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Comment by 23B1 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning".

Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy).

What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of problems, is viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up, and in the following hierarchy:

1. Regular Individuals like me e.g. "build a bird-friendly yard"

2. Influential individuals like architects, urban planners,

3. Small groups, e.g. birdwatchers, Boy Scouts, churches, schools

4. Small towns & neighborhoods, e.g. "build bird friendly parks"

All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".

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Individuals cannot solve this. I leave trees up, dead or alive. I plant native plants. I remove invasive species. I only keep invasive bushes if they house birds. I don't spray for insects except around the base of my house, I don't kill off chipmunks, voles, squirrels, rabbits, etc.

How can this compete with the dozens of neighbors in a half-mile radius that have removed in excess of hundreds of trees, big ones like oak, pine, maple, hickory and up to five feet in diameter, and turn their yards into grass wastelands? I never even see my neighbors use most of their yards. How do you compete against that level of narcissisim and lack of empathy?

It is exhausting on me both physically and emotionally. There's no one I can call to get help with my own yard because every landscaper knows nothing about ecology and uses loud and polluting gas-powered machinery.

I am to the point where I consider my actions as pissing into the wind and spitting into the ocean. Seeing bees where I hadn't seen them before using native plants that I planted is amazingly fullfilling. But I know that it basically has no greater impact, and it is completely against the tide.

Unless governments take action and penalize corporations for the harm they've done and take measures to prevent further harm, we won't be able to stop what's coming.

Yeah, I know that feeling. I know no solution for now. Only waiting until the zeitgeist reaches your neighbors, old or new.

Yeah, the systemic issues driving habitat loss are massive. I have made my yard a refuge for native plants to support insects, birds, and other wildlife, but I see exterminators on my street all the time killing off any insects that appear in neighbor's yards, and that kind of mass scale habitat destruction/loss is going on all around us in so many ways (lawns, roads, industrial farming, et al). I also really enjoy my pollinator garden and rewilded habitat, but people are culturally conditioned to destroy habitat, and unless that changes we're going to keep seeing more and more loss.

Right, which is why you have the opportunity to evangelize what you're doing.

Like for example, a two dudes in my hood have swapped their lawns over to micro clover because I did it three years ago; the lawn is packed with wildlife, and it looks great. Wouldn't have happened had they not come over for BBQ one day and asked about it.

I redid parts of my lawn last fall (first time ever doing so or even having the opportunity). I did about 30% of that new European microclover and 70% various fine fescues. Not sure if I feel it was a success or not, but the clover does make it look like a nice meadow. But the clover and fescue, if I let them grow, it gets so thick that I can't even mow it effectively. Do you just let the microclover fully take over and grow to a certain height before cutting? I have heard it has a memory of where it was cut and stops growing there. I haven't noticed that though. How do you keep other things fron taking over the yard?

Thanks!

It does have a memory of cut height, and I mow it with a reel mower once a week.

WRT other things taking over the yard, it's been rainy as hell here past few weeks and so the weeds have deff. sprung up unaccounted for; I just spend a day weeding mechanically, using a weed grabber tool.

Both count as my workout. Headphones + podcast = no gym membership required.

You'd be interested to know that this month I'll be finishing a huge trellis on the south wall of our house to let vines grow. This will reduce cooling costs and look beautiful (I hope).

Thanks. I use a battery powered mower, but because the fescue and clover retain so much moisture and has grown so thick, it has been really struggling (I think any mower would really) to mulch except at the highest height setting. I let it grow unhindered in the spring, and since it's been raining like crazy, I can't stay on top of it. (I should note that my lawn is probably only a 1/4 of my property.)

What reel mower do you use? Does it have height adjustments?

Its just a Scotts and yes it adjusts – you could also try scything if you wanted to truly scare the neighborhood kids ;-)

try to use some PGR. Like primo-maxx (or generic). it should make things easier

What are the environmental repercussions of that? I don't do any chemicals, weed killer, or chemical fertilizers. All I do, to feed the soil and not the grass, is dolomitic lime and organic fertilizer.

none that i saw. it just suppresses growth hormone of plants for a couple of weeks so they grow at half speed or less. less mowing. less watering. less fertilizers. etc. for plants that are not grass pgrs usually slow down vertical growth and promote lateral branching/density

PGR is just so expensive to use.

yea. generics cost 1/3.still not cheap. yet, i decided to try one this summer, because mowing grass that grows as crazy on the hill (frontyard) at 90sh weather - it's just not my definition of fun

>I never have to mow,

> I mow it with a reel mower once a week.

Maybe you mean you don't use a 2-stroke engine to mow as the point you were making, but if not, what the huh? There's evangelizing, and then there's just being the crazy guy on the corner making stuff up that sounds like evangelizing. You're leaning towards the latter with these kinds of non-ambiguous contradictory statements.

Was the comment edited? I don't see a comment saying "I never have to mow".

Yes, they secretly edited their comment without acknowledging the fact

Consider getting a European style scythe. It’s not much harder than a reel mower and can work quite well in tall grasses.

I’ve used one from https://scythesupply.com/

I have a couple on our farm and honestly really enjoy cutting hay by hand. The key is to get out there early when it's still cool, and keep the blade sharp as you go!

wild white clover is naturally short and takes up much of the lawn where we are renting. if it weren't for the other random tall stuff we probably wouldn't need to mow at all.

Part of it is evangelizing, but its bigger than that - the yards of tomorrow need to look at lot more like grasslands and a lot less like farmland or golf courses, though.

Grassland is long grass, and it shelters a lot more than just insects and birds. It can be cover for small dogs, cats, beavers, possums, moles, mice, snakes, etc...

Understandably most "neighborhoods" don't want snakes, raccoons, or possums in their yards, but that's the level of "wilderness" we need to return to. Might make living a lot more difficult for a lot of folk...

Yeah a lot of inhabitants of a healthy habitat are labeled culturally as "pests" and "pest control" does a lot of damage to native plants, insects, birds, and other wildlife. I go out identifying insects under my porch lights or out in the yard submitting iNaturalist observations. There' an amazing, diverse natural world out there that can be accessible in a local yard that's a native habitat. I'm up to 400 species at my house (lots of those are moths and other insects). But in reality there's a lot of people who see any snake, insect, or arachnid, and respond with "kill it with fire."

> But in reality there's a lot of people who see any snake, insect, or arachnid, and respond with "kill it with fire."

Did you have a natural (or learned) revulsion for bugs? If so, how did you get over it?

I’ve gotten over mice completely, never felt right killing one in the first place.

I’ve been trying to make peace with bugs; I unplugged my mosquito zappers last summer shortly after getting them when I realized they were zapping mostly everything but mosquitoes.

Still something inside of me that has such a visceral reaction to bugs. I wish they would just stay away from me and I’d happily respond in kind :’(

> I wish they would just stay away from me and I’d happily respond in kind :’( I mean, that’s kinda the line I draw and live with.

Anything in the house is fair game. I don’t feel good about it, but mice, insects, or anything else that’s in my living space has to go. I’ll do what I need to to keep my living space mine.

Anything outside… that’s shared space. As much as I can I try and co-exist. I see the bugs as much a part of the nature I appreciate as the bunnies, the deer, the turkeys, the foxes, the ducks, and everything else. None of it exists without the rest. Anything that isn’t an existential threat to myself or my property I leave alone. If I can’t personally handle them right now, I can always go back in the house.

Where I can, I try and balance my use of the space with everything else. I appreciate the nature where I live, so I only do what’s necessary to make it livable for me. I mow only enough space around the house for us to use. I’ve been working on evicting some groundhogs because they’re trying to turn the ground under my garage into swiss cheese. I get rid of poison ivy when it encroaches in our space but we don’t “weed”. When the mosquitos got so bad we were scared to open a door I did spray some pesticide immediately around our house, but made sure to keep the space I sprayed well mowed to discourage the bees from coming here and getting caught in the crossfire.

I guess it’s just a small mindset shift—I still want the bugs to stay away from me, but I can’t be pissed about bugs when I wander into their home any more than I could wander in to a bear’s den and be annoyed that a bear attacked me.

Oh, except ticks. Fuck ticks. Those are kill on sight.

BTI is a great targeted solution for mosquitoes. Tick tubes can work well for ticks. Although targeted, the tick tubes have some potential for larger impact. More effort, but there tick drags and CO2 traps too.

Oh wow, not sure how I missed that one. I'm up in Canada so it's probably restricted or only sold in tiny 100g retail packages, but if I can chase down some industrial sized bags of that somewhere I'll definitely add that to my toolbox. A little bit of that spread around the wet spots during the spring melt would probably go a long way.

So far I've been primarily relying on permethrin. A gallon of 36.8% was something like $100 and dilutes out to ~600 litres of spray for my purposes. It's not water soluble and binds strongly to soil so I don't need to worry about it getting into the water table and spreading beyond where I spray it (or into my well water). I've been spraying just around my house (and, well, _on_ my house) to make a moat to keep away the mosquitos, ticks, ants, and all the other bazillion things that kept finding their way in.

We've also invested in a couple of the CO2 traps for mosquitos. Have those out in the yard a little ways out.

End of the day though... we live in the middle of a forest situated on wetland. That's part of how I got to a place of picking my battles. I know I'm not going to make much of a dent. As long as my house isn't overrun, it is what it is.

Hang a bat house. :)

I have seriously considered it, but I do wonder about the neighborhood response. Although I don't think there's any danger and that there's actually more danger from the mosquitoes carrying every disease under the sun, I'm not sure if it's a battle I want to take on if someone has an issue with it. Once the bats are in place, I believe it requires engaging with state wildlife authorities to relocate them. Maybe I'm being too paranoid. I mean, there are already bats in the area anyway. They probably just have a hard time finding shelter.

I have a bat house. It's been empty for years. Apparently they prefer my neighbor's attic. But all least they'll have a place to go if they get evicted from the attic.

Sorry, late reply. I've never really had any serious issues with bugs, but desensitization by exposure is the way to go. I've used the iNaturalist app photographing and identifying insects for years, so when I find a new to me species I learn about their life history, and explore what I've seen in its taxonomy. So I'm comfortable around most bugs now since I know which are harmless, and which are the handful that have a sting/bite they'll actually use. Most insects, like most animals, don't want to fight, and would prefer to be left alone. Bees aren't going to sting unless you harass them or you threaten their hive, most wasps don't sting, and very few are aggressive. Grasshoppers and katydids totally do bite though, they scare me. Also I steer clear of anything that looks like a fire ant, centipede, warrior wasps, hornet, or yellowjacket.

Why would one not want possums? They are great. Eats bad bugs, highly resistant to rabies, and generally non-aggressive towards humans.

