>There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself.
Speaking of current attitudes towards wildlife, I find it interesting how we are so keen to promote biodiversity but usually unwilling to consider invasive or introduced species as a way of achieving more stable biodiversity. I think with the ongoing threats to our environment and how this impacts us, we will turn more and more to using invasive species to save our natural and urban environments. I hope we stop thinking of nature as a static thing unable to adapt in ways beyond the limited scope of human imagination.
We might come to that, but I think the attitude we have right now is reflective of a very basic fact that we rarely admit to ourselves: introducing new species into an ecosystem adds an additional level of complexity that changes it in ways that are often detrimental, and we are not equipped to even begin to understand how to mitigate the negative effects by managing that much complexity.
In short, we simply don’t understand the ecosystems that exist well enough to begin to try to make any positive changes to it. However, I think the Parrots are okay if they stay in the city because San Francisco is an almost entirely built environment.
Speaking of current attitudes towards wildlife, I find it interesting how we are so keen to promote biodiversity but usually unwilling to consider invasive or introduced species as a way of achieving more stable biodiversity. I think with the ongoing threats to our environment and how this impacts us, we will turn more and more to using invasive species to save our natural and urban environments. I hope we stop thinking of nature as a static thing unable to adapt in ways beyond the limited scope of human imagination.