> The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.
i guess you can blame all the above on a single root cause, though: human over-population. we just don't have plagues and famines like we used to; we're really good at killing everything that we don't like.
i see my neighbors dousing their lawn with weed killer and pesticides every season, followed by grass nutrients! then burn 2gal of gasoline to mow that lawn every week. nothing better than an insect-less, uniform green lawn!
yes! i was fined because my dandelions crossed the magical 8" threshold for a week a few seasons ago. i happily paid it of course. you see, i had saved up the $20 by then with all the money i didnt spend on weed killer and fertilizer.
i'm just the worst person in my HOA.
the irony, of course, is that immediately behind my 0.2 acre property is a massive wetland with "grass" that's 10-15ft tall.
Actually over-production since a lot of food is wasted before consumption.
The over production started before we adopted fossil fuels.
I heard once in one of my classes that every 1 acre of farmland disrupts 24 acres of adjacent land, not just the surrounding acres but the ones surrounding that!
Meanwhile, global warming is terrible but the world being even 5 degrees hotter doesn’t kill most stuff, but 10b acres of farming can destroy entire continents
in no way is this the root cause, in any real scientific analysis. it is literally just the rallying call of right wing politics.
To support such a large population, half of the earth's habitable land is currently being used for agriculture - that's a shitload of habitat destruction - that's not even accounting for all the rest of the space people use for homes, etc.
This is a fact (to some margin of error). It's indisputable that humans require land to produce food through agriculture, and that amount of required land increases with population size. I'm curious what analysis could possibly show human population growth doesn't result in more wildlife habitat destruction.
Since we stopped being hunter-gatherers, we've required agriculture to support large sedentary populations. Land use by humans/wildlife is generally a zero-sum game.
Elon Musk is like “there’s no problem, guys, keep on having more kids!” and he himself did.
Right wingers are pro life, and many religious ones advocate not even using condoms.
Left wingers are the reason women now have so much education and careers that they postpone having children til their 30s.
Anyway, the amount of resources and garbage is proportional to how many humans are on the planet. I don’t see what Elon Musk is so worried about “population collapse”. For an otherwise smart guy, he seems to be very mistaken about this core issue. Maybe he thinks we can escape to Mars and start over LOL
In no way is this true. No left-wing organization is advocating for this, liberal organizations and activists are.
> Left wingers are the reason women now have so much education and careers that they postpone having children til their 30s.
Oh you're one of those people.