Holocene Extinction | Hacker News Reader

Holocene Extinction

en.wikipedia.org

119 pointsrapind124 comments

Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too, by terraforming and making the land more productive.

There's some evidence that the Amazon mix of fruiting tree and nut species were selected for by humans.

"The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans"

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou...

Since some people us this as political grounds for eugenics and population control. Such as one child policies, like China used to have. I think the proper way need to view ourselves, is as "gardeners" and caretakers. What we destroy in one area, we should rebuild in another, or make better.

For example, we could make connected "green corridors" that span the entire country, through which animals can migrate and live in. We have disrupted the migration paths of some species with out cities. But nothing says that we can't make it better by providing routes for these animals around our cities and farms.

May I kindly ask, why do you feel the need to jump out and defend the human species as also being good in the face of what is described in the article?

I am genuinely interested in understanding what motivates this reaction.

You are here, so obviously you feel "good" enough and worthy to exist. With population control its always the "others" need to be eliminated. No one wants to start with themselves. Its an extremely selfish position really. Its also not very logically viable, since those that feel the world is over populated and kill themselves, will just be selected out of the gene pool. Leaving only those that want to live, procreate and prosper behind.

Seems pretty natural, when information is provided, to offer another perspective. It's one of our core functions as human beings in a social construct.

I also think there's a tendency to anchor on what "is". Just because things are natural doesn't make them implicitly "good". And how does one define quality in the first place?

Put another way, what is the distinction between natural and artificial? Are humans not part of nature? And will "nature" not be here long after we've destroyed ourselves, if in fact we do?

Humanism is a fairly common value system.

> Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too

They can but they (mostly) do not. And the best way to have a beneficial impact on environment in the current situation would be "simply" to reduce its numbers. Unfortunately that's not so easy.

Many times there is a heavy dose of misanthropy in these environmental discussions. Phrases like "humanity is a virus", etc.

I would like to share a different perspective.There is a saying, "It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."

Even if humanity overburdens the planet and goes extinct in the next 100 years, I prefer what we have now, than if we had remained hunter-gatherers or pre-industrial.

We have spread out to every corner of the world. With irrigation, farming, heating, air-conditioning, etc, we have transformed the most inhospitable habitats into thriving cities. Members of our species have even set foot on the moon.

We have improved the quality of life for members of our species, especially the poorest. If you had to be born as a female child to a random mother, there is no other time in the humanity's existence where you would be better off than now.

We invented language that can express the deepest and most profound thoughts to the person standing next to us, and invented writing that can encode it in a form that can be understood millennia later, and invented telecommunication that can transmit it instantly anywhere in the world.

Our concept of the "universe" has grown. It is no longer the local grassland or forest. It is no longer a steppe or continent, or even our globe. Our concept of the universe includes solar systems and galaxies and super-clusters, and even the possibilities of a multi-verse.

All animals try to control their environment, but we have learned to do so on an unprecedented scale. We learned early how to control the large fauna that could eat us. Most humans walk freely about, safe from large predators. We also, much later, learned how to control the small predators - the bacteria and viruses.

We have also learned how to control ourselves. We learned how to control reproduction. We can keep from getting pregnant when we have sex, if we desire, or get pregnant without having sex. We can organize into communities and coordinate and cooperate at a scale and sophistication beyond any other animal.

So, if this time is the time that we have ultimately outstripped the earth's capacity to support us (unlike the many, many false alarms in the past), then I say, cheers to humanity: we have lived, we have loved, we have laughed, we have wept, we have left our mark in our corner of the universe.

Yes, let us try to develop technology and do things that help ensure humanity can stay like this for much, much longer. But let us not disparage humanity and all we have accomplished.

Imagine you have 3 people, A, B and C and give each one of them $10,000.

Person A is very conservative and puts the money in a savings account, and spends small parts of money over long periods of time.

Person B is not as conservative, and invests the money in a diversified portfolio.

Person C is an idiot, invites all their friends to a party that lasts an entire week where all the money will be spent at once living them all bankrupt afterwards.

In this analogy, the $10,000 are the finite resources of our planet, Person A were Native Americans and other cultures with strict attitudes towards nature, Person C is our "civilization", and Person B is what we should be doing instead of being idiots.

> I would like to share a different perspective.There is a saying, "It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."

Is it equally good to maim and destroy one's lover, oneself, and countless other forms of life in the process?

100 years may be optimistic.

