Quantifying harm posed by invasive species to animal welfare will reveal a moral problem for so-called "compassionate conservation", which demands protection for even invasive animals.
Is it compassionate to allow invasive rats, mice, cats to injure & kill wildlife?
#bioinvasion #invasivespecies
Real bummer. I loved Coquette.
The Tropical Dry Forest of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Currently acting quite rainy…
Before European invasion of the Americas, the US was way wilder. Bison, Elk, Red Wolves, and Mountain Lions (what we today call Florida Panthers) were widespread in the southeast US. It’s almost impossible to imagine this part of the US so “wild” today, because of generations of change 4/n
Voting feels extra good when your state government is trying to take away voting power.
With respect to habitat loss and biodiversity loss, folks today often accept as “normal” a baseline where massive change has already occurred 3/n
Im thinking about this (and human diseases that are preventable by vaccines) in the context of shifting baselines. My perceived baseline (and the baseline for lots of folks) is a US with no screwworm and no measles. 1/n
I’ve seen this toaster. It’s saved as a trophy behind the scenes by the team that led to this discovery.
Shifting baseline occur because long-term change is typically so slow that it is invisible. But these changes (re-emergence of screwworm, measles, fascism) are happening fast - possibly fast enough for folks to notice.