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Comment by throwaway984393 | Hacker News Reader

Oh jesus christ, "green roofs"? "Bee bricks" ?? This is ridiculous turd-polishing. The problem isn't that we haven't made our buildings more freaky, it's that we've destroyed natural ecosystems. So restore the natural ecosystems.

Have less buildings. Leave more undeveloped land. Reintroduce predators. Remove invasive species. Allow nature to take over (it will). And news flash: hedgehogs and bees are only being saved because humans think they're cute. What we actually need more of are creepy crawly insects, weeds, grasslands, bushes, forests, wetlands. You know, that "undeveloped" land that was here before we bulldozed it all and installed strip-malls on top.

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Sorry but I have to disagree with the whole tone of this.

I see it this way, the thought hat we have "destroyed a natural ecosystem" is incorrect. Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. Those changes, have changed the ecosystem around them.

What Gedge and others in the article are saying, is that it is in human's best interest to support a diversity of habitats that can co-exist with their own. The benefits are three fold, they keep biodiversity higher (balancing other processes in the environment), they can provide benefits for the humans for "free", and they lower the negative impact of humans on the flora that used the space before humans started changing it for their own use.

An example close to home. I live in a typical California 2 story single family home. Because California homes are typically "next" to each other, the walls on the side of my house are blank since there isn't much point of a window that looks at your neighbors wall or worse inside their house at close range. I built a "bat house" which is really just a couple of plywood sheets separated by 1x2s to attach to the eastern wall. Voila, bats come to live at my house. And those same bats are eating pests such as mosquitos which carry West Nile virus in my area. If we could get all the houses on my street to do the same, the city would likely never catch another mosquito on our street.

So what is the "cost" of that? The bat house takes no electricity, its materials are pretty simple. The bats show up for "free" and take care of themselves. There is a guano disposal "problem" but I just dump it into my compost pile and it adds a crap ton of nitrogen to the soil.

So the net of it is that is saves me money on fertilizer, it saves me money on pest control, and it costs nearly zero to maintain.

How is that not a "win" here?

> Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive.

I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to.

If Timothy Morton is correct, humans have already destroyed the earth but we don't know it yet because it is a hyperobject.

> I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to.

Humans are just a later stage of life's flourishing than beavers:

Eukaryotes have more extropy than prokaryotes; Multicelled organisms have more extropy than single celled ones; Complex mulicelled organisms have more extropy than simple ones; and humans (once they invented farming and writing) have more extropy than complex animals.

The next stage after that -- the stage we're currently in -- is the industrial revolutuon.

The stage after that is the singularity, when AIs will take over.

But it's all life, doing what it does: expanding, controlling resources, reproducing, etc.

Beavers are extremely important parts of their ecosystems. Their dam building behavior is depended upon by many other actors within the ecosystem. They're a keystone species.

Humans clear cutting a forest is not part of any larger, stable system.

Entropy is a myopic way to frame it

Sometimes, it's so difficult to not be full of bitter spite and hatred for humanity when viewpoints like yours exist.

Whales lay dying in fishing nets which trap any and all, their companions watch on, suffocating in our acidic oceans, or choking on a plastic bag, sea birds flying hundreds of miles just to be able to feed on scraps, leaving their nests alone nearly the whole day at the mercy of God, delicate insects burnt to a crisp by gender-reveal forest fires, the very cliched polar bear stands on his tiny piece of ice looking in all four directions for a hint of food, a herd of wild elephants gathers in a circle looking down at their pathetic, poached brethren hunted for a small piece of white sticking out of their heads, turtles being turned into mince meat just to make guitar picks, insects being squished to make colored goo, chickens shitting themselves in fear as they're beheading is up next, all while a know-nothing bloviates self-importantly about AI and Singularity and things he has little understanding of. A shame.

It truly is disheartening to be a part of a species that imbalances the entire world to its favor, in what is likely to be the short term, with technology. And for what purpose? What purpose do we bring to this world?

Look at what we've done to the Southern resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest. Kidnapped, murdered, tortured for pleasure and entertainment, poisoned, starved, deafened, stalked, and then gawked out with loud boats. I can't think of a single thing we've helped them with.

