>suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda

Well, being wealth has been increasingly concentrated in fewer people and wealth has always been on the side of fossil fuels and climate denial, would that not illustrate a plausible narrative?

At the very least, those aforementioned people probably could have done something about these issues before any of us knew about them.

If you think those 21 species were the only ones going extinct you're badly informed.

About 200 plant and animal species go extinct every day.

Millions of species even went extinct before modern man was ever here.

Oh well then i guess it doesnt matter we destroy the earth. Fire up those coal plants and slap some more meat on the barbecue, nothing matters after all because things have happened in the past!

How did you that conclusion from what I said?

The timing and placement of your statement comes off as a challenge to the original statement. It appears you’re implying that what we’re doing today is ok because it is part of a natural process. While true, we also have agency to transcend the natural process or perpetuate it.

Just because it has happened, doesn’t mean we should endorse and accelerate it. What we do determines the future.

So are you arguing we should prevent the extinction that would happen naturally? The extinction where man played no role?

Why?

Maybe. If that helpes us develop better medicines or food crops it sounds like the smart thing to do. Instead of waiting around for 2 million years until eco-system has recovered.

However, in my opinion, it's a rather uninteresting hypothetical because human activity absolutely does play a huge role in the extinction of species today.

> Maybe. If that helpes us develop better medicines or food crops it sounds like the smart thing to do.

What about the ramifications of doing so?

What about the ramifications of not preventing extinction caused by human activity (or other causes)?

That’s a separate discussion.

I’m not sure fiddling with natural levels of extinction are smart.

Yes but: 1. Many more species go extinct because of human activity. 2. That's a problem.

Delete your account.

But we will not realize it until 2073. This 21 are species that went extinct between 1960's and 1980's.

My money would be into the molluscs lost as collateral damages by the effects of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the birds by a combination of touristic development plus Mikonia tree invasion starting on 60's and 70's.

Bot: claim of role, rank relevant to the discussion + I agree with you butt (missing) + counter claim or talking points.

"it's just a series of ever warmer summers, nothing to see here" style suggests oil industry?

Regarding extinction, my suggestion is biome transplants. Take a endangered biome slice and transplant it where the temperatures and conditions for the biome will reemerge post climate change stabilization, preferably in an area where humanity has no economic interest.

Transplanting hundreds of species around the world in viable groups is probably a bad idea too.

not so ludicrous. Some species are more important than the other. In terms of biomedicine, the lack of a single species having evolved a unique substance could change the human history.

Without knowing the list, we can't infer a lot about the impact or lack of impact. Some of those species could be obscure hybrids without real impact, the lack of other could be potentially catastrophic; but the effects would have been forgotten by now and assimilated as "the new normality". This is a glimpse of 1950's.

You missed the bit where the person you're replying to said they knew something about the field. The loss of some species in a genus of Hawaiian honeycreepers is not tragic because of the potential for making medicines out of honeycreepers.

I find your take quite odd, considering your background. Biodiversity is not a hit points bar that knocks out your player character when it falls below a certain level. You remove a single keystone species and the whole local ecosystem collapses, creating a butterfly effect of disasters.

Yes, you’re right, I’m pushing an agenda. That agenda is this: rendering species extinct is bad.

>suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda

>rationally appraising the current state

both are an agenda. You can't escape ideology.

This is a lot closer to my thought as well. No one is saying extinction is beneficial. However, in the grand scheme of things, how critical was the unique Catfish that was only found in 1 river in Ohio? How many species have come and gone completely undetected?

Now that a species near the top of the food chain is missing, what species can grow and change to fill the gap? Isn't that evolution, you respond to a change in your environment.

Biodiversity is decreasing at a rapid clip. Yes, biomass will remain constant, but increased homogeny has its own risks.