[HN Gopher] Wildlife in 'catastrophic decline' due to human dest...
___________________________________________________________________
Wildlife in 'catastrophic decline' due to human destruction,
scientists warn
Author : acdanger
Score : 209 points
Date : 2020-09-11 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| holoduke wrote:
| To me (at least in the area I live in) the easiest and quickest
| win is to plant trees massively. There is so much space
| available. But somehow people/governments wants to have grass
| vegetation as a filler between roads, inside parks etc.
| wozer wrote:
| Or just stop mowing these areas. Shrubs and then trees will
| grow there all by themselves.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| The thing is, unmanaged natural life is generally not
| compatible with human flourishing.
|
| Let the land go feral and soon you're looking at an
| unfathomable amount of ticks fed on unchecked deer who breed
| faster than anything can handle and infect each other with
| prions because the alternative is reintroducing wolves to the
| environment.
|
| And even the plant life is dangerous as unpruned, splintery
| trees drop branches in every windstorm, the brush
| periodically catches on fire, thorny or irritating plants
| proliferate and roots infiltrate and destroy nearby
| structures.
|
| It can take millennia to develop a stable, beautiful, all-
| natural environment, and there are sort of 'minimum size
| requirements' in the range of hundreds to thousands of miles.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Mosquitos are having no issues, to the detriment of everyone.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food,
| create energy, manage our oceans and use materials,"
|
| This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means
| to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move
| them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose
| that edge and creates real competition.
|
| The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted
| to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in
| some fields) to replace the problematic industries.
|
| The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing
| politicians and big investors to do the right thing.
| Passthepeas wrote:
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...
| Pastured farming is actually capable of being carbon negative
| runarberg wrote:
| Very much indeed. It frustrates me to no end to look back 20
| years in the past and see that Al Gore ran on an anti global
| warming platform in the 2000 presidential election, and lost to
| an oil baron. While in the 2020 presidential election the
| democratic candidate hardly mentions the climate disaster while
| the western parts of the country is literally on fire.
|
| Over the years we have tried to solve the climate disaster with
| some (but very limited) success. Methods including carbon tax,
| international agreements and green infrastructure. However
| these efforts have always stopped short of being implemented on
| a necessary scale (international agreements especially). It is
| a hard problem only because modern politicians are unwilling to
| implement any of the necessary policy to tackle it (even though
| most voters generally want it; green infrastructure
| especially).
| mc32 wrote:
| "... The owners of the current means to produce
| meat/oil/etc..."
|
| Just as often as big operations contributing to this, it's the
| mom or pop or children doing this in a subsistence manner. A
| contributing factor is encroachment due to local population
| growth.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Indeed. Madagascar is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe
| because every family has many children and each of those
| children eventually needs to slash-and-burn rainforest in
| order to plant enough rice to sustain themselves. Also a lot
| of tree-felling to make charcoal, because for whatever reason
| Malagasy villagers cannot afford e.g. kerosene to cook with.
| The result is the steady eradication of all those cool lemurs
| and other rainforest wildlife, but the perpetrators of this
| destruction are not millionaire industrial fatcats like
| people often imagine, they are dirt-poor subsistence farmers.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| And without significant investment by those with resources,
| asking them to preserve the environment is a direct ask for
| them to go hungry or cold for the sake of the environment.
| This is an ask that 99.99% or more of the human population
| will absolutely ignore.
| zo1 wrote:
| Or how about we invade Madagascar, ship all these poor
| folk to NYC, and declare the entire region a wildlife
| reserve?
