African fauna are finished. Is there any doubt of this?
Over a billion more people there by 2050 and the continent will be the hardest hit by climate change. We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.
Over a billion more people there by 2050 and the continent will be the hardest hit by climate change. We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.
Now Africa is growing very quickly. We should let it grow as we once did. Saying that they don't have the right to build cities and factories, since African nature is so nice and our isn't anymore, is a bit Euro centric.
I think this push to save endangered species is basically a form of colonialism where rich white people (whose ancestors destroyed their native fauna) tell poor brown people what they should value even when it gampers development.
Again, I don't disagree with your reasoning, and it is easy to back up by saying everyone else has done it, why would we stop them from doing it. I guess my argument against this point is that every society in the world should be doing their best to try to prevent things like this, so we shouldn't just let people do obviously terrible things to the environment, just because we have previously done it.
This is obviously a high-level response, not getting into particulars, but I hope you get the point at least.
People cite their distaste and dislike of American and European all over the world yet the vast majority of those places champion all things American or European / white, if only in things like food, music, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle -- if not more / everything. I know it's not "our" responsibility after a certain point so I'm just being curious on a very "surface level" here.
Dunno. Look at EEU; all the garbage that was known not to work in WEU was thrown into it instead of giving them the newest, safest and cleanest tech. Also pressuring them to cut their forests and sell raw wood for cheap to WEU, Ethiopian-style. Do you think Africa will fare better?
In terms of climate change, Europe and North America have made huge cuts in emissions at great cost to their economies. Unfortunately, not all large economies are doing their part globally.
Amount of money being also poured into the countries who’s cooperation is needed for conservation is also not small. No one is asking countries to help for free.
It’s a very disheartening argument to say that because others have made mistakes, anyone that has a choice today should make the same mistake. Especially, since those being killed off can’t exactly fend for themselves.
India has 300 million people without electricity, and they're doing exactly what the US and other nations did years ago: focus on improving their quality of life, using inexpensive coal and fuels.
The more I travel, and the more I see and learn about the world, humans, population and the environment, the more I am dead-set on the idea of mandatory population control. We need to put limits on how many children a couple can have. I know China's policy had some serious downsides, but at this point I fear much, much worse if we don't.
Let's reverse the trend and start offering financial rewards to people that don't have children.
Have you seen any of Hans Rosling's [1] talks on the topic of population growth? After watching, would you still think there is need for mandatory population control?
We need to do everything we can to stop population growth. 7 billion is more than enough. I strongly believe we should get it back down below 5.
We're killing the planet, making species go extinct, don't have enough food, drinking water or energy for what we already have.
> have you seen any of Hans Rosling's [1] talks on the topic of population growth?
I have not, and my internet is a bit too expensive to watch YT right now, sorry.
Natural selection at work.
Is there any scientific evidence that dishonesty is a genetic trait, though?
Let's have severe penalties for those that break the rules, or mandatory abortions, or one of 30000 other possibilities.
yes, I know it's extremely, extremely unpopular, but with what I have seen on this planet, I genuinely believe it's our only hope.
A note of irony: ostriches are African fauna that are unlikely to soon go extinct, because they've become livestock.
Our species will come and go having done little more than left an mass extinction event in the fossil record. A record that will never be perceived since our specie's experiment in sentience was clearly a serious evolutionary error.
All Giraffes or any species need do is wait out the storm. Thus, if we care to, all that needs happen is to convince humans to keep a given species around in a wild state until humanity finally wipes it self out. I imagine a millennia at most.
As it stands humans have the best shot at doing this. Perhaps we'll manage to save the giraffes as well and take some of them with us.
Furthermore, advancing technology makes smaller and smaller groups with smaller and smaller budgets, more and more deadly. If there remains even a modest chance of a species ending war per century century, then our remaining time as a species is very short indeed.
So while they are certainly worth doing, the species can not be saved by something as simple shifting asteroid orbits or colonizing Mars. We have to solve the other much harder problem.
As somebody else in the thread pointed out already, violence has actually decreased since the days of bashing each other to death with stones - and it definitely was not just the foolish young men getting killed.
Also the meteor impact threat is far from being solved apart from some theoretical viewpoint, to begin with the percentage of the sky we are actually able to actively scan for such objects.
Very, very true. I was actually pretty uncomfortable making my original post. But there seems to be too much confidence in the "end of history" narrative that assumes that the relative world stability of the last 70 years is permanent or that the cold war could only happen once.
So at the risk of posting something demoralizing, I thought it worth while pointing out (maybe overly dramatically) that there is an innate and extremely dangerous flaw in human thinking that is, by far, our most serious threat and that we neither fully understand it nor have a known permanent cure for it.
And what few fields are thinking about that problem are all soft sciences.
Big if true!
But everything that we know is a tiny blip on the timeline, and "the data" is practically meaningless. If humans died out soon, our existence would still be so fleeting that the universe would hardly know we were ever here.
As a US citizen, what can we really do. I realize our country shares responsibility for climate change, but isn't a major problem here also poaching? To really solve this, wouldn't Africa have to step up and crack down locally on industry damaging the environment, and poaching?