> And for what purpose?

Is there a purpose to life? Does there have to be? Humans have invented gods to create a purpose, but the gods don't actually exist.

But if you're looking for a purpose, I quite like this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everyth...

Don't we all already know that the purpose to life is to expand and mutate? Which is also the purpose of the universe in general, come to think of it. So I guess the most purposeful being in the universe is a radioactive Joey Chestnut.

> Sometimes, it's so difficult to not be full of bitter spite and hatred for humanity when viewpoints like yours exist.

My viewpoint is simply reality. If you're so full of "bitter spite and hatred", that says something about you.

The whales died in agony before, as did the birds, and those delicate insect bodies are crushed, eaten, and dashed as quickly as they're made.

Nature's a beautiful edifice built on the back of hundreds of millions of years of suffering. You could make the argument the most moral thing to do, if you care about the well-being elephants and the turtles and the chickens, is to re-organize it as quickly as is practical and wise.

I have always felt that the "what humans do is natural too!" argument is a massive cop out and totally understates the massive destruction that humans are a part of.

Your analogy misses the mark by a long shot, and I would say that it's totally irrelevant except that it actually supports the opposite of what I think your point is. Beaver dams, like almost everything we find in nature, sit within a carefully evolved and evolving balance. Beaver damns actually generate and create thriving ecosystems, including benefits for other species, when viewed from a perspective other than a human one. It's only humans that find beavers a nuisance. What humans build does not add to a balance but rather provides an imbalance.

There is no reason to believe, that I know of, that highways and city building, for example, support or diversify or catalyze or <whatever> the ecosystems that they replace and neighbor in any sort of holistic manner. There may be small wins for a very small subset of animal species, but other than that it is destruction and displacement of habitats. Just imagine the next time you're on a highway, even out in the country. Monitor the road kill that you see or the bug splashes on your windshield. They're killed by technology they don't understand while trying to cross a habitat they once crossed freely that is now separated by large swaths of concrete and impassable barriers. Think about all the animals that literally have huge lines drawn in between areas they once roamed. Then notice all the fences, cut grass, buildings, and more that are there and increase in density as you get back closer to the city. All the birds, insects, mammals, and other animals that once inhabited those areas have to go somewhere, or they die off. Now they get condensed and dispersed into areas of tighter competition for resources, all the while still being pushed out by humans in more and more creative ways. There is nothing about this that increases the diversity of ecosystems that once were. It decimates them, literally.

I encourage you to go to a remote place and just notice the area absolutely teeming with varieties of flora and fauna. Then imagine a road there, a house there, etc. and realize what would happen to all that there is there. Then multiply that destruction, degradation, and displacement by the size of human habitats.

Do you know why bat houses are so effective and encouraged by state governments and conversation groups? It's because humans have destroyed and taken over habitat areas for bats, and they struggle to natural find places to call home.

https://www.mass.gov/guides/bat-houses#-why-are-bat-houses-i...

https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bats/habitat-loss.htm

So again, your example supports the opposite of what you think. The fact that bats show up so readily is that they are struggling to find other suitable areas that used to be there.

I would encourage you to think about things from a different perspective when you are out in the "nature" that humans have built. Would you like if another species or even a human bulldozed your house and then built you a little tent to live on a corner of your former plot? Would you call that a "win"? Would you like it if there was, for all intents and purposes, an impenetrable wall or walls built between you and grocery stores and separates you from your family and friends?

What humans have done may be "natural" in a very general sense, but it is almost entirely self-serving. There are clear reasons why extinction rates have gone up and there are countless stories of species struggling more and more in the past 100-200 years.

"I have always felt that the "what humans do is natural too!" argument is a massive cop out and totally understates the massive destruction that humans are a part of."

Fair enough. I agree that if we start from the position that humans are not a part of nature then their impact on their environment is "unnatural." I just find it really hard to support that argument in any meaningful way. I would ask "Are volcanoes part of the natural environment?" When they erupted and created a mass extinction event was that "unnatural"? It is very biblical to put humans "above" nature but that seems to require that the presence of humans on Earth itself is an unnatural state of affairs.