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I guess a solution would be give them supplies so they
| aren't forced to destroy their own backyard in order to
| survive.
| laurent92 wrote:
| We are addicted to high population density, making babies and
| helping get everyone to what we consider is the minimum level
| of consumption, which is exactly 2x higher than the Earth can
| provide sustainably.
|
| At one point we'll have to say "Earth can only feed X billion
| people if we want to have a medium pressure on our
| environment".
| spankalee wrote:
| We unfortunately are more addicted to sprawl than population
| density. We'd be better off with _more_ density.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Second reply: Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology.
|
| The problem is not rising population, it's rising affluence
| and inert technology.
|
| As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more
| of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars, and
| plane trips in particular.
|
| Meanwhile we're not improving core technologies quickly
| enough.
|
| We make buildings using Portland cement. Cement making is
| responsible for about 1/20 of total carbon emissions by
| itself. Planes are not electric yet; nor are cars. Cities are
| badly designed for pedestrians. Meat substitutes aren't good
| enough or cheap enough yet. We burn coal to make electricity,
| thanks to the coal industry's astroturfing campaign against
| nuclear in the 1960s and 1970s.
|
| We also burn coal to make steel. We cut down forest to make
| biofuels, a bizarre and depraved practice.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > As people earn more, they consume more in general, and
| more of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars,
| and plane trips in particular.
|
| That is one part of the problem. But, as we have seen,
| there is alternatives. Because the pandemic, more people is
| working from home, playing video games instead of traveling
| or even learning new skills.
|
| I love to travel, but also to play games or read books. A
| change of culture will help with that. Governments could
| also apply "sin taxes" to luxuries that harm the
| environment in favor of more social and cultural activities
| that hire more people but consume less natural resources.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Cities are badly designed for pedestrians.
|
| Eh every large city I've been to that isn't in US or Canada
| is extremely pedestrian friendly. To the point of being
| actively nicer and easier to navigate by foot than by car.
|
| Even NYC and SF are way faster to navigate by foot/bike
| than by car. I've stopped using Uber in SF because it's
| faster (and cheaper) to get places with a rented bike.
| thethethethe wrote:
| Well there are thousands of small cities and towns which
| are not this way. Hell, if you leave San Francisco and go
| to any other bay area city it's not this way
| rcpt wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with population density. We'd do better
| to have people living in dense city centers instead of
| sprawled out into every corner of the wilderness.
| airstrike wrote:
| COVID-19 begs to differ
| hyper_reality wrote:
| Many countries with high population density have managed
| to deal with COVID-19 rather well, and vice-versa.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| North Dakota has more than 10x the per-capita COVID-19
| infection rate of New York City right now, despite having
| only about 0.03% of the population density.
| [deleted]
| lopmotr wrote:
| In pre-industrial times, the population was naturally limited
| by food shortages. People were chronically exceeding the
| carrying capacity and then being culled back. They've always
| been "addicted" to high population density. What's the
| alternative? Extinction? Every species does the same, but for
| most of them, nobody cares about the endless hardship of
| living at the limit of carrying capacity.
| tuatoru wrote:
| We are not addicted to making babies, or at least not
| endlessly. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of countries by
| total fertility rate, and then google for charts showing
| what's been happening to it over the last few decades.
|
| Most countries, the significant exceptions being in Sub-
| Saharan Africa, have TFR below or near replacement (2.1).
|
| When girls are allowed to learn to read, and when people move
| to cities women don't have all that many kids.
|
| Most of the world's current population growth is due to
| increasing lifespan.
|
| So don't worry about managing population. In a few decades
| the worry will be about keeping it up, not down. (With Sub-
| Saharan Africa, again, as the exception.)
| lopmotr wrote:
| It's kind of weird to see the people worried about over-
| population come crashing into the new worry about
| population stagnation or decline. Both problems are hard.
| The only fun stage is unconstrained growth unless we can
| somehow reach stability without continually killing people
| to stay there like we used to.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| The problem is much more complex than people being "addicted to
| easy money". Wealthy nations have buffer to take on unnecessary
| expense in addressing their basic needs, like food and shelter.
| This is dramatically less true in non-wealthy nations. Creating
| ecological mandates can have actual human impact on food
| availability and on human standard of living. Not the marginal
| improvements experienced in developed nations, but life or
| death quality of life changes to the worlds poorest.
| Aunche wrote:
| It's not just about the capital owners. The actual people
| chopping down rainforests for palm oil plantations are formerly
| impoverished farmers. You can stop corporations from buying
| from them, but you're hurting these poorer communities the
| most.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > you're hurting these poorer communities the most.