And I don't think young people or children today deserve an agonizing life watching their loved ones, their own children, perhaps, starving to death or dying in a water war.

Also you don't need to be a hunter gatherer to not rape the planet.

> watching their loved ones, their own children, perhaps, starving to death or dying in a water war.

Sadly, this was close to the default condition throughout much of human history. It is only recently, with the benefits of industrialization and globalization that we have made that kind of thing much rarer than it was.

I think this is far less evident than usually assumed. The life of the last hunter gatherer tribes is probably the best approximation we have on how our ancestors may have lived. And while death is a more common (and swifter, less problematic) occurrence for these people, they were hardly unhappy compared to us -- sure, they didn't have iphones.

Said every decade for the past how many centuries?

This attitude is similar to a smoker saying after decades of smoking "I don't regret anything, I enjoyed it".

Or an astronaut who willingly goes to space, even though the increased cosmic radiation exposure, increases their risk of cancer.

I actually agree with your sentiment, and this flavor of optimism is something I enjoy in Soviet art on space exploration -- the problem is we could have had all that you list without the excesses that ruin it all.

I have noticed that this claim (that our current system is a net positive) is not frequently uttered by indigenous Americans, or for that matter indigenous people anywhere.

"Fun" statistic: in less than half a century, we've gotten rid of around 60% of Earth’s wildlife. [1]

[1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018

This is an incorrect interpretation of the report. Or at least, the way it's stated is misleading. We have not "gotten rid of" 60% of wildlife on Earth. What has actually happened is (since the 1970s), the average reduction per species is 60%. Some species lost more than 60%, some (far) less.

This is still bad news, but I feel it's important to point out that we haven't (for example), lost 60% of all species on the planet.

A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture.

There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.

I'm always amazed how good the fruit and vegetables look, but how little flavour they have when bought from super market here, compared to Europe, or actually most parts of the world where vegetables are grown locally and organically.

Very sour unripe oranges, bananas, grapes, flavourless green peppers, tasteless tomatoes. Pretty much the norm in Supermarkets.

I believe those vegetable and fruits are GMO i.e. constructed genetically to look good. Moreover quality of soil and its nutrients is not like it was before, making vegetable and fruits less nutritious [1]. In the end, until grown vegetable and fruits are grown in home, we don't have much choice.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

California is not nearly as bad as the rest of the country. the southeast US has some decent produce, but not much, and not nearly as much as its soil should offer. I am continually flabbergasted that Americans accept this - or rather, they don't.

I think so much of meat consumption and fast food consumption can be explained by how bad our fruits and vegetables are.

It’s really only recently coming into focus. Because if you look sector by sector it’s not clear (in terms of emissions). But when you look close it’s clear that a sector like chemical production is heavily weighted towards producing fertilizer. And the majority of that is being used to grow animal feed. Or the transportation sector, a lot of which is shipping food all over the world. And land-use change, deforestation, etc, to create grazing land or grow conventional mono crops — again, mostly for animal feed.

Basically, in our current system, plant foods are an edge product of an animal agriculture system. To be more sustainable, we probably want the opposite — meat as an edge product of a plant-focused agriculture.

The picture in my head is a more decentralized system — regional farms, urban farms, etc. And probably a carbon tax which would make meat a little pricier. It doesn’t have to disappear, but the externalities should be baked into the cost.

Strongly agree with this. Utilisation of water to irrigate animal feed, deforestation of land to support growing that feed, methane expulsions from cows themselves.. it’s crazy to think about the environmental impact of beef, when eating chicken or fish would be far better for the environment (not to mention healthier).

What about in the case where animals can extract more nutrients from plant food than we can? Cows in particular have specially built stomachs that can extract nutrients from plants than we can. I don't think this would be enough to make eating meat more efficient, but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants.

> but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants.

It is not necessary to eat meat.

Necessary is not the right word. More efficient might be better. It's entirely possible to get protein from plants and omega-3 from vitamins, but from a human health point of view, is it more efficient?

Letting grazing animals eat grass that's just growing on its own is incredibly energy-efficient, but that's not what we do. We manually grow food for them then ship it to the animals.

Who's "we", Kemosabe?

Humans, basically — the majority of agriculture.

Well, no.

Nobody grew food to feed to farm animals one hundred years ago, and I'd bet the vast majority of farm animals today are still not fed agricultural products.

Your complaint is against American factory farming, which is a whole separate issue of economic incentives and wealth distribution.