If one subscribes to the theory that Homo Sapiens evolved it feels problematic to me that at one point they were "natural" and at another time they were not. We are quite likely an evolutionary "dead end" if we are successful at pulling off another mass extinction event. But I don't consider us "unnatural", just imperfect.

I would completely agree that our ability to reason has given individuals the capability of choosing how they impact the environment (unlike the beaver that just does what beavers do), but at the same time we are not a 'hive mind' type species where such reasoning was somehow "injected" into every individual.

What the article has advocated are strategies that individuals or small groups of individuals might do to have a different effect on the environment than they currently do. And I think that is an excellent thing.

What I disagree with is that change to an ecosystem is "destruction." It changes what flora and fauna that ecosystem supports, and we may very well change the ecosystem we live in such that it no longer supports human beings. However, if we do that, the world will continue on without us and the ecosystem will continue to change as new flora and fauna evolve to fill the gaps that humans created.

I don't consider it a "cop out" to consider humans to be part of nature, I think of it as a way of looking at human impact in a more dispassionate way. Humans change their ecosystem to support themselves and their offspring. They may do that poorly or in a way that has long term negative effects on their ability to survive, but struggle to define that as unnatural.

Part of my point is that the argument really isn't about what is natural or not. It isn't important, and that's why it's a cop out. Humans are clearly part of nature, evolving via the same processes as everything else.

What is clear is that humans have continually, and at increasing rates, broken out of the precedence set by everything before in terms of fitting into the existing balance and that this reverberates throughout the world in a way that is on the whole not good for nearly any ecosystem. This is what is argued by people bringing attention to these matters. What doesn't matter is whether this is "natural" or not. What matters is that this is bad for basically everything else, and we've already experienced and we're seeing more signs that it's bad for us as well.

Our propensity for violence and technological development has allowed us to flourish and break out of evolutionary development and "cheat" on regarding what resources are available to us. Other animals are usually checked by nature when resource use becomes problematic. Humans are checked but then adapt new ways to consume resources due to technology and our physical adaptability.

I actually didn't make the point that our ability to reason is the key. Other animals potentially match or even exceed (it is unknown) our ability to reason. Such animals are whales, particularly orcas. So I think our reasoning ability is not actually unique. What is unique is our reasoning mixed with physical attributes that make technology development possible and a selfishness and propensity for violence. This leads to technological development that vastly outpaces social and emotional development, which has led to our ad-hoc world and the mess we're in.

> What I disagree with is that change to an ecosystem is "destruction." It changes what flora and fauna that ecosystem supports, and we may very well change the ecosystem we live in such that it no longer supports human beings. However, if we do that, the world will continue on without us and the ecosystem will continue to change as new flora and fauna evolve to fill the gaps that humans created.

When it comes to human induced change, that change is indeed almost always destructive in that existing flora and fauna are reduced in bother numbers and diversity.

I highly, highly doubt humans are ever eradicated save for Earth-level events (asteroid or something like that). I also think "Earth will continue without us" is another cop out. Yes, it would, but not with out destruction and suffering.

>Not without destruction or suffering

Imagine a world without humans. Every day, millions of animals that are able to feel pain die in horrible agony as they're eaten alive; die of hunger or disease; are afflicted by horrific parasitism, or birth defects, or any of a hundred different horrors.

Earth is a giant ball of suffering, and has been since the first animal with a nervous system sufficient to feel pain evolved. It seems pretty hubristic to lay that at the feet of humanity.

Yeah, if we don't coordinate we might wipe out some species, collapse some ecosystems. So? Those ecosystems have beautiful parts in them, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and in any case, their beauty is built on the ongoing torture of (presumably) sentient animals. In that case, bring on the mass extinctions, I say; in fact, we should probably speed them up. Shoot or nuke animals instead of letting them starve to death or be eaten alive.

Maybe we can re-introduce animals once we've made them immortal and immune to pain.

