The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear? | Hacker News Reader

The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

theguardian.com

145 pointszeristor195 comments

I have spent time in remote parts of North America that have seen few if any humans in several decades. The thing you notice in that country is that there are a lot of animals and the animals behave differently when they see you than animals almost anywhere else. They’ve never seen a human before, for generations, and so you are a novelty in their environment that they know nothing about.

Interestingly, humans (without canids) apparently don’t come across as much of a threat by default. I would be approached by curious animals that in any other environment would never allow themselves to be remotely that close to a human. For lack of a better description, these animals also had much more “personality” than the wild animals you see near civilization.

Until you’ve seen the actual wilds, it is easy to forget how much of the “wilds” are actually quite zoo-like.

In remote parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, I saw wild approach closely and then be hand-fed.

I had the same thoughts as you - these animals don't behave as expected - it's like they haven't yet learned that humans can be dangerous.

I live out in the country. Not quite "wilds" but it's about a 45 minute drive to the nearest walmart and we drink water out of a well. It's remote enough that only a few cars drive by a month.

I've also found that the animals behave differently out here, or appear to anyhow. Maybe it's just there's more sensory room to notice the differences. There's a family of small furry rodents that greet me a few feet away from the porch every morning. Birdsong also has a load of hidden complexity to it I've never noticed. Go outside every day and listen to the songs. There's persistence, modification proposals and consensus reaching among birds over days and weeks. I don't know a thing about birds, but it's clear there's a lot of fascinating stuff happening among them.

We have an "armadillo buddy" that lives under the cabin. Clouds of bats swarm between the trees at night and coyotes howl at the moon. There's got to be dozens of rabbits. They'll let you walk right up to them before they run off. Once had to wait for a family of 10 cross the gravel driveway on our way home. Another time there was a large cougar just chilling in the yard.

Having never lived in a rural area until my 30's, it's wild how much activity there is and how close it is to us.

How much of this is because nature doesn't have to work as hard to survive around our cabin, and how much is just being able to notice it? It's a mix for sure.

Why did you decide to move out there? It sounds nice and relaxing but I think I would get lonely, or bored.

I get lonely, but why bored? Plenty of stuff to do on a big property (you don't usually have a postage stamp lot in rural that deep), and you can watch nature, or probably all the mass market entertainment too.

Not many discos out so rural, and not a lot of dining out either, but 45 minutes from a Walmart implies close to something.

I had a similar experience with wild bison - I’ve spent time around domesticated cattle and the wild ones seemed much more intelligent and aware. They would react as soon as you showed your silhouette on the ridge top.

There's a section of rail line between Senneterre, QC and Cochrane, ON in north-central Canada constructed as part of a quixotic federal project a century ago to link the grain-growing praries with an Atlantic port. It was barely ever used and then abandoned in the 1990s. It's the very fringe of the interface where North American industrial civilization reached, and has since rolled back. It's amazing how completely nature has swallowed everything back up. The bridges still stand but they won't in another thirty years or so. Even the railbed constructed to high quality with packed stone dust has trees growing out of it again. I've explored some of the route and I was reminded of who were the great engineers here before humans - beavers completely transform landscapes. They've dammed every causeway along the route, which only further accelerates the erosion. They've flooded a couple rail stops and old logging villages I had hoped to check out. Before long you'll have to know exactly what to look for to even find the line.

That is not a place one visits on a whim, wow!

This documentary explores this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l11zPNb-MFg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath:_Population_Zero

Aftermath: Population Zero - The World without Humans What would happen if, tomorrow, every single person on Earth simply disappeared? Not dead, simply gone, just like that. A world without people, where city streets are still populated by cars, but no drivers. A world where there is no one to fix bridges or repair broken windows…

Say what? Wikipedia says it's a Canadian production, Youtube says "not available in your country". I'm in Canada.

Edit: It's just that particular link. Searching for the title itself brought up a working one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHoOG4eKzbM

mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/l11zPNb-MFg

Book recommendation for The World Without Us which explores what might happen if humans vanished overnight: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us

Wikipedia has a list of ghost towns in the United States.[1]

Most rural towns were built to serve surrounding farms and ranches. As farming became less labor-intensive, the need for those towns went away, and the towns slowly died. See "Depopulation of the Great Plains"[2] It's interesting to note that the depopulated area is the best part of the US for wind power. That could work out OK.

Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.

Japan, where the population is rapidly declining, has a large number of empty rural towns. There's an incentive program to get young people to move there, but not many are interested. Because Japan's infrastructure is centrally funded, much of the infrastructure is still maintained in areas with very few people.

Russia has a declining population and entire abandoned cities. Putin is pushing young people to have kids. There's a "Pregnant at 16" TV show in Russia, which has been re-branded to encourage pregnancy.[3]

The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.

There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_the_Great_Plai...

[3] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/11/05/as-russia-targets-ab...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...

[3] is really interesting. I'm not surprised, but it really feels like history is happening when even the mundane starts to reflect it.

I don’t think it will work as long as women have access to information and literally anything else to do in life other than making endless babies. I fear there will be a push against women’s freedom of choice, once things become dire enough that can’t be patched with immigration.

It’s just a huge opportunity loss if you talk to any young woman, and they’re obviously right. There is no tangible benefit to have more than two children other than “for the humanity!”.

> I don’t think it will work as long as women have access to information and literally anything else to do in life other than making endless babies.

Which has happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban has cracked down.[1] "Our analysis shows that by 2026, the impact of leaving 1.1 million girls out of school and 100,000 women out of university correlates to an increase in early childbearing by 45 per cent."

[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1153151

I think if everyone in the country could easily afford a 5 bedroom house on one person's salary, and they deeply felt like their kids would grow up safe and healthy environment, we'd have a population explosion. The decline is caused by a population that cannot afford enough and is constantly panicked over global events. Everyone is presented with terror of doom constantly, and squeezed by a major shift of resources from labor to capital holders. The rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer.

A family of rabbits without enough quiet, food, shelter, etc will have hardly any babies. The mother will also eat any babies.

You really think women, on average, would be willing to sacrifice 6+ years at the minimum to have 3 children? It’s easy for us, men, to say that. But all my girl friends around my age group (late 20s-early 40s) are generally happy with 0-2 children. Genuinely nothing is stopping them other than “why do I need to make that sacrifice?” question. I will never blame them either, because I would do exactly the same in their place. It is the most logical thing to do. It’s either we make women’s lives objectively worse, or figure out a way where we can live without everyone going for 3+.

Dig into what exactly is it they would be sacrificing. The actual day-to-day raising of children is fulfilling and positive. The cost is mostly worries that are partly financial and more social - falling behind in your career, not being able to maintain friendships, not being able to spend enough time with your existing kids, not being able to afford to give your new kids a good childhood, not being able to put all your kids through college, not being able to afford retirement.

Everyone says this until they have kids, and I think they forget once their kid reaches about 5. I currently have a 1 year old and parenting duties are rough, and we have only one kid and my wife is a stay at home mom, its still super tough and I can absolutely imagine why many women would not want to have to raise children no matter how good the circumstances

I have kids and I disagree. I have been the primary parent for much of their lives and an am single parent of a teenager (the other one is an adult).

Its not easy, but its worth it. Far more so that putting long hours into your job.

> I can absolutely imagine why many women would not want to have to raise children no matter how good the circumstances

That sentiment is part of the problem. Why is it still women's work to raise children? Why are there so few stay at home days? Why do couples not sharing parenting equally if both work? Why do not not have more famimly friendly working hours?

We have currently culturally accepted that its OK for women to do traditionally male work, but not for men to take on women's work. That will not work. I think this is unstable and we will have either a reversal (of which I see some signs) or a transition to men taking on more of a role in raising children (which is the better outcome, but I think is less likely because it is so ingrained that they do not).

See, I completely agree with you, but it’s one of the “it’s a nice thing to say but never really works out”. Even in countries with extreme demographic problems (SK and Japan), men still expect the women to take over the main duties of parenthood. And if women know that they’ll just burden themselves with multiple kids with not enough support from their partner… why would they do it? Can’t blame them, because we might say one thing, but super majority works out differently in practice, so odds are against you.

