Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years (2014)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Is everyone else screaming inside, or is it just me?
That's just an intuitive thought, I am not sure if it is necessarily correct in all cases. It certainly at least correlates.
There are probably fifty times a day I feel a deep seated dreadxiety about something I'm doing. Wearing synthetic fibre. Finding out a soap has triclosan in it. Using a disposable nappy. Eating an avocado. Eating fish (appropriately enough, eating said synthetic fibres in that fish). And yet I have colleagues who toss aluminium cans into the garbage when the recycling is RIGHT NEXT TO IT and they do. Not. Care. I don't know what to do. Individual action is meaningless - every gallon of gas I don't burn just makes it cheaper for someone else. Maybe even the driver who wants to mow me down. I despair.
Not sure what to do about civilizational collapse though.
What can you even do? Thats probably the no-meat diet of 10 people being offset by one persons dogs.
The higher your personal standard is the more angry you will be at your fellow human, its best to just not think about it.
Invasive species in general often carries the problem that hunting them cost more than the population is willing to pay, so they are "allowed" to spread and cause havoc with the ecology. Overpopulated lakes generally stay such because the fish is seen as undesirable, often based purely on local cultural views. Vegetarianism do not address those issue and generally the veggies being grow are those that is already being grown beyond what would be healthy from a bio diversity perspective.
If you make the world better by being less bad, then chances are you are already doing what one human can do. That is fine and enough for one human, by definition.
When we aim for the stars we first must learn to walk, and be content with little steps for a very long time.
The other option is to run for office and effect change that way. That one just might do something.
I don't think this is true. Humans are deeply social and copy each other. One can easily see this with young humans, but I didn't fully appreciate this with adult humans before I saw it myself. When I turned semi-custom-vegan, I did hear that it is kind of pointless because animals will still be slaughtered for others. But even suprising to me it turned out that several of the people I interact with started to reduce their meat consumption as well. We aren't all egoistical ignorants that only think of their immediate benefit.
But that example is extreme. There's strength in numbers, even smaller ones. If 5% did what you describe, there'd be that much more people demanding streets that are safe for biking, etc.
If you want to reduce the consumption of some thing, make it more expensive.
Paradoxically: increased efficiency reduces costs and so increases total consumption. This was noted by economist and engineer William Stanley Jevons, in the 19th century.
There are different ways of increasing costs, and not all necessarily involve prices (or taxes), though those tend to be the most effective and easiest ways to do so. Legal, social, and moral costs can also be imposed (criminalising use, making use anathema, making use taboo), but these take time to impose and have various side effects.
This is a difficult problem, and even recognising the dynamic is difficult. It's deviled ecolologists, economists, politicians, and others, for over two hundred years (and arguably, for over two thousand).
If increased capabilities allow more parties to engage in an activity, you'll increase total consumption.
If increased costs reduce the effective maximum scale of operations, you'll tend to have reduced consumption.
One formulation I've come up with is that "bad hygiene leads to decentralisation", where hygiene is meant in the general sense of systemic health and efficiency. Anything that reduces the capability of scaling up operations will lead to more and smaller rather than fewer and larger units of operation. This is something that proponents of decentralised systems might want to consider.
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/36518392
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7h8sqk/open_th...
I highly doubt consuming meat today affects lifestyle of most humans in 50 years noticeably.
Just sayin!
Seriously, you want to make real impact, learn yourself a high energy physics degree and do research. Not eating meat is a joke. We as humanity will make not eating meat much sooner if we'd focus on uploading and fusion.
"steep decline of animal, fish and bird numbers was calculated by analyzing 10,000 different populations, covering 3,000 species"
Logistically speaking, I'd like to know how they tracked that. I've seen how caribou are tracking in Canada rather effectively (http://mffp.gouv.qc.ca/the-wildlife/hunting-fishing-trapping...)
However, specifics of their research I'd find very interesting if indeed I could see it sited.
Any help?
On my mobile with shitty 2g right now,but googling overfishing or fish pupolation is always recommended
Most humans care some about animals, but they care more about humans.
(Yes, I am well aware that the developed world could accept a lower standard of living, and that would help. I question whether it's enough. And yes, I am aware that that is not an excuse for the developed world to do nothing.)