(I don't actually want this, I like nature and forests. But I like them because I find them beautiful, and I perceive their value as originating from humans (and to a lesser extent sentient animals) finding them beautiful. I don't care about them for some other metaphysical reason, and nature is beautiful <=> humanity is evil isn't a viewpoint I've ended up with. )

Another cop out: there's already suffering in the world, so why do anything about it?

There are two points. One is that animals and plants suffer in order for others to survive. For the most part, a balance is achieved. Animals and plants take what they need in order to survive, and there's no other way for them to survive. Humans are different. We don't need all the destruction we cause to survive. We simply choose to. The second point is that humans dramatically increase and multiply the amount of suffering in the world. The argument isn't to rid the world of suffering, because how could that even be accomplished? The argument is to reduce humanity's contributions to the suffering.

>Humans dramatically increase and multiply the amount of suffering in the world I don't believe that. All the animals that are alive today would die in pain in anyway, no matter what humans do. Every deer that's shot is one not eaten alive by wolves, or starving to death. Does it matter whether a bird drowns in an oil slick or thrashes in the mouth of a crocodile? Animal life is nasty, brutish, and short. Even if we killed a large fraction of the animals on the planet in a painful way, that would be a blip in the colossal historical tapestry of pain, and as there'd be fewer animals in the next generation, it would probably be morally neutral from a consequentialist perspective: the overall, average amount of suffering would be constant.

>there's already suffering in the world, so why do anything about it?

No, that's not what I'm saying. If I care about suffering, I only care slightly (instrumentally) whether it's caused by humans or nature. You seem to care a lot, but I don't. If I 'm going to decide to care about the suffering of animals generally, then that's going to lead me to certain conclusions.

If humans are going to take responsibility for animal suffering, we should take responsibility for all animal suffering, meaning we should reorganize/destroy the ecosphere, replacing it with something more moral. We should also become able to be wise stewards of the new world, of course.

But if I put myself into the mindset of "I care about the suffering of animals", then going from that to "humans should be hippies and let nature be, man" seems pretty evil. If the suffering of animals is bad, then nature is bad and should be stopped.

>For the most part, a balance is achieved. Animals and plants take what they need in order to survive, and there's no other way for them to survive No, animals and plants take as much as they can get, and most of them don't get enough. The ones that don't get what they need in order to survive die, by starvation or by being got by a predator. The balance here is on a see-saw greased with the blood of living things: if I built a system like that, where little furry animals reproduced until there was no food left and then competed increasingly frantically, with some of them eating the others, and then turned around to you and said "look, they've reached a balance! As many of them die horribly as are pumped out! :)", you'd call me a psycho. You're only excusing it because it's natural. It's mathematically beautiful, of course!

>The argument isn't to rid the world of suffering, because how could that even be accomplished?

Wipe out the natural world: Evacuate humans and scans/genomes of all the animals we're interested in somewhere else and build a paradise there; then wreck the surface of the earth so that nothing bigger than a bacterium can survive. Maybe we could engineer runaway global warming, to turn earth into something resembling Venus? Deliberately irradiate the whole surface to the point that nothing survives? Build lots of orbital mirrors to increase the solar irradiance and boil the oceans? Grey goo? Dream big!

If this sounds horrible to you, then I guess you have an aesthetic preference for forests. That's fine, but remember that forests and jungles are hell-pits of torture.

In your vernacular, this too is a cop out : One is that animals and plants suffer in order for others to survive. For the most part, a balance is achieved. Animals and plants take what they need in order to survive, and there's no other way for them to survive.

It is absolutely true that animals do what they do without regard to the consequences of their actions. The western pine beetle doesn't think twice about killing a pine tree that would have lived another hundred years when it uses it to feed its brood. A beaver doesn't poll the prairie dogs that have lived in the meadow for 5 generations before destroying their habit by flooding it.

If I understand your argument correctly, it is applying morality to the question, not whether or not something is "natural." And that is absolutely a fair way to go about it. One can argue that it is immoral for humans to do the things they do. That is separate from the question of whether or not it is in their nature to do those things.

