Sir David Attenborough makes stark warning about species extinction
bbc.com
bbc.com
And I've known about species extinction since I was a little kid. They've happened and keep happening. Little to nothing seems to have done to prevent them during my lifetime.
I feel powerless and have no idea what to do about it.
I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling.
And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.
I think if we all do more to make a little difference, we'll make a big difference as a group.
I've been making a focused effort to buy food produced locally. Details on how this helps here: https://www.terrapass.com/eat-your-way-to-a-smaller-carbon-f.... Lettuce from across the country costs the same, and isn't as fresh.
We moved for a better quality of life, and part of that was reducing our commute. We were able to cut the commute back from 3hrs a day to about 30min a day per adult, if that. There's a calculator here that can help you figure out the carbon savings: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/household-carbon-footprint-...
When our water heater failed, I did some research and realized the state where we were living at the time would pay for a replacement tankless combined water heater and furnace. That saved us about $4k from the cost of the system, plus it is super efficient so our heating and cooking costs dropped, plus we had endless hot water for showers.
I realized one day it's like working on legacy software: if you look at it as a whole, it looks like a completely intractable problem. But if you start making incremental changes, over time you can change and have an impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem#Soci...
Here's a thought or two by Attenborough on overpopulation, one of the drivers of these problems [0]
The problem will solve itself however (with certainty), and I cannot explain it better than George Carlin [1]. Enjoy!
I suspect that if it was a lot more deadly, it would have triggered a stronger government response (at least in the U.S.) and ultimately killed fewer people.
Then again, I've repeatedly underestimated just how incompetent this administration could be.
Not long ago, I told someone that every time I hear his voice, either some creature is going to die or something is going to go hungry. There is no happy ending to this earth saga. I feel helpless most of the time and don’t know how to leave this world a better place.
I don’t know how pay my debt back to this planet. So far my plan is to arrange for my estate to consolidate all my assets to buy land and return it to nature. Not Ag..not gardens. Not habitat. Just return it to nature and let nature do what it wants.
It's such an ingrained assumption inside my head that everyone should understand the value of biodiversity that I couldn't even answer.
I grew up watching David Attenborough, David Suzuki, and Carl Sagan explaining the natural world.
I can't imagine how much poorer my life would be, if I hadn't grown up with that.
And I can't begin to imagine how to explain my world-view to someone who clearly didn't grow up with them... Other than to sit them down with all those fantastic series, and hope that they take hold in them.
I mean, like, start by watching "Queen of the Trees," and see how inter-connected all of that life is:
Different organisms have come up with different solutions to the same problem, and because of that they can break in different situations. The 'service' they provide will be affected differently by an environmental shortage or excess. If twenty microbes are responsible for recycling organic matter and dust or drought or some chemical affects 10 of them, the others will expand to pick up some of the slack.
Aspirin occurs naturally in Willow bark; morphine and codeine from opium poppies; ephedrine and amphetamine is derived from Ephedra sinica (Ma Huang); quinine and it's derivatives from Cinchona calisaya; digoxin from foxglove (Digitalis lanata).
And botox from the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and related species has medical uses primarily for muscle spasticity conditions and migraines.
Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. It's also a prodrug of salicylic acid, but it has additional anti-inflammatory and anti-thrombotic effects, because unlike salicylic acid itself, it can irreversibly inactivate COX enzymes (enzymes that synthesize compounds needed for inflammation and blood clotting) by acetylating them. It's also less irritating to the digestive system.
How the humans invented something so incredibly useful? Most probably after watching "useless" social wasps to mash bark to make its nests.
Our oceans are collapsing. Warming, acidifying, over-fished, pollution.
What are we supposed to do?
I understand why I'm being downvoted. The point I'm arguing is " They ended up flat-out asking me why anyone should care about biodiversity." If you down vote me please write an note saying how biodiversity makes a difference to the life of the average person.
I don't think my life would change materially if I was on a hypothetical space station with very good life support. I suspect the difference is an emotional connection?
Until we have a better answer, we should work damn hard to keep this one running. And we don't know enough about how it works, so we should try preserve the current systems as well as we can.
The term to research for why biodiversity is useful in a utilitarian anthropocentric way is "Ecosystem Services".
The only way we know how to keep what we have is with biodiversity.
