Saving Canada's only desert
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But Spain's desert is small compared to Sahara's, that is as big as Europe. Its dunes are as big as buildings, with pictures you can't really grasp the enormity of this dessert. When Sahara grows each year it literally engulfs entire villages.
In Egypt and center of Africa there are cities that were prosperous in the past that were engulfed by dessert and disappeared.
Honestly I would not shed a tear for big parts of the big dessert going away. When solar energy and desalination becomes cheaper I expect Sahara to be one of the most fertile places on Earth.
You can probably preserve the biodiversity freezing eggs and sperm of the creatures that live there. There are not so much. I believe that with pesticides and herbicides we have destroyed way more biodiversity of our world(not the desert but our forest) and nobody has complained.
Are we always trying to stop things from changing, and a posteriori inventing arguments for why that particular change is bad? (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all change is equally indifferent either)
Desertification is a big problem and it has many human linked causes, large cities change rainfall patterns, deforestation causes soil migration changes the mineral content of the soil and reduces its moisture content and most importantly desertification affects humans as it creeps into arable land increasing the cost of growing crops or in some areas making it almost impossible.
The other problem is the destruction of natural deserts due to buildup of man made structures, agriculture, diversion of water sources, overall climate change (a desert doesn't have to be a "hot" place, many deserts are actually in danger due to rising temperatures which increase rainfall, melt glaciers, or soil locked ice) and many other things.
No one is inventing posteriori arguments and decides arbitrary what is good and what is bad, one environmental change can drastically affect human civilization including costing human lives in the long run, the other is unnecessary destruction or damage to existing natural habitats which do not have much (negative) impact over human civilization or lives but can and should be prevented if not reverted. This is not different than any other preservation effort, you want bears in the wild, doesn't mean you want them living in the woods just by your house, and it also doesn't mean that you would not shoot them if they come and endanger human lives.
You completely nailed it. First you say that no one is inventing posteriori arguments, and then you go on to say that "changes can have effects". But, but non-changes can also cost human lives in the long run. However, you CHOOSE to defend non-changes under the (in my view, irrational) belief that the changes might cause loss of lives, even though you are perfectly content with the consequences of the non-changes, which might also cause loss of lives in the long run. Example: "if we had fewer deserts, we would have more arable land, and so food would be cheaper, and so fewer lives would be lost". So we have one argument that says that changing might cause loss of lives and another one that says that not changing might cause loss of lives. Why do you always pick the non-changing? (when I say "you" in the previous phrase, I'm referring to people who call themselves environmentalists, who always make the argument that change might cause loss of lives, and never the opposite, not you personally).
Desertification can cost us anywhere between 25 to over 50% of the global arable land over the next 50-75 years.
The destruction of natural habitats can also have a negative effect on human lives, if only by denying future generation from being able to visit them. We gain nothing from destroying them in the long run, many of them even if they are deserts can be natural barriers to desertification, and again there is no dichotomy in this case I'm really having hard time trying to uncover any argument you might be attempting to make.
Simple question: do you concede that in some cases keeping the natural habitats as they are might be worse than changing them, in terms of loss of life over the long run? If I can't get a yes or no on this, I don't think there's much point in continuing the conversation.
No, I'm not trolling.
Yes by not destroying some natural habitat and causing the white tailed ferret to go extinct humans might bring their own extinction because in 3048 they are going to become the natural carriers of the Z virus bringing the oh so anticipated zombie apocalypse.
But meantime in the real world from what we know so far from both research and experience negatively affecting the environment causes negative effects on the human civilization.
Nature tends to balance itself out, this is slightly harder to do with humans which have the technology to geoengineer their habitats.
But even if it was so it doesn't matter, no person in their right mind would think it's ok for me to die, and for millions or billions of other people to die just because it's the natural order of things.
And for the most part you can't even hide behind it's a "natural process" because humans are geoengineers we build huge concrete cities, we build dams, we divert rivers, we strip whole mountains and dig the decomposing biomass of our "ancestors" and burn it as fuel.
Bears and trees don't do that.
On one side, according to dogma1138 (it appears from his comments) that any change to the environment is inherently bad. Talk about change and he will quickly point out the loss of lives. I asked several times whether there were any exceptions from this and got no compromise. On the other side, according to ommunist, any concerns that anyone can have about the environment are necessarily misconceptions stemming from corporate propagandist shills, and no compromise here either.
This topic is so polarised that it's impossible to have a productive discussion.
One, to conserve current state of nature because it is worth something - see UNESCO Natural Reserves, etc
Two, because profits would be threatened by change. (Look at the constant work to keep the island Sylt from moving, for example)
But this has nothing to do with preservation efforts, if anything preserving dry subhumid and semi-arid natural habitats can prove to be a good barrier to prevent further desertification countries like Israel and Spain have been doing quite a bit of work in those areas.
Wanting to preserve an existing natural environment and habitat to many species is not antithetical to not wanting to lose arable land to needless man caused or at least accelerated desertification.
I say - that is bullshit. Belarus lost more than 20% of arable land and around 30% of forest land after Chernobyl accident in 1986. It suffered literal hell in social sphere after the USSR was ruined by its elites in 1991. But just 20 years later, by imposing special 17% tax on all businesses that was used to recover arable lands and forest lands from radionuclide contamination, balanced social policy and successful research in agriculture, it is doing just fine!
It is HOW you deal with loss of arable land that matters. 2008 - Syria. They stupidly dug deeper wells until exhausting their precious ground waters to nothing. Result - 2 mln former farmers filled favelas of large Syrian cities. At the same time, same area, same problem - Israel invested into desalination tech and plants and successfully kept its agriculture running.
It is not lost per se that causes famine and social shifts, it is right or wrong policy of the society that does it. We are humans - we can change things. But not 'saving deserts' or 'save beavers'. We are damn good at saving ourselves when we are together. Like Jews.