This statement, "We don't need all the destruction we cause to survive.", is also a problem since if we immediately restored all of the habitat we "destroyed" to convert it to agriculture then there would be a lot of "not surviving" going on.

That we should be good stewards of the planet is something that I think we agree.

My original comment here is that we have to consider human's impact on that planet to be just as 'natural' as the impact of non-human forces on the planet. And it helps in the debate to understand how much of our nature we, as individuals, can influence. Humans are inherently tribal/social animals and as such we are strongly influenced by the "norms" of behavior around us. A really good recent example of this is masking. In an area ambivalent about masking, masking behavior reflects what others are doing. A lot of people wearing masks? More likely to wear a mask. Few masks in sight? People less likely to wear a mask.

Because of this effect, we can (and I think should) influence others to good behavior by exhibiting good behavior. And in the original article this was called out as buildings that increased wildlife diversity over buildings that did not provide habitat. That is both a good and 'moral' thing to do.

To bring the conversation full circle, the original comment to which I responded included this: "Have less buildings. Leave more undeveloped land. Reintroduce predators. Remove invasive species. Allow nature to take over (it will)."

We do that by creating park areas. Not by tearing down existing facilities[1]. The philosophy that we could "fix" things by removing human change is unrealistic given human nature.

[1] Yes we remediate things like mines to revert them back to their state prior to mining but it is rare that a former city will be remediated back to nature. See Detroit as an an example of an opportunity to do so which was not pursued.

It’s a win but a small one, because what about every other animal displaced by concrete, light pollution, lack of wild flowers…? Where I live near Paris there where hedgehogs until a few years ago because there were still a few unmaintained and unbuilt land, and finally real estate project after project they are finally completely gone from the city.

I live in a somewhat newly developed area. There really aren't that many bugs around, mostly tiny moths, ants, and the usual cosmopolitan pests like roaches and carpet beetles.

I took a vacation at a 50+ year old home near a river and my goodness, there was just so much LIFE all over. Species of insect I had never seen before, along with land mammals scurrying about. It is absolutely amazing how sterile living in a city / exurb is compared to someplace only mildly affected by human habitation. And it's not like I was living in a concrete jungle either, there are lawns and green spaces but they are just so much more hollow than I ever imagined.

I had the opposite experience, moving into an older neighborhood deep inside the city, but in an area where there hasn't been much construction for the last 50 years. The number of birds, small animals, and bugs are astounding - and this is a relatively densely populated location.

AFAICT there are two main factors:

1. A nearby stream which is part of a protected greenbelt -- never more than 100m wide or so, but miles long.

2. The fact that the area has not been torn up for construction in a generation, so the plants have had time to overgrow everything. I assume the wildlife largely follows the plants.

Of course there aren't any larger animals who need room to roam, because they couldn't survive crossing all the streets. Cars are one of the biggest barriers to wildlife and humans coexisting nicely - or to humans and humans coexisting nicely.

If there is truly 0 maintenance, 15 foot tall shrubbery and impassible bushing can exist in as little as 10-15 years.

The issue really isn't the amount of buildings we have, buildings and most city infrastructure only makes up 1% of all the land.

The issue is agriculture which takes up 50% of all habitable land.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

We have a really strong bias towards what we see around us, and for an overwhelming amount of us we see the cities, we see buildings, we see roads.

We can go further: the issue is industrial, mechanical, chemical laden agriculture. Agroforestry or simply traditional agriculture with lots of hedges, trees, small plots, etc maintained living ecosystems for millenia in our countryside.

How much lower the crop yields are without all this chemistry?

Hunger has mostly left humankind (any famines are first of all political troubles, not lack of food), but this was made possible by improving yields several fold. It's hardly possible without pretty heavy augmentation like fertilizers and pest control.

Hunger has left the developed world, but is still an issue in poor countries. Our society is so incredibly wasteful with food, there are massive amounts of perfectly edible food send to trash every year. This leads me to believe that even with a massive reduction in the use of fertilizers and pest control exactly nothing would change in the developed world in terms of food supply.

However, to enable that we'd probably have to get away from monocultural agriculture which is not only an issue for agriculture, but for instects and other wildlife as well.

