Species Extinction & Human Population Growth

[Spooky1]

Boring Allert......Boring Allert.......I am about to spill my pessimistic beliefs all over this discussion string!!!!!
Moderator....feel free to send this to lala land or an off topic section here!
Now this will read as off topic but everything we do effects the planet and are huge compared to species extinction. I guess I focus on truly serious issues that will effect all our futures and future progeny. Human beings are users and the biggest issue of all, human population growth, isn't even being discussed by the world community. I believe that will be the downfall of society and free societies will become closely regulated thus making them not so free. Our biggest flaw is that not enough of us as individuals take responsibility for our behaviors and some families continue to produce children like there is no tomorrow. Speaking as a U.S. citizen, Illegal immigration and procreation in accordance with religious beliefs are a huge problem in the U.S. and especially in poorer countries and I personally know of several families in my area that are creating a new life about every 10 months to reinforce what I call the "puppy law", sneak across and have a baby and you can stay. You can't trust people to be honest or do the right thing and I just don't see any way to fix things short of setting up oxygen and carbon dioxide generators on mars to create another livable planet. Of course someone with the technology would have to alter the magnetic structure of that planet requiring the creation of a molten core and that is way beyond our abilities. Just making the point that we can do good things for now but eventually most plant and animal species will be long gone including us. The consensus is that 2100 will be when the Earth can no longer support us at current growth trends. Solar, wind and nuclear power might postpone it for a while but as long as humans reproduce at such a high rate it has to happen. I grew up in the 1950's and '60's and that was the best time of my life, it didn't hurt to have clones of Ward and June Cleaver as parents either. We trusted more than mistrusted, used resources without concern and dumped leaded gas fumes all over the planet leading to all kinds of syndromes. I am still able to enjoy my life and escapism includes a prescription medication called Tramodol, my upstairs bathroom / Nepenthes greenhouse and TV shows like Leave It To Beaver, Star Trek: Next Generation and WWII documentaries and my classic Honda bike collection and restoration project. Being retired I spend a lot of time on my bikes cruising the rural and suburban back roads occasionally stopping at a stream or wooded area to experience the wonders of nature. Probably seems silly for a 60 year old guy to admit but lifting a flat rock and seeing one of our local snake species, Red Milksnake, Copperhead or even a Timber Rattler, is astounding and I will never get over how amazing nature is. Think I maybe took a little too much of the pain killer today..............probably yes!

 

[Whimgrinder]

All that because someone queried you on your choice of supplier for collected Nepenthes seeds??! ;-)

 

[amphirion]

i wouldnt worry too much about that. as we expand, certain factors will keep us in check. the simplest one i can think of is biological in an of itself, super germs and viruses. lyme disease, HIV, spanish flu, black plague, ebola- each of them were in their own little self contained worlds of checks and balances until human expansion disrupted their cycles (there's an interesting book floating around about this, but i cant recall the author or title). heck, misuse of antibiotics has left us with a slew of super resilient bugs that only the strongest drugs can barely destroy. as human populations continue to grow, we will come into contact with more like these and the chances of spreading a pathogen among a dense population will spread faster.

as ian malcom said, "life, finds a way..."

 

[Wire Man]

Another factor that will keep us from expanding too far is food resources. We'll exhaust our farm lands, run out of live stock and pasture, etc. I'm willing to bet we're due for another plague in 100 years or so.

 

[swords]

Another factor that will keep us from expanding too far is food resources. We'll exhaust our farm lands, run out of live stock and pasture, etc. I'm willing to bet we're due for another plague in 100 years or so.

Warhammer 40,000 has a simple answer: search the galaxy for planets that can be used as: Agri-worlds, Industrial worlds, Mining worlds, etc. If anyone is already there just initiate a ground war or unleash cyclonic torpedoes / earth eater viruses from an orbital bombardment and just "clean the slate". Then we can take the resources we need or terraform the planet to suit our purposes. It's only fitting seeing as we come from Holy Terra and they are just alien scum.


Ave Imperator!

 

[Spooky1]

All that because someone queried you on your choice of supplier for collected Nepenthes seeds??! ;-)

Nope, my last line says it all......think I maybe took a little too much of the pain killer today.

 

[richjam1986]

All that because someone queried you on your choice of supplier for collected Nepenthes seeds??! ;-)

Lol That was my query you speak of. And I have a response that could really fit in either thread...

Before I continue to say what I have to say, I think it's clear that you (Spooky) have a great love for the natural world and seem like a good person. I don't want to start a confrontation, and I don't want to express any disrespect, but I feel I must tell it as I see it. Also, while there are different views towards the moral issue of seed poaching for dirrect economic gain (I for one don't see a argument for it that I would accept, and am vahemiantly against it), it's the arguments you used that I took some issue with, rather than just that issue specifically.
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In response to your (Spooky's) response to my post (on his other thread: http://www.terraforums.com/forums/showthread.php?132625-Seeds-germinating&p=1105892#post1105892) , and the above exposition: I must say that while things do look dire, hope is not completely lost for salvaging the core of many beautiful areas and ecosystems in the world, and a doomsday attitude is no excuse to be loose in one's own standards for helping in the cause of conservation. Likewise, in regards to letting the countries in question worry about managing their own natural resources (eg seed export) simply makes no moral sense (see next paragraph). And the fact that others give into temptation to collect seeds (or reptiles, or whatever), also is no reason to go ahead and do so oneself. The point is that all of these are nothing but EXCUSES to place responsibility on other people or circumstances. They are not legitimate moral arguments, as I see it. The best control we have is SELF control, and if more people showed more self control it would do a LOT of good for the world in these regards.

In a global economy, single country solutions CANNOT and WILL NOT fully work. For example, as long as there is a high demand and high price for elephant tusks and rhino horns in China, Africans will continue to poach these species to extinction despite efforts of local authorities. You cannot then say with a straight face that it's not largely up to the Chinese to change their social paradigm and decrease the demand for these 'products'. The same goes in the herp trade, or the plant trade, etc., irrespective of what countries are involved. You were using this as a defence for buying potentially poached seeds, which may be less of a moral delema than buying an elephant tusk, true, but the principle behind it is the same.
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I agree that population is a huge problem. Like you said, it is underdeveloped countries now that are the worst offenders. Many of the developed countries (including the U.S.) have birth rates at or below replacement rate, so that's a plus, and contraceptives are becoming more widespread in developing countries. We definately have a long way to go though.

Amphirion: While I'm not completely discounting the 'plague solution' to population, one of the main reasons human population is as high as it is today (in addition to increased crop yield/acre due to fertilizers, industrialization, etc.) is the progress of medicine, which has been enough to allow the population to explode over the last century or so. I personally don't know if there's a very high chance of plagues becoming widespread enough to dent population growth in the face of current medical knowledge, hygiene, and technology. I guess time will tell though :nervous:

 

[Wire Man]

Richard, that brought to mind a funny conversation I had with someone in November. They were complaining that the economy was too bad for land to be developed, and birth rates were falling. My response was, "Good! Maybe some wetlands can actually be restored instead of decimated. This isn't necessarily a bad thing."

 

[richjam1986]

Yeah, a bad economy can sometimes do wonders for conservation lol

 

[swords]

All plants in cultivation have had either parts of them or their seeds removed from the wild for "economic gain" and to get them into cultivation - which is simply "legal poaching". Whether you have paperwork or not doesn't change the fact they were removed from the wild by a human. Very few tend to spontaneously germinate in sterile culture vessels.

Unlike nepenthes which can be roadside weeds in some areas, I have heard all Heliamphora grow on government protected lands (the Tepuis).

 

[BigBella]

There is a real tendency for the navel-gazers and hand-wringers in society to constantly bemoan human behavior and overplay its potential effect on the environment. Species and, particularly, societies rise and fall; they have done so since the beginning of our recorded history; and, through a handful of massive extinction events over geological time, ninety-eight-plus percent of all species that ever existed on Earth, are gone -- well before we ever left the trees; walked upright; or discovered fire. We're rank amateurs in that scheme of things.

Then, we have the eternal check and balance of disease. Coincidentally, I am currently reading a great book on malaria and how it altered the course of history; how its spread affected local cultures -- destroying some completely -- and eventually gave rise to the African slave trade -- largely due to the fact that those peoples were far more resistant to malaria's more virulent form, than were the indigenous slaves here, who were decimated by malaria in the earliest colonies. As an aside, Africans were also three times the value of any European indentured servant (who were plentiful at that time), for that very same reason.

Fortunes of individuals and countries rose and fell; and Scotland eventually even lost its independence from England, largely due to a disease-carrying protozoan in the gut of a mosquito, half a world away. They effectively went bankrupt, attempting to fund New Caledonia, a colony on the Darién Coast of Panama, wiped out by the disease; and were absorbed by their neighbors to the South. The plan had been to build a road across the isthmus to open trade.

We now have new antibiotic-resistant bacteria; viruses; retroviruses; hemorrhagic fevers by the handful; prions; and the new-found ability to be anywhere on the globe, spreading disease within twenty-four hours. Malaria has been with us 500,000 years; yet our treatments are still primitive at best; and the disease is rampant.

Regardless of any medical progress, we'll be kept in check one way or the other -- and a Merry Christmas to all!

