High court drops river flow appeals (2 species to become extinct?)

Full story: http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=1638&u_sid=2156954


High court drops river flow appeals

BY JAKE THOMPSON


WORLD-HERALD BUREAU

WASHINGTON - Nebraska's attorney general applauded today's U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of appeals by environmental groups, who sought higher spring flows on the Missouri River that they said would save endangered pallid sturgeons and piping plovers.

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said the high court's decision would end legal challenges for now over how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages the flow of the Missouri.

"This is a win for all of Nebraska's interests, including the environment," Bruning said. "The end of litigation gives us a long-overdue resolution of conflict in the basin."

The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of an earlier ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

How is it that we can treat a species this way.

In the human way, my guess is that what goes around, comes around.

subscribes to the 'life was meant to be tough' school. They'd tell you that thems the breaks. Can't worry about preserving the ecology, have use common sense and promote business and agriculture above all else.

the rest are just clueless, greedy, short sighted gits.

I've had just about enough of them too. :grr:

there are tens of thousands of seperate species of ants alone- i don't see why people flip out over the loss of a couple of fairly insignicant species-
as global warming gets goig, there's going to be plenty more.

it's also a pretty safe bet that there are individual species that go extinct every year without ever having been "discovered" in the first place.

i'm not advocating the mass slaughter of animals- but i think that we'll be able to weather the loss of a single species of sturgeon, and another of plover without much hardship.

...it is the end of a natural experiment that had been successful for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years. It is the end of a wellspring of possible evolutionary changes that could bring us any number of benefits, perhaps the cure for a disease or a healthier source of food. And it is one less chance for the process of life itself to survive a serious catastrophe, such as a radical climate shift or a nuclear winter or a meteor impact. A biosphere with ten thousand species of ants has more opportunities for ant-survival than a biosphere with five hundred or fifty or one.

A single species lost forever is a cause for some regret. A species lost due in large part to our own actions is a cause for remorse and introspection concerning our role in the web of life. Thousands of species lost in an avoidable and long-foreseen catastrophe of our own making should bring the deepest personal shame for anyone involved.

but if already extant environmental issues weren't in play, the species would not likely be endangered. Evolution is a sharp knife, and I wonder exactly what impact we have. If the earth itself kills off a species, it must be for a reason. While man exterminated the Dodo, had it been better suited for the planet, there would have been more of them around. No shortage of gulls or ostriches.

I just find it difficult to place 100% of the blame on man in many cases. Now, the damage to the rivers and streams due to pollution is definitely man's problem. But the loss of small specialized species that are endemic to only one region is something else, at least to my mind.

eom

Really, that's my point. Take the dodo as an example; it was not necessarily some dead-end species of flightless bird ill-suited to the planet, hell no. It evolved as it did precisely because it had no natural predators. Had careless humans not shown up on Mauritus, the bird could have gone on living and evolving like any other animal. Maybe in another thousand generations, it would have speciated some very successful waterfowl or died off on its own, we'll never know now. These less dominant species aren't just pointless cul-de-sacs, they're also potential starting points for life heretofore unseen.

The dodo was very well suited to existence as a fruit-eating flightless bird on a remote island devoid of top predators. Many other species have adapted to isolated niches, like the Galapagos finches; it is ridiculous to claim that a species is poorly evolved just because it can't keep up with some sudden new adaptive pressure. If our landfills somehow became sources of a gull-killing bacteria and the "sea rat" population drastically declined as a result, I would hardly blame the gulls for being poorly evolved.

The notion that humans are, ourselves, a legitimate force of evolutionary change is potentially a valid one. As hunter-gatherers, our niche was hardly different from the rest of life, we could have gone on that way indefinitely, evolving along with the rest of the planet's life forms, primarily affecting local populations in a mostly-sustainable way. However, when our ancestors developed pastoralism and farming, our impact on the biosphere grew by orders of magnitude. Now, in the face of nuclear warfare, climate-altering industrialism, and rampant resource exploitation, we have reached the status of the adaptive pressure that wiped out dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. The difference is, we have a choice.

Unlike meteors and volcanos and ice ages, we are a moral agency, we are capable of making decisions in the abstract that consider myriad possibilities, and we can select what we ascertain to be a best possible path for the biosphere. We humans in North America chose to exterminate the Passenger Pigeons (and by happenstance at least one of its parasites), once among the most common birds in the world. If human impact is to be considered a "natural force" of evolution, then the Passenger Pigeon was just as poorly evolved as the dodo, despite its once-huge population and extended territorial range. That is why I don't buy the "small specialized species" argument -- our poor decisions are capable of destroying well-distributed and apparently hardy species nearly as fast as the isolated and ostensibly fragile ones.

While man exterminated the Dodo, had it been better suited for the planet, there would have been more of them around.

The success of a species is not determined by its sheer number. Nor does this in any way determine how well it is "suited for the planet." This is especially the case when the planet has been so catastrophically changed by man.

species go extinct every day, many without having ever been "discovered" by man- and by altering our biosphere, perhaps we'll find the cure for a disease or a healthier source of food as well. living in today's industrial society in the united states, people have a vastly increased lifespan and life expectancy, as compared to those who lived here prior to the industrial revolution... and our industrial society has meant, and will mean the demise of more species...should we give it up?