That’s an interesting point, given modern animal farming practices. 97% of cows are going to come from a feedlot, where they’ll be fed grain (corn). The special part of their stomach that allows them to extract more nutrients from certain plant foods compared to humans, the rumen, is “made” for grass. When switching over to grain, acid builds up in the rumen which can lead to acidosis, so we then have to pump the cows full of antacids to keep them placated while we continue to fatten them up for slaughter.

That's interesting. I certainly do not claim to be an expert in raising cattle. Perhaps there are smarter ways we can raise cattle. Is that why the grass-fed label is so important?

It kind of depends on your priorities, whether taste, animal-welfare, cost, etc. I think grass-fed tastes better, but I do find it has less marbling. Check out The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omnivore's_Dilemma

It’s true that some animals can digest plants that we can’t digest. But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants . It’s not necessary to eat meat for getting nutrients.

> But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants .

Vitamin B-12

From https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-b12/art...

“However, if you follow a vegetarian or vegan diet, you might be prone to deficiency because plant foods don't contain vitamin B-12. ”

If you are deficient there you can take supplements.

Animals can't extract that much more. And we certainly can't get 100% of that back out during consumption, ignoring all the inefficiencies of the process.

1 pound of food in might produce 0.01 pound of cow (probably much less).

Cows primarily eat grass and other ruminants that humans can't digest until the cows reach the finishing stage. At that point, expensive beef is finished on grass and cheap beef is finished on corn (to fatten it).

So 1 pound of corn might only product 0.01 pound of cow, but that's because 99% of the cow was built up by its non-food diet.

And paper.

We kill trees so Trader Joe's can send me a catalog of products I will throw away without reading. And 90% of people will likely do exactly the same.

Or so companies like Lob.com can convert API calls into dead trees, instead of looking into ways to do the opposite.

The Biomass of mammals on Earth is sobering.

Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs (60%) Humans (36%) Wild animals (4%)

Oh, just wait until you include avians. There are so many chickens. Soooo many.

While it is crazy, all of the animals listed are already some of the largest physical beings on the planet. Multiply them to 10000x the size of other animal populations, and this is what the scale will turn to.

It shows the ability of humans to preserve and propagate animal species when there is an incentive to do so. No need to worry about cows going extinct.

Depends on how you define extinct; for example: how many bovine are there in the wild? Are domestic bovine genetically equivalent to prior wild bovine populations? Etc.

Struggling to find a word for it, but it’s obvious that humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues.

Climate change is the most obvious, but there’s long list of issues like this that if suddenly every human on Earth magically expected to live 1000 to 10,000 years would become more pressing issues.

As a semi-futurist, this is the core issue, it’s not that humans don’t see the future, they’re unable to change... the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.

> the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.

I think that's overstated. Many only look to their /own/ future, not the species/collective. Maybe the family unit, so humans with children may have a longer term outlook. Also, many people's economic situation makes immediate or short term needs (food, shelter etc.) more pressing. I agree that current trends are disheartening.

You’re taking the sum of my comment, extracting a singular phrase, and changing it’s meaning.

I clearly define the scope of what “humans” & “future” means via “humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues“ — and cherry picking examples beyond that to me is irrelevant unless there a clear reasoning linking those examples to the topic.

Even if humans did care, that doesn't mean they could organize a meaningful response.

COVID-19 is affecting people right now. It, and other viruses like the flu, are just a giant rhythm game: if everyone could be isolated for 2 weeks, it would be over in 2 weeks, and we'd never have to deal with it ever again.

We just have a fundamental coordination problem. A lot of foresight and resources are required, and only a Central Overmind that mind-controls everyone would be a practical way to implement that kind of coordination. When the price of non-coordination is extremely jacked up, like in a crazy future where anyone can cook up an antimatter bomb or an extinction-tier supervirus (or super AI?) at home, it's obvious that the only tenable mode of operation is massive surveillance + censorship (and perhaps hivemind motor control) by a Central Overmind. :D

>> “ COVID-19 is affecting people right now. It, and other viruses like the flu, are just a giant rhythm game: if everyone could be isolated for 2 weeks, it would be over in 2 weeks, and we'd never have to deal with it ever again.”

Above claim includes set of assumptions that are unsaid and likely unaccounted for, for example:

- isolation occurs per person, not per household.

