Bird populations declining fast across North America
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Loss of natural life is such a failure. Today we speak of stock markets, governments, businesses. Someday, our main concern will not be these shared dreams, but meeting basic needs. This can already be seen in homelessness. How long before things like this means our planet can no longer manage pollution, or produce soil healthy enough to feed us?
As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever. One such consequence is the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it due to serving things that aren't real. I think that a million dead will be remembered with whimsy in the coming decades as not being so bad.
Otherwise you are getting _very_ close to the N/S dichotomy in Jungian psychology and the Myers-Briggs type model :D and the growth idea there is transcendence of the dichotomy, bringing strengths of both ends forward, rather than regressing to the one-sided way.
The difference is not so critical when people are starving, but the difference continues to grow until maximizing GDP starts harming the economy.
Traffic control systems, computer hardware design...these all incorporate the same combinations of depth and breadth of thinking. I think it's wise to keep an open mind and ask whether it's really necessary to exclude a given model or entire set of them.
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Who exactly are we criticizing for doing this? Seems a bit like a straw man argument tbh. I'm not even sure how that relates to the more general concept raised above, of a single model of reality being reliable.
This is true even if what’s being observed is by a simulated entity, the observation exists outside of it’s internal models and is indirectly related to things in the underlying reality. Ie, physical states of various bits of physical RAM.
I don’t know any government that considers maximizing GDP as its primary goal.
Economists however are on all sides of this issue, it isn’t some monolithic field where everyone agrees on even basic ideas.
> It is also important to understand what GDP cannot tell us. GDP is not a measure of the overall standard of living or well-being of a country. Although changes in the output of goods and services per person (GDP per capita) are often used as a measure of whether the average citizen in a country is better or worse off, it does not capture things that may be deemed important to general well-being.
Tirades that when economists calculate GDP the human society is serving "abstractions" or the devil over the "real" and God is just fearmongering.
You can’t say measure X is useful, and it’s flaws are well known therefore it’s flaws are irrelevant. If it’s useful then it’s flaws are part of any decision made using it.
Yeah, that's precisely my point. It's informing their decisions.
>You can’t say measure X is useful, and it’s flaws are well known therefore it’s flaws are irrelevant. If it’s useful then it’s flaws are part of any decision made using it.
Measure X is useful, its flaws are well known therefore people who use it account for its flaws during the decision making process.
None of these philosophers old works need to be given any weight and working with you to decipher your personal beliefs is not my problem.
The abstractions of physics and biology provide the evidence necessary given the context.
Perhaps sit and ruminate as you wish. Those dead men have no capture of my perception. Paulo Freire said we have no obligation to import the jargon and implied behavior of our captors; I won’t submit to Christian rule; why rich mens dollars? The political capture of our economic behavior is a cudgel I’m tired of being bashed with, and the measurable effects are where I’ll put my effort.
If you prefer to equivocate them away with deference to endless semantic recitation, that’s fine, because I know that means you won’t be in the “real” way. You’ll be here proselytizing others just how none of the effort is going how it should.
It's not really that we use abstractions or models, it's that many or all of them are incorrect, and we proceed as if they're correct, even when we seem to know they're not.
I don't think this is just limited to the environment. Sometimes I wonder if this is some defining feature of our age, rampant fraud or disingenuousness. Maybe it's always been this way, and maybe it doesn't matter.
No, it wouldn't. It's not a matter of the speed of the computing; it's a matter of the number of information channels available. The amount of information that would need to be processed to run a complex economy goes up exponentially with the size of the economy, but the number of information channels available only goes up linearly with the size of the economy. I think it was Hayek who first pointed this out more than a century ago.
The proper tool to "run" a complex economy is decentralized computing, otherwise known as a free market.
> Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts.
The way to avoid cyclical booms and busts is for the government to stop messing with markets. The government should not be subsidizing some products and services and penalizing others. It should let the market work out what products and services are produced and consumed.
I don't think the computation cost scales exponentially. If it did, the decentralized free market computer would not be able to accurately compute the economy. Paul Cockshott claims to have found a planning algorithm with O(n log n) complexity, which is very manageable.
The main problem with free markets is that they lead to extreme inequality and subsequent conflict. A planned economy could distribute the surplus much better.
I disagree that the government should withdraw from the market economy. The government can help alleviate the failures of the market. For one thing, the market is generally short-sighted, while governments can think more long-term. For example, it is my understanding that the Chinese government has invested a lot in solar panel technology and implementation. You would probably agree this is a good thing, given the severity of the climate crisis.
By the way, the following are some of what have informed my opinion here:
- https://www.haerdin.se/blog/2021/06/29/a-critique-of-economi...
- http://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.p...
I mean information channels to and from the central computer.
> Wouldn't a factory mainly just need to communicate its inputs and outputs the computer or computer cluster doing the calculation?
If that's all it's doing, a free market does that fine. There is no need for any additional computation. Similarly for any other economic actor.
If the central computation is going to improve anything over what the individual economic actors would do on their own, it can only be by computing what the inputs and outputs should be for all economic actors, better than those actors can do themselves, and then dictating those inputs and outputs to the actors. Otherwise there's no point to it. And that is what it can't do based on the information argument I gave.
> I don't think the computation cost scales exponentially. If it did, the decentralized free market computer would not be able to accurately compute the economy.
Wrong. The decentralized free market computer's capacity scales exponentially, since each individual economic actor is computing their own actions. The centralized computer, however, has to compute everyone's actions. That's why it faces an insurmountable information problem that the individual actors doing their decentralized computing do not face.
> The government can help alleviate the failures of the market.
No, it can't. That is the lesson of history. Every time governments have done this, they have made things worse, not better. That is not to say that market failures do not exist, only that the failures of government are worse.
> the market is generally short-sighted, while governments can think more long-term.
You have this backwards. Government time horizons are the next election. Individual market actors can have time horizons going out decades--for example, individuals saving for retirement. Governments can't even keep their social security trust funds safe from being raided by the legislature when it wants to fund some white elephant.
> it is my understanding that the Chinese government has invested a lot in solar panel technology and implementation.
Quite possibly it has. That in no way means China might not be even better off if it were not centrally controlled by the government.
> You would probably agree this is a good thing, given the severity of the climate crisis.
No, I wouldn't, because I don't think climate change is a crisis. And as far as I can tell, neither do the Chinese. They are investing in those technologies not because they believe they need them themselves, but because they believe they can sell them at a substantial profit to Western countries who are much more worried about climate change than the Chinese themselves are.
About computing capacity: Maybe free market capacity scales exponentially (with the number of actors?) but I don't see how it could. If an economy of n actors has a "capacity" of e^n, the average capacity of an actor would be e^n/n, which is about the same as e^n. How could an individual actor have such capacity? Perhaps my analysis here is mistaken.
Regarding government intervention, let's look at an extreme example. Do you think that, during World War II, the U.S. should have structured its wartime economy around free market principles? Did it make things worse by not doing so?
About government planning for the future: First of all, social security gets gutted because the U.S. government is not a government of the people. Business interests have too much control (that is, more than no control at all.) You also say governments are shortsighted because of elections. Even if this is the case, this is not a necessary part of government. The governance model described in the book I linked is based on sortition rather than election. China's current system, while authoritarian, is also able to plan for the future.
It seems you agree that China investing in solar power is beneficial to it, even if you disagree on the reason. So you agree that, all else being equal, it is better for China to have invested in solar power than to not have done so. In this case, this is a clear example of a government acting in the market with a good outcome. This contradicts your previous point.
And as I have already remarked, central planning does not fix those deficiencies, it makes them worse.
> the optimization problem can be solved on modern computers without the problems of the market.
I strongly disagree, for the reasons I've already stated, but it doesn't seem like we're going to resolve that here.
> Maybe free market capacity scales exponentially
Yes, because the computation consists of the individual actors deciding their actions and the communication of price signals between them. (Note that while I say "price signals", these are much more general than just money prices. Many positive sum trades are made that do not involve money.) That's a general feature of distributed computing: you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation.
> Do you think that, during World War II, the U.S. should have structured its wartime economy around free market principles?
Yes.
> Did it make things worse by not doing so?
Yes.
