Lecture 1: Learning from Past Extinctions, by Anthony D. Barnosky PhD
Lecture 2: Humans, Biodiversity, and Habitat Loss, by Elizabeth A. Hadly PhD
Lecture 3: Rescuing Species, by Elizabeth A. Hadly PhD
Lecture 4: Extreme Life of the Sea, by Stephen R. Palumbi PhD
Lecture 5: Ocean Species Respond to Climate Change, by Stephen R. Palumbi PhD
Lecture 6: Dodging Extinction, by Anthony D. Barnosky PhD
Biodiversity in the Age of Humans (2014 Holiday Lectures on Science)
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/biodiversity-age-humans
Lecture 6: Dodging Extinction, by Anthony D. Barnosky PhD
... A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized? No ... The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. ...We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it (7): "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama."... Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. ...We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand," the idea that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest". Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible. ...
Re: Steffen et al. "Planetary Boundaries" and "The Great Acceleration" published this week