True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside from trying to do something about the number of alive humans, the only shot at reducing agriculture's destructive influence is going more technological not less and I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides.

Compare the livestock vs all other mammal biomass from the first chart in this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506

edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture

This was originally in reply to a now deleted reply, but it is worth calling out an alternative interpretation, we could move away from meat and make more effective usage of land. I think this is true, but still won't get us all the way.

I think even imagining people were willing to give up meat humans still use way too many raw calories for anything like sustainable organic agriculture to be workable. Maybe it would be interesting to know what percentage of the land dedicated to raising meat is for feed vs grazing. Grazing land is usually more marginal than farmland so while overall good to let it go back to nature it won't replace the sort of biodiversity that turning Kansas back to grasslands would

Also I don't trust it as much, but if it's true that humans right now make up more biomass than all land animals before we exploded it seems difficult to imagine us keeping up without continuing to have huge impacts on the planet, better to keep those impacts dense and controlled than everywhere https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stat...

>I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides.

This is why I come to HN. Beautiful!

> edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture

I also encourage those interested in this topic to do this. Exact percentages are interesting, but it is still abstract. Give yourself and hour and just go look for wilderness using google earth. Our stewardship over the planet, if such a thing ever was, has had a sad outcome.

There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that.

How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess).

We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.

Hum, that does seem somewhat possible. I guess my counter is just pointing back at the biomass chart. Maybe labor intensive low fertilizer and pesticide farming can work, but we're talking about a majority of land vertebrate mass being either humans or the things we've grown to eat. There isn't a world in which we keep that up and don't massively distort the rest of the natural world. I think we have to accept that and sort of go on from there and decides what sort of distortions we want. Trading mechanization for pesticides seems great, but we'll still need massive amounts of land dedicated to farming and I definitely see it as a more technical not less solution

Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money).

Another alternative is to stop subsidizing absurdly inefficient things like factory farming. If someone is selling beef produced by grazing semi-wild land, great! But intesively cultivating land to harvest it to fed it to cows locked in a pen sucks.

It's obviously not simple to redirect some of that to human food (e.g. wheat with low protein is fed to livestock, high protein is used for bread) but still, worth having the conversation.

> Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money)

But it would also reduce unemployment. I know pre-industrial food production was a massive undertaking, but we don't need to go all the way.

True. We don't need roofs with gardens all the time. But urban planning needs to account for more green space. Of course we need to fix and leave more wild habitat to stay wild, but we also need to create more spaces for the wildlife to roam free. For example my city is packed on one side being the coastline and the other being a massive freeway. We have a lot of green space but not enough places for the wildlife to cross. We need to allow for that. An interconnected "freeway" and "city" system for wildlife made up of ecological reserves and green highways.

Remove the daily generation of inflationary money from the global economy and stop abusing our mother earth with this flawed idea of the forever expanding GDP. Return to moderate living and actually have time to enjoy what nature has to offer without highly industrial vehicles, boats and all kinds of wasteful things which require large industrial complexes and infrastructure. The world needs more wondering and less greed driven market leaders. The profit of a few is destroying the earth and reducing the quality of life - who really wants to slave labor every day without gaining the ability to have long periods just to travel, explore and admire the beautiful landscapes earth has to offer? If we only would reduce and not increase our list of must haves - we might actually start living instead of just existing to pay taxes and pay the ever increasing monthly bills. The rat race to our extinction has to stop. Everywhere where people stop fiddling with nature, recovery starts showing. Stop building dams, stop mega structures, stop generating the need to use industrial scale weekend flights -throwing massive amounts of extra heat in our airspace - for what? To briefly escape the labor intensive life as designed by our rulers. Did you have a choice not to need inflationary money systems? Money which banks -effortlessly- create every night in databases as mere numbers which keep on abusing you and the earth that we are trying to kill as fast as possible?

It's amazing how strong the resistance is to sprawling less. Not to developing less, but just to using more compact forms so that some land can be preserved in its natural state.

Example: https://dgunderblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/when-is-it-okay...

