We still have hemlock trees here, though it’s probably just a matter of time before the woolly adelgids kill them off. I can't imagine New England without hemlock trees, I don't know if I want to experience it.
The destruction of native species by invasive organisms isn't much talked about, it’s just let to happen, treated like a minor matter in the religions of free trade and market economics. But even in the most pious activities of those faiths, the analysis of costs and figuring of monetary value, the losses are a major factor. The losses to the world in other terms hardly figure at all in the considerations of our corporate state which seems hell bent on reducing everything to a depressing half-life based on commerce and mind-killing entertainment.
You get the feeling that the reason they don’t talk about these kinds of things more is because people presented with enough information might come to the conclusion that giving up a huge amount of the biosphere for the enrichment of a tiny minority of the mega-rich isn't worth it? Isn't that fight, to save the living diversity we have now, worth more than the one over the analysis of dead fossils? Isn't at least as important as the hundreds of thousands of words wasted over deploring the museum of superstition in Kentucky? The best way to fight that would be to turn it into a joke, and the people in charge of it seem to be doing their best to make that job easier.
Some of my friends in the life sciences resent the attention and resources that cosmologists and some of physics can command. More than one of them has talked derisively about “The Lords of Creation” in relation to the glamour attached to the search for the earliest particle of time in the universe while their research into living beings struggles for money. Maybe more emphasis should be placed on the living than on the dead and the inert. Without life the rest of it doesn't matter.
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