|
| My point is that redistributing wealth in a better way, we
| would get less opposition to upgrade our production means and
| people like that poor farmers and others will get a bigger
| piece of the cake in a more healthy environment and
| conserving their culture and land.
|
| I agree with you, thou. The current mindset is that the
| super-rich are super-rich and their wealth cannot be touched.
| So, we are left with limited options on how to manage with
| the scraps. If we think out of the box and realize that we
| can redistribute wealth better, there will be still very rich
| people but also farmers would get a more fair price for their
| contribution.
| Avicebron wrote:
| This is key. It's this cultural blind spot where we gloss
| over the fact that these people are impoverished and so
| desperate that they would destroy the home around them,
| partly because we allow a tiny fraction of humanity to
| amass absurd wealth. Then we double down by making it
| socially acceptable for them to leverage that wealth into
| making it untouchable and ever-growing.
|
| If we just took this situation as strictly unacceptable,
| then we are working with a much larger range of options.
|
| The idea that big reward == all that innovation needed is
| pretty sick. It assumes all it takes is innovation to solve
| literal planet scale problems.
| nickff wrote:
| Well, innovation in agriculture has actually reduced the
| amount of land used for farming in more developed
| countries while increasing production.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > The actual people chopping down rainforests for palm oil
| plantations are formerly impoverished farmers.
|
| The people chopping down rainforest and planting oil palms
| are _dispossessed_ , _former_ farmers.
|
| The people making them do it are wealthy and politically well
| connected who arrange to have their land confiscated.
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| Deforestation in Brazil was almost stopped when Bolsonaro
| came into office and has surged since then. For me this is
| one of the primary reasons why i worry about the future of
| our civilisation: every nature reserve, every protected
| animal, every small victory against ecological destruction
| can so easily be lost again.
|
| Those who wish to protect must be on guard every day and
| win every fight.
|
| Those who wish to destroy must only win once and can choose
| the best time.
| munificent wrote:
| As they say, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
|
| It's worth it.
| Aunche wrote:
| Do you have a source of this happening? This is from a
| report about Indonesia (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i7696e.pdf).
|
| > Large plantations cultivate export crops on about 15
| percent of the total agricultural area, but the majority of
| farmers (68 percent) are smallholders operating on less
| than one hectare.
|
| Indonesia's population is still growing. If you're an
| uneducated farmer in a large family with a small farm, the
| only option you have to make a living may be to work in a
| palm oil plantation.
| sul_tasto wrote:
| I saw the same thing in Latin America: farmers dispossessed
| by banana plantations.
| philips wrote:
| How are people on Hacker News changing their behavior around food
| and energy consumption?
|
| And besides individual action what community action have you
| taken?
|
| Personally I have found myself on a similar path to Peter
| Kalmus[1]. Before having kids I did what I could: didn't own a
| car, commuted by bike, composted, minimized fashion/tech
| consumption, etc. On the other hand my career required
| significant plane travel for a time. Now with kids I feel
| extremely motivated to take further action to reduce energy
| consumption and interact directly with nature: through gardening,
| removing all plane travel, installing rooftop solar, etc.
|
| On the collective action front I become increasingly frustrated
| that something as obvious and "market based" as the Energy
| Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (HR 7173)[2] isn't already
| law. Something like that feels like the bare minimum solution to
| putting the US on the right track.
|
| [1]: https://peterkalmus.net/books/read-by-chapter-being-the-
| chan...
|
| [2]: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-
| carbo...
| runarberg wrote:
| I stopped trying to fix the climate disaster on my own a long
| time ago. There is nothing you can do to save us from the
| climate disaster. The illusion of green lifestyle only serves
| to push the responsibility from the actual polluters over to
| the consumer.
|
| While polluters (including those that marked high polluting
| consumer products on mass scale) are not made to pay for their
| pollution (e.g. by carbon tax) they will keep polluting.
|
| I've shifted towards trying to push politicians into enforcing
| stricter international agreements and building more green
| infrastructure. So far it has only made me feel even more
| powerless then before.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Same here, I'm on a bike for everything, I eat organic
| (literally, I forage a lot of fruit when going for a ride,
| currently there are many figs). So my consumption and my
| environmental impact is certainly super low.
