A lot of them, pretty much.
Yes, except our poetry is not as bad as theirs.
Remember that Vogon poetry is only the third-worst in the known universe. The worst poetry of all was written by a human!
Ahhh, yes!
Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex
Here in Vermont we do a pretty good job coexisting with the beaversā¦ usually. āBeaver Bafflersā or āBeaver Deceiversā can be built that limit the size and extent of their flooding from dams. Hardware cloth type cages can be put around indivual trees that yo udont want them to cut as long as someone makes sure to expand them when the tree grows. The biggest issue comes up when they try to use culverts and bridges to expand their area of dammingā¦ which can flood roads and inundate vast areas beyond what they would naturally do. Itās not always easy but as others have said they are really important to the ecology of the area as well as water quality, moderating stream flow, etc.
Actually yes. Weāre a species thatā¦
- Lost all of our defensive adaptations. We have no claws, and deliberately lost the fang-like canines typical of anthropoid primates
- Are abnormally weak. Our bones are built like balsa wood, have a lot more cancellous bone, and are much weaker relative to any other animal forā¦reasons. Additionally, our brains suck up 25% of our total energy budget, so our muscles are much weaker relative to other mammals like chimpanzees.
- Are abnormally slow. Our leg structure means that almost none of the propulsive force generated by our legs moved us forward, and we only have one muscle to lift our legs (quadriceps) because the others are either gone (caudofemoralis) or retooled to support our back (gluteals). My paleoanthropology professor once said that in terms of speed, the only animals which compare to humans are turtles and tortoises.
- Have a very limited diet outside of meats, tubers, grass seeds, fruits, and handful of leafy vegetable species
- Has one of the most ridiculous, arduous reproductive cycles known in the natural world, in which a third of us die if a second human isnāt around to help.
- Cannot climb or swim very well
- Have a terrible sense of smell and are one of the few animals to not be able to see in low-light conditions
- Has one of the most ridiculous, helpless infancies in the natural world
- Have a pathological need to obey authority from domestication syndromeā¦again, like the Vogons
- And a bunch of other stuff
Humans have mostly survived by, like the Vogons, being too stubborn to die and by pre-emptively slaughtering everything that could possibly be a threat that crosses their path, since they canāt defend themselves well if they misjudge someone. That usually starts with the megafauna and usually ends with other humans (which is bad).
Itās to the point that I canāt figure out how the australopithecines (which had all of these problems but were even worse at walking upright and had smaller brains) survived at all.
However, however, however, even if all this is true thatās not a constructive way to view the world. It encourages us to resent the world, and to hate ourselves because we have no place in it and, according to this worldview, are abominations that would be better off dead. Iāve seen people espouse this. Thatās not healthy. I.e., itās not much different from how many religious traditions at their worst viewed humans as wretched and impure. Even a lot of current environmentalist rhetoric falls into this, because it still comes from a place of āwe are wretched and must redeem ourselvesā, much like the medieval view of original sin in the Catholic church.
The reason why we need to do this, even if someone doesnāt give two pigsā farts about humanity, is that a healthier self-image (i.e., happy with ourselves but also humble enough to not be arrogant) motivates people to care about the environment and focus what can be done rather than wallow in pity, fall into eco-despair, or just not care. That is, if humans are so wretched compared to the rest of nature, why should human beings care about the destruction of the natural world? Are we the evolutionary equivalent of the one maladjusted kid who would take their revenge on the world, just because the rest of nature gets to be beautiful and have purpose? E.g., the Vogons hated themselves so much they would rather destroy the beautiful things in their world out of spite and self-hatred. As Oscar Wilde said, ānothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinnerā.
All wallowing in that does is encourages us to do is be āthe most glorious of sinnersā. Like, think of all that āhumanity firstā rhetoric you see floating around the Internet, which says that we deserve to stomp all over everyone and everything else because weāre the meanest, nastiest [redacted]s in the room (and usually not because weāre the strongest, but because weāre the most underhanded), and somehow thatās a good thing. That is a really toxic worldview. Like, where do you think that comes from?