"a single species lost forever is a cause for some regret"...not always- would you rather that we still had t. rex's and velociraptors roaming the earth?

Look, "a cause for some regret" is not the same as saying "gee I wish we had t-rexes roaming the earth." Even in the case of dinosaurs, one might vaguely long for an opportunity to see them move across the landscape, with their bodies as huge as buildings. Few unseen animals can bring such fascination to children, yet to this day we don't know what color their scales were. These are small regrets in the face of the opportunity for mammals to be able to evolve an ability to regret. Now that's done with, the dinosaurs had their day, and for the record they were far more successful and sustainable than humanity has shown itself to be thus far.

Your upstream post extolled the survivability of the loss of a species of plover or sturgeon. Well, where does it stop? Two species? Four species? Forty species? From a shortsighted and purely humanocentric viewpoint, maybe we don't need sturgeons at all. Or plovers. Or owls. Or salmon. Maybe we can get by with Cornish hens and rainbow trout, alone. We can simply optimize production of those two and eliminate all other fish and fowl. If you can see why this might not be a good idea, then maybe we have something to talk about.

"our industrial society has meant, and will mean the demise of more species...should we give it up?"

Let's not exclude the middle. There are ways to approach civilization without eliminating whole families of our cohabitants. We should do everything we can to evolve its operation in a way that doesn't mean the demise of more species. We can start by not accepting your apparent premise, that we have to destroy species and alter the biosphere in the process of living comfortably. Indeed, we humans may well have to reverse many of our prior alterations in order to continue living at all.

sue me.

but if you really believe it so hard- why don't you start with yourself..? you said this-

"We can start by not accepting your apparent premise, that we have to destroy species and alter the biosphere in the process of living comfortably."

the only thing that's going to cause change in our capitalist society, other than waiting for catastrophe, is consumer demand- so why don't YOU start the ball rolling, since it's what YOU want, and give up all of your non-necessary posessions that are made and/or operate in an environmetally unfriendly way? it has to start somewhere, right?

and what's more important to you- your own personal comfort/lifestyle, or a single species of anything?

:eyes:

"why don't YOU start the ball rolling, since it's what YOU want, and give up all of your non-necessary posessions that are made and/or operate in an environmetally unfriendly way?"

I just love these strawmen. You don't really think me, alone, stopping my demand is going to do squat, but you love the opportunity to call "hypocrite". Bullshit, capitalism isn't just some corner lemonade stand operation. My personal consumption choices only make a difference insofar as I'm one of millions who already do what we can to base consumption decisions on what we know about the environmental impact of production -- but it DOES make a difference because millions ARE making those choices. Are we doing enough? Probably not, not yet, but we're working on it. The train has to slow down before it can stop, and stop before it can reverse itself.

"it has to start somewhere, right?"

It did start somewhere, it's already in progress, maybe it's YOU who needs to change your outlook now, maybe YOU'RE the one preventing the movement from reaching "critical mass" by not altering your habits and expectations.

How much of a discount on the next drive-thru flame-broiled burger is it worth to YOU to be a part of a process causing species extinction? 25 cents? 10 cents? 1 cent? What's your blood price for giving up the opportunity to coexist with a living member of any given species? How much marginal benefit do you, personally, expect to gain from extincting the next species, and the next one, and the one after that? Or is it just the priceless quiet comfort of not caring that floats your boat?

Question your assumptions and examine your values. Humanity has the greatest potential for creation and destruction planetary life has ever known. We're evolution's wet dream, an animal that can reason abstractly and pass that knowledge down through the generations, an animal capable of self-reflection, moral decisions, tremendous insights and observations. To discard or ignore that tremendous capacity developed at enormous cost over billions of years in the name of creature comforts and preserving an optional conformity would be a personal tragedy.

And if we succeed, when our descendents a thousand years from now look back on us, maybe they'll say, "These were the greatest humans, for they were the first to hold the powers of utter annihilation in the palm of their hand, but understood the implications and chose restraint."

question your own-

and question why you think you have the right to tell others how to live their lives in regard to the environment, when YOUR choices are having detrimental effects on that same environment.

by whom exactly?

we're just the current dominant species- when the dinosaurs were the dominant species- had they been granted "stewardship"?

and the everexpanding number of people on the planet need places to live and infrastructure to support them.

is that some folks consider Homo sapiens to be the only illegitimate species on the planet...

by man. In fact, it weighs more in favor of ending man's speciescide.

when it happens, it's not intentional- people don't go out and say "let's wipe us out a species"...but if an insignificant species or two fall prey to infrastructure projects for human society- it's no big loss- there are LOTS and LOTS of species left, and the hit taken by planet-wide biodiversity is almost infinitesimally small.