> social security gets gutted because the U.S. government is not a government of the people.
Ah, the No True Scotsman argument. Every time socialism fails, socialist ideologues say it's because it wasn't true socialism.
> The governance model described in the book I linked is based on sortition rather than election.
I'll take a look. However, I am extremely skeptical that any governance model can fix the fundamental problems with centralized control.
> It seems you agree that China investing in solar power is beneficial to it
I said that China's government believes it will be beneficial to China. They could be wrong. But even if they're not, that is not at all the same as saying that it is the most beneficial thing that could be done with the same resources. I am not saying that governments never do beneficial things. I am saying that governments, on net, will do worse than a free market would do. That is also not the same as saying a free market would always achieve an optimal result; in many situations there may simply be no way of achieving an optimal result. But that does not mean all achievable results are equivalent.
How would the system I'm describing make inequality and the resulting conflict worse?
> you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation.
But surely the nodes themselves must be the ones to perform the physical computation in the end? If the computing power of distributed systems scales exponentially with the number of nodes, why doesn't the computing power of a supercomputer scale exponentially with its number of cores?
> Every time socialism fails, socialist ideologues say it's because it wasn't true socialism.
Don't be ridiculous. There are plenty of countries with much better safety nets than the U.S. The U.S. government is just especially dysfunctional.
> I am not saying that governments never do beneficial things. I am saying that governments, on net, will do worse than a free market would do.
I guess we just disagree about this.
> in many situations there may simply be no way of achieving an optimal result
If you take "optimal result" to mean "best possible result," then there is, by definition, always a way of achieving an optimal result.
Because your system has to be implemented with humans, and humans cannot be trusted with the power to tell other humans what to do. Your system requires that in order to work. (Existing governments also require this in order to work, which is why they're dysfunctional, but your system requires it much more.) A free market does not; in a free market, all transactions are voluntary and nobody is given the power to tell anyone else what to do.
I don't see the point of further discussion since we appear to have a fundamental disagreement about this vital point.
This makes no sense to grow exponentially then. Information channels grow exponentially in a peer-to-peer network but only linearly in a centralised one. You can trivially see this in computer networks. One server with eight clients will have 8 connections. Eight peers will have 64 connections. Adding one more node will make the centralised solution add one more connection. Adding one more node to the peer-to-peer solution adds 17.
Sure there is. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. That's the natural state of a market. We see many markets that are not free only because governments either prevent people from engaging in transactions they would otherwise choose to make, or force people to engage in transactions they would otherwise not choose to make (the obvious example of this is coercive taxation).
From what I understand (not an economist, but quoting what I've heard from them), much of the boom-bust cycle can be dampened by limiting debt.
COVID got us, but that did have a physical reason behind it.
We need to figure out how to reconfigure them. For instance, instead of the gold standard, let's back our money on permanently sequestered carbon. And once that problem is solved, we'll reconfigure it for the next thing.
To put the doom and gloom in context, we had a novel virus go from virtually zero to pandemic in the course of a few months. Within weeks we had working treatments. Within a year, effective vaccines. Less than two years from first publication, and over 4 billion people have been inoculated. All within the systems of abstractions you decry.
We're messing up a lot. And we can do much better. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. When we focus on something, we get it done, massively better so than at any prior point in human history.
> When we focus on something, we get it done
Yeah, great. Can we focus on not ruining this planet for the stock market? Climate change, deforestation and plastic pollution are seriously damaging the one planet in the known universe that can sustain human life.
That "exponential growth" is mostly about taking people out of poverty. Not nearly enough people in the West realise just how dire the average level of wealth is on this planet, which means any "degrowth" rhetoric is just outright misanthropical, and what's worse self-defeating. We still need to produce loads of stuff, and it will be produced regardless of what "enlightened" Westerners imagine about acceptable quality of life, unless you want to literally bomb India or Bangladesh for burning fossils.
Besides, I just don't see why do you imagine some sort of fundamental cutoff existing and being roughly at where we are. Humanity managed to grow from several tens thousands of nomads to soon ten billion people, most probably stabilising somewhere close to that number; why the cutoff was not overshot earlier? If it increased over time, what stops it from increasing any further?
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 , see "Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Europe" and the one below for the same but per-capita
Sorry, I will absolutely challenge "misanthropic" being used here. To suggest that we modern humans could not live as our ancestors did--that is, fulfilling, local, simpler lives with less technology and vastly less energy usage is a subtle assertion that the modern way of living is the only moral one. Which is just, anthropologically, vapid elitism and completely ignorant of human existence over millenia. (I challenge you to live a decade as an ancient philosopher in ancient Greece's height and come back to your 9-to-5 job). This "misanthropic" word comes laden with an implicit accusation that we'd force disease and poverty on people when in fact the only thing that forces disease and poverty on people is exactly overpopulation and broken political and economic systems which are ironically exactly the thing supposedly producing this great wealth.
Oh, we moderns have figured out exactly the right way to hold the world, alright. Rampant consumerism and overconsumption. Yep, the most moral system.
To argue that we need degrowth is not to argue that we need be sick and poor. Hell, the richest person 200 years ago was neither sick nor poor, but was incapable of living a high-carbon lifestyle despite utter luxury. Our entire modern system runs on unsustainable levels of energy consumption and is inextricably wedded to fossil fuels. We live like little kings because we burn the Earth's hidden energy reserves to do it.
So yeah, de-grow it.
That's a fallacy. What's more, you personally can have it right now (bar slaves, which I'll come back to in a sec), yet you somehow choose to have hot and/or potable water, electricity, AC, heating, Internet, vaccines, mass produced food and so on. There is nothing stopping you from emigrating to Albania and moving to a small village there, cutting your electricity supply.
> completely ignorant of human existence over millenia
> an ancient philosopher in ancient Greece's height
I can't believe you chose an example of 1% elite in a society built on slavery in the most hospitable place on this planet as an example of "how our ancestors lived". A tiny society that was constantly threatened by wars, diseases, and starvation, is morally repugnant for modern people, and had stable periods shorter than modern states'. If anything, you are making an argument for me with that comparison.
> the only thing that forces disease and poverty on people is exactly overpopulation and broken political and economic systems
Here, the real misanthropy of your views rears its head where you mention "overpopulation". There will be 10 billion people on this planet unless you kill literally billions of people and sterilise billions more. The natural barriers for population growth back in BC times were famine, war, and disease; why do you think there is "overpopulation" now if not for the lack of those three? And it seems that you'd prefer for those three to return, which is definitely misanthropical.
> Rampant consumerism and overconsumption
Again, you're focusing on your own little bubble of 1 person in 7. Go to Bangladesh or rural India and talk about "overconsumption" and "fulfilling simpler life" there. There are lots of reasons why people run into crowded cities and sweatshops from their "simple" rural lives. I imagine it can be quite hard to understand those reasons when you only see life in the US.
> Our entire modern system runs on unsustainable levels of energy consumption
And this is the main premise of this entire worldview. It's also objectively false, we already have countries on this planet taking most of their electricity from non-fossil sources, i.e. France or Norway. Besides, you seem to forget that those "simple" societies deforested most of Europe to burn the wood as an energy source, and we transitioned from that to fossils which is arguably an improvement. I don't see any fundamental, unsurmountable reason why we can't transition again, now from fossils to nuclear and renewables.
That's true.
What's also true is that some things simply can't be done. If a species goes extinct, it's over (Jurassic Park fantasies nonwithstanding). It's not like they will respawn if we fix the ecosystem, the damage is permanent.
If we get too far into climate change, it won't get undone in time, no matter what crazy geoengineering efforts we undertake.
In between there's a window where we can act. That is closing.
If we is taken as individuals, then sure we can do tiny bits and pieces. But it will take global systematic changes that start with the elite individuals to invoke such changes. And those that try will acquire many enemies and challenges that fight for the status quo.
Remember ozone layer hole? Acid rains? Leaded petrol? Asbestos causing lung cancers? All sorted out when we realised they are problematic. Not immediately, not without some foot dragging and screaming, but sorted.
We are great at solving problems. We just take a bit of time and convincing to get going.
It's a matter of perspective. Do we solve large problems? Not really. Do we forget about large problems and/or declare victory? A lot. We only have so much attention span.
