[ExI] Money, happiness, and extinct species

[J. Stanton]

Stanton's Inverse:
Money can't buy happiness, but lack of money can cause unhappiness.

On 12/13/14 4:00 AM, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote:
> The most interesting paper IMHO in the thesis was about de-extinction
> of extinct species, where he showed that by the standards of
> environmental ethics we ought to do this for some species.

The massive bison population of the United States (20-80 million on the 
Great Plains alone, depending on who you ask) was entirely due to the 
anthropogenic Quaternary extinction of other browsing and grazing 
megafauna such as mammoths and giant ground sloths.

The echoes of those animals can be seen in plants like the Osage orange 
and the avocado, both of which are giant fruits with a giant seed too 
big for any extant animal to propagate by eating and crapping it back 
out -- but which a multi-ton mammoth or sloth, however, did without trouble.

The pre-Columbian Indians went to a great deal of effort to thin ground 
cover and otherwise maintain forests in an open and hunting-friendly 
state: it is said that one could ride through a New England forest on a 
horse at full gallop.  This is much more similar to what we think of as 
"savanna", a biome maintained primarily by the action of giant grazers 
like elephants and giraffes, and which North American forests before the 
arrival of humans likely resembled far more than the nearly impenetrable 
tangle of the modern elephant-less and fire-suppressed era.

Note that the modern overpopulation of deer just about everywhere is due 
to a combination of the expansion of their preferred forest-ish habitat 
(they're primarily browsers, not grazers), a lack of competition, and a 
lack of predation.

Meanwhile, the argument has been made seriously that elephants should be 
introduced to North America, as the extant species most similar to what 
was once there.

JS
http://www.gnolls.org