species are to earth what parts are to an automobile. Remove the rearview mirror, and you can still drive it. But someday you'll remove a small bolt or screw and the damned thing comes to a grinding halt. Our planet is at the tipping point right now-and species loss is a very serious threat to the survival of all human beings-even the selfish and poorly educated ones.

species can go extinct, and have- without any help from man.
species evolve as well...bio-diversity is a very liquid thing- as some species go extinct, other new ones arise.
i'm not saying that we should just clear-cut the planet- just that things need to be taken in perspective, and the pros and cons of each situation should be weighed- but the possible extinction of a pretty insignificant species or sub-species shouldn't be an automatic deal-killer.

selection. The destruction of other species is not natural selection in any form. It is just that -- destruction.

take the cake. Human civilization and species did not evolve in a vacuum, in fact, civilization itself could not have occured without the help of a few "insignificant" species. Farming, the keystone to the building of civilization, required the domestication of Cattle, Pigs, Chickens, etc. During the hunting and gathering days, if we never domesticated the Wolf, we wouldn't have nearly have been as successful as we are now. Farming wouldn't have been sustainable for the past 4000 years its been around if wild cats didn't invade our territory and reduce the rat and mouse populations for us. Grain storage would have been impossible otherwise, and what would have been your solution? Shooting them with arrows, so your grain is then eaten, causing famine? Hell, because of the recognition of what these wild cats have done, we invited them into our homes and many people today are more than happy to accept these half wild animals into their homes.

Not to mention this, keystone species, which many scientists are just recognizing, are species of animals that literally support entire ecosystems. A simple example are bees, required by many flowering plants for breeding, another animal that we should probably thank for the helping us start up civilization. The point being that you kill off a keystone species, and some are much higher on the food chain that bees, and you damage the ecosystem they are in severely.

Before our machines, the Train, Plane, and Automobile, we relied on horses, Llamas, Elephants, and other animals for our primary means of transporting goods and ourselves. Without them we wouldn't have had trade, build the monuments we stand in awe of today, or even get up to the technological level we are at today.

Not to mention that you are misrepresenting what Evolutionary theory posits, I would go so far as to say that you are not qualified to even comment on either ecosystems or Evolution. News flash, its not "Survival of the Strongest" its "Survival of the Fittest" but the second part is missing, the survival of the fittest within the niche that the species is evolved into. Scientifically there are no "Superior" species, or "Inferior" ones either.

Hell, the most successful species on the planet don't have brains larger than the head of a pin and don't even have backbones. There are over a MILLION insects on the planet for EVERY SINGLE HUMAN, and we call ourselves the most successful species on the PLANET. They were the first animals on land, the first in the air, and they are still around, after everything from meteor strikes to severe volcanic eruptions rocked this planet and killed off almost all other species on the planet, and we are somehow "Superior"? Don't make me laugh.

Now, I know you are going to argue that because of our technological advances that we don't NEED animals anymore. Well you would be wrong, we risk worldwide famine thanks to our technology, is any other species on the planet suicidal? Look, you talk about 1 or 2 "insignificant" species today, and entire ecosystems will collapse tomorrow, and let me tell you, we, Homo Sapiens, NEED those ecosystems to SURVIVE on this planet. We need ocean algae and rainforests for oxygenate the atmosphere, take away CO2 and stabilize the Global Climate. We need those bumblebees for many reasons, breed of plants, to making honey, an excellent food source that for some reason is a natural antibiotic that never goes bad. You speak from ignorance, nothing more, nothing less.

that "ME, ME, ME, ME it's all about MEEEEEEEEEE!!!" attitude is getting fucking old.

what is the intrinsic value of the single species of sturgeon or plover mentioned in the originally referenced article? (a value that can't be filled by other sturgeon or plover species)

That is the definition of the term.

I have seen some very fine thinking at DU, outstanding reflections demonstrating balance and insight. Generally I am very proud to be a member of this community.

I have also seen some stuff that is frankly amazing in the annals of twisted thinking.

It is unfortunately the latter case here. The contention that humanity can even survive the crimping of diversity would rank with the top ten most ridiculous ideas I have ever seen on DU.

It is a ridiculous idea.

It is also a basic operating premise of our culture.

We will change it or die.

Published Thursday
April 27, 2006

Concern for pallid sturgeon stalls I-80 bridge work

BY MICHAEL O'CONNOR


WORLD-HERALD BUREAU

LINCOLN - With its flat snout and toothless mouth, the pallid sturgeon doesn't look tough enough to halt work on a major river bridge project.



But that's what the rare, ancient fish has done to construction of a new bridge over the Platte River on Interstate 80.

The Nebraska Department of Roads ordered the contractor to stop work on the bridge because of concerns over the sturgeons' spawning, or laying eggs.

The state issued the order after discovering a pile of gravel in the river near the bridge construction, posing a potential threat to the spawning, said Jason Jurgens, who oversees environmental permits for the Nebraska Department of Roads.



Full story: http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=1638&u_sid=2158495

Republicans hate their children- and our children. That's the long and short of their shortsightedness and greed.

Another of the 999 reasons I go out of my way NOT to associate with them.