You just moved the goalposts in every example. I'm not sure why would you do that, what's the underlying narrative you have in mind.
I haven't moved any goalposts on anything, it's just different standards. When someone says "I've solved problem X" one would assume that X is no longer a problem. That's the common assumption. All of the problems you mentioned and I commented on are still problems. The ozone hole is still a major problem that kills people and is affecting our planet. We project it will be closed, but it ain't closed. (And there have been flare-ups of CFC emissions). It's also a problem then once solved (when both of us are dead probably), will require constant vigilance against.
Your post came off as very rosy, like all these problems are solved and are in the past. Not the case.
And it's not like our new technologies don't bring about new problems. E.g. pesticide use and microplastics everywhere.
Also, air pollution makes them weak. Birds are much more sensitive to air pollution and CO2 level, because they breathe at much higher rate while they have much lower mass than land animals.
Boom-bust cycles for animals are common. I try to reflect what the natural order was 10,000 years ago and reflect. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice sheet over North America - ie no birds.
Cat ladies are insane and organized now. In my city, there’s a group distributing shelters and placing them in various outdoor areas to keep feral cats alive over the winter.
They are as nutty as the pigeon feeders, except the cats kill everything in sight.
I think as society sprawls out and folks have fewer kids, this stuff gets escalated.
'Neuter and Release' programs are common, supported and sanctioned by animal shelters, usually local vets provide their services for free, and the point is to provide basic medical for the animals while at the same time trying to control excess populations.
Calling them 'Nutty cat lady vigilantes' would be like calling people 100 years ago providing shelter for abused women 'Marriage Wreckers'.
They were stealing pets and shaking down the owners for cash.
But my cat likes going outside. He likes catching birds.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=outdoor+cat%2C...
Predators are part of a feedback loop. That the predators in question are housecats makes it a somewhat unnatural feedback loop, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.
Housecats are part of the food chain as well; they can be killed by cayotes and raccoons, and hawks might sometimes go after a small cat.
> "Steep declines in North American birds parallel patterns of avian declines emerging globally (14, 15, 22, 24). In particular, depletion of native grassland bird populations in North America, driven by habitat loss and more toxic pesticide use in both breeding and wintering areas (25), mirrors loss of farmland birds throughout Europe and elsewhere (15). Even declines among introduced species match similar declines within these same species’ native ranges (26). Agricultural intensification and urbanization have been similarly linked to declines in insect diversity and biomass (27), with cascading impacts on birds and other consumers (24, 28, 29). Given that birds are one of the best monitored animal groups, birds may also represent the tip of the iceberg, indicating similar or greater losses in other taxonomic groups (28, 30)."
This points to agricultural pesticides having impacts on insect populations, and additionally this mirrors where losses have been most extreme, in grasslands most impacted by agricultural activity:
> "Across breeding biomes, grassland birds showed the largest magnitude of total population loss since 1970—more than 700 million breeding individuals across 31 species— and the largest proportional loss (53%); 74% of grassland species are declining. (Fig. 1 and Table 1)."
I've made it a habit to always seek out the original paper instead of just reading the 'science journalism' take on it, for reasons like this.
https://www.flatheadaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/R...
I frequently get people becoming wildly irrational and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably, let alone a much larger one. They'll angrily insist that the earth's "carrying capacity" is 20, 50, 100 billion people! Or that countries should be looking to increase their populations, or that natural population stability and decline is a terrible thing.
As though we have not _already_ caused (and are continuing to cause) a great extinction event almost entirely before any significant effects from greenhouse gas emissions have made an impact.
Habitat destruction, chemical pollution, mining, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, water depletion and contamination, farming practices and monocultures, human interference, etc., are all just horrific, are responsible for massive destruction and extinction of the environment, and aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away the instant we somehow get the GHG pollution thing under control (if we ever do).
The funny thing about that is, if our population was a very healthy, say, 5% of its current level, greenhouse gas emissions would be practically a non-issue too. The problem would literally be solved. Gradually moving toward cleaner and more renewable sources of course should and would happen, but while that was responsibly and efficiently changing, there would be no imminent climate catastrophe occurring.
EDIT: It's happening again.
Arguing about how many people the earth can sustain is pointless without defining what kind of life you expect people to be living. How many billions can capitalism + western rates of consumption sustain and for how long vs a simpler way of life.
> aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away
and neither are all the people deemed excess by your world view, which is probably the part people get riled up about.
Not really, 10 billion "simpler way of life" people have huge catastrophic footprints as well. Farming being a major one. But the point was not to come to a precise figure and metrics, it's an unhinged kneejerk reaction to any suggestion that the population is not sustainable. Which it is not.
> and neither are all the people deemed excess by your world view,
This false ad hominem suggests you are one of the people my original post refers to.
_My_ world view deems no person "excess". It acknowledges a simple reality that our population is not sustainable and reducing it or limiting growth is critically important for the environment and makes all other environmental efforts simpler or less severe.
> which is probably the part people get riled up about.
No, it's not. They get unhinged about the idea that population is a serious environmental problem at its current levels let alone increased levels. The (baseless and unfounded) claims they make being that it's not a problem "because earth's carrying capacity is 50 billion people" or other absurd statements along those lines.
There isn’t an infinite carrying capacity to any planet, nor is it reasonable to have excess of a singular species for it is at the expense of others.
Some may have hurt feelings if you explain that more than 2 kids increases the population, but then “go forth and multiply” is probably not currently sound guidance, given what we now know, vs what we knew, say, 5 thousand years ago. It was arguably bad judgment to completely finish the great grazing herds and the Mastodons but try telling that to a hungry lot of humans.
The more we come to grips with the human as another animal species, one of many on earth, the easier it is to see how our own hubris is the issue everytime.
To the person above who thought 7 billion humans above wasn’t pushing any planetary limits: while no individual human wants to feel like excess, and certainly homicide is never what is being suggested, the fact remains that a wise human race that wishes to have a healthy planet and lots of resources per capita will steer their population over generations to be healthy.
I’m rather convinced that the same way a rabbit population without predators will suffer disease if it blooms too much, that this is what we are starting to encounter as we brush with the limits of our host in terms of our reckless dominance and destruction on the only known home to life so far…
No one wants to hear about limits or rules but hey, reality called…
So we don't have "too many" people? The world is not OVERpopulated? Because excess means "too many" or "more than needed," so if you're saying there's no excess, then you're saying there's not too many people.
I definitely agree with you, by the way: the world does not have an excess of humans!
It's not an ad hominem, and if you think that my reply is "wildly irrational and upset" then I question if you actually get that kind of reaction in general.
It's merely my interpretation of what you said, since you've given no concrete details and left nearly everything to the imagination of the reader. Given your 5% figure, you are arguing for reducing the population by ~7 billion people, but how? On what timeline? Just saying the world is overpopulated is uninteresting.
> The (baseless and unfounded) claims they make being that it's not a problem "because earth's carrying capacity is 50 billion people" or other absurd statements along those lines.
You've stated that the earth's carrying capacity is 5% of current population, which seems to be equally unfounded.
Same kinds of thinking cause the exact same kinds of knee jerk reactions, denialism, conspiracy theories, etc. when you suggest green house gas emissions are not sustainable and should be reduced too.
And I should say that you're wrong about that genocide assertion too. In most of the countries with the highest consumption and environmental footprints, populations are naturally in slight decline on their own. No genocide or suffering needed to reduce populations in those places.
One day the doomers might actually get it right for once. I'm not holding my breath, but even if I were, proactive genocide would be a tough sell.
> populations are naturally in slight decline on their own
I am aware.
> No genocide or suffering needed
That depends entirely on why you think this trend is happening, but if you're willing to accept the trend as it stands then we can probably find common ground.
We're past the sustainable carraying capacity because we have already brought about mass extinction events, irreversible destruction of habitat and environment with our existing population (and it even started when the population was far lower, it's just that it's been accelerating). I have the counter example. There is no "model".
Also it's strange you accuse me of being a spectacularly wrong doomer when you were just now spouting easily disproven doomsaying about genocides. Maybe tone down the ad hominems a little at least while you're sitting in your glass house.