No, seriously -
We are destroying not just other species' natural habitats; those natural habitats are our own, that's where we evolved. In billions of years of natural history, we and our ancestors have led a "modern" way of life for a few thousand at most.
We're so adaptable that we can thrive in highly technologically altered environments as well; but I'm quite sure that anyone can experience the feeling of recognizing that those aren't truly home for us.
The point is people see world differently because of some fundamental differences in genetics & childhood nurturing.
What is your measure?
E.g. Cats kill billions of small birds and mice a year (think what that does to owl populations). It’s shouldn’t be legal to let house cats roam freely outside.
Ok. If there was an abundance of food for the owls then we'd have many, many more owls, and they would kill billions of birds instead. We'd just be sacrificing cats for owls. Why is that better?
Why is it better to introduce hundreds of millions of bored free-range emotional-support predators into any given ecosystem than to not do this?
Seems tone deaf to ask this in a thread about biodiversity and species extinction.
Because there are wayyyy more cats than owls. So we have more biodiversity.
I do not follow. Are you saying that idiocentric tastes negatively correlate with empathy?
Of course the staff were all furious at hearing this, which he seemed to enjoy. I asked the other owner if he was serious and he said he 100% was serious. So I approached the owner dumping the oil why he did this, why he didn't just empty the oil into a container, etc. Long/short he said it didn't effect him and couldn't care what any of us hippies though of the practice.
I would say that there is a fundamental difference in the way people are; they either view things in the long-term and strive to ensure the best for all of us. The other side of the coin are people that just want what's best for themselves and maybe their family. They don't care or want to believe such actions have long term effects on them directly.
It's not merely selfishness, it's sadism.
Doesn't sound like a nice guy.
Even guys that are seemingly nice have very odd beliefs. It really opened my eyes as to what to talk about at work, even if the topic didn't seem 'fringe' to me. Older dudes out west/here in Colorado in particular grew up with a sort of cavalier notion of what freedom and America means to them, and telling them what they can or cannot do on their own property is the heart of the matter.
Most people believe crazy things, even those that don't tend to not behave in consistent alignment with what they believe to be true or good.
Yea, but their property doesn't exist in a vacuum. They have neighbours and there's always downstream effects.
I'd say part of this attitude is an effect of rights becoming disconnected from responsibilities. Like, sure, one may "own" the land, but it better be well take care of, be a good steward. Not because there's immediate bad effects, but because those effects diffuse into the real non-human world.
There's a certain personality type that derives more pleasure from the loss of another than a gain of their own.
I guess people tend to believe that everyone else is like them, including those of us that aren't sadistic. And if a full 33 percent are sadistic, is it something that even should or can be corrected?
Now that's terrifying.
However, it is much better to simply look at a flower and meditate on how amazing it is that it exists at all than ruminate on the facts of how cruel the world is.
Gore Vidal's vversion is well-known: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
NY for example:
"Thus, for example, even a spill of a gallon of oil into a ditch is covered."
https://ag.ny.gov/environmental/oil-spill/oil-spills-homes-a...
California:
"California Penal Code 374.3 makes illegal dumping on public and private property punishable by a fine up to $10,000. Also, pursuant to Section 117555 of the California health and Safety Code, a person who dumps illegally is punishable by up to six months on jail."
https://pw.lacounty.gov/epd/illdump/penalty.cfm
Calcycle page on illegal dumping:
This is the only type of correct answers for those cases
I've spent a lot of time trying to formulate my reasoning and unfortunately, the easiest explanation is the most clinical and least likely to inspire: diversity is necessary (but not sufficient) for long term survival of any nontrivial system - be it a species, civilization, tribe, or business. Dynamic environments driven by random events and emergent phenomenon like weather/climate, food chains, and sentient beings are going to be chaotic and unstable in the short term. Diversity allows better suited individuals to exploit the current environment while preserving a diverse minority contingent that is far more likely to be able to adapt to the next change in the environment without a catastrophic collapse of the system. Without that minority group, the medium to long term probability of survival for the whole is zero and without the majority, the minority group wouldn't survive long enough to make it the next environmental shift.
It's as close as you can get to an abstract natural law of complex systems. It applies to a company's talent pools and its ability to survive pivots or changing market conditions, an ideology's ability to survive the realities of geopolitics, a religion's ability to survive schisms and protests, and much more.