If you have a garden or chickens they can be a problem. Otherwise, they're out of sight and out of mind.

They are very much not fun when they try to take up residence in your house and start eating stuff.

> How do you compete against that level of narcissisim and lack of empathy?

I would assume the start is stop labelling your neighbours as narcissists and anti-social.

A bon mot, to be sure, but whether or not they are labeled as such makes no difference. The behavior refuses to change in either situation. Plenty of pitiful fools are still trying to keep sod alive in the vicinity of the Mojave.

I didn't say anti-social.

And what do you call displacing hundreds of birds, animals, plants, insects by planting literally wastelands made of grass just so that the grass can be looked at? How is that not narcissism, a lack of empathy, and vanity? It's the very definitions of those words.

We must first come to terms with what we as humans do and how we interact with and perceive the world.

Look up Benjamin Vogt and Douglas Tallamy. They say the same thing. I can't remember who it was, but someone said that it was a disservice to the diversity of life found in deserts to call lawns green deserts.

I'm a bit confused by this:

> Unless governments take action and penalize corporations for the harm they've done and take measures to prevent further harm, we won't be able to stop what's coming.

What corporations? It sounds like your neighbors are just individuals? And can you clarify "what's coming"?

It's pesticides. It's pollution. This isn't complicated.

What's coming? Ecological collapse. That's what happens when you kill all the pollinators, when you kill all base prey animals.

None of this is complicated, nor unforseen. We've known this about pollution and pesticides for decades, even longer when it comes to climate change.

The owning/ruling class is directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of the pollution and environmental destruction on the planet. This is not complicated.

And if you wiped them out, then wouldn't a functionally identical class take their place? There's no us vs. them, them is us.

The voting class is responsible for always wanting to “save the mother and the orphan” (metaphor, but it’s a “let’s save everyone, allow everyone to prosper, increase wages and let everyone massively live in consumerism” attitude), effectively massively overpopulating the earth, requiring more concrete poured in cities and even more poured concrete in tourism because their home city is unbearable, and all of it requiring, in a word, mass industry.

But somehow it’s the industry that’s at fault.

But “how do you dare say no to more humans!” is somehow at fault. I get it, we can be 10bn if we all ate crickets, but surprise, food is not even the reason why land gets urbanized and overexploited and polluted. Plus, creating more high-density humans, the kind who never sees any patch of earth, the kind who believes travelling across the world to see Kylie Minogue in a casino and buy some flamboyant clothes, is the best way to get voters who understand and care nothing to nature.

Ruling class just executed what you wanted. Guess what, what we want is to leave no human behind, help everyone, and raise them all to high levels of consumerism, whether in the West or in the third world. I really don’t see how the ruling class has any stake in pollution. Every time they try to get us to reduce our lifestyle, we vote them out.

Yeah you can account for it that way, but the people who buy the products and use the services the owning class owns and operates are indirectly responsible, so individual action is very much relevant!

I should make it clear that I don't see myself as a model ecological homeowner, but I do feel that I am trying. I was trying to point out that I can't even make a difference as an individual versus other individuals, so I feel individuals have no hope competing against industrial environmental damage. I feel like I already notice less bees and butterflies compared to last year. I don't think I have even seen a butterfly this year.

In terms of what corporations, just open the so-called phone book with your eyes closed and point. Our worship of scale has us destroying the environment at scale.

What's coming is more headlines like the one here and what the other commenter mentioned of ecological collapse. Without pollinators, how will we grow food?

The point really is that individual action is sisyphean. The energy is too diffuse because the vast majority of people lack any real power or even real autonomy over their lives.

The only way the things that were done by mass action can be undone is through mass action. Who are the people who can invoke mass action? Basically there’s only one answer: governments.

Maybe if governments hadnt spent the last 60 years destroying labor movements (at the behest of corporations) there would be another option. But here we are in the year of our lord 2023 after decades of successful union busting.

Okay so my original comment was maybe lacking on its own "solutioning" so let me try one out, based on your comment.

1. Set up a bird-friendly/enviro-friendly environment in your yard. You could do this by planting micro-clover instead of grass, building bird houses, adding safe sources of water for birds, planting pollinator-friendly flora.

2. Evangelize. Plan a block party or even a birdwatching 'club'. This doesn't have to be as formal as it sounds; you could just take pictures of birds and evangelize them on a local group, or maybe point out to a few of your neighbors that they have really interesting specimens on their property.

3. Connect with the local Audubon chapter (or equivalent) and give them encouragement or support; help them with their website or social media, invite them to a BBQ, show them that you care and will help out.

Obviously I don't know your situation and can't predict all the reasons this might not work – and I'm not suggesting that you have to do all this – I'm really just trying to get your juices flowing, show you that there's ways that you can at the local level that might even benefit you – like getting to know your neighbors, having a beautiful and unique home, or even just making friends!

I basically already do all this though except evangelize, although I do have some plans for that.

My religious friend takes photos of the natural areas around his town and then donates the (beautiful) photos to local churches to be displayed in their hallways – "God's bounty". He also sells calendars of same to parishioners. Each photo comes with a story about the wildlife in the area and how it interacts with the human world.

Is he intentionally psyop'ing an environmental message? He's pretty smart, so maybe. Is it effective? Maybe.

But I will tell you this: I have been on more hikes with this guy than I would have normally thanks to the majesty he documents... so it's worked on me!

In some areas humans actually increase the biodiversity. My area is mostly desert most of the time. We get our water from the California aqueduct. On my property I have squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks. I've seen red tailed Hawks and Owls. Cats can't be outdoor here. I've already seen a cat's head discarded on my property. I have so many types of birds here all the time.

The open space here has a ton of animals and biodiversity but humans have actually increased the biodiversity. For example the squirrels on my property eat dates off my date trees. Date trees and eastern squirrels aren't native here but they do feed the hawks and owls. Bees are harvesting on my property constantly.

Yes, but that comes at the expense of the biodiversity that existed before the California Aqueduct did. The Central Valley was once a massive seasonal wetland that supported millions if not billions of migratory waterfowl, to say nothing of non-avian biodiversity in the area (which I likewise recall being massive--this is detailed in Cadillac Desert, which I don't have on hand). I don't think that that biodiversity tradeoff is a net positive one.

I don't know why you think that. It makes no sense. The viaduct comes from far far north away of the central valley. That water would otherwise not even ever flow through the central valley. Naturally this area doesn't really retain most of its water. It just goes right into the ocean. The central valley lake naturally appears and disappears through no fault of humanity.

> but humans have actually increased the biodiversity

If that's even true, I would say that it is exceedingly rare, even on small local levels. And it would be dwarfed by the rest of human activity killing off biodiversity. I have squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, voles, foxes, raccoons, owls, hawks, several species of birds like woodpeckers, cardinals, nuthatches, etc., bats, coyotes, fisher cats, deer, bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, dragonflies, hummingbirds, and more all on my properly. Some are there every single day, like the chipmunks and bees, and the others are frequent visitors. But even with all that, the diversity is absolutely lower than what this area would have been like just 200 years ago. For example, mountain lions are gone and bobcats are on their way out. Same with bears. And there are several native plant species that are on their way out as well.

Also, deserts actually can be teeming with biodiversity. It's just not the biodiversity that we recognize.

The Oasis effect of habitat is valuable and can form part of corridors so insects and birds can migrate and breed.

So your actions alone can be valuable.

Your may inspire others or be part of a chain of things which inspires them.

Your hard won knowledge awaits their questions.

You may have to fight HOAs and disaproval. Your battles lay the groundwork for those that follow to succeed - setting precendent and raising issues, sometimes even by losing.

Even if others don't follow your practice you may pique their interest - which may change their opinions. Opinions are the mandate by which local officials and politicians act?

Many of these good consequences may be invisible to you. Doing good is never useless. The causes of change can be unpredictable and subtle. The future can be radically altered by small effects in the past.

Perhaps the life of a native bumble bee that survives by virtue of your planting may be the one that mutates enough so his descendants survive the coming changes.

Increase the luck surface for a good future.

Stay hopeful.

> You may have to fight HOAs and disapproval.

Thank god that I do not have an HOA. Luckily things are different here, although I am very surprised that someone recently was able to cut down literally every tree on the property. (It appears the house was bought by an investor or someone quite wealthy.)

I honestly can't imagine the stress that an HOA would bring to my life.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm definitely still learning and making lots of mistakes along the way.

I don’t have a solution, but I just wanted to say thank you for doing whatever you can. It’s frustrating as fuck but it’s what we’ve got and it’s the only way I can sleep at night, so thanks for being another person doing the right thing.

Just do it because you will have a better life. You don't need much more reasons than this.

Walking barefoot in the wet grass while sipping your coffee, and smirking at the neighbors that still keep doing it wrong is optional.

In most places, the probability of a snake or a racoon hiding in the grass to attack you is negligible. We are loud. They have better things to do and plenty of places to run away.

I've lately wondered if people like us could setup a foundation to buy more land and setup private sanctuaries?

What do you think about this? Does anything like that exist currently?

I don't know, but that's an interesting idea. I've thought about looking into what it would take to protect certain trees and native plants on my property. But I have also wondered if that would also make my property unsellable. :(

Yeah when 99% of people don't care about this sort of issue or are unaware of it and keep cutting trees down it doesn't matter if a few people are doing all they can.

I go home to my parents' neighborhood in Florida and more and more of the trees are disappearing in a 100-year-old neighborhood. It's not even new houses being built. These are 50-year old houses.

There is 1 house in the entire neighborhood (has to be at least 1,000 houses) that had a "no mow may" sign for the bees and isn't a purely St. Augustine grass yard. This is an upper-income higher education neigborhood too.

The culture is changing to be even less tree friendly from what it was a few decades ago.

Honestly I don't have hope in general for our future environment. I do not think we will be able to stop what is coming (both temperature-wise and species-wise). Humans are desperate for money and unfortunately making money means making things as easy and convenient as possible to get/buy.

The planet will bounce back one way or another, short of a global nuclear war I don't see how we can do more damage than the asteroid that took out the dinausaurs. Humans just may not be here to enjoy it if we can't get out of the way and stop consuming natural resources for the sake Of GDP growth.

Right, no one cares about the planet, and rightfully so. The planet will be fine. It's humankind that's at stake.

And all the ecosystems and species we depend on*

> The planet will be fine. It's humankind that's at stake.

This is oft repeated, but it fails short of anything meaningful. The planet, as in a rock floating around in space, will be fine, yes. But what about the untold amount of species of plants and animals that are suffering and will continue to suffer in our wake?

They will adapt or die and something will replace them. Diversity will go down for a while and then back up again. It's almost impossible to sterilize Earth and as long as something lives on it will eventually flourish again. It will never be the same but something else will flourish.