|
| I pick up plastic trash every now and then, it's hard to
| counter all that continuous litter volume
|
| Next step is to spread this philosophy, but it's not easy or
| even possible to change other people lifestyles. It's sad
| because, it's definitely healthy to live that way
|
| Just talked with someone today, near a fig tree, he said they
| should cut that tree next to the road because it was dangerous,
| I replied to him, the fig tree is more important than the road
| and car traffic with a smile, and a bit of sadness inside
| because I know what will happen
| nverno wrote:
| This brings back memories of living in Portland. It would be
| amazing if cities were designed with this type of foraging as
| a priority :D
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm not trying to shame you for your efforts--plastic trash
| is indeed ugly and annoying; thank you for picking it up--but
| plastic straws are not the reason the west coast is on fire.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >And besides individual action what community action have you
| taken?
|
| I didn't have any kids.
|
| Its a message that unfortunately most people still refuse to
| hear (much less accept) - the earth is massively overpopulated.
| It doesn't matter how think you try to dice the onion, there
| are far too many people for the earth's finite, renewable
| resources to sustainably support. Certainly our wasteful and
| overly consumptive habits are accelerating this destruction but
| no matter how we tailor our habits, the fact is that there are
| simply billions too many.
|
| Some people ignore this obvious issue because its a difficult
| problem to solve that caries with it a host of economic and
| ethical issues. Others ignore it due to religious beliefs, and
| others because they worship at the altar of technology (which
| they believe can solve every problem). As long as this remains
| the case, we cannot even begin to acknowledge the issue and
| seek solutions.
|
| Some argue that the population levels of "developed" countries
| have plateaued or begun to shrink slightly but that isn't
| happening remotely fast enough given the rate of degradation of
| our ecosystem. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, objective
| reality doesn't care about our economic or ethical concerns and
| the sustainable resources we all depend on to survive (the
| birds, the beeds, the wildlife, the oceans, clean air, clean
| water, contiguous forests, ect) will continue to be degraded
| and will force a solution to this problem whether through
| famine, war, disease or otherwise.
| jl6 wrote:
| I adopted a mostly plant-based diet. It's very effective in
| terms of impact reduction, and most people can do it easily
| with minimal lifestyle sacrifice (compared to things like
| giving up flying and driving and aircon).
| sul_tasto wrote:
| Seems like this is never the type of issue discussed at Davos.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Surprise, surprise. What did we think would happen with
| increasing quality of life (increased consumption) and increasing
| population (further increase in consumption).
| LostTrackHowM wrote:
| The same headline would be equally true from the moment we left
| Africa and entered other continents, to today.
| lopmotr wrote:
| Here's some good news for fish
|
| https://reefresilience.org/wp-content/uploads/graph02.jpg
|
| It shows rate of fishing has plateaued or declined but
| importantly, "effort" continues to climb so I imagine cost should
| provide a natural limit.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we
| stopped destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are
| already living in small, isolated pockets surrounded by roads,
| farms, and industry. Meanwhile, plants and smaller animals face
| intense competition from invasive species - often brought in by
| accident thanks to the constant flow of goods around the globe.
| We're probably headed for a pretty homogeneous global ecology -
| where "economically significant" or highly adaptable plants and
| animals thrive, while the others are relegated to zoos, national
| parks, or extinction.
| samatman wrote:
| That's the direction things are heading.
|
| It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples
| from as many critically endangered species as possible.
| Unextinction is a difficult problem, but without the necessary
| material, it's impossible.
|
| Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like
| those, it's right in the name. And it's no substitute for
| building wildlife corridors, managing park lands better,
| extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it doesn't draw
| resources away from those things either.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It doesn't really matter if we collect the genetic material
| if we aren't reversing the actions that caused it to become
| extinct. For example, arable land is shrinking and population
| growth as well as an increase in consumption will not leave
| much (if any) suitable space for some types of wildlife.
