One in three fish caught never makes it to the plate – UN report

Sure, we can keep looking at the half-full glass focusing what is not extinct yet, but over few generations, we might be pretty lonely on this planet when it comes to complex life. It's more an indication of how badly we're screwing our own environment, also for ourselves. It's clear that life itself will survive much harsher situations compared to mankind and repopulate once we're long extinct.

This mass extinction caused by humans is an order of magnitude faster and affects far more varity of species and plants.

You're right, in the sense that of course the tardigrades, archaea around deep ocean vents, and blue-green algae will continue trucking along more or less whatever happens. We, however, are not tardigrades.

What is going to have problems is the health of the ever growing Human population. Us Humans may well be heading towards a crisis, the planet won't even notice.

BTW, I think we should be working hard to support a sustainable future for Humanity and the rest of the environment.

It also supports the balance of all the ecosystems: forests, seas, rivers... Which we also depend on to survive.

It's what makes us live on a beautiful, comfortable planet instead of survive in a terraformed rock we have to fight against while rushing to the next scientific way to palliate yet a new deficiency.

In our planet system, everything is connected.

Let's take a very naive but simple to understand example, the tomatoe.

Planting so much, and always the same kind of tomatoes makes the land nutritionally poor and the plant susceptible to parasites. We compensate this unnatural state by addition artificial nutrition and pesticides to the plant.

The result ?

Most tomatoes are tasteless garbage that looks more like a plastic ball than a fruit. Their nutritional content has been divided by 10 during the last 80 years, so that you need to eat much more to remotely get the same minerals and vitamins. When you eat them, you also absorb a small amount of all the products we put on them, with consequences we still don't know about.

That's just for a simple tomato. Bring together all the food, the water, the air, the temperature, etc. together, and that's how much we are disturbing.

It's not just emotional. We are seated on branch we are sawing.

Due to nutrient pollution of the ocean, large dead zones are spreading, these are zones without enough oxygen to support life caused by nitrogen and phosphorous pollution. 70% of the earths oxygen is produced by marine plants. Forests produce most of the rest and we are cutting them down at an accelerating rate.

So from an objective point of view, not enough oxygen is a pragmatic cause for concern. Looking at it from the perspective of nature, species evolve to survive, it is their prime directive. We are actually doing a pretty good job of working against this directive to our species own detriment.

Examples that come to mind immediately include the huge number of medicines that have been derived by isolating compounds derived from plants, an area which we are probably far from done exploring. Another more specific case I can think of, is how one of the most important compounds in molecular biology today (Taq polymerase) came from bacteria found in the Lower Geyser Basin at Yellowstone. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermus_aquaticus)

It might be how the nature works, but it is definitely not how Nature works. Capitalisation matters.

If we were being deliberate, sure, a targeted assassination of the Anopheles mosquito might not be a bad thing. But I don't get that sense at all... More like collateral damage.

As annoying as it is, it's a useful critter.

You see, the way you react is the very cause of our current troubles: we only see the living systems as a way to please us, and only on the short term. When they don't please us, we start hating them, and find a way to bend them to our will.

Now we destroyed most of the systems, or at least their balance, and we are painfully discovering that it may dooms us all.

So let's try to adopt a different point of view before we face even more terrible consequences of our gluttonous actions.

It's sad we destroy it. I wish we would not.

But it will survive, thrive even.

The problem is that our current actions will kill us.

I think it needs a multi-pronged approach. Inspiration is a great start, but it's fairly weak against a marketing machine spending billions inventing more nonexistent problems and needs.

We need to rediscover collective action, activism of the get off facebook and into the street to make someone's life difficult variety, regulation as a good thing (food safety laws, clean air acts, child labour laws etc), and stop pretending the market has the solution to everything.

That's a slightly challenging wishlist especially if we don't want to give up all the lifestyle in the process. :)

Who said anything about wealth? That sounds like a red herring to me. In any ecosystem, with any living organism, a population will increase until it reaches the limit of its food supply.

>Also, I feel that these appeals often suggest that we should be OK with letting some unspecified Other die for the cause of environmentalism when we would clearly not accept this for ourselves.

And I feel like your appeals are more interested in virtue signaling than actually having a meaningful discussion.

Say you have an island that has enough resources to feed 100 people. 30 settlers move there. In a few years, the population grows to 105. There isn't enough food. People die off and the population is down to 95. There's enough food to go around, so the next generation the population grows to 105 again. This process fluctuates indefinitely.

Then someone takes a boat out and discovers a nearby island. This has enough resources to feed another 100 people. There's enough food to go around, until the population reaches 205 people. Now there's not enough food again and people are starving. Repeat indefinitely until we run out of islands.

There is no solution to "solving hunger" that doesn't involve controlling birth rates. Anything else is just pushing the problem back. Nobody has to die. Simply making contraceptives as ubiquitous in third world countries as they are in developed countries would probably solve most of the problem.

I'd love to see the animal agriculture industries forced to pay for their externalities but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. But in the meantime a lot of positive change has come just from people being made more aware of where what they eat comes from and what it costs to get it there. Non-dairy milks have become so popular, for example, that they've put a huge dent in the dairy industry's profits.

There is a lot of 'feigned indignation' in this world, and big plans whereby everyone has to change, and then we will see progress.

I couldn't give up fish, not right now. So I applaud anybody who would actually take that step, over writing a few bullet points as to how we should tackle the problem.

Even if I'm wrong saying that... how long will it take to reach critical mass? How much destruction will be caused attempting to reach it?

Individual-centered solutions can't work efficiently enough for these things to change without personal incentives. We need incentives, replacements, regulations.

Look at the difference between those two worlds:

World 1: "Don't use those free plastic bags! Buy a reusable bag instead for more money! It's the responsible thing to do!"

World 2: "Plastic bags cost $0.06 each."

Which one has less plastic floating in the sea?