones. So this makes them horribly susceptible to every disease under the sun.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-202289...
Do you have a better source, which you think refutes their arguments?
They are arguing that Ireland was not a net exporter of food because a large portion of Irish crop exports were oats, and oats are not food.
The supporting arguments are worse. For instance, they state that oats are usually for horses' consumption. Further, they state that the average farmer would not know how to prepare the oats for human consumption.
All this seems obviously false[1].
As a general point, the obvious point of comparison with Ireland would be the various states of 1840's germany, also heavily reliant on potatoes for sustenance. They also got the potato blight, but there was no great famine.
[1] they also give some figures, which I won't comment on.
Our oceans are collapsing. Warming, acidifying, over-fished, pollution.
What are we supposed to do?
The point is people see world differently because of some fundamental differences in genetics & childhood nurturing.
E.g. Cats kill billions of small birds and mice a year (think what that does to owl populations). It’s shouldn’t be legal to let house cats roam freely outside.
Ok. If there was an abundance of food for the owls then we'd have many, many more owls, and they would kill billions of birds instead. We'd just be sacrificing cats for owls. Why is that better?
Why is it better to introduce hundreds of millions of bored free-range emotional-support predators into any given ecosystem than to not do this?
Seems tone deaf to ask this in a thread about biodiversity and species extinction.
Because there are wayyyy more cats than owls. So we have more biodiversity.
I do not follow. Are you saying that idiocentric tastes negatively correlate with empathy?
What is your measure?
I did the introspection you ask for, and "watch those shows" is the best answer I can come up with.
I understand why I'm being downvoted. The point I'm arguing is " They ended up flat-out asking me why anyone should care about biodiversity." If you down vote me please write an note saying how biodiversity makes a difference to the life of the average person.
I don't think my life would change materially if I was on a hypothetical space station with very good life support. I suspect the difference is an emotional connection?
Until we have a better answer, we should work damn hard to keep this one running. And we don't know enough about how it works, so we should try preserve the current systems as well as we can.
The term to research for why biodiversity is useful in a utilitarian anthropocentric way is "Ecosystem Services".
The only way we know how to keep what we have is with biodiversity.
It's such an ingrained assumption inside my head that everyone should understand the value of biodiversity that I couldn't even answer.
I grew up watching David Attenborough, David Suzuki, and Carl Sagan explaining the natural world.
I can't imagine how much poorer my life would be, if I hadn't grown up with that.
And I can't begin to imagine how to explain my world-view to someone who clearly didn't grow up with them... Other than to sit them down with all those fantastic series, and hope that they take hold in them.
I mean, like, start by watching "Queen of the Trees," and see how inter-connected all of that life is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM