How are humans dangerous to biodiversity?
[ 13/1/21 ]
Two major ways: we change things, and we move stuff around.
The reasons why we do both of those can get quite complex and interesting.
Sure, population growth is an issue, but if we organised our technologies efficiently, we could feed the entire current population of the planet off a land area equivalent to the size of California. So it is not so much our need for food (though we do need food) it is more about the habits and systems we use.
One of the greatest dangers to biodiversity is the idea of valuing things in markets; but that gets really complex, when one starts to look closely at the multiple levels of perverse incentive present in valuing things based upon how scarce they are (rather than how abundant).
We are smart, we can change the world in ways that we think will be of advantage to us; but often we are not as smart as we think, and things are vastly more complex than we suspected, and things go badly wrong as a result.
Our tendency to move things from where they evolved to other parts of the planet has been a major issue for many of the species not adapted to protect themselves from the introduced species. We see a lot of that where I live, where our ancestors brought mice, rats, hedgehogs, weasels, stoats, ferrets, cats and sundry other things to a place that had not had predators that hunted by smell, only ones that hunted by sight. So many of the native birds, reptiles and insects are in deep trouble.