A current example would be the ubiquitous banana. The cavendish banana (the most common variety you'd encounter in your produce isle) is under attack globally and is at risk of being wiped out. And this isn't the first time that's happened. The banana your grandparents grew up with, the Gros Michel, while not extinct is no longer commercially viable.
Not so. Ireland was a net food exporter for the duration of the famine. The problem was political and economic.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-202289...
Do you have a better source, which you think refutes their arguments?
They are arguing that Ireland was not a net exporter of food because a large portion of Irish crop exports were oats, and oats are not food.
The supporting arguments are worse. For instance, they state that oats are usually for horses' consumption. Further, they state that the average farmer would not know how to prepare the oats for human consumption.
All this seems obviously false[1].
As a general point, the obvious point of comparison with Ireland would be the various states of 1840's germany, also heavily reliant on potatoes for sustenance. They also got the potato blight, but there was no great famine.
[1] they also give some figures, which I won't comment on.
Bananas are kind of a weird case for multicropping, because they are all sterile clones. So this makes them horribly susceptible to every disease under the sun.
Not saying that this solution will work with poachers but there is probably a combination of approaches needed to preserve the biodiversity. One national park in India has given legal protection to park rangers if they were to kill to poachers and that has had a dramatic impact on the population of single horned rhinos. In 2015 park rangers shot dead more poachers than poachers killing rhinos for Chinese medicine.
But would you expect it would convince anyone to change their lifestyle or behavior, given the other evidence that people seem to just accept as the new normal? The west coast of the US is burning. And when California isn't burning, Australia is. Chunks of Florida already regularly experience "nuisance flooding" related to sea level rise, and it's frankly confusing to me that people are still building stuff in Miami. Rising temperatures have meant that the ranges of some infectious diseases have expanded in rich countries (e.g. Lyme disease in parts of Canada, Zika and Dengue in parts of the US). But most Americans, Canadians, Australians and others haven't substantially reorganized their lives to stop emissions.
If direct impacts on the lives of people living in rich and powerful countries doesn't cause people in those places to change their behavior, why would you expect them to be moved or motivated by threats to pangolins or rhinos?
This also further solidifies my belief that asking people to change their lifestyles in ineffective in tackling the climate disaster. Given the choice people will carry out their normal businesses (even as the world is burning around them).
What we really need is actual policy that combats this. We need the state to build the infrastructure and enact restrictions on polluting behavior so people aren’t given the choice of carrying out our polluting destructive business.
What have you been doing?
> People with heart or lung disease, older adults, children and teens: Avoid physical activities outdoors.
>
> Everyone else: Avoid strenuous outdoor activities, keep outdoor activities short, and consider moving physical activities indoors or rescheduling.
I’ve been staying indoors, and so have many people. You definitely should not go fishing, golfing, play football in the park, etc. like I’ve been seeing people doing
Human beings procreating responsibly is a major factor in continuing our species to perpetuity. It should not be for religious, economic, political or social reasons.
Species extinction occurs because human beings are outbreeding every other species on earth exploiting all the planet’s resources and keeping it for themselves.
This is detrimental to our own survival as we are super apex predators. When an apex predator gets hungry, nothing else can survive. And we are always hungry and we keep adding hungry mouths.
If we pick quality over quantity, we will have a healthy stock and sufficient earth resources when the eventual depopulation event occurs. Depopulation is a mathematical certainty.
We can either control population with responsible procreation and resource conservation or we can burn all existing and non renewable resources and perish in a spectacularly tragic and violent way.
The only way to prevent species extinction is to conserve habitat for the species. Since everything is below us, we have to step aside and make space. Without habitat, we will perish as a species.
Being the apex predator, it’s like sitting on the top most branch of a tree and sawing off all the branches. Because apex predators consume everything. Increase in population is like inviting everyone to come and sit on top of the tree too.
Hunters and fishermen know this. That’s why most conservation groups seek hunters and fishermen and NRA support. They donate because they realize the importance of preservation of habitat.
How do we go about this? By removing population pressure from economic activities like work and employment and GDP. This can be easily achieved by automation. Growing high calories, nutritionally dense food to feed the population and investing in local food security by utilizing modern tech like hydroponics and vertical farming on marginal land. Figuring out the environmental cost of replacement rate of human births and helping people gain resources to justify having children rather be a continual drain by incentivizing large families.
