,
23 tweets,
7 min read
Read on Twitter
Some epic #ExtinctionDenialism by Matt Ridley here merits a point-by-point rebuttal. THREAD 1/23
“Much of the human destruction of biodiversity happened a long time ago” Yes, the loss of megafauna onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.111… caused by over-hunting changed the face of the planet through the loss of ecosystem processes and was accompanied by innumerable co-extinctions 2/23
Yes, this loss on continents was then followed by loss of island faunas as and when we reached them and often driven by our other mammalian accomplices – cats, rats, dogs which to this day science.sciencemag.org/content/305/56… are doing huge damage to insular systems 3/23
However we are now seeing an episode of Continental Extinctions pnas.org/content/102/51… as the last redoubts of tropical habitats in diverse biogeographic provinces are lost, then their unique species are lost too theconversation.com/will-we-soon-s… 4/23
Knowing whether something is gone or not is problematic, but we do have quantitative tool kits now to try and assess the loss sciencedirect.com/science/articl… 5/23
Updates are on a month-by-month basis, e.g. no-one has seen a Cherry-throated Tanager since the beginning of the year in its last known Brazilian forest fragment. Is it gone? Hopefully not, but every day is doesn’t reappear looks increasingly bad for a species on the brink 6/23
In many cases we are likely losing species before we know them sciencedirect.com/science/articl… this happens again and again 7/23
And the last breeding bird lost in in Europe was considerably more recent birdguides.com/news/first-eur… and the end of a long-tail of losses following millennia of change that has filtered out the most sensitive species 8/23
Hence continental North American ‘global’ bird extinctions continued until the 1960s as the history of massive land cover change was more recent 9/23
This filtering process is now well underway in the tropics 10/23
Yes, we can solve some of these problems with tech and invasive mammal removal, but we need to use less land for agriculture and modify what we eat science.sciencemag.org/content/360/63… to spare land for nature 11/23
Matt argues that “The idea that “western values”, or “capitalism”, are the problem is wrong” yet land-cover change pnas.org/content/114/23… is often driven by corporate interests in agribusiness, mining, logging and other extractive industries 12/23
It is true that markets have driven abandonment of marginal land and have increased productivity but agricultural frontiers are expanding in the tropics to produce cash crops including animal fodder, often for western markets 13/23
It is not that the country is rich or poor that defines the state of its nature. Most rich countries are at temperate latitudes where environmental change is historic and there is room for the species that ‘held on’ to come back. And most biodiversity is tropical 14/23
Moreover many of these as you state are big generalist species – Wolves, bears, ospreys science.sciencemag.org/content/346/62… returning after we stopped persecuting them, or after creating habitats for them, a spectacular conservation success 15/23
But it is actually really easy, for the predators all we have to do is nothing, i.e. stop killing them 16/23
The same is true for beleaguered Hen Harriers in the UK, they aren’t specialists and would do fine if we just didn’t shoot them. The same is not true for many species in the UK that can’t cope with habitat degradation independent.co.uk/environment/na… 17/23
I agree that ‘Intensive farming spares land for nature’ although we need to avoid the negative environmental externalities associated with intensive agriculture and make sure that the ecosystem services we need delivered are still provided europepmc.org/articles/pmc62… 18/23
And also make sure that land really is spared and not that production simply goes up… 19/23
The “Doing more with less” argument was the most poorly argued of the lot 1) my mobile phone has only increased in size of late 2) we are literally living in the Great Acceleration igbp.net/globalchange/g… 20/23 
“The fact that species are recovering is ignored by the media” is completely nonsense, good news stories are reported ALL THE TIME, they are however outnumbered by the bad stories because there is a lot of bad news about species loss. 21/23
There are however lots of place to search for them e.g. conservationoptimism.org and I endeavor to share such stories when they arise 22/23
You only have to turn to NGOs and more ‘radical’ movements like #ExtinctionRebellion to see the raft of ideas to fix the current loss. Claiming that there is not a problem, burying your head in your coal and saying everything is fine is not helpful 23/23