People drove megafauna extinct before they invented the wheel. Great Britain lost most of its forest, irreversibly (for at least next few millennia), before Romans arrived. Romans, in turn, demolished half of Europe worth of forests to support iron production. Taking that argument seriously it means that "the sustainable carrying capacity" is way below what we had in 300 BCE.
Alternatively, it just suggests that there is no inherent carrying capacity, it's always of function of technology. As technology changes, the carrying capacity increases. Thankfully, our technology improves faster than ever before in the last few centuries and continues to accelerate. This suggests your core assumption is likely to become obsolete in not too distant future, even if it isn't now.
No it doesn't, because I'm not saying there's one carrying capacity that's somehow inherent to earth.
Of course it's related to technology and lifestyles and our environmental impact. What made you think I was trying to say otherwise?
Clearly if we got all our energy from burning wood and food from hunting and gathering, we couldn't even support 1% of our population without massive unsustainable habitat destruction. And yes in the past there have been many unsustainable societies that we might like to have changed but that's done now we are dealing with what's in front of us.
And with our current environmental impact, the current population is not sustainable. Maybe technology and societies will change enough in future that it could sustainably support today's levels of population, but that's irrelevant. That doesn't help the 53% of grassland birds in North America being wiped out in the past 50 years.
Yeah, by maybe 10-20% generation over generation. If your target population is 5% of today, and your strategy is to use the natural population decline of Western countries, you aren't getting to those levels for a good 15-25 generations. 400-700 years or so.
So my counter-example disproves the absurd claim that any population limitation or reduction requires or devolves into genocide.
> If your target population is 5% of today, and your strategy is to use the natural population decline of Western countries, you aren't getting to those levels for a good 15-25 generations. 400-700 years or so.
I'll assume that math works out for those stated assumptions. So what's the point?
There's an odd disconnect in the comments you've been making where you identify this problem of overpopulation, but seem extremely reticent to describe what you think should be done about this problem you've identified. Maybe I've missed it, and I plan to continue reading the thread to see if that's the case, but if I haven't, let me ask you directly: what, if anything, should be done about human overpopulation?
And if your answer is "nothing, I'm just pointing out it exists" then... well, thanks for contributing, I guess?
I didn't say that waiting for western countries to decline to 5% of their populations was solution. Hope that cleared things up for you.
> There's an odd disconnect in the comments you've been making where you identify this problem of overpopulation, but seem extremely reticent to describe what you think should be done about this problem you've identified. Maybe I've missed it, and I plan to continue reading the thread to see if that's the case, but if I haven't, let me ask you directly: what, if anything, should be done about human overpopulation?
What's really odd is that you think an observation is verboten if it does not come with any solutions! Very strange. I don't think your question is the big gotcha you're hoping for though. In general, policies should be geared toward limiting population growth or reducing it, which as I said then makes all other environmental efforts proportionately less difficult.
Most of the highest consuming countries have naturally declining populations, so one thing would be to leave those alone rather than institute growth policies. Another would be to invest in education, healthcare, and other quality of life measures in other countries which are shown to reduce population growth over time. Another one would be to end global environmental and trade agreements which incentivize countries to boost population and limit quality of life with per-capita concessions. For a few examples.
"We should reduce population somewhat."
"Yet you are part of the population. Curious!"
I suppose not, though what you say later in this comment is remarkably close:
> Most of the highest consuming countries have naturally declining populations, so one thing would be to leave those alone rather than institute growth policies.
Moving on:
> What's really odd is that you think an observation is verboten if it does not come with any solutions!
Well, all right, you kinda got me there - I do, in fact, believe that observing a problem without suggesting solutions is not particularly helpful in most cases. "Verboten" is too strong a word, though - one should be as free to make pointless remarks as productive ones in a public forum such as this.
And, for what it's worth, I didn't intend my question as a "gotcha" - I appreciate that you actually answered it. Broadly, I agree with you: taking advantage of demographic transition through eg. better education seems like a good tactic, as does avoiding policies that tend to boost consumption.
Unfortunately, since anti-growth policies are antithetical to our current economic order (again, broadly speaking) I'm stuck on what combination of influences would actually synergize to make these changes possible and/or more rapid. Fortunately, I suspect at least one important transition is happening now, in the minds of the people of the world (the wealthy nations particularly) deciding they do not need as much as they are used to having access to.
To be as transparent as possible about why I care about this matter, the perspective on the destruction of the biosphere that I've internalized is that it has gone so far that mass human casualties are likely in my lifetime, and moreover that this will be how I personally die - either directly via environmental effects (heatstroke? fire? flood? famine?) or from the social breakdowns that will multiply as the foundation of our society crumbles away. I consider this outcome existentially bad and want to avoid it, to say the least.
Given this, I very urgently desire solutions that DON'T take 500 years to work, because if those are all we can come up with, then we might as well not bother: this civilization of ours is doomed sooner rather than later.
You keep coming back to that, but it's a strawman. I did not say that is the solution. My hypothetical 5% was just to say that so many difficult problems would suddenly become easy ones.
There is no one solution, there won't be a mere handful of solutions. There will be (and are) many many efforts and they won't "solve" it, they will make some things better and make others less bad. So anything will help, anything is better than nothing. Reducing population growth from 20% to 10% by 2030 means we only have to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions by 45% per capita instead of 50% per capita to achieve the same result (to make up some numbers). That's a huge win. And not only does that benefit apply to greenhouse gas emissions, it applies to practically all environmental problems.
Second, not lowering birth rates involved billions of people suffering and dying. There is no option where we keep living above sustainable levels without consequence.
>Habitat destruction, chemical pollution, mining, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, water depletion and contamination, farming practices and monocultures, human interference, etc., are all just horrific, are responsible for massive destruction and extinction of the environment, and aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away the instant we somehow get the GHG pollution thing under control (if we ever do).
is claiming broad relation to population being above some threshold, since the whole comment is about overpopulation.
Subjectively and with zero rigor I think that possibly 150 to 100 years ago levels of population were capable of creating so much of the modern world. But from the Holocaust to Pol Pot, the Bangladesh civil war, mass exterminations of some of humanity's most capable gene pools is something that I very badly want to be convinced hasn't badly harmed the species potential.
After we take full intentional control of the planet's climate and shift 99% of human land use to the project, then I expect it will still be 100 years or more before we get back to pre-industrial natural productivity. This won't happen on its own, I'm assuming we put a large amount of artificial accelerators into to the process. It won't be the same as before humans, but we could quickly get back to the same megafauna numbers as before. Rough equivalents to pre-industrial ecosystems will eventually work out the missing niches.
Now certainly you can see why your ideas may be a little harder to accept as the scientific fact that human activity at even much smaller levels as today's population has caused terrible environmental destruction, extinction, etc., and with a lot more room to disagree, but so long as you approach the conversations humbly and with a willingness to consider differing opinions as you would have people consider your opinion I sympathize. Some people just react irrationally.
To offer one small critique: you suggest that we first need "people to migrate from Earth into orbit," THEN "take full intentional control of the planet's climate" - surely if we have the ability to fully control Earth's climate, we don't need everyone in orbit?
And, since we have to develop the technologies necessary to implement your plan anyway, wouldn't it be easier to just figure out how to remediate the biosphere directly, instead of figuring out how to get everyone into orbit, THEN figure out full planetary climate control, THEN artificially-accelerated natural productivity restoration?
1. Current human impact on the planet is unsustainable
Now add these premises:
2. As developing world changes, our impact gets worse 3. As our own standards of living increase, our impact gets worse
Your vision of the Earth doesn't have space migration as part of our path to sustainability. Because of this, you're fighting increasing demands while at the same time needing to reduce total impact dramatically. Say that the equation is:
Impact = (number of people) x (quality of life) x (efficiency)
You can reject either (2) or (3) or both at the cost of some human harm. Most pro-tech people tend to not reject either of these, but you might be an exception. Because of that, you have 2 increasing factors, because you don't have control over the number of people are we're locked into growth for 50 years or something demographically, even with birth rates quickly falling below replacement (which they haven't yet).