- 14 days is enough; research I’ve seen claims that only covers 97.5% of the population, which clearly is not 100% of the population; meaning that in 2.5% of the cases, it took longer than 14-days for the individual to become systemic; longest claim I have seen is 28 days, but that’s clearly an outlier may have been due to error of some sort.

- 14-days assumes you’re systemic on the first day of isolation, though mean time to becoming systemic in not zero days, it’s 5-days.

- assumes no latent environmental infection, wildlife based exposure, no bad actors intentionally reinfecting a population, etc

- simply put, no, 14-days is not enough, and few people understand the dynamics at play.

I've thought about how a hive would manage, but I suspect there are other weaknesses a hive would have that would come to light pretty quickly (you know besides lack of free will, and extinction from depression or lack of motivation). We probably need something new, but seem unable to experiment quickly with new ideas.

“Hive mind” as it relates to a singular species is a work of science fiction to my knowledge and barriers to such a systemic centralized existence appear to defy the laws of physics, information theory, etc.

Even the human mind in my opinion does not exist as a hive and at best described as an ecosystem that eventually experiences systemic failure.

> and perhaps hivemind motor control) by a Central Overmind.

I volunteer to be the Lead DevOps engineer who looks after the Central Overmind.

This makes me wonder if perhaps sentient life/civilisation is simply incompatible with nature by default. That doesn't make the former bad or mean that we shouldn't try and preserve the nature world, just that I suspect any species that evolves to be like humanity is probably going to have a similar effect on its ecosystem. Any alien world with a sentient species might also be in a similar situation for many of the same reasons.

That might be why space travel is so important to focus on too. A single planet simply doesn't have enough resources for a species with a planet wide civilisation and modern/advanced technology. So you're stuck with the choice of either expanding outwards, sticking with extremely basic tech, or having a far lower population.

You don’t need to have intelligence. Intelligence is just a form of fitness, but other species have had ecological hyper-fitness before (look at what happened with rabbits in Australia). All of them display the same behavior: massive growth and then overshoot and collapse. We’re exactly on the same path right now. I don’t think is very plausible to make an inhospitable planet livable.

> Intelligence is just a form of fitness

It's not _just_ a form of fitness--intelligence makes us aware of the trajectory that we are on; we know what will happen, and (I know this sounds crazy but hear me out) we could do something about it if we wanted to. So intelligence is important, but it doesn't make up for our utter indifference and willful ignorance.

This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

Yet billions of years in, until we arrived, there was no failure to be sustainable. We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event (arguably we already did)

> We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event

There's evidence that cyanobacteria did it earlier, on an even more massive scale:

"...biologically induced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere... causing almost all life on Earth to go extinct." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Isn't sustainability only that the system keeps existing? This is the 6th event, and even if this one is caused by us, Earth has gone through massive changes before.

The system will keep existing even if we erase ourselves (along with a long list of other species), but other life will keep on existing even after we're gone until our solar system ceases.

It's up to us whether we want to keep existing or not.

Earth has undergone lots of (short) periods of unsustainable ecosystems. They always crash and annihilate themselves. What is left has no choice but to gradually come into homeostasis, because the instability of too many aggressive species just leads to chaotic behavior and more crashes.

That's not true at all -- there have been countless problems similar to this, it's simply that in time life has rebounded, and that species without an "evolutionarily stable strategy" have died out. Here's just one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

[edit]

A bit more info on ESS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

All the more reason to focus on space travel to expand the our resources!

There are some fun sci-fi explanations for the Fermi Paradox. One of them is that no one likes neighbors that break out of their box, since they tend to ruin everything, like we ruined our planet. So coalitions develop that instantly blast civilizations that try to expand.

That sounds like a bad moralistic fable. Neighbors advanced enough to instantly blast expanding civilizations that don't expand? If they don't expand why the hell would they care about others outside their domain? When compatible planets are so rare that essentially being able to survive in space indefinetly is essentially a logistical prerequisite to expand in the first place. They might compete over such viable luxuries if they find others in range good canidates but a radical antiexpansion ideology and said capabilities is deeply inconsistent.

> Neighbors advanced enough to instantly blast expanding civilizations that don't expand?

Yeah, omg, right? It's like they have a completely different value system. How impossible!

Heh? Sentient life and the civilisations it creates are part of nature, where would the incompatibility stem from?

If you’re talking about the phenomenon of some species depleting the resources of their environment, harming their population in the long run, that’s not a phenomenon unique to humans.