| sethherr wrote:
| ... wait, how is what you're suggesting different from zoos?
| samatman wrote:
| In a zoo, we take an animal out of the wild, and keep it
| alive. Ideally breeding them as well.
|
| In my suggestion, we tranquilize an animal, and take a
| blood sample, and extract marrow from the hip. We then
| perform a full genome sequence on the blood, and freeze the
| marrow down, with compounds which vitrify the cells such
| that they can be revived at any point in the future.
|
| We should do both. But the latter has advantages: the
| animal stays in the wild, it scales better, and the only
| ongoing input is a bit of energy to keep the cells cold.
|
| We don't have the technology to print a whole genome from a
| file, but I expect we will. Stem cell cloning is well
| understood, and will only get better.
|
| Doing this to as many individuals as possible will preserve
| genetic diversity. It's insurance, basically.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Fragile species will continue to be in decline. Long term,
| large species will remain in protected environments like
| national parks. The idea that humans are incapable of
| protecting larger species is belied by a visit to Yellowstone.
|
| Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted
| species to flourish. This will certainly shift the makeup of
| our planet's biodiversity.
|
| You mention all of this in passing, but I think these effects
| make the prognosis on biodiversity somewhat less than "very
| grim".
| mongol wrote:
| I don't think it is a matter of what humans can do if they
| make enough of an effort, but what is most likely to happen.
| coronadisaster wrote:
| > often brought in by accident
|
| also often brought on purpose
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The glimmer of hope that I have is that the same sort of market
| forces that create these problems can be marshaled to solve
| them. For example, if the wealthiest countries implemented a
| carbon tax including a border adjustment (accounting for goods
| from countries with a laxer carbon policy) would give
| governments a single, simple dial that the could turn to lower
| carbon emissions. Similarly, we ought to be able to implement
| other kinds of ecological taxes to great effect. However,
| arriving at that kind of policy is a purely political problem.
|
| In the meanwhile, there are other market-based solutions, like
| organizations who certify products' sustainability. The
| certifier allows the manufacturer to place the sustainability
| trademark on their products if they pass the required audits.
| I'm of the impression that this has made a significant impact
| for forest-derived products via the Forest Stewardship Council
| (https://fsc.org/) with a handful of activists decades ago
| pushing the largest retailers (e.g., Home Depot) of forest-
| derived products to invest significantly in FSC-certified
| products.
| x87678r wrote:
| You're right. On a good day I think end of biodiversity is
| basic Darwinism in in the new environment.
| air7 wrote:
| That might be over pessimistic as "95% Of The World's
| Population Lives On 10% Of The Land"
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217192745.h...
| hh3k0 wrote:
| The important part of that statement is "lives".
|
| According to the IPCC, humans have transformed _more than
| 70%_ of all ice-free land if you take stuff like agriculture
| into account.
|
| Edit: It'd seem that I've had remembered outdated figures.
| elihu wrote:
| Still, even sparsely populated rural humans have a pretty big
| effect on the natural habitat. We've pretty significantly
| displaced wild animals with humans/livestock/pets everywhere:
| https://xkcd.com/1338/
| nostromo wrote:
| And what about land we use for food. And for watersheds. And
| for lumber and metal. And for electricity.
|
| The amount of land we live on is tiny compared to the amount
| of land we use.
| xnx wrote:
| I wish we spent more time talking about "habitat destruction"
| instead of "climate change", while understanding that climate
| change is the largest form of habitat destruction.
| philips wrote:
| Why do you feel discussing habitat destruction would be
| helpful?
| pvaldes wrote:
| There is an huge difference between saving giant panda in
| zoos and saving the forests where giant panda lives (and all
| the other species of birds, flowers and mammals including
| pandas with it.
|
| De-extinction would be to save just one screw from a
| perfectly tuned and complex machine that produces more than
| pandas. No-extinction is better than de-extinction and also
| much more cheap.
| coolspot wrote:
| Too complicated for the masses. Climate change is something
| everyone can observe more or less. Dead bees, elephants, wolves
| - not so much.
| mythrwy wrote:
| The net effects of climate change (and of course the magnitude)
| are big question marks in my book.