City spaces are deserts of concrete, steel, glass and asphalt. With the exceptions of a few parks and gardens within. Why not reintroduce at least parts of the destroyed ecosystems back into these artificial deserts?

It is also probably not really a healthy habitat for humans either.

Depends. On the particular habitat and human(s) ;-)

Ones sensoric deprivation is another ones stress.

If you read the article it tells you that only 1% of the earth's habitable land has human development on it. There's plenty of space for nature to thrive, and it does.

The big problem for me is externalities that affect that untouched world. Industrial and agricultural runoff, different pesticides and things like that.

sure, but some of the largest and most important ecosystems which contribute a lot to the overall stability of the earth are being completely obliterated. I remember reading that the Amazon is now a net carbon dioxide producer due to over-utilisation of natural resources. surely that can't be good, right?

That's true, but area is not the only important metric. It only takes a thin sliver of highway cutting through a forest to segment an habitat, break migration paths, and strongly affect ecosystems.

The article is mainly about green roofs, but wildlife bridges would perhaps be an even more important example of "building for wildlife".

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-...

Driving along the freeways through northern Ontario (400) and northern British Columbia (1 through Banff), I was amazed to see how many wildlife bridges there actually are. The ones in BC are plainly visible because they go over the road, but the ones in Ontario mostly go under the road in the form of large tunnels with fence funnels on either end, and most people would probably never notice them if they weren't paying attention.

I even saw a few under the highway in the prairies in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. I think those were mostly for moving livestock across the highway though.

--This-- is the point.

Animals need corridors to move between populations

Green roofs would improve the temperature of our homes making to spend less in energy. We should build more, just by our own interest. They are nicer to see than just a roof also.

1% is used for habitation and other city based stuff.

50% of habitable land is used for agriculture.

uninhabitable land includes tundra, desert, exposed rock, mountains etc. That's ~29% of all land.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

> And news flash: hedgehogs and bees are only being saved because humans think they're cute.

Hedgehogs maybe, but I think in the case of bees humans like fruit and honey.

Agreed on everything.

Leave nature to its own devices to recuperate. It does that surprisingly well if there is a bit of water, sun and soil.

I agree with your sentiment but oftentimes small interventions are the only kind possible. And I wouldn't say that something like a pollinator strip is ineffective -- bees and other pollinators are losing habitat, pollinator strips restore them. It may only be one dimension of wildlife but it's a critical one.

> Have less buildings.

I agree. Let's start by demolishing the building you live in, the building you work in, and the buildings you buy food in.

What, you didn't mean those buildings? Well guess what, no-one wants the buildings they use demolished, so this idea is a total non-starter.

I think I agree with you but to play devil's advocate, we're now seeing a huge percentage of jobs around the world could be done at home with minimal upgrades to infrastructure. That in and of itself is evidence that some/more businesses could run virtually. That saves office space that could be returned to nature.

You're perpetuating a dichotomy here, the same dichotomy that produces parasitic industrialization. Humans are a part of nature, and we are fully capable of living in symbiosis with other creatures and ecosystems. Please keep your mind open!

Of course, in the long run our goal should be to destroy the ecosphere. But yes, we need to survive till we get there.

Yep.

Wait until you see how much more water and land and ecosystems are destroyed by hipsters insisting that "organic is healthier" and "gmos aren't safe"

I think you misunderstand the criticism of GMO. They are usually designed to be more resistant to some pretty hardcore pesticides, like RoundUp from Monsanto. That becomes agricultural run-off, and pollutes the nearby ecosystem.

Urban residential areas with houses with few people are the worst imo. They require a huge amount of infrastructure like paved roads. It might be ok to live like that if you have young kids. If you don't, while living like that, you are an environmental burden period. Also, please don't think that driving electric and feeding some birds and eating green etc can redeem living like that

In terms of land usage, I find it hard to believe that the type of house someone has won't be dominated by the supply chains that feed them and equip them with clothing and tools.

How much do you think a yuppie city-dweller's medium-density apartment and train usage offsets the rest of their consumption?