Isn't it part of the question of whether life existed on Mars? If it did and got wiped out, it would mean that something else doesn't always flourish.

True, but we're talking about millions of years of possible desolation before that happens.

Hopefully many of them outlast us regardless of what stupid things we do, but yes this is a very real risk and we could take down a huge portion of diverse life on the planet with us.

All of life comes at the cost of other life, whether it be a human or a wolf or a kudzu vine.

Humans are the only chance Terran life has of surviving the death of the sun.

are you so sure? there are intelligent species other than humans. Perhaps they are simply human-like species in their nascent evolutionary state.

It's unlikely that a second industrial revolution can happen, since we already consumed all the easily mined resources.

Only the ones useful to us

But we left them on top, right?

Materials yes, but easily accessible sources of large amounts of energy are mostly gone.

I mean they will still have the sun.

Producing solar panels requires an advanced technical civilization being in place. You cannot jump from middle ages tech to producing solar panels with skipping dependence on fossil fuels in the intermediate steps.

You can still use water and wind which are also powered by the sun.

We had water and wind power for centuries before the industrial revolution happened.

Your point being?

It’s hard to extract the huge amounts of energy we get from fossil fuels from these sources without having a cheap energy source available to get you started.

Hard does not matter. If it takes the new life 100k years to go from agricultural to the industrial revolution rather than the 10k years it took us they will still get there. What I am saying is that it's not impossible to have an industrial revolution without coal. Not that it's not hard.

We did that in preindustrial age. In total, it didn’t amount to that much energy.

We at most did things like run a mill on a river. Now compare the megawatt output of a proper modern hydroelectric project and say it isn't much energy. Imagine a society side stepping coalburning and going right to big hydro projects. Even something like a forest specifically grown and cultivated for energy is a relatively new idea, and doesn’t require any real technology even beyond understanding systems theory.

Big hydro requires ungodly amounts of reinforced concrete, labor (to dig millions of cubic meters on earth) and transportation capacity (gotta transport that concrete on site - hard to do with ox-powered carriages on unpaved roads). I can't see say Louis the XIV's France ever pulling that off.

Despite this, dams and other monumental architecture as well as complicated water management controls were built in ancient times all over the world.

A tree is a solar panel and battery storage all in one.

We've been using them in pre-industrial times. Their energy output was not high enough to start industrial revolution.

Petrol is renewable, just not at our scale. I'm not sure where all the materials we left on the surface will be in a couple million years however.

If carbon is burned its in the atmosphere presumably. Thats easily accessible as it will eventually get absorbed as terrestrial biomass. Charcoal economies are technologically simpler than coal economies.

Of what use is this argument? It always comes up. The entire planet is suffering.

I can't speak for anyone else that may have said something similar, but for me this is an observation rather than an argument. I don't want this to be what happens, I simply haven't seen any meaningful number of people actually willing to make the types of changes that would reverse this course.

Getting rid of or drastically reducing oil use would be a huge step in the right direction, and probably one of the most meaningful things we could do today. That will never happen by choice though, we're way too dependant on cheap energy and the conceniences (and economics) it provides.

It’s not about the planet being fine or not, it’s about the planet being a nice place to live for our descents. Your ascends made a nice job to get you a better life. Removing birds species won’t help in that direction, as well as a ton of other direct and indirect stuff we make happening here.

I completely agree and in no way do I like what we are collectively doing to this planet. I try to live a pretty minimal life and limit my impact on the environment. But the fact is that we seem hell-bent on running the planet for our own gain and it would take a miracle at this point for us to pull out of the tailspin, even if we actually had the will.

I can only speak to the people I've engaged with in the US and parts of Europe, but people aren't really willing to make the changes that really seem most important to me. Drastically reducingoil use, for example, would make a big difference but would destroy the GDP measure that many countries value so highly and would cause a huge shock to most every industry in the world. We've grown too dependant on industrialized food, easy access to products, and the power of leveraging cheap energy to go back to doing most things manually or with the help of animal power.

Once you've established that and, luckily, don't fall into the camp of the ones who don't give a damn and just profit. How do you cope? It's a very depressing thought that puts in perspective absolutely everything, including reproduction.

That's a great question and really the ultimate trick. For me the situation is oddly a bit of optimism and hope in an otherwise totally screwed up system. I find peace in the idea that the planet will go on one way or another, if we humans cause too much damage it will get rid of us like a bad cold and move on.

That can absolutely be depressing as well, but that's where I have to remind myself that the environment functions on the scale of thousands of years rather than decades. This planet and the life on it is an absolutely amazing thing, and amazingly resilient. I hope we can pull out of this nosedive so that we can continue to see what humans come up with, but I rest assured that we can't literally destroy the planet and that "the end" for us will be well down the road.

In the meantime, I just try to do my part to minimize my impact and partner with nature rather than fight it. I want to enjoy my life, and for me part of that is pushing myself to the point of some frustration and discomfort. I live in a small house with simple utilities and hope to have it off grid soon. Yes I still have a car and buy some things from Amazon or the grocery store, but I do without when I can and at least a few times a week I get annoyed that I don't have more storage in my tiny house. I figure if I'm feeling a bit of that pain I must be doing something right and can better enjoy the good parts of life.

Thanks for the detailed answer :) I am still very unable to ignore the things I can't control which is likely my main problem. I think the small house soon to be off grid part may be a very good way to take a step back... It's way too easy to focus on absurd human behaviours in rather dense areas.

>Humans just may not be here to enjoy it if we can't get out of the way and stop consuming natural resources for the sake Of GDP growth.

Humans may be the only species to understand the concept of a species, and it seems some members don't care at all if the whole species disappears, as long as 'the planet' is fine. Intelligence may be an evolutionary dead end.

Nobody said otherwise.

I don't understand why someone always has to respond to climate apocalypse discussion with "but actually the planet will be fine."

The GP I was responding to did actually allude to a future of inevitable climate issues and species collapse.

For me the fact that the planet will love on regardless is a sign of optimism though, not doomsday apocalypse or some kind of perverse nihilism. It's like looking up at the stars, it reminds me of how small we are and that we're just a part of history rather than the start and end of it.

I suspect it’s common that my city (France) requires 1 thick-trunk tree per ~80 square meter (9m x 9m). Also there is a ratio of concrete-vs-earth of 10% (posh neighborhoods), 15% or 20%, and parking spots per living surface.

My yard is 30x50m => 1500sqm => 1275sqm must be kept as earth, I must have 18 trees (thick-trunk) (and 2 parking spots and the street must have 0.5 guest parking spot).

Wait, you have tree requirements, but you also have mandatory car parking requirements!?

I don't know about the tree requirement, as I don't believe I have that in my hometown, but we do have a mandatory 2 parking slots rule, within the limits of the property. The idea is to ease the parking space (less traffic jams, less people turning around searching for a place, less pollution also), avoid cars being on sidewalks and general security (better view of the surroundings when driving)

Yes, abstracting away that if people can conveniently park and use their car, they will use it for absolutely everything. That's why France is also champion of surburbia in Europe... We're are ruining our landscapes and cities with single family homes, only for that stupid summer bbq we've all seen on every bloody ad since childhood, and PSA's profit of course.

As soon as people have a house, they will have a car. Be realist. Building without parking space means they’ll invade the street parking.

On the other hand, I know places where companies can’t rent a house, they must stick to commercial-zoned areas. THAT’s enforcing the 10km-every-morning-to-go-to-work rule.

But again, suburbia is a pleasant lifestyle, we wouldn’t have to ruin landscapes if we could live downtown, but you guys make it horrible (Oh, hi Grégory Doucet). Sometimes intolerance bears a cost.

> As soon as people have a house, they will have a car. Be realist.

You don't even need to go to Japan or the Netherlands to understand that this is not true, you just need to spend a bit of time on YouTube: I recommend "Life where I'm from" for the former, and "Not just bikes" for the later.

> But again, suburbia is a pleasant lifestyle, we wouldn’t have to ruin landscapes if we could live downtown, but you guys make it horrible (Oh, hi Grégory Doucet). Sometimes intolerance bears a cost.

I don't think anyone is arguing about whether it's pleasant or not. I personally hate this lifestyle even though that's where I grew up, but that's irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that a car-centric suburbia is unsustainable at scale...

Yes, does your country allow building houses without parkings? Both parking and guest parking requirements are in proportion with square meters built.

It's common in a 50+ year old neighborhood for trees to be diseased or dead or have a root system that is growing into the foundation of buildings or other infrastructure. It's not that people don't want trees, it's that people don't want trees that are a liability during the next storm (which I'm guessing is especially true in a place like florida).

But just think about that. Imagine someone just up and moving into your yard, without your permission, and then they decide to bulldoze your house because it's getting in the way of <x>.

I do understand the practicalities and constraints of homeownership, but I do wish we, as a species, did a bit more thinking ahead and had more empathy for literally anything else besides us.

I doubt that it's people lack empathy, it's more that if a tree root starts cracking up your concrete or a dead branch falls on your roof in a storm it will likely cost you a lot more than just dealing with the tree in the first place.

It might cost you your life if it's a large tree.

"Imagine someone just up and moving into your yard, without your permission, and then they decide to bulldoze your house because it's getting in the way of <x>."

Sure, it sucks. That's called eminent domain.

it doesn't matter why people don't want trees. It's humans sacrificing trees for their needs/wants that matters. It's getting rid of trees and other natural things in general that is the problem. Humans' mere existence causes this.

>There is 1 house in the entire neighborhood (has to be at least 1,000 houses) that had a "no mow may" sign for the bees

That would be a huge HOA violation in many places.

In NZ, there's been successful local endeavours to, for example, plant nectar bearing trees in urban backyards to encourage endemic birds to return, another I know of to bring biodiversity into monoculture vineyard areas to keep the bees healthy, and they've worked because people benefit from them - our nectar feeding birds are also beautiful singers, and the song of the korimako/bellbird and tui are cherished, and the vineyard owners themselves benefit from healthier pollinators.

It's where there's no direct benefit, or the species is uncharismaric that it gets tricky. It's a lot harder to motivate people to preserve habitat for a stick insect or mudfish.

I think it might have something to do with feral and outdoor cats killing 1.4-3.7 billion birds per year in the US alone. [1] Individuals can do something here I wager, between education and taking responsibility by spaying and neutering.

It’s pretty wild to me that cats aren’t mentioned at all in this article since they’re absolutely massacring wild birds. They’re the leading cause of both bird and small mammal deaths in the US. They kill 10% of all US birds every year.

I do agree personal responsibility isn’t enough but it can certainly help.

[edit] in fact a cursory google shows the population of cats in the US is almost a perfect mirror of the bird population graph in the article since 1970.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo...