|
| But you bring up the exact thing I think every time I hear the
| more extreme climate change claims.
|
| We have some very real and relevant issues right now that are
| huge, existential even, and not based on theoretical models and
| we don't seem to be discussing or doing anything at all about
| these. Groundwater depletion. Topsoil depletion. Loss of
| habitat and biodiversity. Microplasics. Desertification.
| lopmotr wrote:
| I think you committed a bit of heresy there. When expressing
| ideas about political topics, you also have to give praise
| the correct Gods or people will think you're an enemy.
| canofbars wrote:
| Doesn't matter what term you use. The rich and powerful will
| spin up the propaganda machine to shit on whatever term you
| pick.
| vharuck wrote:
| >New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse
| habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation
| action and change the way we produce and consume food.
|
| I'm pessimistic with this claim. From my experience, if a
| productive process like agriculture becomes more efficient, we
| scale up output. The resources being used up, in this case land,
| won't be reduced. For an analogy, consider how adding more lanes
| to a busy highway ultimately means more people drive and
| congestion is just as bad.
|
| What we need is more government protection of habitats. But it's
| hard for a government to directly and explicitly oppose economic
| opportunities.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Sounds like Jevon's Paradox:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
|
| "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological
| progress or government policy increases the efficiency with
| which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any
| one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises
| due to increasing demand."
| xg15 wrote:
| Thanks for the pointer and definition.
|
| "Increasing demand" seems pretty funny when we have whole
| industries dedicated to artificially generating demand (e.g.
| marketing and advertising) and when the ultimate quality
| metric for a country is it's GDP - so both business as well
| as government will do whatever it can to keep demand from
| going down.
|
| Sometimes I feel we're sitting in the bus from Speed (that
| will explode if it goes under 50 Mph) and just realized we're
| headed towards a roadblock. So now we're paradoxically trying
| to come to a full stop and not go below 50mph at the same
| time and wonder why it's not working.
| nickff wrote:
| As a matter of fact, the more industrialized nations have
| increased productivity and production, while decreasing the
| amount of land devoted to agriculture (returning a great deal
| of it to 'nature').
| aaron695 wrote:
| Lucky we have the doomsday cult to keep telling us the world is
| warming and will wipe out the animals in 100 year so let's not
| concern us with local problems.
|
| In reality it has and always will be local.
|
| And the solution has and will be for a few more decades use
| fossil fuels to help. (The doomsday cult sunk nuclear)
|
| This applies to both the environment and if you have empathy,
| other humans.
| philips wrote:
| I find it notable how indirect the author is about the "Why" in
| this story:
|
| > New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse
| habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation
| action and change the way we produce and consume food.
|
| > The British TV presenter and naturalist Sir David Attenborough
| said the Anthropocene, the geological age during which human
| activity has come to the fore, could be the moment we achieve a
| balance with the natural world and become stewards of our planet.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| Many people consider anthropogenic extinction immoral and the
| ongoing human-caused mass extinction event to be an urgent
| moral crisis.
|
| But let's suppose you were going to take a cynical argument
| along the lines of "these species are going extinct due to
| their poor adaptations to a changing environment, it's just
| evolution," or let's just say you think moral objections are
| irrational. Then from this (ignorant and needlessly cruel)
| perspective,
|
| - the destruction of the Amazon is likely to have profound
| climatological/geochemical impacts, including increased C02 in
| the atmosphere
|
| - widespread defaunation of predators could very well lead to
| increased pests or disease-carrying animals
|
| - loss of insect life could be catastrophic to industrial
| agriculture
|
| - overharvested fishing and agricultural resources means
| diminshing returns (and possibly famine) for future generations
|
| More generally, the destruction we've wrought upon the world in
| the last 150 years is scientifically uncharted territory, and
| it's deeply naive to assume that 150 years of strong economic
| growth can be extrapolated to suppose that destroying the
| planet will work out for humans in the long term.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| which, from the Darwinian perspective, will cause either our
| extinction, or an adaptation, but only after many have died.