Well, if by "incompatibility" we mean something that leads to destruction, then why not? Destruction and death are also natural phenomena.

Ecosystems are not exactly stable systems.

You don't need sentience to cause imbalance and breakdown - https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/trophic-ca...

Sentience is like anything else. Just a tool to that makes the species efficient at doing X. When a herd of buffalo gets slightly too efficient at grazing or a a pride of lions gets slightly too efficient at taking down prey things can unravel.

But after the breakdowns and collapses the big mystery is why things reboot.

> That might be why space travel is so important to focus on too.

Exponential growth does not work. In the limit you can only expand in a sphere at the speed of light: O(n^3), so exponential growth is coming to a halt, one way or another, in this universe.

Going to other planets ultimate solves nothing. You either reach homeostasis with your limited resources or you don't, which means you will reach the end of your resources and collapse.

Yeah, the reason to go to space isn't to get a (fictional) free pass from reaching homeostasis, it's to give you a larger number of resources at homeostasis.

A trillion humans is inherently cooler than a billion humans. More art, more science, more bigger projects achievable through collective efforts.

We _are_ nature and have no more control over our destiny than ants do.

This philosophy makes me wonder what concept you think is communicated by the word "control". In a sense you're not wrong, but in that same sense my thermostat has no control over the temperature of my house. If I believed that, I'd look for ways to reinterpret the word "control" to make it a useful concept again.

Human society is often imbued with a desision making powers that don't really exist. Why do we xxxx?! (insert damaging human behaviour here) people say, it makes no sense!

It makes intuitive sense to us that "humans" collectivley can and should make rational desisions, because we feel as thought we can do this individually. The reason we extrapolate this from 1 individual to many is because we don't see ourseleves or our society as a natural chaotic system, we see it as a rational desision making system that's broken and we're wrong.

Well, I'd say society is neither chaotic nor rational. It's trapped by game theory into predictable suboptimal outcomes.

But I think we still have much more control over our destiny than ants do, basically unless you grind down to the level of physical determinism where nothing has control over anything and we're all dancing to the tune of some Lagrangian.

To argue otherwise, I think you'd have to make the case that no individual or small group has ever hatched a successful plan to create social change. I'd point to the Montreal protocol as one of many counterexamples. We've also managed to, so far, not blow ourselves to smithereens with nuclear weapons, having limited ourselves to only one nuclear war so far.

The word "nature" is meant to specifically exclude humans so the argument "we are nature" is self-defeating

It's not self defeating, it's enlightening. The separation is rooted in post Christian Western philosophy and is false. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are.

This way of living, with that many people on the planet is not sustainable. We are on a runaway train to extinction and we want it to go faster. The economy!

When people talk about climate, resources, ecology etc. people are typically quite optimistic until you bring up the idea of "sustainability". The typical reply is something like "oh, we'll get there one day, it's certainly possible in the future.." but the idea of that sustainability is something we can put off is rather absurd, in the most technical sense.

Sustainability is the border between two ways of life. The side we're on, is by definition, unsustainable. It literally cannot be maintained. When you are in a state that no one on earth would argue can be maintained, pessimism and existential concern should be the default, predominate way of thinking.

If a subsistence farmer needed 1000 lbs of potatoes to feed his family each year, but was only capable of growing 700 this year, and was estimably 650 for next, you would be deeply concerned. Even if his estimate was 850 for next year, you would still bet that he was not going to survive. But this is how we live our lives, the sustainability is often talked about as some sort of moonshot goal.

The irony is that we do scream "the economy!" but when you think of the basic logic of sustainability there is the one side where you cannot survive on your current path, and the other where you produce a surplus of what you need. If our farmer expects to grow 1200 lbs of potatoes he can survive unexpected events, sell his potatoes to a neighbor, expand his family etc. Clearly the real economy only exists on the other side of sustainable.

If the economy is unsustainable, in any situation other than the world we live in, anyone would clearly state that such an economy is an illusion, since by living in an unsustainable way you have less than you need to survive, let alone enough to worry about what you want.

I agree. And the other thing too is nobody wants to hear about the prospect of overpopulation. In fact, I think most of our problems stem from this.

Bill Gates, for example, says we can "feed 12 billion people". Ok sure, but at what cost to the planet and our quality of life? Others say "the whole population could fit in an area the size of Texas". Or they look at Hong Kong density and say "it's possible". But I don't think that is sustainable or desirable.

