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I feel helpless and very gloomy when I think about biodiversity loss and climate change. I even fast forward David Attenborough documentries when he talks about these things. Sometimes "its all going to hell but we are going in together" thought is more comforting than thinking about my own and everyone else apathy.

Thanks for making "code written by nature" comment. Knuth also agrees that bioinformatics has many more fantastic problems than computer science because its much much older.

I was in awe of planeria when I first saw it regenerating from its parts first time.

> But when someone mentions veganism around here, all those hackers flag his post to oblivion.

Veganism will never save us there.

It's because meat tastes good. That's literally all there is to why we aren't all vegan. Humans will not voluntarily give up one of the nice things they currently have access to and enjoy. Nobody cares about delayed indirect consequences on a planetary scale. Our brains aren't wired to think that way, since it provides no instant gratification.

If someone came up with a novel way to create a meat-like material that actually tastes as good, without involving inefficient animal farming, it will be a much more successful approach at solving this problem.

> Humans will not voluntarily give up one of the nice things they currently have access to and enjoy

Plenty of people have, somewhat nullifying your comment.

Barely 1% of the world's population have, I think the point stands.

Yes, because for decades or longer, meat has been associated with affluence and a higher standard of living. There is no country in the world without meat & dairy subsidies.

On a finite planet with 8 billion people, to feed everyone the "western diet," we would need 2-5 such planets. It's simply not longer possible.

https://xkcd.com/1338/

Veganism grows very fast, though. It's already starting to influence meat and dairy sales, enough to make some producers very nervous (wood milk ads, for example).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2GL3NAWQU

The Secret Reason We Eat Meat - Dr. Melanie Joy

https://www.plantproteins.co/vegan-plant-based-diet-statisti...

As many as 6% of U.S. consumers say they are vegan — a 6x (500%) increase compared to just 1% in 2014.

U.S. retail sales of plant-based foods have increased 11 percent from 2018 to 2019, hitting a plant-based market value to $4.5 billion.

The most important thing I learned about changing people's minds is that you need to meet them where they are, not where you want them to be. This is not just for veganism, it's for any topic of interest. People want solutions that are convenient, and if you can give that to them while accomplishing your own goals in the process, that is what people will decide to use.

This is one reason why the rise of meat-like alternatives that nevertheless taste like meat are one of the most subersively impactful ways of turning someone vegan. I suspect once we as a species transition fully to lab grown meat, we will all basically be vegan. But the reason why so few people are vegan these days (out of the overall human population) because it is simply less convenient than eating meat, given that we like the taste of meat. There really is no alternative currently that still satiates people's demands for the taste of meat.

> once we as a species transition fully to lab grown meat

I wish... there are many obstacles to implementing that on the scale and timeline needed. I worry we don't have time to wait for that, while we already have plants that could sustain us completely and easily (82% of calories, 63% of proteins).

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

> it is simply less convenient than eating meat

Tradition, culture, convenience, taste. The only reasons.

> There really is no alternative currently that still satiates people's demands for the taste of meat

It's starting to change. Plant-based alternatives for meat (junk food) are getting better everyday (at least where I live).

In the last years came new bacon and sausages, which my SO refuses to eat because they're "too meat-like".

Well said. I had not made the parallel between genetic diversity and preservation of code, but now that you've put it like that it makes so much sense. I mean, I'd always cared about conservation, but this gives me yet another way to understand and explain its importance.

Hacker News is, uh, a name. I don't think most people here are "hackers", nor they identify themselves as ones.

Most people are just employees in FAAG or some VC-funded firms.

And to be honest I don't even think most people here are informed enough to discuss biodiversity. I definitely am not.

Genuinely curious, since almost all (all?) of your submissions to HN seem to involve the climate in some way: what do you do for a living? What causes you to gravitate towards these types of articles and discussions?

> What causes you to gravitate towards these types of articles and discussions

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biologys-beloved-...

Biology's Beloved Amphibian - the Axolotl - Is Racing toward Extinction

https://daily.jstor.org/the-race-to-save-the-axolotl/

The Race to Save the Axolotl - when an axolotl loses a limb, it regrows, and nary a scar remains. But this incredible creature is on the brink of extinction.