There's only 1 factor left in your toolbox - efficiency. We live better but at a lower impact to the planet. Agreed, that's great, but because of (1) and (2) we already have high expectations of this factor. On top of that, we need truly dramatic total reductions in total impact. So if we need 2x improvement (which is probably underestimating) to stay level, then we need maybe 8x or 16x to get where we need to be so that the Earth is moderately healthy. That would be great, but this is magical unicorn-ish thinking. Is this what you're counting on? I want to know.
We can control Earth's climate today by Sulfur geoengineering, which I'm worried that we will not start until it's too late, and even more worried that it may not be globally coordinated which would be disastrous. This is just a band aid, we still need to virtually eliminate Carbon emissions on a time scale we're not prepared for. As long as we are here, then climate intervention will be done for us (our own selfish needs), not for the health of the biosphere.
"Earth has established a totally balanced and ecologically stable underground society (similar to that portrayed in Asimov's novel The Caves of Steel). But one man, Cranwitz, regarded as a deviant and eccentric because he keeps a few animals as pets, refuses to get rid of these animals, the last non-human inhabitants of the planet.
He is finally persuaded by his sector representatives to exterminate his pets, but also commits suicide. This leaves Earth in 'perfection', with its fifteen trillion inhabitants, twenty billion tons of human brain and the 'exquisite nothingness of uniformity'."
Irrationality is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I find it interesting that ruining of the earth by humans was predicted approx 2,000 years ago.
Sadly we have lived up to the hype.
And, we show no signs of making the wholesale changes needed to turn this ship around.
But, if you're interested in an often pooh-poohed alternative, you may find some comfort reading this: https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/peace-happiness/save-e...
You're not alone and it doesn't matter if something is popular.
Apart from the adoption rate (no pun intended)
It is led by Les Knight.
Here is quick explanation, from their site:
''' VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.
We don’t carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.
Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.
As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us. '''
I certainly like the promotional video, "Thank You For Not Breeding".
Found another one.
because you are wrong. 100 years ago people said we would all starve when the world population reaches 1 billion people. then we not only not starved but became wealthier as well. Doom predictions are mostly damn wrong.
And I'm not making any predictions, just observations. This might come down to semantics on what exactly you suppose sustainable to mean or whether or not it is desirable, but causing an ongoing mass extinction event does not meet my definition of sustainable.
I'm talking about environmental sustainability to be clear (hopefully it was from the context but I may not have been explicit enough). I don't doubt we could physically feed billions more people at least as long as we have cheap energy and fertilizers from fossil fuels if we accepted ever increasing environmental destruction.
Claiming we are in the middle of a mass extinction event is a prediction, not an observation. It will become an observation when you have actually seen billions of species disappear over time. You don't extrapolate an extinction based on trends over dozens of years (especially on mostly imperfect data).
>Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor.
and then makes recommendations about tinting windows and cats. One does not imply the other.
All of which also mirrors stuff like plastic recycling and water pollution. Individual actions are so incredibly dwarfed by industrial actions that it's almost pointless. We need legislation, not feel-good individual ethics.
The most effective thing we could do would be to tax beef (and other meats on a sliding scale), because this would decrease the acreage needed per person. People would howl because they like meat, consumers would also just absorb a lot of the tax instead of actually changing behavior. They'll break out arguments about inequality and social justice (but in truth they like the taste).
Vertical factory-like farms seem very promising to me. These will only target certain groups of foods, which tend to be very leafy and healthy. Government policies can play a big role in advancing this tech because economics are challenging and it needs some more scale to drive the cycle to further cost reduction.
I'm sure that direct farm incentives to reduce pesticide use could help. But there's a reason they're used, and there needs to be a game-plan that doesn't assume the farmer will make massive capital investment into the alternatives.
> Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor.
But I don't think the numbers in the article make sense together.
> wild bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada have declined by 29 percent—or a total net loss of around three billion birds—since 1970.
> between 365 million and one billion birds die each year across the U.S. as a result of window strikes.)
> pet felines kill some 2.6 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone.
So ... the total decline over 50 years (~3B) is approximately the same as the annual deaths from cats and windows at somewhere between a quarter and a third of all birds? I think this is one of those cases where uncritically accepting estimates from independent sources who used different methods produces an incoherent picture.
I went looking for data on actual bird populations, and I get wildly different estimates.
The 3 billion number comes from the following source (as far as I can tell):
" Critical data were contributed by citizen-science participants in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, North American Breeding Bird Survey, and other bird-monitoring initiatives. The Partners in Flight Avian Conservation Assessment Database was a critical source for the data. " - https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/
Nat Geo quotes
" New research estimates there are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth. " - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-many-...
A lot of articles seem to quote the "at least 50 billion" line, probably based on the above numbers.
Basically - I'd say we have no idea how many birds there really are. Take ALL numbers involved as wild guesses.
If the ecosystem is healthy, a dozen birds dying will make way for a dozen more to replace them
I had this same question a couple years back when I read this stat, so I messaged the Cornell Lab Ornithology and one of their reps explained how these numbers make sense.
“We start with a population of breeding adult birds at the beginning of the year. They breed, and multiply, and then the population is "spent" throughout the year on deaths such as window strikes, pesticide poisoning, and cat kills. If the population could keep up with these deaths, we would see a net loss of zero. Unfortunately, instead, we are seeing less and less breeding adult birds at the beginning of each year.
So when we say "we've lost 2.9 Billion birds," what we really mean is, "We've seen a net loss of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds since the 1970's." Back in the 1970's, the breeding season started with about 13 billion adult birds. This year, we had about 10 billion. Throughout the year, they multiply to about 40 billion before they die back. Of that 40 billion, cats kill 2.5 billion.”
But birds aren't real![0]
"homelessness", "pollution" and "healthy" are abstractions that try to capture in single concept a myriad of different realities, and most of us won't have similar concrete representation of what's behind them. This of course becomes an issue real fast because because solving "homelessness" for instance requires separating all these different cases in their own buckets and coming with appropriate solutions to all of them.
Also money is as real as the food you buy with it, the electricity that comes if you keep paying your bills and the factories you buy with them.
Hell, before civilisation even existed you had humans wiping out megafauna right across the world.
Regardless of what economic system we have, a technologically advanced culture that values hamburgers and Doritos over biodiversity will trample on nature to get what they want.
(I'm not making the cynical argument that humans don't inherently care about the environment - in many Australian Aboriginal cultures, for example, environmental damage was considered as great a sin as murder - just that you can't blame capitalism for wider humanity's lack of care or respect for the environment.)
The whole point of a command economy is to have a central planning authority that oversees production of x tons of potatoes, y tons of steel and z T-34 tanks. They explicitly ignore abstract financial metrics like GDP and stock prices. They still ruined the environment.
Unless you're arguing that the mere existence of abstract concepts somehow degrades the environment, I don't see how this proves your point.
If you take a "command economy" and tell it to feed the people of the world, restore natural areas, shelter people... Then the abstractions serves real things.
Those tanks are serving the abstraction of survival.
> YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
> "So we can believe the big ones?"
> YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
(Death about belief and humanity, from Hogfather by Terry Pratchett)
> Until human society stops serving abstractions […]
Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of. No government to organize large scale actions, no incentive to share ideas, no way to exchange goods from places where there is overabundance to the places in need of those resources. Wanting to maintain a livable environment, too is nothing but an abstract thought.
I would dare to claim that human society exists first and foremost thanks to our brains being able to abstract away some processes. Of course, it creates blind spots and shortcoming in the process, but they are in the end an acceptable cost.
> As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever.
Is it? Seems to me that more and more people are starting to be more proactive in attempts at preserving the nature. Too late? Maybe. Time will show.
I'm appalled that such a quote could be used to support such an argument. Grandparent, and Pratchett's Death, agree that humans and human society are supposed to support humans. Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope -- and the biosphere itself that serves as backdrop, stage, and audience all in one.
Whether unintentionally or otherwise, the parent is missing the point. The grandparent doesn't argue against abstraction itself, but the reification of corporations as people, the conflation of the stock market as barometer of the economy, and enablers of all this in ostensibly benevolent governments.
If one chose the read the rest of the fucking book, one would see that it's all about fighting against those who would use human frailties -- like greed, and desperation, and the smallness of our own perspective -- to trick humans into destroying that which makes life worth living. Of course, it's all couched in the supernatural trappings of the Discworld, but as Prachett points out in several Discworld book intros, the Disc is a "world and mirror of worlds". On Earth, the antagonistic Auditors have names and addresses...