Why would the supply chains that feed and equip them dominate? Food, clothes, and tools all benefit from high per unit efficiency and this reflects real efficiency in less expensive inputs. Even if you mean the transit the huge barges have very good kg per mile (even if filthy bunker oil is the current norm).

For a simple example of this sort of scale efficiency just take a vat of molten steel for one - a larger vat has more volume with less surface area. For a contrasting illustration of an extreme in the other direction, many thimble sized steel vats would be extremely inefficient as they cool off quicker and either need more of them or give it far more time to cool off.

Housing is linked to transit needs as an inevitable knock on effect. The lack of scale is what makes individual cars less efficient than loaded buses.

I would be perfectly willing to consider hard numbers - there are all sorts of counterintuitive truths.

Farming takes up a lot of land. Even the most land-efficient diets in this analysis [0,1] required 0.3+ acres per person -- a larger land area than most suburban houses sit on, even when including the marginal cost of the extra road they require.

[0] (clickbaitish summary) https://ensia.com/notable/which-diet-makes-best-use-of-farml...

[1] (original) https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/jou...

0.3+ acres per person times a billion people is about the size of europe.

Depending on how you count it, it's definitely within a small constant multiple. A ton of global land goes toward food production. In somewhat more detail:

It's about 27% of the way there (assuming europe == EU). Multiply by 7.8B people and you get 2.1B acres, compared with the 2.3B acres actually used worldwide.

Those numbers might look a little fishy (2.1B should be a hard lower bound, and the upper bounds were >2 acres per person), but the low figure of 2.3B acres in actual use is roughly explained by:

- 9% of the world is malnourished

- Meat and other high-land-use foods make up well under 20% of the global diet (on average more concentrated in wealthier, lower population nations).

- Not all of that meat comes from the land, skewing the exact metrics being used a bit.

I'm sure the 0.3+ acre estimate isn't perfect (back of the envelope calculations suggest soybeans can supply the requisite calories in 0.15 acres, and your other nutrients can be furnished in 0.05 acres), but it definitely appears to be in the right ballpark.

They are huge so even with good isolation they spend too much energy in acclimatization. That kind of urbanization is made for cars so the streets are empty and you need to travel by car everytime to some mall to buy things.

I agree with you but humans are selfish and destructive. It is always down-voted but the only true solution is less humans. Of course, we could change but history has shown we have no desire to do so and worse, are accelerating our greediness. The thing is that the earth has started to change based on our over-consumption. One way or the other, there will be a lot less humans on this planet in some hundreds of years from now.

Have you noticed that the whole purpose of life as a phenomenon is self-sustaining and proliferation?

Forcing lower numbers of humans is not unheard of; usually this is considered cruel. Mass killings aside, take a look at policies enforced by India and China in 1970-80s.

Choosing not to have kids is myopic: if your genes make you more conscious and thus caring about the planet as a whole, removing them from the gene pool lowers the chances that next generations would share these traits of yours.

The best medicine found so far is exactly what the ultra-green do not like: urbanization, education, higher standards of living, minimal numbers of people doing the traditional countryside agriculture. This puts reproduction rates safely below the replacement rate all over the world, no matter what culture and religion.

i would say the purpose of life is only proliferation, it's the environment that provides the negative feed back for "self-sustaining". For example, deer with no predators will proliferate until they starve to death and numbers go down to what can be sustained by their environment. If the environment can't sustain any then the population count goes to 0 to match.

Maybe the ultra-greens are against urbanization and I think there is merit to that. But the other topics don't really fit.

You can put every living human on Sicily and still have space. The problem is that 99% would have died of thirst after a few days.

I think today is earth overshoot day, so we used resources the earth could recoup within a year. That problem isn't solved with everyone moving into cities, it is externalities and our resource consumption. Maybe cities are a few percent more efficient, but it doesn't really matter that much. Cities are also relatively unhealthy in most cases. Living expectation are countered by the proximity of medical professionals perhaps.

edit: It is indeed today:

https://www.overshootday.org/

My reaction was on the idea of "too many people". I posit that urbanization, etc solves this problem within 100-150 years by natural means.

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