The first robust count of axolotls in 1998 estimated that around 6,000 animals lived in each square kilometer ... in 2015, he only found 35 per square kilometer.

The axolotl is the world’s the oldest self-sustaining laboratory animal population.

But it is unknown how long researchers will still be able to work with the axolotl: Like many lab animals, they are highly inbred, which could threaten their survival. To measure how small a gene pool is, scientists use an “inbreeding coefficient:” identical twins have an inbreeding coefficient of 100, completely unrelated individuals a coefficient of zero. For healthy growth, a captive population should have a coefficient of 12.5 at maximum. The notoriously inbred Spanish Habsburgs had a coefficient of 20; the coefficient for axolotls is 35.

Axolotl are going extinct because the tiny extent of their natural habitat is underneath what is now Mexico City. There are 10 million people living on top of their native environment, veganism does nothing to address this.

The immediate jump to food preferences in this thread is strange, it's very evident that changing diet, modes of transport and a plethora of other things we argue about doing is a rounding error compared to simply having one less child, overpopulation is the root cause of all this yet an incredibly taboo issue to discuss.

https://i.cbc.ca/1.4204289.1499983814!/fileImage/httpImage/e...

Countries should work towards stabilising their populations first otherwise it's all for naught.

This is already happening naturally without any sort of societal intervention. Who knew that people simply want to have fewer kids because life is better without them?

> Countries should work towards stabilising their populations first

The population growth is already starting to decline; for example, Europe is already experiencing a decline, the population growth in the US has recently flatlined.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...

U.S. Population Grew 0.1% in 2021, Slowest Rate Since Founding of the Nation

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393076/

Major Trends in Population Growth Around the World

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...

World’s population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century

> overpopulation is the root cause of all this yet an incredibly taboo issue to discuss

The root cause is overshoot. Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all but symptoms of ecological overshoot.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471

Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable on plant-based diets.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449

How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach

“Without concerted action, we found that the environmental impacts of the food system could increase by 50-90% by 2050 as a result of population growth and the rise of diets high in fats, sugars and meat,” he continued. “In that case, all planetary boundaries related to food production would be surpassed, some of them by more than twofold.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/

The consumption of animal-sourced food products by humans is one of the most powerful negative forces affecting the conservation of terrestrial ecosystems and biological diversity.

A little math might help.

environmental_impact = number_of_individuals * mean_individual_consumption

We can either choose how to lower mean_individual_consumption, or wait for nature to reduce number_of_individuals forcibly. One way is better than the other.

Well it was the guy I responded to who brought up veganisim as a solution in his top level post, but okay let's talk overpopulation. Axolotl have only ever been known to live in a few lakes which have been almost entirely obliterated by Mexico City, home to 10 million people (21 million if you count the whole metro area!) What exactly do you propose? Even if the population replacement rate in Mexico City were brought below 1, how many years would it take to depopulate the city? Short of forcing people out of the city at gunpoint (and to where, exactly?) how could you actually get the city depopulated in a reasonable amount of time to save the wild axolotl who might have a few years left at most? And how would this undo the habitat destruction which already occurred? How would you remove the structure of the city and restore the environment which it replaced decades+ ago?

Urbanization is often touted as the solution to habitat loss; concentrate people in high density urban areas to preserve the environment in the rest of the world. But in the case of Axolotl, they don't care for the rest of the world. They care about that specific piece of land that is under one of the largest metro areas in the world.

> And how would this undo the habitat destruction which already occurred? How would you remove the structure of the city and restore the environment which it replaced decades+ ago?

Not an expert by any means, but, as I understand it, Lake Texcoco National Park[1] is a fairly radical project (given the tendencies of urban politics) to move towards answering those questions.

> The main objective of this project is to reclaim the site to a green infrastructure in the valley of Mexico City. Rather than returning the area of an intact ecosystem from before the Spanish colonization, the key is to create a complete balance between infrastructure and nature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco_Ecological_Park

> veganism does nothing to address this

Veganism would help solve climate change (15-25% co2, also methane and n20), deforestation, pollution, soil erosion and overfishing (5 things out of 7 causing overshoot of the carrying capacity of our environment).

> because the tiny extent of their natural habitat is underneath what is now Mexico City

I'm aware.