I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.

However, when you also have articles stating that migratory fish and insect populations have declined by 75% over the last 50 years [1,2] (which clearly isn't caused by outdoor cats) it would seem to me there are larger forces at work.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/27/migrator...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/25/the-inse...

I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.

Outside of birds, cats kill rodents. I live in rural Quebec, near farms, a massive nature preserve, and a national park larger than small US states.

When I first moved here, I had no cat, and several other neighbours were new to the area. Old houses, not fresh builds, just changeover of owners... they too with no cats.

The first year I was here, I became aware of the problem, and started to lay traps. And I caught 100+ mice, sometimes several per day for months, all inside my house.

Once Spring arrived, I tried to find entrances, and did! I blocked them, but anyone that knows rodents, and owns wood houses, that won't help if you have an out of control, local colony, and once the winter comes, do they ever want in!

I spent 3+ years with traps, sometimes reducing the population a bit, but each winter more than 50 mice.

Then a neightbour got a siamese cat.

I now catch a mouse or two a year.

If you look at mouse breeding and brood numbers, and you live in a area with loads of food in the summer (near farms, nature), you need something like cats. It's not an option, it just isn't.

There's a reason farmers have loads of semi-wild cats in their barns. And both the mice they catch, and the cats that catch them, are invasive.

And with the hantavirus often touted as 50% lethal, you do NOT want the moral responsibility of trap and release, nor do you want mice in your house. At all.

And yes, it is in the local population.

If they only killed mice that would be a fun fact, but they also kill 20 billion small mammals a year, lol. The point was though that cats are killing all the birds, that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangential at best to the topic at hand. I can accept that mice are a problem and cats are killing all the birds and small mammals at the same time. It’s kind of like saying DDT is fine actually because it helps a few farmers improve their crop yields. That it does, but it nukes the eagles from orbit too, and we have to look at this systemically.

Once we accepted DDT as a problem we found alternative solutions. But there’s also localized solutions. A few spayed/neutered farm cats aren’t the end of the world.

The outdoor neighborhood cats are the ones that are an issue. It sounds like promoting owl habitat would be a great targeted solution to mice problem without affecting small birds as much.

Great Horned Owls apparently also kill cats, so that might be a perfect solution.

I feel like we're sliding into snake territory now.

Owl also kill other birds, so...

They can, but that's less of an issue since other birds are not active at the same time.

But they're not pets that are released into the wild by the million.

that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangenti

You like to eat, yes? Because I assure you, without cats, or something to replace them that does what cats do, you and I will starve to death.

Farmers don't have cats because they're cute. 3They have them to stop rodents from eating silo, seeds, fields bare.

What do you plan to do? Spray death chemicals all over the place, as a replacement?

And no, trapping won't work. It never kills enough, and there are never enough traps.

Honestly, I sincerely doubt cats are the issue. Cats do very poorly away from human settlements, and therefore there's loads of area without cat habitat. In Canada, most of the land is cat free, there is so much land without cats, it would be impossible for them to wipe out a noticeable percentage of birds.

There's no way they're the problem, as a result of this, when we're talking about 1/3 of the birds.

A far better explanation is insect population collapse. Missing food.

> Because I assure you, without cats, or something to replace them that does what cats do, you and I will starve to death.

You could have made the same argument about DDT. You have to acknowledge the problem before you can find a different solution.

With enough determination it’s quite feasible. You know as a Canadian that Alberta is the only place in the Americas without rats. They have a very successful management program. [1]

Cats are an invasive species, so are rats. Alternatives exist, please stop being so defensive. Given this topical counterexample it hardly seems like a case of “cats vs food and hentavirus” since Alberta has no rats, plenty of food and no hentavirus without relying on cats.

> There's no way they're the problem, as a result of this, when we're talking about 1/3 of the birds.

… they kill 10% of birds per year. Times 3 years is just about 1/3. Given it occurred over 50 years I’d say we’ve got us a good candidate. Especially since there is documented evidence of them leading to the extinction of entire species. You can see how the math here is within the ballpark yeah?

[1] https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...

Alberta is not rat free. It claims to be, but poke about a bit, and you'll see how fake that claim is.

And rats are not mice. And Alberta has plenty of cats around farms.

And the replacements for DDT are destroying insect populations. The problem is NOT cats. I notice you didn't explain why birds, in all the areas without cats, which is all areas in Canada without human settlements very close by, which is most of Canadian land, are dying too.

You're attributing cats to the problem, then explaining how it's proof it's cats.

> Alberta is not rat free. It claims to be, but poke about a bit, and you'll see how fake that claim is.

Once again no sources cited on your part other than, I guess, your gut, and "poking around."

> The problem is NOT cats.

You haven't made a case for that. The studies I dug up say quite the opposite, that cats are a massive source of wild bird mortality, that they've driven several species to extinction. I have cited sources and you seem to just be shooting from the hip?

> ... in all the areas without cats, which is all areas in Canada without human settlements very close by, which is most of Canadian land, are dying too.

What makes you think cats aren't in areas without human settlements very close by? This map shows they're all over the place. [1] And if that doesn't convince you check out the invasive feral cat population map in Australia where they actually wanted to cull the population. [2] They live on every square inch of Australia, and let me tell you, people do not.

"In some cases, house cats have singularly contributed to the virtual disappearance of Vancouver Island bird species. The streaked horned lark, once a resident of southern Vancouver Island, is now likely locally extinct in Canada, and cats were cited as one of the main causes of nest failure." [1]

"The coastal vesper sparrow has seen its population drop by 85 per cent over the past decade, and a federal government analysis cited a “high concentration of domestic and feral cats” as factors in their decline." [1]

Stop just repeating "nuh uh" and dig up some studies or lets end this conversation here, because the fact is, you are wrong on this one.

> You're attributing cats to the problem, then explaining how it's proof it's cats.

No, I'm cities studies that attribute it to cats.

[1] https://www.capitaldaily.ca/news/cat-victoria-songbird-feral...

[2] https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/invasive-species/feral...

Wild house cats cannot live without prey, and they are not adapted to -40C, let alone -20C for weeks at a time. They cannot live in many parts of North America without humans settlements.

There are native cats in Canada, skilled at even detecting prey under feet of snow, but house cats are not that.

There is no significant cat presence in Canada, outside of human habitats.

I notice you cited Vancouver Island, the most temperate place in Canada. And there are deserts in Australia, cats don't live there without humans, yet there are birds adapted to the desert.

[citation needed]

> that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangential at best to the topic at hand

No, they help the people who are putting food on your plate. Good luck living your life if the farmers can’t do their job.

Some cats kill rodents. Mine (indoor cats) can't be bothered.

Did you think they were talking about literally every cat?

The GP wrote their post as if the choice was feral cats everywhere or we all get the hantavirus, so I think it's a fair point.

Over the last 27 years, 75% of the flying insects biomass has disappeared because of human activity. But it must be cats !

I wonder how humanity would deal with a 75% of our food supply disappearing by 2050. Cats would certainly take over us...

yup, If only we make all but indoor only incarcerated cat pets extinct we will bring balance to the world. It's not like we ever had outdoor cats before when the birds were plentiful. All sarcasm aside, insecticides and loss of habitat are major players in declining bird, bee and insect populations. Natural predators not so much.

I am pretty pro-climate / nature, but from a pure scientific bent and it is enlightening (and frightening) the frothing rage you get from most “green” people if you point out that having outdoor cats and having kids are two of the most damaging things you can do to your environment.

At the risk of getting flagged the logical conclusion to this train of thought is that the most effective singe action any individual can take to reduce carbon emissions is to mass murder their neighbors and then kill themselves.

"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."

Rustin Cohle, True Detective

You should also include dogs in your list of damaging things:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433840-800-how-a-bi...

"Birds, it turns out, seem to be particularly sensitised to dogs – even on leads. In woodlands outside Sydney, for example, a study found that people walking leashed dogs caused a 'dramatic' reduction in the diversity and abundance of birds – more than double that caused by the same number of people walking without pets."

actually, feral cats are what keep mouse, rat, squirrel and chipmunck populations in check and they are on their way to going extinct with the spay and neuter army out there. They do prey on birds when they can catch them but not at any great rate. You state 10%, that is not a massacre when you factor that cats are birds natural predators. Will you be erradicating eagles and falcons because they too prey on birds? Feral cats are not the same as abandoned house cats. Their home is the outdoors, why are we eradicating them to extinction? They are part of natures balance and an important rodent predator.

My neighbor has an outdoor cat. This cat kills at least one bird a day according to their kids (the cat brings the corpse to their porch). So I think you're tremendously mistaken about "not at any great rate."

Housecats are not native to most countries, and feral cat colonies are not healthy either (lots of disease). They are not part of "natures balance" and we're not eradicating them to extinction. That's just utter nonsense.

Before they were housecats fed from the grocery store, how many birds did they eat a day? A natural predator does not make their prey extinct.

Cats are an invasive species. They are not natural predators. That is the problem. I say this as a cat owner.

You are the owner of a domesticated species. Feral cats are part of natures food chain and natural balance. Without them there would be no stopping the rodent population.Not liking them being there doesn't make them invasive.

No, they're not. They're an invasive species brought to different locations around the world via human activity. The feral cats being discussed originated in the middle east and were brought to different continents by humans. North America's native cat species do not naturally target mice.

This is like saying the argentine black and white tegu is a natural part of the food chain in Florida. Please understand that humans bringing a species to a new location doesn't suddenly convert them to part of nature.

Cougars, wolves, coyotes. eagles, snakes (venomous and constrictors), hawks, and owls are natural predators of cats. Their populations have been decimated mostly by loss of habitat (same with birds). Peronnally I'd much rather be overrun by feral cats than rats any given day.

You have not responded to my statement about cats being an invasive species. I will interpret this as conceding the point.

Most housecats (that are allowed outside) don't kill prey for food. They do it for pleasure/instinct.

Er, cats are not native to North America. The 100M of them are descendants of the cats introduced by the colonists. They are an invasive species. They were never before and are not now part of natures balance in the Americas. So are rats in many places, having hitched rides on boats.

Okay, I hear you; however, I'm not sure that the idea that cats bear more responsibility for birds fatalities than humans passes my smell test, though.

Food for thought [0] - 269 million bird deaths a year in Canada alone is asserted. Cited reasons for death include: feral and pet cats, agriculture, oil and gas activities, and collisions with buildings.

As noted outdoor cats are domestic and thus kept alive by humans. Who's responsible in this scenario - the cat or the human? I suppose some feral cats are the result of/spawn of domestic cat abandonment as well.

[0] https://windsorstar.com/news/human-activity-killing-birds-by...