Fortunately, the human growth rate is stabilizing so hopefully we can figure out how to have humans grow to a natural equilibrium AND keep diverse ecosystem. If the question is framed as either humans or animals, society will end up with only zoos, farms, and humans.
If the world's population lived more like an average Indian, the human population could still roughly double without issue. If the world's population lived like an average American, we'd need 3.1 additional Earths to sustain us. [1] We're kind of jerks.
I think the above things are useful, but I doubt that they would really go far -- the population growth of the past several decades is unlikely to be balanced by a few relatively minor adjustments you cite. I suspect technological advances like efficient vehicles (or synthetic beef as you put big emphasis on beef consumption) will help more than biking.
I am all for biking, but you are unlikely to reduce car use by more than 20-30% by it (bad weather, aging) while increasing miles per gallon (or a similar metric) has more upside potential.
In the end though I think we have too many people already and will have way more in 20 years; unless we address this somehow all of the above could be irrelevant. Just my 2c.
People don't think there's inherent value in biodiversity, but in reality there are certain ecological functions carried out by many species that we take for granted. These ecological functions are critical for the environments we live in. E.g. Water Filtration [2]
Okay still don't buy it? Well let's talk about efficiency.
There are a couple of startups who are working on carbon scrubbers. [3] They see it as a potential market as the amount of carbon increases. I think this is ridiculous... grasses are extremely efficient at sequestering carbon, specifically bamboo. The entire attitude of science being able to combat climate change smells of engineer's disease[4]. Bamboo has been evolving for millions of years to efficiently remove carbon from the atmosphere. A couple of engineers are not going to be able to compete with that in a realistic time frame.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11148
[2] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120925-natures-water-purif...
[3] http://shanghaiist.com/2016/08/04/smog_diamonds.php
[4] https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...
I mean, I admit I have what you call 'The Engineer Desease'. I believe in scientists more, than in plants.
There are however no wild animals on land. Every land animal is either a pet, livestock, or in a zoo or preserve. Except for the limited species above, every other land species is extinct (but their DNA is preserved).
Would the above scenario be one that is appealing to you. Is wildlife and ecological diversity a good apart from its human benefit? Is human good worth harming ecological diversity for?
That's very subjective and depends on what you are measuring. Sure we have less conflict, less people in absolute poverty, but we also have more people in slavery than any time in history.
It appears that humanity lived in balance (Lotka-Volterra style) with the rest of the inhabitants of the planet until the invention of agriculture, which is still relatively recent.
The transitions that led from agriculture to walled cities to city-states to modern nation-states all occurred within the past 10,000 years or so. Whereas the oldest known human fossil is something like a million years old. Divide that 10,000 by the million years our species has been on this planet, you get 1%. So for 99% of humanity's time on the planet we probably behaved a lot like most of the other land mammals.
Something happened that led to the changes in our behavior, and we are now facing the consequences of our collective actions for the past thousands of years. It looks like we'll need to change even more before it's too late.
100’s of kilometers of wilderness where animals freely roam about and do their thing without human competition is a very surreal sight.
If the mara+Serengeti or the barrier reef disappear from the planet, I wouldn’t want to live with joy anymore.
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In a less personal sense I think Nature is sentient and could destroy us overnight if She wanted to, but apparently She doesn't, at least so far.
Perhaps the natural, wild world is like the yolk to humanity's chick embryo and the Earth is a cosmic egg... What we are experiencing could be totally Natural.
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Along a completely different tack, I don't think that scenario would be stable: I believe eventually something would go seriously out of whack in a simplified and artificially-controlled ecosystem (cf. Biosphere II)
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In any event, I believe there's a better option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo
"Toby Hemenway - How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization"
We have spread invasive species all over the place. Many of them haven't even been noticed yet. This includes stuff like soil fungus.
Even when we do notice, we do nothing. Cats are a huge problem, but obsessed cat lovers are well-organized politically. They show up in force at every town council and country commissioner meeting where a cat issue comes up, defending stuff like giant feral cat colonies right next to the beach where endangered beach mice should be reseeding the grass that holds the beach in place. [edit: getting my cat lover downmods... but this is an actual problem causing beach erosion in Florida, and there is indeed a giant cat colony in my area that isn't more than 500 feet from the beach]
If we disappeared today, the extinctions would just continue.