When resources disappear, civil unrest and war begins. We have always seen this. Famine and drought have always preceded every major war. From tribes to the latest Syrian incursion. Even way back, primitive tribes will go to war with the the neighbours when there is a famine or drought or food runs low. The men who die remove themselves from the food chain. Women and children are spared and were always spoils of war. The resources are combined for greater survivability of species..not a tribe.
The latest upheavals we see and the protests and revolutions in recent memory have always been due to less resources to distribute amongst a larger population. Densely populated regions revolt when resources are stretched thin. We incarcerated criminals when they show a tendency to appropriate community resources without contributing to the common pot thereby reducing their ability to be multiplying and replicating vectors of DNA. We did not allow the sick and the weak to continue sharing the commons.
If we look at the bigger picture unemotionally, what we pride ourselves with..the genteel fair kind and sociological progress Is what has allowed this resource restriction.
We can’t let go of that progress. The only way out is automation. And removing economic incentives for procreation. And resource allocation and distribution equally by removing speculation over resources that contribute to human survival.
CRISPR would have been a ‘sci fi’ fantasy years ago. And it’s now reality. Environmental stewardship as fantasy is the sad reality we face now.
I don't care how many hours you've logged on "ML SAAS" it's not where you think it is
My gardener has 5 children and three grandchildren at age 48. This is irresponsible procreation. An average 2.1 replacement rate in a family unit that doesn’t rely on welfare still relies on tax subsidies, incentives and free public schools.
Both are unsustainable. When there is no cost and only rewards for irresponsible procreation that is resource hogging from the commons, there will be a quick deterioration of available resources for all.
When there is want and scarcity and more demand in the apex predator population, they start stripping the habitat and resources of the species below them in the food chain.
That will eventually threaten the apex predators survival. This is more ‘killing the golden goose’ of Aesop tales than ‘blade runner 2049’ adoption of Philip k dick’s sci fi story.
If I were to explain to a child about apex predators, I would bring up sharks..if sharks eat all the little fish in the sea, when they are out of little fish in the sea, they will die because they won’t have anything more to eat to survive.
That being said, I find this a difficult conversation to have online, because "responsible restriction of childbirth" isn't something anyone short of dangerously dictorial, can fathom to hope to achieve. It's a non starter, therefore we have to approach the problem from a end that's not so...thorny..
It's easy to say, "let's just thanos this and get it done" reset at another few thousand years..but the hard question is who gets snapped?
I never said ‘responsible restriction of childbirth’. I said ‘incentivise responsible procreation’.
I don’t know if you twisted my words on purpose or you really don’t see the difference?
Why is it genocide to offer incentives for a greater quality of life for their thoughtful and mindful roadmap to nurture their progeny and to protect the commons from over exploitation. We should be rewarding responsible procreation and parenting.
Human beings like ‘to do the right thing’. We are rationalizing animals rather than rational animals.
Supporting and incentivizing irresponsible procreation economically and empathetically simply gives people reasons to mindlessly offer themselves rationalizations to continue making wrong and harmful personal decisions.
Giving people incentives and support to provide the greatest chances of their gene pool to thrive along with the rest of the human species is a rational solution to the depopulation event that is a mathematical surety to occur within a century.
Having said that, maybe it’s also time to have discussions about ‘thorny’ subjects. The lack of open discourse is why even reasonable suggestions are downvoted here. Because there is nothing to compare common sense with..
It's fine to tow this line of thinking, but give it 100 years or so to implement.
1. Remove food insecurity. The job of the govt is to provide basic calories to ALL. In the form of credits. (Like in Switzerland)
2. The subsidized calories will come only from farms that have to follow ecological practices.
3. Housing: everyone gets to live in state housing for diff income levels. On 99 year lease at market rate. This gives generational housing security. And protects housing from speculative shocks.(like in Singapore)
4. Universal health care.
What is provided is a basic quality of life to everyone. Just as everyone deserves a basic quality of life guaranteed hybyeh govt, everyone has to display responsibility. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Downgrades to quality of life if too much is siphoned off from the commons is a reasonable and fair bargain.
Of course, consumption per capita is still a concern, and global population is still a concern, but it's hard to fault your gardener for having 5 children if you live in an industrialized country with below replacement rate fertility.
> An average 2.1 replacement rate in a family unit that doesn’t rely on welfare still relies on tax subsidies, incentives and free public schools.
This is a totally different kind of commons. Personally I'm much less concerned about funding public schools than I am about overfishing, habitat destruction, etc.
