Comment by jjallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjallen | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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