I was responding to the question why I'm interested in these topics, and I never suggested that axolots' problem could be solved by veganism.

You're right that veganism would not (probably) help in this specific case, but that was not the point of the comment you were reacting to.

This times a thousand. The amount of unique information that is encoded in any single species likely dwarfs the collective knowledge of mankind.

I think it's a mix of groupthink and "someone else's problem". It's hard to break through an echo chamber and it's hard to accept something that inconveniences you. (I would assume the parts of the world where most of HN's audience resides are not going to be impacted by climate change as soon and as hard as many others.)

I do believe HN is full of intelligent and compassionate people. Perhaps it's compassion fatigue? (Too many horrible things happening, can I even make a difference through my individual actions?) Maybe we just needed you to make a good analogy, to illustrate the problem?

Veganism has nothing to do with biodiversity loss though.

Land clearing happens for ranching purposes, but is also happens for peanuts, coconut oil and all sorts of other products. Rice[1] is a cash crop associated with land clearing.

For example a practical sustainable diet for the world would be much more efficient if it included goat milk and meat, because goats can subsist off of marginal lands and foods which humans can't.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127803

> Land clearing happens for ranching purposes, but is also happens for peanuts, coconut oil and all sorts of other products

Ranching takes 80% of the agriculture land, 50+% pastures were forested in the past.

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation#beef-soy...

Combined, beef and oilseeds account for nearly 60% of deforestation (majority of oilseeds are mostly used for animal feed).

> goats ... can subsist off of marginal lands and foods which humans can't

That's the typical argument of animal ag farmers. That land should be rewilded and afforested, to enable return of the wildlife.

Goats and grazing are a recipe for desertification:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09596836166704...

Blame it on the goats? Desertification in the Near East during the Holocene

https://grist.org/climate-energy/cattle-grazing-is-a-climate...

Cattle grazing is a climate disaster, and you’re paying for it

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/grazed-and-co...

Grazed and Confused?

> Veganism has nothing to do with biodiversity loss though

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/

Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...

The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...

The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4

In terms of carbon sequestration and dealing w/ climate, it is clear that agricultural land use(especially land used for animal feed) is the largest barrier to ecosystem restoration. Potential for carbon sequestration is enormous (literally enough for the entire 1.5C carbon budget)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

Yes yes you've got a big list of cherry-picked papers and pro-vegan PR which declares "meat bad".

Then just a quick dismissal of goats because it's devastating to your overall point if "vegan" isn't actually the solution and no answer at all to the existence of cash-cropping other then to say 'oh yeah it's probably animal feed'.

Really? Rice is animal feed? Give me a break. There's a reason no one takes vegans activists seriously - you're as loose with the truth and reality as any politician.

> Yes yes you've got a big list of cherry-picked papers

What's wrong with that? Show me a similar list of papers proving that animal agriculture is the solution for our problems, and I'll happily change my viewpoint. The problem is that no such independent and peer reviewed studies (can even) exist.

> Then just a quick dismissal of goats

Yeah, I think that grazing is extremely destructive for the ecosystems. Not when you've got a single goat or two, but at the scale yes. It's not a secret that previous civilizations had environmental pressures that contributed to their collapse, and overgrazing could be one of those reasons. A lot of those previous civilizations places are now deserts. Coincidence? I'd bet not :)

> existence of cash-cropping other then to say 'oh yeah it's probably animal feed'

We would need just a fraction of resources if it were not for pastures and the need for animal feed. It's not probably, it's for sure. Again, science.

> Really? Rice is animal feed?

I never said that. I'll give you this link/graph again:

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation#beef-soy...

Rice is 5.6%, animal ag (incl. feed) 60%.

Are you vegan because you believe it's better for the environment?

Or are you vegan because of a moral objection to eating nervous-system bearing animals for food?

I started for the environment, for the biodiversity and because the switch to plant based diets is a must for preserving the Earth for future generations (many reasons for that claim).

No words and social media comments can describe the sheer amount of destruction animal ag. is causing.

I learned to appreciate the moral aspect of it later. Carnism is a helluva drug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2GL3NAWQU

Genetic information is code

Have an upvote for that line. Me like. It's how I think of it.

Never thought about it like that. Thanks for sharing that perspective.