Cats in europe are even worse. You go to certain cities and there are thousands of strays lying on the roads and roofs, populations seemingly sustained by dumpster diving, rats, plus plenty of restaurant owners or workers straight up feed the cats regularly. There are seemingly no catch and fix programs like in the US.

a quick google search tells me that there are 75 million feral cats in the usa, far more than any other country - by area or population or any way you want to measure it

This seems like a number that would never be accurate no matter where you look. Either way, you just don’t see cities coated in cats like you do in Europe. Like dozens and dozens of cats up on a roof is a very common sight when you start exploring especially Mediterranean cities. Cats visiting you multiple times as you sit outside at cafes. Hotel and resort feral cat populations that the workers know by name at this point. I’ve seen it all. There’s just nothing like it in the US. Maybe in Key West at hemingways old home, I’m told.

I have no idea if it’s accurate, but would suggest that if it isn’t, then neither is the number of birds they supposedly kill a year

Side issue but this is why arguments against wind turbines "because they kill birds" are never spoken in good faith.

Yes, wind turbines kill birds.

Collisions with vehicles kill 1000 times more birds than wind turbines do.

Collisions with glass buildings kill 3 times more still.

And cats kill 4 times more still [0].

Wind turbine bird deaths are deep in the noise as sources of bird deaths. Yes, we should keep trying to reduce that number further. But if we really care about saving birds we have a lot more dirty laundry than wind turbines.

[0] https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds

Yep and both windmill and glass collisions are an easy fix. I believe it was black stripes on the windmill blades and UV stickers on glass.

> There's no one I can call to get help with my own yard because every landscaper knows nothing about ecology and uses loud and polluting gas-powered machinery.

For my own yard, in Washington State, I've interacted with a half dozen arborists and landscapers. Every one of them has been an expert in local species, has had concrete suggestions about what to plant and how to maintain, and is generally very excited to engage on the problem at the homeowner level.

Right, but that won’t happen until things become sufficiently painful enough (for the masses or corporate profits or both). Not ideal, but that’s the world we live in.

Consider local master gardeners. There are ones at our local community college and they’re incredibly helpful

No, individuals is the only way this works. Individuals started it and they can stop it.

But ideally in addition to doing things yourself and being an example you should also try to convince and encourage others to do it by raising awareness, supporting legislation, not using suppliers and not working for companies that violate those rules etc.

"Unless governments take action and penalize corporations for the harm they've done and take measures to prevent further harm,"

What would those measures look like?

Not OP but I’d assume something analogous to the tobacco lawsuits but for ecological damage caused by marketing of products generally known to be harmful to healthy natural ecosystems that trap users in a cycle of additional product use (once nature reacts to the apocalypse by starting additional pioneer plant growth in that are).

Actually that metaphor works rather well…

You say individuals cannot solve this, then go on to show how the problem is with individuals turning their yards into grass wastelands. Well if its individuals causing the problem, wouldn't it mean that individuals can solve it? Seems like your comment is contradicting itself.

no, they are referring to how difficult it is to awaken or change individuals.

I completely sympathize with you. Seriously. But I'm not sure the cause is simply narcissism - to my eyes the real root cause is abject ignorance. If they were to realize, like you, they would be unable to behave the way they do

> How can this compete with the dozens of neighbors in a half-mile radius that have removed in excess of hundreds of trees, big ones like oak, pine, maple, hickory and up to five feet in diameter, and turn their yards into grass wastelands? I never even see my neighbors use most of their yards. How do you compete against that level of narcissisim and lack of empathy?

Moving might be an option. There are places where this doesn't happen and while you might have other problems, you probably won't have those problems.

I don't think the issue is whether GP lives next to neighbors with these kind of lawns, but more that the relative proportion of bird-hostile yards is outpacing any individual attempt to counterbalance. Moving only solves the problem if the only thing you care about is the extent to which you, personally, are forced to see one of the causes of this population drop in your daily life. It doesn't address the problem itself, which is kind of also GP's point.

No person can solve this. Techno-optimist HN won’t believe me now, but we’re living through the Collapse of the civilization right now. Ukraine, banks, covid, climate change and all else are merely symptoms of human population overshoot. See https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea...

I agree with the sentiment but a couple problems with this approach

1. When you put the onus on the individual, powerful organisations will jump at the opportunity to absolve themselves of blame. Look at recycling and how it was pushed by the plastics lobby or the idea of a “personal carbon footprint” that was pushed by oil companies. There is a fact that these are systemic problems, that require systemic solutions.

2. History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. Which massive threat to human life has been solved through bottom-up grass roots action (I.e. not protest to drive systemic change)? Look at small pox, the ozone and cfcs, covid, lead pipes, asbestos, etc. these all required huge top down programmes to deliver results.

> When you put the onus on the individual, powerful organisations will jump at the opportunity to absolve themselves of blame.

Powerful organizations already absolved themselves. Check out the headline.

Also, this doesn’t put the onus on individuals. Individuals aren’t responsible for the change, but they are powerful enough to do something.

Doing something doesn’t mean doing everything.

The question to me is: what is the thing I should do? Where should I invest my energy?

Time and energy are finite resources and taking political action to drive systemic change has proven results (see previous examples).

I don’t know of any transformative movement against mass threat to human life that hasn’t relied on some form of top-down implementation to achieve its aims. Maybe environmental vegetarianism in the west? But that’s hardly been an unqualified success…

But they didn’t start with top down action:

Sustained political movements that drive results build upwards through the layers outlined, because that’s how you change culture — and politics is downstream of culture.

We live in a democracy, so if you don’t convince your neighbors first, then politicians will correctly respect the majority’s wishes over yours.

COVID is a great counter example:

The reason that it destroyed our society and has led to years of bitter fighting that’s doing massive damage to public health is precisely because it was authoritarian policy lacking public consensus — and now is likely to destroy many of the institutions that supported it in the backlash, as the public investigates gain of function, PSYOPs, ineffective policy interventions, etc.

I’m able to focus on multiple items.

But let’s assume that I must choose one thing to focus my energy. Birds are better off with me working on a habitat in my back yard that maybe homes 10 birds over my lifetime, the next 70 years.

That will have a greater impact than any way I can influence top-down implementations.

But fortunately, I can both build a habitat, donate to environmental charities, advocate for improvement, and vote for political parties.

WRT #2, I'd argue that many, MANY peoples – towns, families, cultures – have survived MUCH longer thanks to their bottom-up, localist thinking. I'm not saying top-down doesn't work, but it clearly isn't working for climate change. Too many adverse incentives, to much systemic ineffectiveness.

Re. #1 it drives me nuts when I see articles with titles like “Did you know that almond milk uses X gallons of water to make?” as if the onus is on me to understand the calculus of almond vs. cow milk vs. just pouring plain water on my cereal.

If we look at every issue an article like that wants to point to they all have mostly systemic causes, big Ag pushing factory dairy farms, heavy water subsidies for almond growers on land that otherwise wouldn’t support growing almonds, etc.

I hate that in the name of “conserving the earth” there’s this sort of endless game of shame and blame. Switch from cow milk to almond milk, not good enough. Recycle plastic, oh but you need to be aware of which plastics you’re recycling. You can switch to reusable containers. Oh but don’t buy aluminum, the carbon footprint for producing it is too high.

If we just decided to regulate one thing, like the diesel fuel container ships use, that would have a bigger effect than any of those environmental “tips”.

Personally, I think this is why solutions such as carbon taxes and appropriate pricing are the way to go. Market forces start bringing out the desirable outcomes as people look to find ways of living, purchasing, and consuming sustainably.

The unfortunate state of things is that we've run out of the problems that we can solve and are left with the problem we can't solve.

Our society/species is pretty terrible with problems that involve diffuse responsibility. Part of the problem is that we don't have social technologies equipped to handle diffuse responsibility, and another is that we have social agents who exploit this social bug to make money.

Well put. I thought about bringing up the many, many solar panel scams. What an absolute shame.

are there many solar panel scams? I had no idea

All over social media, spam, everywhere. What happened was the U.S. and state governments started offering tax incentives, so a bunch of middlemen (scammers) popped up to take a portion of that benefit while marketing it to regular folk. It's a whole cottage industry (barf):

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/solar-alternative-energy/review...

https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/solar-panel-s...

I’ve been reading Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” recently. The book makes the point that the history of Homo Sapiens coincides with mass extinction - humankind has been disrupting and destroying habitats since it rapidly expanded out of Africa 300k years ago. Even before the agricultural revolution.

It happens time and again throughout various geographies and histories, Homo Sapiens arrive somewhere and then a ton of species go extinct. Abstract ideas evolve faster than genes, and the evolution of the ability to process such ideas allowed our species to jump to the top of the food chain too fast for the typical checks and balances in nature to take place.

I think the best we can probably do is to continue to invest in education, science and technology. If people (particularly women) are educated and empowered enough, then it seems to drive down birth rates. Science and technology because if we can drive the costs of fixing these issues low enough, then we might be one day be able to “undo” some of the tragedies that we’ll have caused along the way.

Culling luxury/non-essential consumption would already get us quite far. But we wanted dutiful consumers and boy do we have them now; plus we built a large part of our wealth on that behavior so it sticks.

And to add to that, virtually every externality of our consumption is invisible at the point of sale, and it requires abstract thinking to even get the idea that there might be something wrong with it. But even with an inquisitive mind finding out the concrete externalities is really difficult when the deed is done and hidden in complex supply chains.

Really our best bet I think is to define minimum untouchable habitat and have the effects of that ripple through the economy on its own (the effects of this will be really unpopular, I fear; wonder how 30 by 30 will turn out). Not sure (hard) technology or education could help us in a way or on a timespan that matters by now, but I guess one needs to do appropriate things on all fronts, fit-for-purpose for the various societies/target groups.

So much for the naive idea that humanity lived in harmony with nature until the rise of civilization a few thousand years ago. We and our extinct cousins were invasive species migrating out of Africa.

Agreed about driving down the cost of fixing these problems. They’re so complex and universal that there is no simple solution everyone can just vote on.

Thanks for the book recommendation.

Does anyone know a good reference that discusses technology in the context of evolution? I think it's less abstract ideas and more technology that evolution can't keep up with. It's likely many other animal species can think abstractly, such as whales. But it is our technology development that surpasess everything, even our own emotional ability and intelligence.

I don't like it, but it could be worth reading Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants". I find some flaws in Kelly's thinking, but his central idea (as presented in this book) is worth considering.

Thanks for recommending that. I've never heard of it. Do you mind elaborating on what you think the flaws are?