And it is the same thing I am talking about. Abstraction is humans’ way to streamline the process of maintaining the society. Money was created as an abstraction of a reward for one’s labor. Then atop of it more abstractions were built. Existence of stocks and markets is orthogonal to how to maintain a livable environment. In other case communism would do a better job at not starving people to death.
> Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope
Give me an example of a society/culture, that cared more about the environment than the ones currently existing. Former societies/cultures were much smaller in scope and headcount to care about such things. Deforestation was a thing during the time of ancient Romans[0], the idea that a species can go extinct (at lest in European-centric culture) started to take roots during 19th century[1]. According to the Wikipedia, Thomas Jefferson was against a notion that species can go extinct (my point is: it wasn’t simply some fringe group’s dogma). Compare this with The South Sea Bubble[2], which was in 18th century.
In short, my argument is: the abstract ideas like “valuation” and “wealth creation” were there well before any coherent idea about taking care of the environment as a finite and common resource was widely accepted.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#History_of_scientif... [2]: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/South...
Unfortunately so. As far as I am aware, there are no political movements in any Western country focused entirely on reality and the consequences of reality. We have become enamored, as a society, with abstract ideas and are sacrificing reality on an altar to our delusions.
But it isn’t. Most of the damage has taken place during our lives. Over half the carbon humans have emitted is after 1990.
This isn’t an inherited problem. We’re doing this to ourselves. Right now.
For many decades now, we’ve effectively been waging war on a key part of bird diets.
Edit: also, as mentioned elsewhere, we’ve reforested, but have subsequently lost critical meadowland. And our new forests tend to be more monocrop than the woodlands of old.
What other studies are there that indicate turning off the lights and reducing light pollution is a good idea?
1: The Chicago Alley Lighting Project (1998-2000)
Light pollution seems to be the easiest type of pollution to fix
This is a huge problem.
When "reforesting", all too often the effort is just planting rows of evenly spaced out pine trees. Pine needles are decidedly less edible than soft leaves, and the piles of needles on the ground don't exactly provide a good environment for smaller plants to grow and certainly aren't a good home for insects. People are essentially planting green deserts.
It won't matter if the percentage of clean energy is 50% if we are still emitting greenhouse gasses at 1990 levels. We need carbon zero yesterday to be honest, but the world is only just now waking up to this fact...
The world going Carbon neutral by 2050-2060? The damage we are going to do between now and then will be phenomenal. ( if we ever get there...)
Energy is required for human life to live now. We cant go back with out massive famine and death. Just cutting boff energy production not get to Carbon zero NOW like many are demanding is not feesable, realistic, or moral
The alternative is literally the death and famine that you are afraid of.
I strongly suspect we will blow all targets and will move along the most pessimistic scenario.
Yet the article suggests a number of things for individuals to do, such as installing window screens or keeping cats at home. Why? If "the driving factor" of the decline of bird numbers is habitat loss because of agricultural development, shouldn't concerned individuals be encouraged to take more productive action, such as lobbying their governments or protesting, maybe, to stop the intensification of agriculture?
But, instead of doing something that counts, the article suggests doing things that have the only effect of giving people excuses that they "did what they could", so that they go on living as before, with a calm conscience, leaving someone else to figure out how to solve the real problem.
I see this a lot in environmental issues but I don't want to start yet another flamewar by pointing out obvious examples. It's probably the biggest reason why most people, who are now convinced that we are destroying the environment, are sitting on their hands and feeling good with themselves while the world is burning. Easy solutions that achieve nothing are constantly suggested as "what you can do", when all "you can do" as an individual amounts to a drop in the ocean compared to what our entire civilisation must do, collectively.
[0] https://nitter.1d4.us/andrwfhenderson/status/118738610196045...
Where is the hacker spirit? Where are the builders? If HN is no longer the place where people do things, then what is?
For example, no matter how hard you try, there will be no profitable carbon capture venture under our current regulatory regime. Every scheme to sell some sort of carbon capture derived chemical product will fail to compete against traditional fossil fuel produced equivalents. It is a matter of physics, not hacker spirit. The government either needs to support the carbon capture market, or regulate against the fossil fuel industry. There is no "free market" approach that works here.
I call your 'learned helplessness' and raise you 'rational acceptance'.
> No consideration is given to the many positives in modern life
One can see the many positives in life while also pointing out the hopeless state of affairs we've created.
> Everyone wants to wail in dismay at the perceived impending doom and do nothing, or they want to actively destroy modern society.
Everyone deals with grief differently. There's no shame in being a nothing-doer, a wailer, or a destructive rebuilder. There is room for all options. I think that if you look, you will find plenty of people who are attempting to build and do, if that's what you prefer to see. You might even be able to contribute, if that is your wish.
Here is a writeup[1] about one project you might be interested in, and that site will have other projects reviewed as well, I'm sure.
[1]: https://www.thecarbonic.com/post/harvard-researcher-leads-gr...
The actionable suggestions of a carbon tax and land-value tax have been proposed to deal with our largest environmental problems since decades ago and the progress has been agonizingly small. It's not surprising people are frustrated [1].
You can't preserve the atmosphere, oceans [2] and wilderness -- which by their nature are not owned -- within the legal-economic framework of ownership and exchange. Even if something happens to be both profitable and climate-friendly (like electric cars), the benefit to emissions is accidental, and this kind of coincidence does not provide a path to a general solution to the problem, because we cannot simply hope that happy accidents will occur whenever we want them to. It's a textbook tragedy of the commons, but there's no practical way to "de-commonize" and sell shares of ownership in the atmosphere, and anyway exercising control over those shares would just turn into a second government, because practically nobody does anything that doesn't involve the atmosphere.
There are all sorts of interesting innovations that might replace contemporary technologies in a more sustainable future, but since the market price of those technologies does not reflect the environmental benefits they offer, there is no guarantee they will be successful in the present economic system.
I think one misleading historical phenomenon was that around the '70s a bunch of left-wing activists started to raise alarms about running out of various resources: hazards which would fail to materialize. But capitalism is pretty good at managing resources when the availability of those resources follows a smooth price-supply curve, which is true of almost all natural resources which are not byproducts of other resources. However, the same was not true with ozone, it wasn't true with sulfur dioxide, and it won't be true with carbon dioxide either. Even Hayek admitted air pollution was a problem.
[1] These are the wonkish eco-capitalist approaches, which earn the ire of populists because they can sometimes put pressure on people who are sympathetic, or seem to be unfair when contrasting a few anecdotal experiences. But if you are going to talk about "hacker spirit" and "realistic, productive tradeoffs", these are precisely the kind of ideas you asked for, and you are precisely the kind of person who should be advocating for them. Obviously the crunchy crowd wants green jobs or whatever.
[2] The absence of a corresponding tax (cf. carbon, land-value) suggests a new Pigouvian tax: some kind of liquid efflux tax. But this is extraordinarily hard to quantify.
There's every reason to be optimistic and interested in this topic for investors and hackers. There are smart people all over the world doing some real problem solving and a lot of the solutions are a combination of highly profitable and disruptive.
Bird populations declining is a complex problem that has a few root causes of which intensive farming is the obvious number 1 to address. Intensive farming needs to be disrupted in a profitable way so we can replace it with something less likely to destroy what remains of our planet (much of it has already been transformed into desert) and actually turn around that process. Plenty of interesting companies in this space. Also plenty of money being invested. Here. More of that and less of the dooms day thinking.
In the US one form of intensive, large scale farming that is worth addressing is corn production. Corn syrup is not a thing that you need in a balanced diet. It's bad for you. There's no reason to keep on subsidizing corn production the way the US currently does that results in industries emerging to find uses for all the subsidized corn. Corn syrup, bio fuels, animal food, etc. are all things that are made with corn that are probably doing more harm than good. Simply putting a stop to that would improve people's health and free up a lot of land for more productive and less destructive purposes. Whether it is forestry, organic farming, or even having sheep/cows graze on the land, it's all better than over fertilizing and eroding the soil in order to produce corn.
