[Taxacom] when is a common species critically endangered?

[Stephen Thorpe]

There is clearly a lot of sense behind your opinion, and I share the general sentiment. But I think you are getting the details wrong, which may be putting you at odds with others unnecessarily. Homo sapiens disturbance of habitat IS something different from the impact of elephants, ants or beavers! For one thing, we can make choices which will greatly affect the outcomes. Furthermore, neither elephants, ants, nor beavers have the power to make such large scale and radical changes to the environment as we do. At the extreme, we have the power to destroy all life on Earth by nuclear means, they do not have this power...
 
Stephen


________________________________
From: Zack Murrell <murrellze at appstate.edu>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> 
Cc: "taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Sent: Thursday, 28 June 2012 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] when is a common species critically endangered?


In general we tend to view Homo sapiens disturbance of habitat as something different from the impact of elephants, ants or beavers.  We view species that we purposely move (e.g. starlings in the USA) but not species moved by others, as adventives/invasives.   We view migrations along Homo sapiens' corridors of "disturbance" as being somehow different from post-glacial migrations.  On the other hand, some scientists are using "invasives" to gain a general understanding the genetic structure of species as they move across the landscape.

To answer Mark's question "how long will it take before humans and their artifacts are considered part of "nature"?", my knee jerk answer is "when pigs fly" but maybe the better answer is that this will occur when Homo sapiens stop putting their own species at the "top" of the evolutionary tree of life.   

Zack

Zack Murrell
Associate Professor and Curator of the Herbarium
Director, SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC)
Department of Biology
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608 On 6/27/2012 6:13 PM, Stephen Thorpe wrote:

It doesn't necessarily lead to "twisted logic". If you were to take a "God's eye view" of the Earth, then you might have a hard time retaining such concepts as ethics/morality, etc. One animal gets killed by another ... big deal! One human gets killed by another ... BIG DEAL! The fact that we are humans cannot be ignored ...
> 
>Stephen
>
>
>From: Zack Murrell mailto:murrellze at appstate.edu
>To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu 
>Sent: Thursday, 28 June 2012 9:46 AM
>Subject: Re: [Taxacom] when is a common species critically endangered?
>
>Mark,
>
>I don't think this is a naive question.  Our speciocentricism leads us to
>categorize things as crops, invasives, weeds, natives and non-natives. Species have been moving across the planet since life began, yet we view
>Homo sapiens migrations, along with those co-migrating species, as something
>different.  I suspect this leads to all sorts of twisted logic in how we
>view conservation, migrations and distributions of species.
>
>Zack
>
>Zack Murrell
>Associate Professor and Curator of the Herbarium
>Director, SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC)
>Department of Biology
>Appalachian State University
>Boone, NC 28608
>
>On 6/26/2012 10:29 PM, Mark Wilden wrote:
>> This is no doubt an incredibly naive question, but how long will it
>> take before humans and their artifacts are considered part of
>> "nature"?
>>
>> ///ark
>>
>> Mark Wilden
>> Web Applications Developer
>> California Academy of Sciences
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>> Taxacom Mailing List
>> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>>
>> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:
>>
>> (1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org/
>>
>> (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>
>Taxacom Mailing List
>Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>
>The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:
>
>(1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org/
>
>(2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>
>
>