> If people (particularly women) are educated and empowered enough, then it seems to drive down birth rates

Good luck selling that line when people like Musk are on record saying that it's better for the planet and for humanity to have more kids

I don’t know if Musk said exactly this. But what I find interesting is that people would rather evoke the name of Elon for some political point winning than to actually discuss the merits of the idea itself.

it’s more confusing to me given the fact that Musk literally commercialized and made viable the idea of a car that has a true chance to reduce pollution.

No we can solve these problems. We know the solutions. It's government regulation, complete with punative fines and imprisonment on not just corporations, but the executives of the corporations. We choose not to solve them, because it will make a multibillionare a mere single billionares and we believe this is bad, because the billionares tell us it's bad.

In the United States has been an intentional, systemic, and documented propaganda campaign (their term even!) from the 1900s, with an even larger emphasis since the 1930s, to today by the National Association of Manufacturers -- the funders of hayek and Friedman -- to delegitimize any attempt to put any regulation as not only antibuisness, but antifreedom, and it's bullshit. It's to trick people into thinking they aren't just powerless, but being powerless is actually good.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. There is plenty of precedent for society level change leading to improvement. National parks, air quality, public health, etc.

At the risk of sounding reductive, the problem in your example is getting folks to choose differently. This applies at both the meta and mesa levels or in other words, within the present system and the choice of which system. That's what I mean when I talk about social technologies. We lack the social mechanisms, or in other words, they must be developed to overcome it.

If individuals are responsible for just 1% of the issues then even if we eliminate them "bottom-up" completely, we are still left with 99% of issues that should be fixed at another level.

For example, consider what would save more water: 10 million people stopping showering completely or one corporation stopping production of water-intensive crops in a desert.

What if politicians do not have the political support to stop the one corporation because 9.99 million people like to consume the water intensive crops grown in the desert?

Typically these water intensive crops are not even consumed by people!

Much of it is alfalfa which gets exported to foreign cattle farms.

We can very much stop raising these water intensive crops in the desert and affect exactly 0 people’s access to food.

Actually, I think that localized thinking has benefits that are so much better than the status quo of globalization that that 99% the issues you describe would be vacated.

Like let's talk about food, how we get bananas from across the globe. Who the hell needs bananas when you can buy fresh, seasonal fruit from the farmer an hour away? Yeah you might not get to have banana cream pie for Christmas, but you made a new friend (the farmer) had a good time (with your family at the peach orchard) and ate something that didn't need to be coated in poison to survive a f'ing trip through the Panama Canal! (I know I'm pulling this out of my ass – but you get the gist)

People want fresh fruit and vegetables year round though.

I don't expect the lone grocery shopper will be able to weigh the externalized costs of a cheap, delicious banana so accurately as a regulator. The trick is keeping the banana merchant from turning the regulator into a shareholder of BananaCo. Tell someone if you discover how to accomplish that.

Well put! Consumers have very divergent needs and desires in our system because we built our system to reduce consumer analysis and increase consumption. It's amazing that folks come on here and place additional responsibilities on consumers when all market forces are shoving them in the opposite direction. It's essentially victim blaming.

Individual solutions are mostly a fantasy. It's what we tell ourselves because the real solutions are fundamentally at odds with democracy and freedom. A few exceptions aside, people have never voted for a lower quality of life and personal degrowth. Instead, we prefer to slice and shift the blame around until no one is really responsible anymore. Your vision hangs on some sort of mass enlightenment that's just not going to happen. How many tragedies of the commons have been solved this way irl? Imagine being a fisherman in a Chinese trawler off the coast of West Africa. You could decide to stop overfishing. What then? You'll get fired and replaced by someone more desperate than you. The real world is a lot more complicated that "building a bird-friendly yard".

>All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".

That's the entire point of having concentration of power though. The decision makers can coordinate and manage things in ways the individual cannot. That alone gives them the responsibility to seek out a solution for worldwide issues. The lone individual is bound to follow basic instincts, rule of law and economic opportunities.

The problem is none of your solutions are viable either. Even if they were executed the results are usually negligible. In fact most of your solutions end up making us feel better about ourselves. But this is all illusion.

For these huge environmental problems humanity is facing, I'm sorry to say the only way it to do huge drastic unrealistic changes that will never occur because humanity doesn't have the will power to pull it off.

The real honest answer is that there no "solutioning" the worst case scenario will likely play out.

I know you think you're being a pragmatist and a realist, but 'tis you who are suffering the illusion. Localism has incredible antifragile second- and third-order effects in the face of wider catastrophe.

The tragedy of the commons ends up making local-ism non viable at any level of legitimate scale. Any of it that does get implemented therefore becomes negligible in effect.

> viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up

Don't have outdoor cats: https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/

From the cited source: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely __the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.__

(emphasis my own) Besides this, your cats will live longer and healthier. Like the average cat lives twice as long (or more) when indoor. Do it for the birds, do it for the squirrels and other small mammals, and do it for your own fucking cat.

There’s a bunch of statistics that just sound like nonsense and get repeated on the internet constantly. On the Mt. Rushmore of this list is the cats killing billions of birds a year. Another one is how efficient dishwashers are compared to hand washing dishes.

That depends enormously on what 'efficient' means. They certainly save a lot of time so that's an efficiency. They do use less water for the same amount of washing, so they are more efficient with water. The only problem with that is that, just with most efficiency gains, the result is more consumption. In this case, dirtying more dishes.

So I would argue dishwashers are demonstrably more efficient than hand washing dishes. Whether that means better for the environment is an entirely different question that has to take into account manufacture and use.

> So I would argue dishwashers are demonstrably more efficient than hand washing dishes

Yeah my argument is that this is nonsense. Just turn the tap off often when you’re scrubbing the dishes (use the water for rinsing) and it should be obvious that you’re using less water — particularly when you take into account the fact that a dishwasher uses 4 gallons of water no matter how many dishes are in it.

Under ideal conditions perhaps a modern dishwasher comes out ahead, but again maybe the ideal Rambo bird-killing-machine cat is also capable of decimating local bird populations.

I've measured my (previously owned dishwasher; don't have one at the moment), and compared it to handwashing in terms of water used.

How did I measure it? I had the DW drain into a bucket.

The DW won hands down. I also learnt to wash dishes without the water running when I was a kid.

Yes, the proviso that you should only run it when it is full is important, but I assumed everyone knew that.

The other twist on water 'waste' is where does it go afterwards for recovery?

Cities often have systems, we're in rural Australia and are water conscious- as far as dish and clothes washing go that's grey water discharge which goes onto a near house mulch pit for household rottables and garden waste, the water that reaches the pit bottom hits a crushed stone bed with slotted pipe that drains water to above the vegetable garden and fruit trees (between the leach drains ) where it moves through the soil making tomatoes, potatoes, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, etc.

No dishwasher, no tap running - but regardless of how much water we use in the kitchen none of that truly goes to waste, if we use more we just put less on the garden from the same source tanks (which are all level gauged).

Does that filter all the microplastics from washed clothes?

Microplastics shed from synthetic fibre clothes probably stay in the mulch, crushed rock and sand and don't reach the roots of the vegetables and trees and don't feature in the runoff (from sub surface water travel) at the base of the slope.

Mulch on garden with microplastics is likely ok as plants extract the minerals | elements they need.

I'd have to sample and check.

A great deal of our clothing, bedding, towels, etc is natural fibre in any case.

The average faucet puts out about 2 gallons per min. Even if i turn off the faucet between scrubbing it would take more than two mins of the faucet on for me. I do agree that it me use more dishes so there’s that.

You turn the faucet on at full blast every time you open it? I let out enough to rinse, but you do most of the mixing of soap and water for rinsing mechanically rather than just trying to blast it away with a high-pressure water stream.

Excellent point I don’t. But on the flip side I know I cannot use as little soap as a dishwasher since it’s down the drain

I have always, and I'm sure most people at home do, filled the dishwasher up completely before turning it on. That's quite a substantial load of dishes each time, 2 meals worth + sundry in a 5 person household. The dishwasher I have says it uses 6 litres per wash on the normal automatic mode. That's just over 1.5 gallons, and even if a total lie and it uses twice as much that's still only 12 litres / 3 gallons.

Where it probably falls down is where they have dishwashers in office kitchens where they don't fill it up and chuck it on anyway so they have their favourite coffee mug ready for the morning.

Well the cat number is cited from a paper and it does pass the sniff test. There's 45 million cats in America so that's 29 - 89 birds/cat/yr. That's not an unreasonable number, even taking into account a power distribution (I would buy that there's cats out there killing several birds a week, as I've seen this with my own eyes). The higher number probably over counts domestic cats though, but that's not too meaningful to my point given how these cats come to existence. Sure, publication doesn't mean absolutely correct, but there's nothing very suspicious about this one that I'm seeing at least. But I didn't do a deep dive either.

Repeated? They've cited their source. Why take issue with it like it's a whispered rumor rather than a paper with specificity you can disagree with?

I can totally accept the paper being wrong, but yeah this is how I feel. Fine to reject the claim, but if it's the word of a random commenter saying "trust me bro" vs that of researchers who published in nature and put all their evidence out there for everyone to see... I'm going with the latter (I'd even go with that were it not published).

Like at least make some critique about the study instead of: claims bullshit, refuses to elaborate, leaves.

In New Zealand, cats kill 100 million birds a year. We have 5 million people. I can easily imagine with US population, cats in the US could account for a billion birds.

From the quote you cited, it sounds like we need to manage strays much more so than owned cats. Considering that indoor/outdoor cats are indoors some of the time, we would assume that owned cats are not really a priority here.

30-90 birds/cat/year seems extraordinarily high when considering the behavior of all the cats I know who spend time outside.

Well cats are definitely highly in-homogeneous hunters and some do A LOT and others very little. I'm sure the high end of that number is counting strays but I've known cats to grab a bird a few times a week. The thing is that many cats aren't showing you their spoils. Also, remember that cats sleep most of the day and their hunting is primarily done at limited hours. Though (indoor/)outdoor cats tend to be more active. You're probably not going to meet these cats though unless you've been to a rural area. Barn cats tend to be pretty effective predators. If you're in a bigger city, well there's not going to be as many birds (less opportunities) and you're probably less likely to see the spoils as if you have an adverse reaction one time then they won't show you again. They're just bringing back home a toy, not a meal.

One to two birds per week sounds low to me. Cats kill for fun.

Jane Goodall has a very simple and realistic (but not easy) framework for recovering from the anthropocene extinction:

1. Eliminate poverty worldwide (this is essential because desperately poor people will not let environmental concerns keep them from basic survival) 2. Radically reduce resource consumption by rich nations and individuals 3. Eliminate government corruption 4. Stop human population increase

Obviously achieving this will require upending many power structures and confronting many deficiencies of human nature. But when you see it laid out like that, it seems obvious that is task ahead of us.