1. Industrialized countries consume more than the rest of the world.
2. Consumption is many times higher in countries with lower replacement rates.
3. Richer countries typically import and overfishing and destroy habitat of over populated high density developing nations with already depleted resources.
4. China is a special case. China exports a lot of our conspicuous consumption. China in turn imports a lot from developing as well as developed world with its bolstered purchasing power. It takes a lot of maintain 1.4 billion people.
5. One other (bad) solution is to make every nation self sustainable and close borders. And allow them to determine their own replacement rate via births and immigration.
6. Overfishing happens in Asia to feed Americans. Habitat is destroyed in Latin America to feed the China and the rest of the world.
7. Habitat is the most important thing when it comes to resource allocation and resource conservation and exploitation. I like E.O.Wilson’s Half Earth policy because it’s an elegant and fair solution.
7. You should be concerned about funding public schools because the subsidized cheap frozen fish fingers is what’s causing overfishing elsewhere in the world. More children at a higher consumption strata = more habitat destruction.
America IS the 1% of the world. A poor child in America has more resources and nutritional calories and dollar spent/per head than 80% of the world’s children.
8. While there are a lot of begging bowls out in America(and other rich countries), the begging bowls in the rest of the world that sells their resources to America have deeper begging bowls that often don’t get filled.
8. One way to NOT incentivise over population and irresponsible procreation at a macro level is for America and other rich countries to curtail consumption and stop economic exchange of goods that are hostile to habitat preservation. (Example: palm oil)
> You should be concerned about funding public schools because the subsidized cheap frozen fish fingers is what’s causing overfishing elsewhere in the world. More children at a higher consumption strata = more habitat destruction
Funding public schools is orthogonal to whether that school churns out cheap frozen fish fingers. You could add funding on the stipulation that the funding needs to be used on sustainably grown local produce, for example.
> One way to NOT incentivise over population and irresponsible procreation at a macro level is for America and other rich countries to curtail consumption and stop economic exchange of goods that are hostile to habitat preservation. (Example: palm oil)
I'm sorry, you're suggesting that if rich countries stop trading environmentally hostile goods this will disincentivize reproduction locally? How do you reason this? Am I going to have less children because I eat local organic produce?
A good example is our smart phones. I am old enough to remember when there were only land lines. And not everyone had one. Now everyone from India to Africa to USA and even our homeless in CA have a smart phone. Smart phones that are indispensable now use rare metals that are mined. Cell towers have to be placed to ensure connectivity. People have to afford the bills. Every like, upvote, reply, games, online order, tweet is a tiny bit of a carbon foot print.
And consumption grows exponentially. More people means more jobs and more services. Larger carbon footprint. More consumption. More to support that population. We don’t live on 500 sq.ft, air and sunlight alone. It takes a lot to sustain humans.
Take dairy for example. Traditionally China never had dairy in their cuisine. But with a better quality of life, they need cows and fodder for cows. They can’t grow it because the aquifers are poisoned or have run dry. So the cows come from NZ and the alfafa from California sent to China during a Californian drought when we didn’t have water for our citizens but enough to fill the empty shipping containers that carried iPhones and would have gone back empty otherwise.
As quality of life increased in India, everyone drives a car when they used to have public transport. An automobile is a marker of a better quality of life. Human beings like social hierarchies and the way to exhibit this is by possessions.
As the world becomes a better place, we consume more and that has a price too: environment and habitat and eco systems.
Funding of public schools subsidizes education for all which is a noble endeavor, but it takes responsibility away from parents. When unionized public schools = unfunded pension liabilities, the education suffers. More public schools, more subsidized education = more teachers = more unfunded pension liabilities. More work to compensate for the needed taxes = more workers = more employment = more 40 hour work weeks = more commutes = more fossil fuels = more consumption. It’s a Ponzi scheme.
Cutting tax burden to only provide for free public schools will result in more responsible and mindful family planning.
Your final point: if rich countries started looking at sustainability goals, they will consume less. This would make importing more expensive. Only surplus has to be exported.
Let me explain: Commons = environment, air quality, water quality, cultivable land, natural resources. These should not be owned and traded for private profit. I am not against private profit but we can’t have private enterprise exploiting the commons for profit. That’s how we end to with nestle selling bottled water when communities have to pay more to water utilities for their potable water during a drought.