When people think of picturesque countries like Norway, they often forget that those countries have low population densities, which allow them to leave parts of nature untouched.

Another issue that arises is that the global economy is built on a forever growth model. We're kind of stuck with an economic house of cards standing on the back of continued population growth.

/Bit of rambling here.

I certainly believe Bill Gates could provide 12 billion people with Windows licenses.

World population growth has plummeted. You should be pleased. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Updated-World-Pop.... That drop in growth was not achieved by impact of war, disease or starvation but by economic activity of the kind you think is an 'issue'. People want to trade and better themselves. When they do this, dramatic improvements can result at all levels. You're hardly able to take an interest in protecting and nurturing your environment when you're poor. Note how it's the middle and upper classes in the West who largely comprise the environmental action groups across the world. The poor are too busy just surviving. 19th century families in the UK (one of the richest countries in the world at the time) were large because 15% of babies under 1 year, died.

Hans Rosling: bedrooms drive economies.

Growth in general has fallen, yes. The issue is momentum going in to 12bn people or so. I don’t think that things scale effectively at population levels like that. Not to mention the environmental impact.

I tend to agree, but remember that we need to include livestock in the population counts of mouths to feed.

It's not the number of people, that's a fallacy. (See: Das Kapital vol 1, and http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp7.htm)

We have more than enough resources on the planet to feed everyone(0)(1)(2)(3)(4), it is the distribution of it that is the problem.

Large amounts of food are wasted(5)(6)(7), that is a problem posed by our economic system and something that we can fix -- something we should try to fix, without going straight to Eugenics (as Malthus did, and many white nationalists do), or population control.

(0): https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/the-world-produces-en...

(1): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241746569_We_Alread...

(2): https://medium.com/@jeremyerdman/we-produce-enough-food-to-f...

(3): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-hunger_b_1463429

(4): https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-a...

(5): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41173771_Food_Secur...

(6): http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/flw-data/en/

(7): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13364178

Yes but who’s willing to get off at the next station, not the passengers who’ve been on it from the start and not the passengers who just got on and are getting a taste.

Technology really is the only way out.

With very few exceptions, any affordances technology brings are consumed by humanity's insatiable appetite before they can benefit the environment. If technology figures out how to make $X more energy efficient, we just run more $Xs such that the (trajectory of) energy consumption is constant.

A big exception is energy. Net electricity usage per capita has leveled out or declined in the developed world since around the year 2000.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

Isn’t just counting the developed world missing the problem though? We also moved all of our manufacturing to the developing world at the same time and they saw a much greater increase.

Shipping stuff around the world and moving your pollution to Asia doesn’t do much good when we all share the same atmosphere.

This is really interesting; I wasn't aware. That said, "per capita" is the wrong metric since we're discussing humanity in aggregate. I might still be wrong about energy in general, however. In any case, I think the broader principle holds.

No. Political will is the only way out. Technology alone is not going to help when politics is geared to subsidize dirty fuel, permit polluting industry and avoid economic interventions that would help, like carbon taxes.

Technology makes cleaner solutions cheaper, rendering all that irrelevant.

Over time, perhaps. But we don't have time. Where are the low-methane cows? The low-carbon flights? When will cement pollute less? Why are we still generating 61% of power with coal and gas [0]? Part of the answer to all of these things is that there is a lot invested in maintaining the status quo. Airlines getting away with tax-free fuel isn't a technology problem. How long, realistically, until any significant proportion of current meat eaters switch to lab-grown meat or other alternative? And how much political capital will alternatives need to accumulate to take on the meat industry?

Sure, technology can help with any of these problems but it'll take forever as long as governments only pay lip service to wanting to change things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...

I think you're both right. I don't think we'll get much mileage by limiting consumption via legislation, but I do think subsidizing industries like renewables and green research (and phasing out dirty energy subsidies) combines policy and technology to get us there faster (in time?).

I think political technology is the way out. Right now we can't coordinate political will efficiently enough. Nations aren't powerful enough in a global capitalist world economy and even our best flavours of representational democracy doesn't have enough integrity to make the right decisions.

"It doesn't matter if I take the cost for changing my ways if I can't trust the others to not eat the benefit."

My big hope is that technology will evolve to a point where we don’t need physical bodies anymore and pretty much live in cyberspace.

Yes, assuming you mean "way out" in the same sense the parent post meant "getting off at the station".