"Bird-friendly yard" is probably the most counterproductive of these. Habitat loss is far and away the biggest problem that birds face. Anyone having a yard is the problem. People must learn to congregate in compact development forms and leave the land for the animals, if they care about having animals.

Probably the only easy life change individuals can do is not eat meat and not buy ethanol. That would return tons of land to natural uses.

This is exactly what GP is talking about.

Millions of people have a yard right now, today. Telling them to not do a little something for birds right now, and instead they should feel bad unless they uproot their life this instant to become one micron in what would be at best a generational reurbanization project is the kind of thing that gets people to just tune this stuff out.

The rational choice of an individual, if the “real answer” is disruptive to their life and will take massive state incentives and/or coercion, is to wait for the carrot & stick to actually be produced. So why not put some, idk, whatever is bird friendly in the yard in the meantime?

Each homeowner just needs to cut back a little and dedicate a percentage to native plants and wilder growth. What we need are the right insects in each region, then the birds will follow. A huge manicured lawn (pesticides make it worse but even without) and none native plantings allow the wrong bugs to win, and in some cases those bugs are not good food for the birds that live in that region or temperate zone.

We don’t need complete wilding or any bad feels, just learn to appreciate the beauty of a wilder native section of a property.

No, I am not an expert but this seems to be the easiest thing to do.

I’m in the Midwest. I noticed a big drop off in birds when westnile virus came through. Dead birds in the middle of the yard was a dead giveaway. Don’t see crows anymore.

But when I was a kid I never saw hawks, now I can usually spot 5 or 6 when I’m out during the day.

Makes me wonder what the baseline count should be.

This is a book I enjoyed in which the core message is that the way we first saw a place, as children, or when we moved there, influences the way we imagine its undisturbed natural state, whether that's true or not.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Once_And_Future_Wor...

A couple weeks ago there were 5 eagles circling overhead where I live.

"Air pollution particles may be cause of dramatic drop in global insect numbers" (2023) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230712124747.h... :

> Researchers report that an insect's ability to find food and a mate is reduced when their antennae are contaminated by particulate matter from industry, transport, bushfires, and other sources of air pollution.

So catalytic converters, catalytic combustors, AGR Acidic Gas Reduction, Net Zero homes and vehicles etc. may be pretty impactful.

(In addition to planting and allowing clover and dandelions for the bees; and leaving longer grass for fireflies and ticks and CO2 capture and grasshoppers)

An herbicide that doesn't kill clover would make for prettier lawns; but the non-grass plants in the lawn are the food of the insects, which are the food of the birds.

I find it hilarious, that no one mentions the real solution. Of course, once it's spoken it's obvious why it can't even be spoken aloud...

5. Exterminate all stray/unlicensed cats, exterminate all indoor cats if caught outside and fine the registered owners $50,000.

If I posted this on reddit, I'd have maniacs stalking me and issuing death threats. Maybe here it'll only be hatemail.

But cats are so cute! We can enslave and torture chickens, cows, and pigs, but how dare you threaten kitties!

It's not a solution, it's cheap bluff. Try to voice this idea on an HOA meeting and tell Ms. Smith that you noticed her kitty outside and that next time you'd "exterminate" it. If you can't do that, how are you going to convince people to vote for such a law?

Solutions are still solutions even if you're unwilling to implement them.

I just said "keep tight control of your songbird-murdering organic robots"... and you replied with "it's a bluff, you can't convince people to do that!"

Filing this under no-shit-sherlock.

They are actually trying to do this in australia: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/magazine/australia-cat-ki...

> All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".

Other way around really.

"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."

You're not going to do anything about that individually.

You could opt out of the whole system and grow your own food, but that isn't viable as a solution across the entire population. It would take literally everyone doing that and most people simply will not.

And focusing on the individual as the solution lets corporations and governments off of the hook. We've been trying to "reduce, reuse, recycle" our way out the problem at a local level and it isn't remotely sufficient.

The problem is we shouldn’t be working against the government on this. Problems like this are why governments exist, it needs to happen at that scale. Unfortunately, it seems like we’ve forgotten how to solve social problems of any significant scale.

Many folks don’t consider it a problem - let alone one they want to solve.

It’s working as intended, when you get out of the bubble.

"We" haven't forgotten how to solve social problems. Not to get all political, but at least in the United States, there is tremendous pressure not to solve any problems. Our elites are content with the status quo.

I took my dead yard and added about a dozen apple, fig, and shade trees. This brought some birds for sure. I would still expect to see more though given the seed I put out.

I'm guessing massive cities and suburban sprawl are a big part of the problem. Most yards are literally just grass which often requires tons of weed killer and fertilizer in some areas. As a society we're so dumb sometimes. My mother also has a bunch of cats and they've killed dozens of birds over the years. That probably adds up.

Doing things yourself is good, but these "you personally need to" has a very, very bad aftertaste with things like

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

Is there a version of Poe's law for idealists (which I assume you are) and shills?

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is the largest charity in the UK by membership. People do take a lot of direct personal action on this topic.

That gets dismissed as “virtue signalling” as “it won’t make a significant difference.”

That is basically the Conservative rank and file line for why Canada shouldn’t reduce emissions. They say “we are only 1.5% of emissions, so it won’t matter.”

I am not arguing that your way is bad, but that there will be stiff resistance either way. At least with government, you just need to win once and inertia means that it likely sticks.

I disagree. If you can see immediate benefits in your neighborhood – for instance, more birds showing up – then 'acting locally, thinking globally' is more effective than the reverse.

Oh that argument from cons really gets me enraged. As a comparison to show their inconsistent reasons oh conservatives are proud of Canada’s contribution to the world wars, you never hear conservatives say “we only contributed 1.5% to the war effort, so it won’t matter”

It’s not clear that Canada’s self-sabotage of it's most profitable industry (oil and gas) will benefit its people or the environment in the long run.

On the other hand, when it comes to fighting actual Nazis in WW2, every bullet counts.

> At least with government, you just need to win once and inertia means that it likely sticks.

This isn't remotely true. Regulatory bodies are chronically underfunded and undermined in north America because they're villainized by corporate donors and the politicians they pay for.

That means they take a long time to write a rule. Same with a legislature. But once written, how often do they go away?

The laws get their teeth removed, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly. Laws mean nothing if they aren't enforced.

In Sweden, the Eurasian Skylark has been in decline, due to loss of habitat. It thrives in high grass on the kind of land that is ploughed and used for agriculture. But you can now pay farmers for a "lark square". For 100 SEK for a year, about 10 USD, the farmer will leave a rectangle unplowed, which will benefit the Skylark. This photos illustrates "lark squares"

https://64.media.tumblr.com/8fc53eb231b08f8476b5a8f76eb20ef9...

https://www.lantmannen.se/44bdd3/siteassets/images/06-innova...

This initiative is supported by Birdlife Sweden and has had a proven effect.

Brilliant. I read somewhere that they were encouraging the use of hedgerows in the UK for the same basic reasons; that it provides habitat for myriad wildlife amongst farming fields.

1. Regular individuals: vote for city, county, state, and federal candidates who acknowledge the scope of the problem and want to solve it. Vote against people who deny the crisis’s existence.

I think people have been doing this since the 60s and it hasn't had much of an effect, which is my point. If the political solution is ineffective, pivot.

This is a myopic, self defeating view of recent American history.

Do you believe that the American people, by focusing on change via government, have been sufficiently effective in preventing a forthcoming (or probably currently underway) environmental collapse?

Do you believe a majority has tried what you’re suggesting? I think the answer is no. Nevertheless, over a trillion dollars will be spent over the next ten years on incentives to make our country carbon-neutral because enough people turned out to vote in 2020 to secure a slim majority of federal legislative seats to affect such a change. https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/the-us-is-po....

Here’s another example for you: it would’ve been unthinkable in 1996 when a Democratic President signed the so-called and repugnant “Defense of Marriage Act” into law that about 26 years later, support for gay marriage among Americans would be over 70%, and that a bipartisan coalition of Senators could get behind a bill to enshrine same-sex marriage into law, but here we are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_for_Marriage_Act

Nihilism doesn’t do any good for anyone. If you live in a heavily gerrymandered state with climate deniers elected to a majority of seats, start volunteering with a group that seeks to eliminate gerrymandering in your state with independent redistricting commissions.

Right, or you can just start doing it on your own, per my original suggestion.

Government is useless and f*cks up nearly everything it touches. People need to do it themselves now.

Good luck!

> What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of problems, is viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up, and in the following hierarchy:

You want magic. The thing you are describing is called magic.

In my mind this is just like entropy in action. We hit the exponential growth curve and we're going to cull ourselves out of our environment, taking other things out with us or before us because humans dominate that much of nature at this point. Just seems like an unstoppable force. As far as I know exponential growth curves lead to something like that in all animals independently of their behavior because Darwinian adaptation in animals is much slower than the decline caused by exponential growth.

I'm a regular individual. I don't have a yard. I live in a city.

Renters all over have restrictions on what they can do with a yard. You simply cannot rent and "build a bird-friendly yard" in most places. Sometimes, you cannot dig to add a garden, let along replace things. And why would you? It would just give the landlord even more money.

And the landlords aren't going to do it without some pressure, which isn't going to come. Renters don't really have power in most places and we can't even get some of the folks to keep up a safe place.

Do you think a neighborhood can just "build a bird friendly park"? Many neighborhoods don't have parks, at least not in the Midwest. Who is going to donate their house or yard to do this? Are poor neighborhoods just out of luck? Where are folks and small towns going to get the money?

Don't architects and urban planners work with these "powerful forces" in general? How are they going to do anything without the government - especially a city planner?

What do you expect small groups to be able to do without a larger force? How do you expect any of these organizations to actually do anything?

All of your suggestions reek of things like "jaywalking", which came from pro-auto propaganda, and "litterbug campaigns", which were propaganda from companies to shift the blame from them to the consumer.

Recently bought a house with a beautiful backyard on a pond. I put a couple bird feeders up because I noticed a cardinal male and female occasionally hanging out on the lawn. Now my yard looks like a bird sanctuary! I love it.

My next step for a new age take on an old man hobby is to get some cameras hooked up to an NVR that can do object detection and point them right at the bird feeders so I can get a stream of recent visitors.

bottom-up solutions only have so much effectiveness though, and at some point crosses a line into feel-goodery.

does building a bird-friendly yard actually accomplish anything? does building a bird-friendly park actually accomplish anything? is there any science that backs up an argument that people have the power to do anything at all about this, or are these just individual actions that make people feel like they're helping to solve the problem while diverting their attention away from actual practical solutions?

individual actions aren't free. making people feel like they're doing something is counterproductive if it's not helping in a meaningful way. we've all been sorting our plastic recycling for the last 30 years, and the only practical outcome of that is that we feel better about creating more plastic waste. if planting "bird-friendly" gardens doesn't do anything beyond make people feel better about killing birds, then let's not do that.

