When should we intervene? V 1.0

[razeraze]

This is version 1 of the debate "When should we intervene?". This is not a place to insult, mock, degrade or put down members for their views. Engage the debate in the spirit in which it is meant to be debated.

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It is more a moral compass that I hope everyone takes time to answer.

When do we intervene with nature? I watched a documentary about Yellow stone bison recently and it got my wheels turning. One was injured in a fight and the scientist let it die and get feasted on by scavengers. This got me thinking when do we intervene with nature?

Here are two stories that illustrate two possible scenarios. The first was to control elephant population which led to the killing of endangered rhinos. The second is a natural disease running through koalas dwindling populations.

BBC News | AFRICA | Elephants kill endangered rhino
Chlamydia Vaccine to Help Koalas: Preventing Bacterial Infection to Slow Koala Population Decline

[mpgt]

Originally Posted by razeraze

I wanted to do this as a debate but could not figure out how to make it a debate...

I can help with that.

[spix14]

Well I think a lot of it depends on how much man's presence or intrusion has influenced the matter at hand. If it's a truly wild setting, like out on the plains of Africa or somewhere similiar, then let nature take its course. If it's a case of human influence, for instance a situation or behavior that started because of habitat intrusion, poaching, ect., then it's time to step in and do what we can. Natural illnesses I don't think should be interfered with because it is just nature's way of weeding out the weak and keeping the gene pool strong. Maybe if the situation got bad enough to where the species might go extinct, we should help out, but even then for me it's iffy because extinction is a natural part of the cycle, notwithstanding the incredible rate we've sped it up to. I mean naturally occuring extinction.

[mpgt]

I think Spix is right. If we created the problem, and we find ourselves in position to fix it, why not? Frankly saving one beached whale or one bison would probably not have a huge impact on the whole population; neither would ignoring such an animal. I think the great impact lies in the effect of the event on the people involved.

[razeraze]

Joe thank you.

Spix: I agree with that, accept maybe the extinction part. Nature seems to make some creatures extinct and make way for new creatures, so I am not sure how I feel about that. It is always sad to see things like global warming, but The earth is going to warm up with or with out our influence, so many creatures may die. If you look at the history of the earth there have been many cycles that cause extinction before humans were even on the map, so should we stop that cycle if we can?

I honestly don't know where I stand on this. If I found a wounded animal, I would try to help it how ever I may be taking another's meal or starving a family of scavengers. I guess it is the butterfly effect and I am not sure where I stand on this one.

[spike06]

i agree completely with spix and joe. nature is nature, like in raze's story, if that guy wasnt out there to witness the bison being killed and eaten, it still woudlve happened. now if that was an endangered animal, then yes, by all means intervene and save it

[Dundee85]

What if that bird was an endangered raptor species and the snake a common snake species?

[Dundee85]

People keep talking about how the polar bears are suffering b/c of limited food resources due to 'global warming'. If it's true that polar bears are starving to death, I don't see any problem with killing caribou or other animals and dropping them into polar bear territories to help fatten them up. As long as polar bears don't start to associate people w/ food, I don't see the problem with helping them. Whether or not global warming is a man-made phenomenon (which it's not), helping the polar bears is still within our means. No harm there.

Just because something is 'natural' doesn't make it morally immune from human intervention. Very situationally dependent.

[TammyJamaica]

I guess the right answer to this question is "it depends", no cut and dried answer, unless you have very radical views, like in PETA, in which case there would be no use in any argument with you.

This is really an interesting topic because there are so many good arguments on either side, so many diverse situations and examples to prove points.

I hunt and kill anoles, which I hate to do, but it is to to feed my five young, critically endangered, captive Jamaican Boas. I could just let them go in the bush and hope they would survive, but know that it would be very unlikely, as they are almost always chopped to death on sight by superstitious and fearful humans..hence their endangered status. If this is "nature taking its course" then I am against it in this case, and I am knowingly interfering with the natural course of things. Two of the boas are now eating mice/rats so this is good news for the lizards.

I disagree with people deliberately mixing/experimenting and altering animals for the purpose of producing money-making but sometimes flawed and unhealthy albinos, "morphs" - (abnormality).
I don't think we should mess around with natural evolution if we can help it.

That is my (possible flawed and ignorant) opinion.

[Hairless]

Originally Posted by Dundee85

Whether or not global warming is a man-made phenomenon (which it's not), helping the polar bears is still within our means. No harm there.

Global warming, global dimming, global climate change (related and independant)...choose your title...

The is no question climate changes without mans influence and there is also no question our influence is having an affect. How great an influence may be debatable for some.