The builders? Of technology, you mean? Why, you can see their hand in all the technological advances that have caused the loss of habitat that the article flags up as the most likely driving factor for the decline of bird populations. The article mentions "intensification" of agriculture. That's the abuse of technology to increase production yields. That's the culprit, right there.
Your builders and your hackers are the ones chiefly responsible for the mess we're in, because of course that famous hacker mentality makes no space for any considerations of long-term safety and sustainability of economies or the environment. It's just a blind, magical belief in technology as something that can never go wrong, that can never destroy and harm, anyone.
The damage to the environment that was caused by abuse of technology in the first place is not going to be addressed by creating even more technology.
You want a solution? Less technology, fewer machines, less burning of fossil fuels, less use of pesticides, less deforestation, less soil depletion by ever intensifying agriculture. That is the solution. And it is blindingly obvious.
What's especially frustrating is how shortsighted the Malthusian "degrowth" response is. It honestly feels like people don't realise that "the West" is just one billion people out of eight and its carbon impact is shrinking both in relative and absolute numbers. Therefore any measure that might work have to be acceptable to the developing world. In fact, I'd say we need to introduce the MAP test: can you convince Modi, Assad, and Putin to implement your proposed measure? If you can't, bin it, we don't have time for it.
The only general approach I can see working under that test is tech. We "just" need to make low carbon options more economically attractive, and then it'll happen automatically. No amount of Western self-sacrifice in the name of degrowth, no amount of high minded rhetoric about "overconsumption" will do that. US becoming an eco fascist state and going to net zero overnight will barely move the needle.
But it's so easy to forget about that in the tiny bubble of Western eco activists.
Or in absolute numbers, the top 10% emitted 3x the amount of the whole bottom 50%.
And that is without taking historic emmisions into consideration.
What we don't have time for is doing nothing (ie continuing the destruction of our habitat). The 1.5° C goal is already getting out of reach.
The 100M pet cats in US on average kill 26 birds/yr? Doesn't seem right. When I track the source[1] of research, the estimates include both "own" and "unowned" cats and rely on some assumptions like "a correction factor to account for owned cats not returning all prey to owners", amongst others.
Cats belong indoors, period.
Most of the places which aren’t islands had predators in roughly the housecat niche before human civilization and many of those are lost.
I think it’s just the opposition by agriculture for wolves and the fact that people aren’t as affectionate for their prey which makes the “wolves good” narrative and people like birds and feel good about blaming humans so there’s “cats bad” narrative.
It probably doesn’t matter, your suburban cats are killing birds in a habitat that humans already destroyed by putting a suburb there.
If you want to make a difference to offset some cat activity plant native pollinator friendly plants and trees and shrubs that bear fruit for birds. You’ll make much more difference building habitat than complaining into the void.
This is especially true when you prop up that predator's existence by feeding it (and not letting its population remain harmonious with available food supply/prey).
Yeeeeeeah but that’s true of all human cultivation of animals, including bees, cows, and tilapia. I mean I’m also not sure what you’re getting at with the feeding of cats thing. I don’t know anybody that’s like hardcore pro-feral cat. Most people just have an indoor cat which kills 0-1 birds/year and feed it cat food.
But anyway to my interpretation of the Op’s point. Who cares how many birds die when (if you’re like me - Canadian Geese) they’re getting run over by cars and starving to death and can’t replenish their numbers because their nesting grounds were turned into a parking lot? This problem, like sooooo many others stem from our terrible relationship with nature and inability to admit we already know how to build towns and cities in harmony with nature and we don’t need to invent crap like highways or suburbs.
... and constrain its population by neutering it, and reduce its hunting behavior by keeping it inside most of the time.
Cats are native to North America. Animals in North America have evolved to avoid cats. This is not some island in the Pacific Ocean which forms the only habitat for a rare flightless bird with no natural fear of felines.
I live in a dense suburb of Providence which is surrounded by roads and buildings for miles in every direction. There are cats running all over the neighborhood, which is very cute and fun to watch. I do not own a cat and never have.
You know what else this place is full of? Squirrels, rabbits, and several colors of loud-ass birds. Apparently the cats aren't quite the slaughter machines they're made out to be.
Now, I would absolutely agree that if you live in a "wild" rural area, especially in or near a wetland/high altitude/island ecosystem, you need to keep the cats inside. But in a city, full of animals that have co-evolved with humans and their pets for centuries and in some cases millenia? Give me a break.
Without us they’d be doing this for sustenance, so in theory multiple kills a day.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Growth-of-the-house-cat-...
Ah, the famous anti-cat "study" (giving its huge glaring deficiencies it is more like propaganda pamphlet) by Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center where a postdoc got convicted several years ago for animal cruelty committed toward cats! That is really objective people without agenda... Would you take seriously for example a study by child molesters on societal benefits of child molestation?
> "estimates that our pet felines kill some 2.6 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone"
So is the net loss of 3B birds since 1970 a lot or not a lot? If 2.6B birds each year are killed just by house cats, then wouldn't the decline of 3B over 50 years be not that big of a difference? It sounds like banning outdoor cats would single handedly solve the decline and result in a bird population boom.
Some birds grow slower than that, but cats are usually not a problem for them.
if there remain historians a century from now, i'd be not surprised they collectively call decisions taken now as "The Mistake".
Instead, I suggest reading IPCC reports. While quite stark and damning, they provide context for the predictions and balance speculation out, so you don't get "we're all going to die in a decade", "our kids are going to starve to death" kind of nonsense that gets into public attention (thus incentivising lousy papers coming to similar conclusions).
That is hubris.
I have skimmed the action reports for policy makers from the IPCC.
A humanist approach to the nihilism and fatalism around climate change might be that the urgency presented is what is required to make progress in a time frame where we don't meet horrific consequences. In other words, bias and exaggerate so that we take the action necessary, and not get complacent or have a "balanced" point of view - which may be sufficiently as bad as ignoring the problem altogether.
i am however grateful of your comments on how to improve my approach of the literature!
I support non-zero-sum efforts in these areas, with perhaps a greater emphasis on protecting biodiversity.
We aren’t preserving the animals for themselves, in a geological time scale the animals will be fine, extinction and population contraction are just part of the dynamics. We are preserving animals because we like them and it seems a high quality thing to do.
The doom narrative gets attention but doesn’t fairly reflect a reasonable prediction for the future and attracts much opposition to the more reasonable and practical things we should do.
Turning things into fear and moralizing lightning rods polarizes but doesn’t necessarily actually move the mean.
i am however talking here of a personal literature review of several thousand papers over several years. not headlines.
as a physicist i do not like neither the dynamics, nor the cinematic (in the physical sense of it) of all this.
so yes, but that's not my point.
I agree that the ecological crisis is not existential on a geological scale, but that's an irrelevant scale for questions of human civilization, where we are indeed facing some very bad problems.
“Researchers also found that common birds from just 12 families, such as blackbirds, sparrows and finches, account for over 90 percent—or over 2.5 billion birds—of total population decline. Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor.”
The result was a calamitous famine, and it seems big Ag is on a similar path, but in a wildly different context.
Big Ag is indeed on a worse path, as they are literally depleting soils and biodiversity, engineering a monoculture propped up by fertilizers synthesized from fossil fuels. It's a completely unsustainable system that is sucking the Earth dry and carpeting it over with astro turf.
It's not that cats don't do that damage, it's the hypocrisy.
Cats don't wreck the planet, we do. We destroy natural habitats at planetary scale, and not just to have a place to live. We cut forests for cheap palm oil. We spill our garbage everywhere. We always go for the short term thoughtless approach.
And in those places that we do live, we ensure it's as hostile to life as possible. Lifeless lawns with useless exotic plants, useless lights that for some reason have to be on all night.
We've know this for decades and rather than to try and find a more balanced way, we doubled down. More cars and bigger cars. Bigger houses. A house stuffed with electronics. Eating more meat. AC. Cheap air travel. Throw away consumer goods. Excessive packaging.
The cat thing is performative, like most of our "morals". An easy win to show that we care, but we don't. Not at all.
Rethinking extinction
https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-not-edging-up-to-a-mass-extinc...