I agree that I like grassroots solutions. However, what would that look like here? The main culprit is that grasslands have disappeared on a massive scale, being replaced by farms and houses. Of course there are still some bird in protected areas or larger yards, but I don't think anything will be able to make up for the population loss when the habitat loss is so great.

The one thing thats not mentioned in the article that might make a difference at a smaller level is pesticides. Many people love to have a yard without weeds and without bugs. Without some flowering weeds, many bugs have no food. Pesticides kill the rest. Now what will the birds eat? There aren't any flowering or seed producing plants and there aren't any bugs.

I hate ticks and mosquitoes, but there are some targeted solutions for those.

There is no individual solution to climate catastrophe. The vast majority of individuals have little to no impact on carbon emissions. We need concerted legislation focused on fixing the causes of our ecological collapse to make a dent. The market will not save us and neither will individual action.

When people say "We need concerted..." how do you suppose we get it. I'm 100% agreeing with you but how?

Vote for RFK? Honestly and respectfully?

So, let's think of previous global crises.

What would be the bottom-up way to handle, say, the acid rain crisis, which was caused by excessive sulfur dioxide emissions and was resolved by top-down legislation.

Or alternately, what would be the bottom-up solution to World War 2?

My garden is full of birds. The neighbour forgot to trim his huge tree one year and it was full of bird nests.

Birds are left with no place to live near / in cities if there's so little gardens and trees.

But put some water, grass and trees and birds show up.

Having a water source is also huge. Saw migratory birds too, multiple years.

I don't think it's on purpose or not but our small towns and back yards are just not welcoming for nature. If there's a little room, animals do come.

But real estate is all about room! People need to keep storing stuff. My neighbors on basically all sides keep building sheds and extending their homes. Pretty soon they will have no grass to speak of. But plenty of room for storage.

I know your intentions are good here, but honestly the less human interference the better. we didn't design their habitats, and i highly doubt we'd get it better than mother nature did. we humans are an self-excluding and blameless bunch. we constantly lust for providing solutions for ecology, but no matter how much "solutioning" we throw at it, the problem cannot, and will never be fixed by human involvement. the best thing we can do is live our lives simpler, and start to think how we can lessen our impact on the environment. i am willing to bet all my money that not a single person on this planet, is willing to do this 100%. yes, it is hard to go back to our roots, but living as an exclusive being, that considers itself deserving of reaping the benefits of industrialization and high-tech, at the same time not realizing the enormous impact our daily lives have on things, is not acceptable behaviour.

we are like bacteria in a petri dish of agar. eventually we will consume all and destroy our own thriving habitat. it's inevitable. go to any developed area of the US! watch the highways in that area everyday! tell me that we don't have an impact after seeing how many cars pass you that day (i bet you couldn't even count them all)! the massive amounts of energy consumed, toxic chemicals that enter the water tables, runoffs, and larger bodies of water, the emissions from each vehicle, and the amount of natural resources consumed to make each car. this is just one example of our gigantic impact we have, yet we treat it as if it was nothing.

1. don't build bird friendly yards! you draw in predators to a centralized location, and can lead to a large localized food-source dependency that is detrimental avian health, and what happens when that location is no longer maintained? stop building!!!

2. see #1 and don't draw natural beings into an artificial environment, but do the reverse. these are beings of nature, not downtown.

3. these things already exist and is not helping (i birdwatch while hiking. good for me, useless to ailing birds).

4. see #1 and #2

this is solutioning. sorry to point that out. my point being, lessen your impact don't increase it

The main issue with humans and their ancestors and the environment is from agriculture. We went from hunting and gathering for millions of years, skimming excess carrying capacity off the land in low numbers, to agriculture only a few thousands of years ago, where we manipulate the environment to suit our needs where we are. We just aren’t adapted to agriculture let alone modern life. Mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships do not happen overnight, nor in the timespan that we have been farming and amassing population. So long as we insist that there must be some 8 billion people living at once on earth, the biomass to fuel that massive population has to come from somewhere in the system, and considering the complexity just about anything we do is liable to have deleterious nth order effects we will never be able to anticipate until they are plainly obvious.

indeed

Most people don’t want to hear the hard truth, which is that political activism - that is, incentizing large institutions to change behavior - is the single most effective individual action we can take for both things like birding and things like climate change (which are of course linked).

It’s not fun to hear this. It’s a lot more fun and rewarding to build a bird house or start a local bird park. These aren’t net zero effect things but if we’re ultimately concerned about efficiency and impact, they are nominal.

We are clearly at the stage of human civilization where we have to start looking beyond immediate gratification. Is that possible? I don’t know.

Ask HN: Are there any companies doing good work in this space?

I'm looking for a new gig and have been shocked at how few companies seem to understand the types of solutions that stand a chance at making a difference re: these sorts of problems.

The most impactful solution for individuals is also enormously unpopular in certain societies, especially the US and Canada: eat less beef. Beef takes a horrendous amount of land to produce: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

Yep, #1 works well in my experience, and for us, it mostly involved doing less - letting most of our yard go back to not being an all-grass yard, leaving dead trees when possible, not trying to kill the insects that live around our house, not putting netting around our berry bushes, so it's not been particularly hard.

That is certainly one way of seeing it. I agree that government regulation can be overbearing. OTOH, although I care about environmentalism and climate protection, I am not willing to inflict personal costs upon myself, if everyone else isn't also guaranteed to be playing along. That would just be unfair.

You missed the biggest point - North America is a capitalist society and there's no money in any of these solutions. There's profit in deforestation. There's profit in using pesticides. There's profit in razing forests to expand suburbs. But there's no profit in maintaining a natural and healthy habitat for the creatures that live in the areas we want to exploit.

Do local solutions work? Yes, they absolutely do. I've been working with state and local foresters on a habitat improvement project on land that I own and it is producing real results. Since 2018 I've been converting ag land to forest and meadows. I've planted over 6000 trees with my own hands and constructed and curated scrapes (ponds) and meadow areas with local grasses and flowers. It took a couple years but the turnaround is evident. I have families of ducks living on my land that never used to be there before. The area has become popular with migrating geese and sandhill cranes. I have a healthy array of woodland creatures who took up residence including a family of bobcats. Local wildflowers have attracted and given a home to more bees than I've ever seen out on that property. By all measures my project is a success and I'll continue it for as long as I can, but all monies that fund this come out of my own pocket. I can enroll in the state's managed forest program to receive tax breaks on my property, but that's about it. I could solicit donations and look for grants to help foot the bill, but even then I'd still be in the red. The only ROI I will get from these actions is the belief I'm doing my part for a social cause. And just like governments or social groups or even corporations, when times get tight the feel-good programs and dollars are the first to get cut since they don't show a return that can be expressed on a balance sheet. If I reach a point where I can't pay for more trees or spend time planting them, I just won't plant more trees. I have 42 more acres of trees to plant but I also won't starve myself and my family to make it happen. I've talked to lots of people about the options I have for funding this work but it all comes down to either pay for it yourself or take charity.

Everyone wants to save the trees. Everyone wants to save the birds and the bees and all the furry woodland creatures but no one wants to pay for it. You're not fighting against goodwill, you're fighting against capitalism and you'll always lose because there are no objective returns on investment for the preservation of natural habitat.

Bird friendly yards don’t save birds from predation by human domesticated predators which are uncontrolled — cats.

That's like putting a band aid on your haemorrhaging jugular. You can plant as many trees as you want, as long as Dupont&co dump their god awful shit in the soil/water/air 24/7 it's game over

> All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".

I love this idea. Affecting large change is best done by embracing the status quo of large power structures. Few have the fortitude to ask “What if everybody individually just sort of came up with their own ideas of what solutions to problems are and eschewed organization”

Yeah, really the only top-down solution that would be effective against the worst offenders is their permanent cessation.

Agreed. What about going vegan?

Rubbish. Individual action is a joke. One might believe big actors put that idiotic notion in to our collective heads to escape responsibility.

One single supermarket with open fridges and unreasonable AC settings nullifies several families’ worth of energy saving efforts. And that is one trivial example.

This is exactly how to not solve systemic issues.

You forgot:

1. Take arms and do the revolution

The point isn’t to have you save the birds, it’s to get you to give up certain freedoms to a group that claims they can save the birds.

It is my freedom to have a big lifeless lawn that takes the place of local plants and displaces insects, which in turn starves bird populations. Why doesn't my yard have any birds?

Lawns aren't the problem. I used to live within the Willamette National Forest in Oregon and there is no wildlife there. Sure, there's a few deer, bear, and birds, but no where near as much wildlife as I can find in my suburban neighborhood. The original forest was nearly completely clearcut and replanted very densely with just a few species of timber trees. The canopy is so dense, there is no under story. There is nothing for wildlife to eat in these forests.

> Lawns aren't the problem

> The original forest was nearly completely clearcut...just a few species of timber trees.

So clearcutting and planting non-local, dominating plants isn't the problem,but clear cutting and planting non-local, dominating plants is the problem.

This is obviously two sides of the same coin, when you remove native plants, native wildlife goes away. Just because certain species of wildlife can make it work in the suburb doesn't mean that large lifeless lawns, especially in areas without intermixed native green space, are not killing off birds, insects, etc.

The timber trees that were planted were local species. It is the monoculture that is the problem.

Even if they were local, you're still describing a situation where human intervention planted a monoculture that's terrible for the environment.

That's what I was pointing out. What's your point or are you just repeating me?

I’m so tired of these conservative freedom arguments. Somehow on one side it’s always the freedom to consume, like the freedom to own a 5,000sq ft home, or an oversized SUV.

Conservative freedoms never seem to be about my freedom to enjoy listening to the birdsong of native birds because we saved their habitat.

It's probably not worth arguing about the definition of "freedom". To my eye, you're referring to two concepts that are so different that trying to use the same word for them just creates more confusion.

It's insidious anti-action propaganda.

The implication is that if someone actually wanted to save the birds, you should support them, but actually everyone is just looking to curtail your freedoms and nobody is actually looking to save the birds. Therefore don't even bother trying to save the birds, if you care at all about your freedom. Otherwise you're a soft gullible mark, you wouldn't want to be a mark, would you?

That such propaganda tends to align with consumption and/or antisocial and/or selfish behavior is a big clue, but it's not the end goal.

Are you saying that this conspiracy is masterminded by… Big Bird?

What freedoms are those?

Thats what happens in countries with powerful welfare states. People will default to think that the government should solve all of their problems

Sure, but it’s even worse in the non-nanny states

How so?

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