 

[richjam1986]

All plants in cultivation have had either parts of them or their seeds removed from the wild for "economic gain" and to get them into cultivation - which is simply "legal poaching". Whether you have paperwork or not doesn't change the fact they were removed from the wild by a human. Very few tend to spontaneously germinate in sterile culture vessels.

Lol.. not my point at all. Of course all cultivated plants have their origin from a wild collected plant or seed. My point is, with our current propogation technologies, there's a huge difference in impact to natural populations between MASS collection of wild seed to dirrectly sell online VS. collecting a couple seed pods to propogate and mass produce in tissue culture, to THEN sell through an established and liscenced buisness. The latter is sustainable, the former perhaps not.

That's why I carefully chose the phrase "DIRRECT economic gain", as in dirrectly from the wild to the customer, instead of from the wild, then into propogation, then to the consumer.

 

[Spooky1]

I am a nice guy and concerned citizen and I will certainly keep an eye on my Tramodol usage in the future or at least stay away from the computer forums if I become blitzed again. I am philosophically very conservative about everything except where it comes to supporting my hobbies and interests. Being a bit obsessive / compulsive I find I have little control over that and I wouldn't change it if I could. Growing up with an intense hunger to know the reasons for everything and having equally conservative parents that supported my journey I think I was the luckiest kid I knew.
I have spent my adult years studying the 20th century and specifically WWII and how connected one event is to the ones that came before and after. It's stunning how the populace of a contemporary country like Germany could hand over their constitutional protections to a single individual until it's put back into the context of all the other historical events of the period. The saddest thing of all is the greed that has led to countless wars of aggression and oddly helped to keep the human race in check. I just don't believe that humans can evolve to the point that they will put the planet ahead of the "what I want when I want it" mentality. Geez, I hate that attitude in people and we are surrounded by it. When I mentioned on my now defunct Facebook wall that America needs to experience another "Great Depression" style catastrophe to reel in all the cry-baby thinking most of the so-called friends on my list blocked my wall posts. When times are good it's impossible for people that have experienced the 1930's and then WWII to truly convey the horror of it. My dad told me a lot of stories about those years and how people were literally starving to death and you couldn't buy a job but I can't really know how it feels because I can always come home and yank a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia from the freezer, select a movie from my DVD juke box and kick back. Sounds silly but the more Trekkie's there are the more hope I have because they have the right idea and who is to say that phenomena like that aren't having a beneficial effect. Election time always makes me crazy like this and once I recover I will sound at least semi-sane once again. My doctor suggested that I not watch the news or more specifically political news about five years ago but it's hard to shut out everything especially when an election is in play every four years. It's wrong to become uninvolved like that as it leads to ignorance and without information one can't really make wise decisions. I'm off here now to spend some time in my bathroom / greenhouse with the tropical smells, monster movie like fog and camera, to recuperate. "FREEDOM!!!"

 

[richjam1986]

There is a real tendency for the navel-gazers and hand-wringers in society to constantly bemoan human behavior and overplay its potential effect on the environment. Species and, particularly, societies rise and fall; they have done so since the beginning of our recorded history; and, through a handful of massive extinction events over geological time, ninety-eight-plus percent of all species that ever existed on Earth, are gone -- well before we ever left the trees; walked upright; or discovered fire. We're rank amateurs in that scheme of things.
[/I]

Yes, we are all going to eventually go extinct, and pitcher plants too, and then in several million years new beautiful life forms will evolve. No problem, right? LOL. Ok, sure, but are we or our children going to be there to witness it? No... Give anything several million years to straighten out and all will be hunky-dorry, but come on people... We need to live and think in a time scale that affects us... say the next couple centuries, perhaps?

As far as overreacting to seemingly small acts: I get your point, but tell that to the numberous species that have been collected to extinction, or put under threat of extinction, by many individuals of a similar mindset. Numerous small offences to the natural world combined have huge impact over the period of several decades.

 

[richjam1986]

I am a nice guy and concerned citizen and I will certainly keep an eye on my Tramodol usage in the future or at least stay away from the computer forums if I become blitzed again. I am philosophically very conservative about everything except where it comes to supporting my hobbies and interests. Being a bit obsessive / compulsive I find I have little control over that and I wouldn't change it if I could.

Well, I've said my two cents and I'm content with that. Don't let a little lively discussion drive you away from the great community that's here on terraforums. I'm sure I speak for all when I say I hope not to turn anyone off to the forum, and want you to feel as welcome here as anyone! I certainly won't 'black list' you, lol There are just some topics that people are really passionate about and will spark discussion.

Maybe more people need some tramadol to help them speak their minds lol

 

[BigBella]

As far as overreacting to seemingly small acts: I get your point, but tell that to the numberous species that have been collected to extinction, or put under threat of extinction, by many individuals of a similar mindset. Numerous small offences to the natural world combined have huge impact over the period of several decades.