We canāt love the planet if we canāt love ourselves.
we are a very specialized species. we used to flock to disturbance i think, when other animals ran away. Then somewhere along the way we learned to MAKE disturbance. Many other cultures have handled it in ways that were sustainable, like how many groups used fire, but one group of humans arose that makes a HUGE amount of disturbance to the point that we might kill ourselves off or at least have a huge population crash.
Interestingly there are few other animals that are anywhere near us in their ability to both customize and disturb the landscapeā¦ perhaps the most important one is ā¦ beavers. But they want open water and to cut down trees for their purposes and we want dry land and to cut down trees for our purposes. So we come into conflict, even though they are so important.
we are a very specialized species. we used to flock to disturbance i think, when other animals ran away
Almost every predator species does this. Hyenas, jackals, sharks, vultures, lions, wolves, etc. Mostly because chaos and disturbance means āfree foodā. Other species are known to follow forest fires to feed on the animals too slow to get away. We used to be one of those species that showed up on the edges of a clearing whenever a lion or spotted hyena made a kill.
Many other cultures have handled it in ways that were sustainable, like how many groups used fire, but one group of humans arose that makes a HUGE amount of disturbance to the point that we might kill ourselves off or at least have a huge population crash.
Itās not entirely clear thatās the case. There are lot of historical cases of non-Western cultures abusing their environment to the point that they crash.
- The Mayans overdrew from the cenotes on the Yucatan peninsula
- the Puebloans ended up stripping their environment when a big drought hit in the 13th century. The archaeological evidence suggests a general decline in non-Sylvilagus game prior to that.
- Cahokia cut down so many trees it may have created the red wolf and contributed to the Little Ice Age
- the Garamantians overused wells in North Africa
- Thereās evidence of a historical decline in biodiversity between the 3rd and 1st millenium BCE Egypt leading to a general loss of megafauna. E.g., Bast has been suggested to have originally been a lioness goddess only to turn into a cat goddess because Egyptians no longer knew what lions were.
- Thereās evidence that pre-Neolithic Middle Eastern civilizations developed farming because they ran out of large mammals to hunt
Some of these are still debated in the literature (e.g., Iāve seen debates over Cahokia), but there are a lot of examples. A lot of it has to do more with access to technology and resources rather than sustainable cultural practices. Like, people may or may not have had cultural practices in place, but logistics put a hard limit on how much a culture could exploit their environment, and when those logistical limits were removed ideals werenāt enough to stop severe environmental damage.
For example, with bison on the American prairie, the Plains nations used as much of the animal as they couldā¦at least in part for pragmatic reasons because it was hard to hunt bison on foot. There was a hard limit on how many bison you could kill because itās hard to kill a large bovid on foot with bows and arrowsā¦you have to be very, very clever to do it. So many Plains nations did try to kill as many bison as they could, because the bison migrated and they had no idea when they might see them again, and if the bison moved into a rival nationās land that would be a big problem. Starvation was common. Then horses and rifles come in and all of a sudden itās easy to kill bison. Itās to the point that Iāve seen it suggested that even if you removed Europeans and their attempts to deliberately wipe the bison out, the bison might have been in danger of going extinct from overhunting anyway (albeit over a slightly longer timescale).
Interestingly there are few other animals that are anywhere near us in their ability to both customize and disturb the landscapeā¦ perhaps the most important one is ā¦ beavers.
One kind of wonders if aliens showed up on Earth would they regard humans as keystone species for mallards, squirrels, raccoons, rats, peregrine falcons, barn swallows, and all the other species that thrive off of urban environments, given we do the same thing for them that gopher tortoises, alligators, elephants, and beavers do in their own habitats.
i am definitely not making the claim that the current dominant western culture (or whatever you want to call it) is the only one that causes ecological problems.
What if mallard aliens came to earth? oh man thatās scary.
To my surprise, I saw and videoād a pair of beaver on the campus of Northwestern University near Chicago (Evanston if weāre going to be precise). From what I gather they have been there a long time, occupying a manmade lagoon more or less in the middle of campus. I saw them in plain sight during winter break one year, when there are obviously fewer people around to disturb them.
Ah, sorry about that. Iāve had to deal with a lot of people who have tried to make that claim in the past, particularly with regards to environmental science classes and debating ecological issues. It wasnāt clear what you meant when you said āone group of humansā versus āhumans in generalā.
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