This is a frequent topic of discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/

What happens to the economy when a significant portion of society wakes up to the reality of the biosphere collapsing? Will it happen soon or when the oceans are dead or the pollinating insects extinct?

There's a risk that not much will happen (from this realization alone). Most people don't have much power to do anything about it other than joining political movements. And for the individual life goes on. Once it starts to affect society itself we will act but only to do something about the immediate concern.

The economy/society works like this, it can only be forced into action because there is yet no efficient way to coordinate action over the scale required.

If it happens gradually, we may never wake up to it. For all I know, our biosphere is an already collapsed version of yesterday's, yet we usually see it more as a better version of tomorrow's.

Are there any resources for determining which US politicians support environmentalism (specifically meaningful, evidence-based policies as opposed to vapid virtue signalling) and/or where the "battleground" states are? I guess in general I'm looking to get involved more in climate politics, but I don't know where to start.

First look at how their campaigns are funded. You will not find any meaningful action from politicians who are dependent on support from billionaires or powerful corporations. Then I would look at whether they are committed to supporting the Green New Deal and how their policies are rated by climate groups like the Sunrise Movement. This has helped me learn more about climate policy in general, and has made me more able to distinguish platitudes from serious proposals to address this crisis.

My favorite writer on the subject is Naomi Klein. I think her work is a good resource for learning more about the politics of the climate crisis.

Check out Citizens Climate Lobby. citizensclimatelobby.org

Non-partisan group attempting to get a carbon tax and dividend law passed, and they are making progress. They continue to get new co-sponsors on their bill, they do a lot of training on how to get involved, how you can speak to your Congressperson etc.

Thank you! I'll dig into this. This sounds like exactly the thing I've been looking for!

> meaningful, evidence-based policies as opposed to vapid virtue signalling

You would need to define what set of policies you consider which first.

I'm not really sure how to break down "evidence-based" any more for you. It's pretty self-explanatory. Virtue signalling refers to actions that indicate you care about a topic (the environment in this case) but without any real commitment to the cause. For example, politicians who want to appear to care for the environment might promote a ban on plastic straws because it generates lots of good publicity, is only most mildly inconvenient, and is transparently negligible with respect to saving the planet ("better than nothing" unless one accounts for the squandered political will).

My question to people who think this is objectively a bad thing - given the usual line of thought to get that conclusion is that we shouldn't be prejudiced towards valuing humans any more than other living creatures (which makes sense), then why would the replacement of non-human biomass with human biomass necessarily be good or bad?

Now I kinda know some sensible answers to this question. For one, genetic diversity in life is critical for survival given diversification means at least a few strands can survive sudden unexpected events. i.e if everything were giant dinosaurs there may have been no life left after the dinosaur extinction. The other answer is that we are pre-built to aesthetically enjoy thriving nature (which is probably meant to drive us towards protecting genetic diversity).

However given the human backlash to human trashing the environment, I could easily see us settling on an equilibrium where life is not, at least for the most part, the kind of wild chaotic world that it was before us, but a world where the environment is increasingly managed to some degrees by humans. You see this as nations getting richer stop eating cats, dogs, care more about preserving the environment, raising better treated wildlife, etc.

In that case, perhaps humans can help facilitate a new epoch in nature where genetic diversity is not just a biproduct of a random process, but a conscious goal. Granted this would require a much deeper knowledge of nature, humility to know when we can't control everything, and a cultural shift towards being stewards of nature. But given the shifts that have already occurred in human thinking around nature, I don't think this is outside the realm of possibility. Given our increasing energy usage, it's probably the only route in which we don't end up causing environmental catastrophes that either kill us off, or our civilization. That and finding new planets.

I'm optimistic that a few things will help save us from ourselves: lab grown meat, electric cars, and solar power.

My undergrad degree is in biology and it was depressing to learn how humans have eviscerated nature. I remember joking with a classmate during my evolution class saying "what way are we going to learn about how humans destroyed nature today?"

The problem is that too many of us do things with a marginal utility near 0 which are bad for the environment just to buy food, pay debts and pay landlords.

The solution is obvious. Do nothing. Just do nothing (obviously you can read, ride a bike, write poesy and so on...).

States should pay people to do nothing rather than destroying the world.

'Ecologically, humanity has been noted as an unprecedented "global superpredator"'...

</sigh>

Now imagine survivorship bias applied , six times

Misread Holocene as Holodomor. Both extinctions being man made of course. So Holocene is the macro of Holodomor.

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