Israel was trying to fight the creeping dunes for decades, it finally figured out that actually trying to convert them into arable land early own was one of the causes that increase desertification, once it realized that it adjusted its policies and now keeping arid and semi-arid regions and building "natural" barriers that prevent the dunes from creeping is its main environmental policy and so far it's been working as the dunes have been receding by as much as 2 meters per year.
But the general argument isn't for "pro-desertification" it's just against unnecessary environmental change, Okanagan is not a desert it's a pretty good arable valley overall wanting to preserve the natural habitat and not fill it with vineyards isn't really a hard argument to make.
You can say that we can and should screw over every piece of land to get everything we can from it, but most of us can agree that we should preserve what we have left and find ways to better exploit in less destructive means the land we've already taken over and if at all possible try to reverse some of the damage we have caused.
I'm really trying to understand why would you think just stripping and entire habitat and doing pretty much nothing with it is somehow useful just so you could grow a few grapes in Canada.
Again, you completely misunderstood my position. I'm not making a comment on deserts, or this deserts specifically.
I'm making the following comment: "it seems to me that certain people (which I've just learned includes you) seem to believe that any change to any environment is necessarily bad"
We have very little ability to gauge the true impact of environmental changes so far we've learned that for the most part any manmade or man accelerated change has in the long run an adverse effect on humans and the planet as a whole.
There is no conflict between humans being the geoengineers they are trying to stop adverse changes to their global habitat that can threaten them, while wanting to preserve natural habitats that serve as a home to countless other species.
Most people think nature is pretty nice, and well pretty pretty, screwing it over needlessly especially considering that every time we do it gets worse for us is what most of us by now came to define as "bad" because it has a negative effect on our civilization.
On the other hand if you say make an argument that we found the cure for cancer but to make it we need to harvest every blue belly turtle in the planet and cause the species to go pretty much extinct I don't think many people including me would have much of a moral objection to it since while I do feel bad for the blue belly turtle (I made this species up, it might exist but i don't know :)) the positive effect on human civilization is most likely going to outweigh any negative effects the extinction of this turtle will have on the environment.
You seem to be writing your responses as if I were claiming that "it's ok to trash the environment", or something, which is not true (see my other comments in this thread).
Anyway, I'm bored, sorry.
I don't know what false dichotomy you are trying to point out but it doesn't exist, no serious preservationist or environmental scientists saying "all for X". We want to preserve what we can do not cause further needless destruction and degradation in the biodiversity of our ecosystem.
Many environmental problems including desertification are cause by us destroying natural habitats including deserts.
If you have a desert more or less contained in its "natural" state providing a habitat to multiple species do what you can to preserve it. If you have man accelerated desertification that is threatening to turn your arable land into sand dunes within the next 5 decades you should do what you can to slow it down, stop it, and then reverse it.
The only way of fighting desertification seems to be now to actually try to revert the damage you've done to the natural barriers and local environment in the first place. Sand dunes that have had migration patterns of barely a CM per year now migrating at rates of a few meters per year are not a "natural" state.
A) You provide no evidence for your major claim (that the people fighting change are doing it for selfish motivations). Neither in general, nor in the case of this specific desert.
B) Even if the _motivations_ for doing something were selfish, it could be that the actual environmental concerns themselves were valid.
Don't get me wrong, the phenomenon that you speak of (social parasites) does exist. But in this case I was hoping for a more environmental (as opposed to sociological) discussion. Just to be clear, you don't disagree that valid environmental concerns could exist, right?
"The Indian Express reports that the Intelligence Bureau submitted a report to the prime minister’s office saying Greenpeace was “negatively impacting economic development” through political activism and its anti-fossil fuels agenda. The reports says that Greenpeace activities have reduced the country’s GDP by 2 to 3 percent a year."
And to be precise about the topic - it is Lael Parrott's selfish interest to finance her 'research' in Okanagon that stinks from this PR article.
You keep talking about agencies, or about saving species (the benefit of which can be debatable depending on the species) and aren't really addressing my point. Conditions of the environment exist that will kill you.
You rhetoric style makes it really difficult to have a rational conversation with you.
@oneloop. HN does not techically provide me reply link, so I reply here - Sure thing. I told you earlier, I am based on oxydation as a life form. Remove oxygen - I die. And speaking of desert - me and you will die there too, being left in the middle of it. So what?
So you do agree that some conditions of the environment will have negative consequences for humans, or don't you?
Are you really saying that you need financing to get evidence to back up your original claims?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%82%C4%99d%C3%B3w_Desert
It's slowly disappearing though.
The Osoyoos "desert" isn't really arid enough, either.
Deserts don't have to look like sand dunes, they are any area with a low rainfall. Sometimes the plants that are adapted are virtually a forest, but it's still a desert. For example in the Baja California desert: https://mbgecologicalrestoration.files.wordpress.com/2015/03...
aren't deserts defined by being arid regions?
It is "technically only semi-arid shrub-steppe." [0] which are "Shrub-steppes are distinguishable from deserts, which are too dry to support a noticeable cover of perennial grasses or other shrubs" [1]
Semi-arid regions are also colloquially called "semi-deserts". As far as the semi-arid regions I have visited go, it seems to have pretty decent vegetation compared to others.
Maybe the fact that it formed from a lake bed makes it not a real desert?
Nope ;-) https://www.flickr.com/photos/83908676@N02/12262674976/
I was under the impression it holds the largest piece of "soft desert" in Canada, but maybe that's wrong.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/deserts/what/
As I understand it Carberry gets 300-500 mm of rain per year.
It looks more like Silicon Valley in dry season than a real desert.
What does that look like? Antarctica is the largest desert in the world, does it look like "a real desert"?