So far, the data suggests that native wildlife is responding in the areas the contractors patrol; though they might not be surging back, mammals and birds are finding the toehold they need to survive. While no one believes the pythons will ever be fully eradicated, Kirkland is hopeful that in twenty years, native wildlife might have regained more than a toehold, and the issue might lessen into something close to manageable.
biodiversity == resilience. If we let the planet turn into a near-monoculture of kudzu and cockroaches (or whatever the stable equilibrium might look like), we die. If we wait to act until the web of relationships is simple enough that we can predict the particular nature of that death, it seems likely that it'll be too late.
This does seem like a doomed-to-fail stopgap kind of solution, but sometimes stopgaps are all you've got.