Contrails: What’s Left Behind Is Bad News | Airliners.net
''The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 was the aforementioned event, and it was likely to have excited meteorological researchers involved in contrail impact studies. The national airspace was shut down for three days, something that had not yet occurred since the jet age began in the 1960s and is not likely to occur ever again. Scientists took advantage of this unique three day period in history that lacked contrails. What they learned was shocking and is enough evidence to effectively silence any counterargument to their case. One measure of climate is the average daily temperature range (DTR). For thirty years this had been recorded and extra cirrus clouds in the atmosphere would reduce this range by trapping heat. “September 11 – 14, 2001 had the biggest diurnal temperature range of any three-day period in the past 30 years,” said Andrew M. Carleton1. Not in three decades had there been such a large temperature spread between the daytime highs and the nighttime lows. Furthermore, the increase in DTR during those three days was more than double the national average for regions of the United States where contrail coverage was previously known to be most abundant, such as the Midwest, northeast, and northwest regions. The specific increase in the range was 2°F, which in three days was twice the amount the average temperature had increased by over thirty years time1. This is evidence that contrails do alter the climate of the land they drift above''.

Icarus Flying II – wot no sun? | The Olive Press
''In the 1990s, Graham Farquhar and Michael Roderick of the Australian National University were puzzling over an apparently illogical set of results: the rate at which water evaporated all around the world had declined over the last 30 years despite the warmer climate.
Farquhar and Roderick were measuring something called the Pan Evaporation Rate. What’s that? Well, as Farquhar puts it with commendable Aussie directness: “It’s called the Pan Evaporation Rate because it’s the evaporation rate from a pan. But there’s an apparent paradox here – the evaporation rate is going down, but the temperature is going up.”
Surely, higher temperatures should evaporate water faster, like turning up the heat on a stove? Not so, says Roderick: “It turns out that the dominant force in evaporation is the energy of sunlight itself - photons hitting the surface of the water and tearing away water molecules, not the air temperature.”
So, in a world of less sunlight, even with higher temperatures, we can expect less evaporation. Global Dimming had a real effect – and if it reduced the evaporation rate from a pan, then what of the world’s oceans?''

As far as when should we intervene (this view may be more general than the thread intended, but it is related and my view of intervention):
We (man) don't have a history of positive intervention in nature and more often than not our efforts (even when we try to correct man made problems) don't have a good result. For this reason, we need to find ways to quit being a factor in natural cycles/habitat (on both a large and small scale) and let things follow the natural 'change'. Nature/evolution has done just fine over the past uncountable years-until man entered the picture and decided he knew better and could do whatever he wanted without affecting the large picture.

IMO it is only a matter of time before we really upset some 'small' cycle or link in the 'chain' that will cause some real problems with the 'big picture'.....that's if we haven't done it allready and it is only a matter of time before the results of our past actions show themselves. In other words, we have heard the expression "the straw that broke the camels back". What/when/where will be the last straw.

[Dundee85]

An interesting film on the legitimacy of climate change... definitely worth watching.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

[Oroborous]

I disagree that we as humans have had no influence on the global climate change. Because it's obvious we've had our part to play in global warming by burning immense amounts of fossil fuels and releasing Co2 and methane gases that add to the deteriation of our atmosphere, thus speeding the rate of melting ice in our polar regions. But this thread was not meant to be a debate on global warming.
As far as intervening with nature goes I agree spix14, if we helped to cause a problem it is our responsibility to do what we can to fix it. Otherwise I don't think it's necessary to intervene with nature. I once saw a document on Great White sharks that really bothered me. A shark was hunting a seal it had injured when the seal jumped up onto the film crew's boat, it was terrified and bleeding from a large wound on its side. The crew did not push the seal back into the ocean, instead they moved it to saftey away from the shark. Everything has to eat and nature is harsh, but that's the way it is. The seal would have died anyway and they took away the meal of a shark whose numbers are fewer than seals.

[Dundee85]

With regards to global warming... there is a relationship between CO2 and a warmer climate, but it's inverse of what you think. Rising global temperatures cause the temperature of the oceans to slowly rise, but b/c water has a high specific heat and b/c the volume of the oceans are so large, there is a lag time between the increase in the earth's temperature and the increase in the water temp. Anyway, once the oceans heat up, they will start releasing CO2 b/c warm water dissolves less gas than cold water. So then an increase in atmospheric CO2 FOLLOWS warming of the earth, not the other way around. Again, I urge you to watch the link I posted. It's very well done and also explains all the political mess involved in global warming and gives an alternate, convincing, scientifically supported theory to global temperature change.

With regards to that seal (I think I saw the same documentary)... anyone with a heart would not have thrown that cute little seal back in to get munched on by a shark. When it comes down to it, we're human. We feel empathy for other creatures. You have this injured, defensless creature staring up at you with big brown eyes and you're going to throw him back to the shark so that you don't 'intervene'? I think that's ridiculous. The shark is cold blooded and isn't going to starve if he doesn't eat that seal. The seal may have lived, may have died. But the film crew didn't kill the shark by not throwing the seal back. Yeah, there are more seals in this world than sharks, but that's the way it should be. And in that moment in time, it wasn't just any seal... it was that seal, in their boat that jumped into it for safety. I do not judge them for their actions.