I don't think anyone is burring their heads in the sand, we just have no power to change things here or abroad. Half of our country still thinks climate change is a hoax...
If you really think it's going to get better, it won't.
I find it interesting that population growth is discussed so little in the context of climate change. It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates. This would have a major impact on both climate change, and the depletion of the planets resources.
Simply having a department receiving resources supporting scientific research and planning of what is an appropriate population size for some kind of nationally recognized standard quality of life, and having that department publish annual figures comparing our size and trajectory to their data would be useful.
Today one often can't even have the conversation without what's effectively a table-flip reaction in the form of terms like eugenics, forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, fascism, nazism, and the holocaust.
I personally think the only way to gracefully manage population size is culturally. A population that's cognizant of how impactful their decision to have excessive children is to everyones' long-term quality of life will behave differently. Today we don't even inform people of what excessive is in this context. Can we even agree in this conversation what an excessive number of children is? Where has it been defined? There's zero consensus, and our leaders willfully ignore the topic.
We have MPG figures on vehicles, we have MPG standards put out by the government as targets, people can qualify what is a fuel-efficient vehicle according to current standards relatively easily as a result. There's _nothing_ from the government saying what is an excessively large family to the best of my knowledge. When people can start having real conversations on this topic, with generally respected data behind the figures, then the culture can begin to evolve through the natural course of societal life.
When the EPA started talking about fuel economy and setting standards, it normalized the conversation surrounding fuel-efficient vehicles while supplying tangible figures. It would be quite useful if something similar happened with the topic of population size. Normalizing this conversation would go a long way towards helping people acknowledge that the main cause behind anthropogenic-caused global problems is the multiplier.
It's not something I expect to ever happen. Our economy is too dependent on continuous growth.
Somewhat off-topic but relevant: If this UBI concept actually gains any traction, it will be very interesting to see what happens to all the optimistic predictions of population size flattening out relatively soon. Occupying people while they make just enough to scrape by is, I suspect, a big part of what keeps their numbers down. UBI is just one example of something that may inadvertently blow those predictions away. When you've got a population on the order of hundreds of millions like in the USA, it doesn't take many doublings to become a billion.
You don't need to do this. The simplest solution to birth rates is to improve the economic power of your women--generally by education. Once women have choices that don't suck, birth rates drop dramatically.
EDIT: and worldwide, i.e. reducing the international demand
There isn't just endless savannah. Poachers need local infrastructure, supplies, protection, etc. If locals can make a living from tourism and from protecting the animals, they will stop the poachers and/or stop being poachers.
[0] http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?205830/Former-poacher-turned-...
If you convert some poachers in park rangers, you are just rewarding their past activity. More poachers will come and fill the place in seconds (now with the hope to reach a redemptive ranger position in the future). The extremely rich families that raised this lucrative system will exerce their power to keep the business running. The name of the poacher pawns is irrelevant for them.
Education will not work either. Too little too late. There are lets say 3000 extant tiger in the planet. We could easily find 3000 selfish people in the planet that want to show a stuffed tiger in their house next year as another rich toddler toy and symbol of power. Not to mention the yummy idea to earn lots of money speculating with the "tigercoin viscera market". Is not realist to expect future generations will have the chance to cleaning this mess. Would be like expecting current australian people to fix the Tasman tiger extinction by their grand parents.
Closing the market and exportation is the only way, but is a difficult goal when a diplomatic luggage can be send to any part of the planet with a full order of lioness bones or leopard tortoises alive inside.
That's one thing people here could work on.
Most of the demand comes from SE Asia and China where they think this stuff cures medical conditions.
Long term, those governments need to modify primary and secondary school curricula to unambiguously dispel those myths. Eventually, the people who believe rhino horn cures cancer will die out or be pressured by their children, but this will take at least a generation.
In the meantime some species will go extinct. Their only hope is a sudden and prolonged recession or depression in Asia.
How many people in the developed world believe that vaccination causes autism? Or that they have biological intolerance for MSG? Or take extreme doses of vitamins or minerals?
I don't think that any amount of grammar school curricula could overcome the human tendency to believe in crazy shit, non-backed by science or reason. This human nature even transcends class, and appears among the relative elite (e.g. fear of irradiated food, avoidance of gluten when your not even celiac, Elon Musk's belief that we live in an alien computer simulation, etc).
You can perhaps use school curricula to shift mainstream thought, the Overton window, etc. But there will always be enough "alternative view" enthusiasts that I doubt you could ever eliminate demand for rhino horn as an erectile dysfunction treatment.
This seems like it has being going on for a while and the Asian governments just don't do anything.
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Also WRT to finance incentives for locals: IIRC rhino horn goes for obscene ammount of dollars in Asia, so any tourism dollars will have to compete with that.
That's not quite true. Most Americans (7 in 10 in a recent study [1]) believe climate change is happening. The difference is that half are unwilling to pay extra in electricity bills and other areas to deal with it.
The overtones of political tribalism in your denouncement of "half of Americans who believe it's a hoax" is good reflection of why politics is so divisive in the US and only grows further apart on important issues.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-americans-wa...
I do not bury my head in the sand. Instead I try to convince people on HN all the time that people in Africa should stop procreating to solve these problems.