| It's probably all avoidable, but I don't see the human kind,
| in its current form and way of societal organisation being
| able to get out of this.
| okcwarrior wrote:
| Ok, this is a crazy comment, but I have been playing Microsoft
| Flight Simulator 2020 a lot and almost every piece of land has
| something, somewhere built on it. Farm, suburb, etc It's
| depressing but maybe it helps me understand that we are using too
| much of earth. Do we really need endless farms?
| mikeg8 wrote:
| Small scale farming is not always ecologically destructive. We
| Definitely don't need endless mono-crop farms, but adding more
| small scale, diversified, local farms would probably be a net
| gain for climate. Look into silvopastures and the carbon
| drawdown benefits. Also helps build in resiliency to the supply
| chain for food, something we saw the need for at the outset of
| the lockdown when grocery chains were depleted.
| mythrwy wrote:
| If we are going to have endless people we need endless farms
| probably.
|
| It would be cool if we could keep the population of the globe
| like 1/10 what it is now but I don't know of a humane and
| rights respecting way to achieve that.
|
| Or maybe if we reduce our standard of living it would help but
| how low can we go? And people aren't going to go for that
| either. It's a tough problem.
| coolspot wrote:
| We got a lot of people to feed. The only right way to
| stop/reverse climate change is to control population growth.
|
| Others ways, like reducing each individual's carbon footprint
| or clean energy just gives us excuse to breed more and
| overwhelm the planet, but later.
| Falling3 wrote:
| Completely disagree. Tje richest 10% of the world is
| responsible for 50% of CO2 output. I don't know about other
| metrics, but that I'm sure that pattern isn't just limiter to
| carbon footprint. We don't have a population problem. We have
| a problem with Greer and resource use that slashing ourr
| population - even drastically - will not in any way solve.
| samatman wrote:
| The richest 10% of the world also come from regions with
| stable-to-negative population growth. Those regions are our
| only hope for moving to a sustainable technological
| platform while maintaining a high quality of life; we're
| talking about the people who buy solar panels, windmills,
| and electric cars, who at least _can_ build nuclear plants,
| if they get over their political reservations.
|
| The poorest 50% of the world would absolutely love to emit
| more CO2, and will do so just as fast as they can acquire
| the resources.
|
| I don't think any steps to limit population growth really
| need to be taken, however, other than two things which are
| good in and of themselves: women's education, and improving
| access to birth control.
|
| But concerns about Earth's carrying capacity need to be
| taken seriously. Malthus is wrong right up until he isn't,
| and we should strive to avoid hitting that limit.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I believe in the contiguous USA the furthest you can get from a
| road is only 20 miles. There are no undisturbed places left,
| really. Unfortunately preserving roadless areas is politically
| contentious here. Clinton enacted a roadless area rule at the
| end of his administration and Bush tried to reverse it a week
| later.
| grecy wrote:
| It's a fact the furthest you can get from a McDonald's while
| _anywhere_ in the lower 48 is only 115 miles!
|
| http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-
| mcdon...
| refurb wrote:
| Not sure I believe the 20 miles thing unless you could count
| an old road that hasn't been used in 100 years as
| "developed".
|
| There are massive swaths of land in the lower 48 that are
| pretty much untouched beyond a few footpaths that are rarely
| used.
| volkl48 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure that statistic includes every Forest
| Service road on the books.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, clearly. In what way is a forest road not a road?
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7775746,-122.9327754,2401
| a,3...
| refurb wrote:
| I think when people think "road" they think something
| maintained and well used.
|
| A forestry or old logging road that hasn't been used in
| 50 years doesn't come to mind.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I can't really know what people think is or isn't a road
| but these are objectively roads and I think you are
| understating the extent to which resource extraction
| activities use these roads today, and the degree to which
| any road, no matter how much or little used, alters the
| ecosystem through which it passes.
| ptmcc wrote:
| I agree, but the fact that there was a forest/logging road
| in that area as recently as 50 years ago does indicate that
| it is an environment recently impacted by humans.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Well, go right ahead and name any place that is, say, fifty
| miles from a road.
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