Let me clarify your understanding of my words: I am saying that when rich countries stop trading environmentally hostile goods, this will lead to less exploitation of land and sea. And habitat. And even when it does, it will be for the local population to sustain them.
If there is no market or buyers for habitat destroying palm oil or tiger bones or rhino horns, the stream of income dries up and people can realistically gauge whether their economies and environment can handle more population or less population.
I also don’t know how you went from all this to ‘eating local organic produce’ to ‘less children’. Organic has nothing to do with anything. Resources from the commons should be exploited locally only. Bounded resource exploitation reduces the false sense of prosperity.
Once people taste a better quality of life, they will never go back. Poorer countries have a better quality of life and never at par with what we have in western countries. Give them a taste of a superior quality of life and no one is going to go back to a lower quality of life.
Countries that are less populous are richer than higher density countries. Why? Because when you don’t have much to lose, you don’t know what you are missing. Increasing quality of life is more important than increasing trade of the resources of the commons.
I think your hearts in the right place but this is misguided. Marginal land should not be farmed, via any method. Re-wilding marginal lands is one of the best ways to restore ecological health and diversity on a wide scale.
Hydroponics are also not a silver bullet, the tech has conformed to the hype curve just as predictably as anything else. You can produce leafy greens, and even some meat via aquaponics, but not significant calories or staples.
>The only way out is automation.
I know you had a few ‘and’ after this but nevertheless, hard disagree. A major contributing factor to mankind’s abuse of the natural world is abstraction from it. We will not solve that by going deeper into the darkness where kids grow up believing the food that sustains then springs into existence via inexplicable magic. We need to become closer to nature and the origins of our food, not further away from it via automation, urbanisation and increasing specialisation. All of these further the ignorance, misunderstanding, and abuse of the natural world on which we depend.
Is it most efficient to have more people return to rural environments and become involved in food production? No. But seeking greatest efficiency is one of the biggest errors we are committing here - nature is not efficient, it is broadly stable and able to support great diversity of life, at the cost of efficiency. We should be seeking to emulate nature in these regards, instead of attempting to extract and refine the parts of it we believe we need to maintain our particular version of life.
Using solar, better led lights and maybe hacks like placing them near water treatment plants etc can be a good optimization of energy and resources that are other wise underutilized. Further aquaponics that is also fish farming is even more environmentally friendly as it’s a closed loop system with minimal inputs.
By marginal lands, I mean abandoned factories and soil contaminated with heavy metals that is difficult to remediate without a lot of expenses. Growing highly perishable produce like lettuce and strawberries indoors in these spaces is a win-win. My 2c.
I dream of little nuclear ‘suitcases’ that can power cities for weeks or months. Factories that can be run with solar as well as nuclear energy. Hopefully we will find a way to dispose and dismantle nuclear installations safely in the future.
Your other point: if we are to emulate nature and get back closer to natural growth and evolution of civilization as we know it..we could model it around the Nile valley or the Indus Valley. I think having clusters of small self sustaining villages with intra trade and further away trading for other wgat we can’t produce is better. If we can create village clusters networked to other clusters connected together to bigger and bigger fractal systems of both tech and environment and wilderness, we can have it all.
In the future, a lot of trade would be services. For small scale sustainability, we would need automation. This frees up labour force to do other things. Even a simple adjustment like a 4 day work week or 20 hour workweek or working remote would have a massive impact on how we consume and our collective footprints.
SD zoo just made a horse!
https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewal...
First of all, there's no money in it. So the technical reasons, whatever they are, don't really matter.
Second, I don't think it's that simple to just apply CRISPR to this problem, like CRISPR is some kind of magic bullet. This would be asking way more of CRISPR than previous experiments by orders of magnitude. It would be like asking the Wright brothers when they're going to scale their flying technology to get to Mars.
Without this map, how would we are going to be able to use a technique that alters genes and efficiently change nucleotides to avoid recessive traits?
Now is the time that we are finally transitioning to electric vehicles and hopefully toward sustainable policies and economies, but has the collective level of consciousness risen to empower us to meet these challenges?
At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
Those people won't cease to exist. They'll just stay in poorer nations. In fact, wouldn't accepting them into a wealthy nation reduce the average number of children they have? And if these nations can drastically reduce the impact of their citizens, all the more reason to start recruiting migrants.
Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens.
With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.