chiaraviglio@husc4.harvard.edu (lucius) (10/01/86)
_ It seems necessary to put a few things straight here. Before you people say that extinction of many species would be worse than such disasters as nuclear war and economic collapse, keep in mind that some of these disasters could very well _i_n_c_l_u_d_e a massive species extinction as bad as or worse than the one we are now threatened by without those factors. For instance, consider a nuclear war. I don't think I need to go over again the predictions of what would happen to the climate after a nuclear war; this and the large amounts of radiation would very likely cause massive extinctions (not only is it likely that the human species would become extinct, but many other species which are for one reason or another more vulnerable would die off). Also, consider again the argument that people in a state of economic collapse cannot afford to think about conservation. While people who are in a primitive state are in some cases able to live in harmony with the ecosystem they live in, we have good evidence of very significant exceptions: very early humans may have been responsible for the extinction of formerly abundant species including but not limited to the woolly mammoth, and very early humans for sure didn't have tractors and chainsaws. People who have been living in a culture that is used to hacking and slashing the environment are going to keep on doing that if they survive a devastation, and will be even more desperate to do so with all hope of alternate ways of getting things (from outside, conservationist technology, conservationist ideas) gone. Without tractors and chainsaws it will be harder to destroy a forest, but the making of the Spanish Armada and the accompanying deforestation of much of Spain is historical proof that it can be done at a fairly high rate even with very primitive technology (if you can make axes and set fires and girdle trees that are too big to chop down you can do it, and it doesn't take advanced technology to kill off an animal species either). Even a totalitarian government could cause a mass extinction, even if the government were relatively evanescent -- say it lasts for 20 years. Think: would Marcos be concerned with conservation? No -- if he and his cronies or the likes were running the world it is very likely that the rate of extinctions would increase, not decrease, as the government (and companies in on the deal) would have as its only purpose profits at any cost. And Communists (the type of world totalitarian government most people fear almost in exclusion to all others, and some other people propose as the solution to everything) aren't necessarily any better in this regard -- even the Soviets, who often want to make people think they are responsible, are whale-hunting, and will thus contribute to the extinction of the whales -- and you can't even object to that over there without the high risk of getting slammed in the Gulag. Now, for other reasons, I think that a mass extinction is not necessarily the worst disaster that could happen to the Earth, although I would say it ranks among the worst -- it is not the scope of this article to go into the details of that statement here. But, that aside, before you come out with a statement saying that a mass extinction is _t_h_e worst possible disaster, please consider that it is a likely subset of many disasters well short of the magnitude of an asteroid strike. Lucius Chiaraviglio lucius@tardis.ARPA seismo!tardis!lucius
carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (10/02/86)
[Lucius Chiaraviglio] >Before you people say that extinction of many species would be worse >than such disasters as nuclear war and economic collapse, keep in >mind that some of these disasters could very well *include* a massive >species extinction as bad as or worse than the one we are now >threatened by without those factors. Yes, but I don't think anyone has claimed that mass extinctions would be as bad as a global nuclear war. Edward O. Wilson spoke of *limited* nuclear war, by which he presumably meant one too small to have catastrophic consequences for the biosphere. As you point out, the nuclear winter studies suggest that the environmental consequences of a large-scale nuclear war would be horrendous, possibly including, with draconian justice, the extinction of the species that devised nuclear weapons. >Even a totalitarian government could cause a mass extinction, even if >the government were relatively evanescent -- say it lasts for 20 >years. True, but it's also possible that a totalitarian regime would cause less environmental damage than the alternative. But this is beside the point: Wilson's point was that the *predictable* consequences of totalitarian conquest (loss of freedoms) had at least a fair chance of being reversed in the relatively near term, but that the loss of genetic and species diversity through habitat destruction was nearly certain to take millions of years to repair, and that this process is now well underway and accelerating with each passing year. Richard Carnes