I was happy to hear this, because I took it as gospel that we were in one. I was told to worry about the population explosion and the coming ice age back in the 70's. So I take things with a grain of salt. (however, I am not a climate change denier)
So I doubt that birds a really dying off across N America. How is this determined? I've road tripped extensively around N America in all 50 states and all Canadian provinces and the most amazing thing is how empty most of the continent is. House cats are not roaming the wilderness killing birds.
If you told me birds are disappearing from urban areas I could find it more beleivable.
How many of those birds are old/ill? I find it strange to say the least that all those studies lack such an important information. May be because providing such information would mean completely different conclusion - there are billions of birds getting old/ill yearly that predators normally would take of. There are only cats left around humans, so they perform that highly necessary job.
There are another human companions - rats - who raid bird nests for eggs. Outdoor cats help control the rat population.
There is a reason that for example a farm with a bunch of outdoor cats would have a bustling bird population. The same about several areas with large feral cat colonies that i know of - the birds are thriving there, in particular because various egg raiders don't get to walk there freely.
The blame is on reflective windows?
>(A 2014 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Smithsonian study found that between 365 million and one billion birds die each year across the U.S. as a result of window strikes.)
That seems unreal. So I want to read said study.
https://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/pdf/management/lossetal20...
Oh wait... its cars hitting birds? Why did they seem to exclude this important detail? And the study clearly puts it that around 339 million is max? So the billion birds number is made up?
This article also seems to dance around the actual problem?
https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph240/scherr1/
The massive increase in windmills is the source of death. Every single typical windmill will kill dozens of bird and bats every year.
The gymnastics that OP is doing is to cover up the mass death by windmills.
There is agriculture, but wild animals can live alongside and even within it. For example there are hedges alongside fields where birds can make nests. There is no toxin accumulation in predators because pesticides or herbicides are not used.
Farm animals can graze outside. There is a whole ecosystem around that with birds eating flies etc. There is no massive eutrophication because synthetic fertilizers are not used. It's kind of a steady state. Everything is designed so it can be run for centuries.
It's of course way more expensive and laborious to farm like this than industrial farming. But maybe technology like robotics could advance sufficiently that we could go back towards more like this. Of course not exactly the same, but taking some ideas.
Weeds could be zapped with lasers. Smaller tractors can be autonomous. Synthetic fertilizers could be used but injected underground so they don't run off or evaporate / create N2O. Etc.
Hopefully something can be done to save the declining bird population. America was able to almost totally reverse the impending extinction of Bald Eagles and Falcons through banning DDT, I can only pray similar action is taken in the future.
What is doubly distressing is that we collectively could be addressing issues such as these if we wanted to.
It's unfortunate, but people are too obsessed with their short term comfort and prosperity to consider making sacrifices for saving the environment, nature and future generations.
I think that in order for us to save nature we need to get away from our western utilitarian view of nature - the idea that nature is here for us to exploit and exists only to the extent that it furthers our goals. But these are deep-seated beliefs that are very difficult to change on a mass scale in a relatively short period of time - it would take generations and we don't have that kind of time.
Among other factors which contribute to this, one thing not mentioned is that bird feeders and bird houses used to be a very common sight in American backyards, but do not seem to be anymore. I've only seen one house that has them now.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wildlife-officials-dont-fe...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/environm...
After all, not every population can grow forever. So which pieces of news should we be alarmed about, vs which are expected?
> The study found that population decline was not limited to a few species but a wide range of species across every biome
In contrast, population dynamics is usually concerning either a single or a number of linked species. But on the greater scale, the planet as a whole will probably rebound after humans have destroyed everything including what has made their life possible and will hence have gone extinct.
Deforesting, not an issue if the demand for lumber is cut down by 80%. Same for coal, oil, paving, lithium... It all gets solved with just less people.
8 billion people is just too much, even if we all recycle and take the bus.
The only solution is strong government action to reduce emissions and environmental consequences of consumption. It's not completely un precedented: the hole in the ozone layer was the unavoidable apocalypse in the late 90s and is an almost solved problem right now.
I wish. We only halted its growth and it is only barely healed. From Wikipedia [1]:
> A 2005 IPCC review of ozone observations and model calculations concluded that the global amount of ozone has now approximately stabilized. Although considerable variability is expected from year to year, including in polar regions where depletion is largest, the ozone layer is expected to begin to recover in coming decades due to declining ozone-depleting substance concentrations, assuming full compliance with the Montreal Protocol.[107]
> The Antarctic ozone hole is expected to continue for decades. Ozone concentrations in the lower stratosphere over Antarctica will increase by 5–10 percent by 2020 and return to pre-1980 levels by about 2060–2075.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Prospects_of_o...
1/3rd of all emissions are produced by 20 companies
The US Military alone puts out more carbon than the top 60 carbon emitters.
“The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” — Utah Phillips
Sure, but mostly they're producing goods and services that millions/billions of people consume. Getting rid of those 20 companies won't change anything.
I'm pro-anti-trust and I believe that breaking up certain big corporations would a good thing. But that's a long way from "the problem is capitalism and imperialism" and the implication that eliminating those things is possible or would fix environmental problems. The Soviets were even worse for the environment.
Read in this voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G19B7lTgwCE
I think if the world really got behind this, we could get the population down in 3 or 4 generations.
Surely if humans are the cause, they can be the solution too. Planting more forests is possible. Breeding Elephants, Giraffes, Hippos, and other large mammals we displaced is possible and is bing done now. Making land more hospitable to wild animals is also possible. Perhaps we need more people to be born not less to fill these roles.
Even large ultra modern cities like Dubai, are not all bad. They terraformed the desert. All kinds of plants, birds and animals live in Dubai that never could before. New York is home to billions of rats.
I'm not even sure that human activity has in anyway reduced the biomass of the earth. Cities provide ideal habitat to all kinds of birds, plants and animals. And Carbon emissions are good for plants, CO2 is needed for photosynthesis.
Forests have been converted to farms, and we grow way too much corn, that is used for fuel. A terribly inefficient and wasteful process. So I'm a big proponent of Nuclear Energy technology, which would greatly reduce our need for fossil fuels.
I also think Farms should be surrounded by treed buffers, and we should build green forested corridors that span the continent.
All of that might require more people not less to accomplish. That rare genius that will bring us break through energy technology might be someone in the next billion people not yet born.
https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/
edit: yes cats do too, let's try to talk about it all, cat genocide if you want, windmill improvements too.
That's the most substantive response yet, let's source it and drill down solutions for each.
Windmills are the most recent change I can think of to explain this trend.
Cats, cars, and pollution have been killing birds, but maybe it's ramped up.
1975 is when the first commercial wind farm went up, maybe you got something :p
If it was all pollution we'd see improvements as we decrease emissions. (we have been since 2005)
An even bigger cause of decline is birds that are never born due to habitat loss and pesticide use that fundamentally disrupts their food chain because no insects = no birds.
Windmill bird mortality is some extreme, irrelevant outlier that does not matter at all. It's a manufactured issue that follows a formula discussed by Albert Hirschman in his 1991, "The rhetoric of reaction". Specifically it uses the framework of the perversity thesis: “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.”
This is used as a scripted template to smuggle agendas through "think tanks" (which is a polite term for "propaganda factories") and then onto some theatrical "they aren't telling you this on mainstream media" sphere where they are peddled as "talking points" and "facts".
In this case, as in most, they load it up with common logical and rhetorical fallacies. The go-to here is to represent the extreme statistically insignificant outlier as if it's the normal and then advocate for policy focusing around the outlier.
It's not about the outlier, in this case birds. Instead, it's about whoever paid the think-tanks to use the classic Hirschman tools and push the narrative through the channels. Most of the think tanks are funded by oil and gas so ...
If we focus on the other 99.99% of the deaths and the other 100% of the non-death declines then the problems will actually be addressed instead of say, firing up coal fire power plants, drilling for oil, decommissioning wind farms and having it have zero effect on the downward trend.
It might be hard to figure out why publicly traded oil and gas companies would feel fiscally obligated to invest in campaigns to increase their market share, but I'm sure we can connect the dots.
Unless you honestly think they are abandoning their fiduciary duty, are squandering company money because they're all a bunch of rabid birders, and just happened to read the numbers wrong. I mean sure, ok.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Growth-of-the-house-cat-...