Well, until you can stop the bush meat trade and muti medicine; or convince Asians that tiger paws, their dried penises; bear gall bladders; or even ivory won't put lead back into their pencils, good luck to you.

Some years back, I saw an exhibit at the California Academy of Science, documenting the trade in prohibited animal products of all sorts; and I especially recall a wire coat hanger with perhaps a dozen pendant bear gall bladders hanging from it, seized by US Customs -- all for traditional Chinese medicine. It was then valued at over one hundred grand; and that was more than a decade ago.

On the floral side of things, I was in Asia in the late 1990s, in an area where we were prohibited from collecting seed. There were a few CITIES-listed species (some carnivorous plants -- primarily orchids) and a few seed pods were indeed pocketed by some. Most, I believe, eventually became tissue cultured in Japan or Europe. A year or two later, that entire cordoned-off area was replaced by a monstrous golf resort and condo community; and where we were hiking, no longer existed. Were they not illegally collected, those particular plants -- those potential genomes -- would have been wiped out as surely as if they were in a forest fire.

Then there are the so-called "background extinction rates" to consider; just how long does a given species exist -- whether we potentially contribute to its demise or not? Should I have ratted out those I traveled with, because of their seed collection -- even though those sites no longer exist?

I am not wringing my hands or losing sleep . . .

 

[Whimgrinder]

Dave's comment about the unfortunate flip side of the CITES coin is absolutely correct: sometimes these regulations have unintended consequences. This makes it very difficult to know when you are doing "the right thing", and harder still to know what "the right thing" is. It's a very complex problem, without clear solutions.

 

[lil hokie]

This has been a very interesting read. I have many things that I would say but since I am late to the race I will keep them to myself. I did find myself nodding to several points made here.

Dave's comment about the unfortunate flip side of the CITES coin is absolutely correct: sometimes these regulations have unintended consequences. This makes it very difficult to know when you are doing "the right thing", and harder still to know what "the right thing" is. It's a very complex problem, without clear solutions.

I will say that I agree with the above completely.

 

[richjam1986]

Dave's comment about the unfortunate flip side of the CITES coin is absolutely correct: sometimes these regulations have unintended consequences. This makes it very difficult to know when you are doing "the right thing", and harder still to know what "the right thing" is. It's a very complex problem, without clear solutions.

I would agree that these issues are very complex, and regulations are imperfect and can occasionally even cause harm. The thing is, there is a whole range of gray area between what is absolutely wrong and absolutely right. I can think of several situations where collecting might be illegal, but not necessarily unethical. I would say, however, that treating any natural location as if it WILL ultimately be developed anyway (as has been at least hinted at) is not the way to go. Any blanket statement on the matter is likely to be untrue, as there are so many factors and circumstances to consider.

Sometimes it can just be plain difficult to know the best course of action. I think we would all agree on that.

 

[richjam1986]

Well, until you can stop the bush meat trade and muti medicine; or convince Asians that tiger paws, their dried penises; bear gall bladders; or even ivory won't put lead back into their pencils, good luck to you.

All due respect, but again this sounds like a cop-out to me. Sure these problems are likely to continue, my point was generally that we all should do our part with what little influence we have. Collectively, this can be a significant influence. In talking about the Asian black market, I was specifically answering to a comment saying basically that we shouldn't worry about buying mass collected wild seed, as that is the exporting country's responsibility to control. My point was, of course it is also our responsibility because WE are the market; and without a market, irresponsible seed collection won't continue.

Then there are the so-called "background extinction rates" to consider; just how long does a given species exist -- whether we potentially contribute to its demise or not?

I know all about background extinction rates, but we as humans are liable to create the next mass extinction event all by ourselves , irrespective of 'natural' background extinction rates (I've read several studies on this exact topic in my conservation biology course). Are you saying that we should not attempt to stop even human caused extinctions? Or do you not believe that humans dirrectly cause extinctions? If so, then I don't know what to tell you...except that we do. lol. Edit: OR, do you hold to the "everything will go extinct sometime anyway, so why does it matter" mindset? If so, I already addressed that in an earlier post in this thread (as has Whimgrinder, Here: http://www.terraforums.com/forums/showthread.php?132625-Seeds-germinating&p=1105940#post1105940) ...

I'm not speaking to the experience you shared specifically, but in general terms. I understand how it would be unbecoming to rat out your hiking partners for collecting small amounts...
...

Edit: Sorry if I'm sounding super nit-picky. I can get super obsessive about details to the point of being silly. I really should just back away from this thread and get behind a plexiglass shield before something blows up in my face. lol