Most people outside of Australia recognize that the Australian shark culls are dumb emotional reactions to a non-problem. Shark culls are an international embarrassment for Australia.
Far from it, this is not even remotely a possibility. Mosquitoes are not threatening humanity with extinction in any conceivable way. As I stated elsewhere in this thread yesterday, if humanity were actually threatened by mosquitoes, I would support their eradication.
Humanity is important but humanity is not currently being threatened. If humanity were actually being threatened I would support the eradication of any species threatening it.
Waiting for economic factors to suppress the birth rate is the milquetoast approach I described earlier in this thread that is causing incredible environmental destruction. It's nothing more than an excuse to turn a blind eye to the problem.
I think a big part of it is a tendency of tech/engineering sorts to have an allergic reaction against any sort of tradition. Old fashioned is worse than uncool, it's dumb and outs you as an inferior mind to the engineering who is always rational and pragmatic and has no time for tradition.
There are plenty of communities in America that have professional fire departments. Particularly cities where there is actually a tax base to support it. You'll find volunteer fire departments in pretty much any working class town where the manpower is capable and willing but the money is lacking.
A truck being small is not incompatible with a truck being a beautiful shade of red polished to a shine. Just look at Japanese firetrucks. They have some very small trucks that look great.
Many sharks, plus bycatch, for no rational reason at all. Australian politicians vilify the animals and demand even more be killed. It's wholly irrational, as is your characterization of the sharks "menacing" the beach simply by living in their natural environment. Sharks aren't menacing the beach, the Australian government is menacing the sharks.
> "They're just sharks."
It is this sort of shitty attitude that will only become more prevalent when the eradication of animal species is further normalized.
Those mosquitoes aren't invasive anywhere. Eradicating them means killing them wherever they're native as well, which is definitely what many people in this discussion are proposing.
Culling invasive species wherever they are invasive is something I support. But many people want to go a lot further than that.
In early 2001 the Taliban banned the growth of poppies and opium export plummeted to near zero.
>The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded that the movement's ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's largest crop in less than a year, officials said today. The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.
>But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming families, and experts say it will not be known until the fall planting season begins whether the Taliban can continue to enforce it.
As I've stated throughout this threat, it isn't just about mosquitoes. Honestly I would not mourn mosquitoes if every last species was exterminated. What concerns me is the social impact of further establishing humanity as the arbitrators of which species get to live and which deserve to be exterminated. It won't stop at mosquitoes; the extermination of mosquitoes will be used to justify even more exterminations in the future.
(Furthermore exterminating a species just so the human population can grow even faster will lead to an incredible amount of additional extinctions due to habitat loss. Humanity is growing fast enough already; we don't need to optimize for this any further.)
Half of human deaths isn't very significant considering that despite that the human population is still exploding at an unsustainable rate that will cause incredible environmental destruction if left unchecked. Far from being threatened with extinction, our present course will cause the extinction of countless other forms of life.
And in response to that, you propose that we deliberately drive even more species to extinction for the purpose of making the problem even worse?
> "How many more human lives need to be lost before you think it's OK?"
If they were a threat to the survival of our species, I would sign off on it. Plainly they are not.
How many more species must be exterminated before you decide the planet is safe enough for humanity? When will the Disney Worldification of the planet be sufficient for you? Maybe Disney World levels of safety from wildlife aren't even sufficient for you? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/11/03/d...
> "Its important to differentiate b/w the plans of a politician and the plans of research scientists who have done actual work in this area."
Not really, because the general public won't take such care with the differentiating. The more scientists deliberately exterminate or cull animals, the more the public will grow accustomed to the idea of humanity taking such an active violent role in the environment. And the more the public grow accustomed to that idea, the more they'll be willing to fall in line behind politicians who try to do the same. Particularly when those politicians claim science as their justification (numerous disastrous examples in the 20th century.)
The ethical analysis performed by scientists looking to justify exterminations should include the social impact of their actions. Scientist and engineer sorts often loath considering such factors.
The fact that you cite past animal exterminations to justify additional animal exterminations proves my point. The more species are eradicated the more normal it becomes and the more people will be willing to do it again.
The normalization of extermination should be avoided, even if it comes at the costs of hundreds of millions of human lives per year. (There is no people shortage, but damage to the environment is often permanent. And not to put too fine a point on it, but human populations are growing too fast as it is which is a leading cause of environmental destruction. We should not be attacking the environment to encourage massive increases in human population growth; not unless we have very concrete and immediate plans on how to artificially retard the growth of human populations. Waiting for economic factors to suppress birth rates isn't good enough; that sort of milquetoast approach leads to extraordinary destruction of the environment. It's little more than an excuse to ignore the problem and do nothing.)
I never said this was new. What concerns me is it being done in the modern era. And not just in the modern era, but backed up by scientists too, which lends it additional credibility. In general, people in this era trust science more than they trust politicians. If a politician tells them something is a good idea, they will distrust that politician if it goes against their gut instinct. But if a scientist tells them the same, many will make an active effort to overrule their gut instinct to the contrary. This is good when the scientists are acting ethically, and bad when the scientists are acting unethically. It's easy to make a first-order argument for the eradication of certain species of mosquitoes being ethical; you just point to how many human lives it will save. But as I previously explained that analysis is incomplete; it does not take into account how the act of eradicating mosquitoes will change how people perceive the relationship between humans and the environment.
In short; a scientist demanding a cull will have more social impact than a politician demanding a cull. The more culls scientists demand, the easier it will be for fear-mongering politicians to demand culls.
> "but it's hardly an "emotional outburst" to want to prevent swimmers from being eaten"
Considering...
> "Since 2000 there have been 15 fatal shark attacks along the West Australian coast.[9]"
Yes, it's an emotional outburst. Anybody who goes in the water should know the risks. If that's the problem, put up more signs warning people. Very few people are getting killed by sharks; the shark culls are totally unjustified. If you talk to your average Australian about the Chinese slaughtering sharks for soup, they'll condemn it. But a disturbing number will defend the slaughter of sharks for an infinitesimal chance of saving some surfer who knew the risks and chose to swim with them.
