>I don't really feel that maintaining the bird population above the plutonium and chemical weapons landfill really moves the needle on the global ecosystem either way.

Oh, you don't feel that way huh? Never mind little details like

>"Today more than 5,700 tropicbird pairs nest on the island, or nearly half the estimated global population."

Half the global population left! But what is that in the face of your feelings? 6 months of intense brutal lonely activity, volunteered in a hazardous zone with little hope of any outside support, that has been extremely successful, and it's a "vanity project"!? If they were serious!?!? Really :(? I've volunteered for hurricane clean up in terrible totaled mobile parks that were some of the most unpleasant conditions I've ever faced in my life but they were a lot less harsh than this sounds. I got to go home at the end of the day for one. Perhaps if humans hadn't introduced rats and destroyed/taken over habitats for birds worldwide ants sometimes drifting onto an island would be a different thing, but as other comments have said we have. Your comment is upsetting and horribly uncharitable.

> Oh, you don't feel that way huh?

> But what is that in the face of your feelings?

You know damn well that was a idiomatic way of saying "according to my not-necessarily-infalliable estimation of the relevant information".

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The work of those young volunteers is worthy of our respect and gratitude. Thank you to them and you!

Human activity currently puts about a million species at risk of extinction [1]. I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

Aggressively spraying poisons into the environment has decimated insect populations across the globe and, consequently is also thought to threaten bird populations which eat these insects. It is a short-sighted solution.

The harshness of the conditions for the humans choosing to do this task really has no bearing whatsoever on the task's impact on the global ecosystem. For someone so critical of feelings, that's quite an emotional appeal you have going there.

[1] https://www-nature-com.mines.idm.oclc.org/articles/d41586-01...

Some things can only be saved with insecticide in a remote island. That there are “millions” of other threatened species scattered across the globe with all sorts of micro/macro solutions (or lack thereof), is a nonsequiter.

All you seem to be doing is nitpicking a specific small action despite its clearly defined goal and success, when you can’t even be bothered to propose a concrete alternative action that would do better with the same resources. Just vagaries and platitudes like “insecticide bad in general”.

> Some things can only be saved with insecticide

So you can say, with absolute confidence, that no other conceivable solution could ever have been effective? I don't know if I'm that confident about anything.

I don't agree with the defined goal or the method; it's more than just a nitpick. My concrete alternative would probably be to do nothing. Or try to mitigate climate change. And insecticides ~are~ bad in general.

I think of it like chemo: sometimes you have to use poison to achieve a goal. Apparently this summer they declared victory over the ants.

> I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

You have a point. I hate the feel good videos of people rescuing individual koalas from the Australian bush fires and putting ointment on their burns. We've fucked up their entire ecosystem and now we pick one of them and treat it to assuage the sad feelings of millions of humans? Give me a break.

It matters to this one.

> Human activity currently puts about a million species at risk of extinction [1]. I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

False dichotomy.

We need grass-roots intervention and macro political intervention. One does not detract from the other.