I ended up in much the same position, and still think its worth it.

> Even in countries with extreme demographic problems (SK and Japan), men still expect the women to take over the main duties of parenthood.

Maybe that is why they have extreme demographic problems? People choose to have kids for personal reasons, not demographic ones.

Why can we not have that cultural change? We managed the one that allowed women to do men's work? Everyones wins. men get the joy of full participation in their kids lives, women are not landed with all the work, and children get better parenting.

You misunderstood me, its not just the womens role, we have split the parenting job pretty much down the middle, and we have about as good a situation as a modern family could get - its still very hard on both of us and thats why I can confidently say its a rough job that anyone (women or men) might want to for go.

You said your wife is a stay at home mum and you have split parenting down the middle. That does not sound consistent to me. That sounds more like traditional roles, so why is to so hard?

I was married to a stay at home mum and did half the parenting, but that meant I was overworked and she was not doing very much. It is one reason I am not married to her any more!

My ideal would be something like both working part time and sharing parenting. I blame governments focused on maximising the workforce and GDP. A lot of parents here in the UK drop kids off at school for breakfast and pick them up after "after school" activities. Not much joy in your kids if you hardly see them/

And the cost to a woman’s body, during and after pregnancy, including risks?

I know a pregnant woman has been nauseous for 6 months, is on prescription medication for it, and now can barely walk due to symphysis pubic dysfunction. Completely healthy prior to becoming pregnant in terms of BMI/blood sugar/pressure/physical activity/etc

I know many who have had to get a C section, or bed rest, or the kid has issues like allergies, club foot, autism, etc.

> And the cost to a woman’s body, during and after pregnancy, including risks?

Is very real, but significantly lower for later pregnancies, and was generally not something that put people off in more prosperous times, even when medical care was less advanced.

Women only gained rights recently, how could one know that?

There is a 100% correlation with total fertility rates dropping and women’s independence.

I think you’re not factoring in the other choice - not having kids and not having those problems, lower or later in life. Hanging around with educated women in their 20s/30s, and that’s a very real concern.

> "why do I need to make that sacrifice?"

No one does need to make that sacrifice, but don't be alarmed when other groups that made that sacrifice start changing world how they see fit.

That’s kinda an irrational statement especially towards the ones that had a kid or two, no? Like even statistically speaking, majority in the west does not have 2+ children. So, like, they’re more likely to change the world as they fit.

I think it's rational if a bit cold.

Subreplacement level fertility is bound to bound to bite you. We don't know of any way to turn subreplacement country (fertility rate < 2.1) into a above replacement country (fertility rate >= 2.1). Just how to mitigate it (immigration). Eventually pools of high fertility will run dry.

Some think that it depends on replacing individualism with some form of collectivism. Some think it's related to hope for future. It's very hard to do any comparison.

Yeah. It’s pretty hard to want to have lots of kids when the whole of the economy is designed to transfer all current productive resources as much as possible to leisure obsessed boomers.

Kind of depressing when you realize you’re designing CPUs with billions of transistors and yet you’re going to end behind some retired boomer who sold cars just because he got here first and the magic of compound interest

My understanding is that research does not support this position. Something else is likely going on.

> Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.

In Nevada/Eastern California there was a railroad that went from the Carson City area down toward Owen’s Lake.

The interesting part is if you look at the railroad map, pretty much none of the stops exist anymore. It’s a long string of communities that are all long gone from the eastern Owen’s Valley.

Even the eventual highways that were to follow ended up coming down the western side of the valley, yet more reason for those late communities to no longer exist.

And it’s pretty much all gone. No ghost towns, maybe a few overgrown foundations remnants.

But if you had never seen this railroad map, you’d probably never have any idea this land was occupied at all.

As an outsider looking-in that caught some of this portrays in Pixar/Disney's animated Cars [1] movies its interesting to reflect upon the parallels with its Route 66 references, which originate from and also culturally impacted us locally [2].

It's also ironic that Route 66 [3] was originally in-and-of itself a bypass.

As someone that predominantly lived in a capital urban city of a nation still expanding rather than contracting, understanding its equivalent occurence in Bulgaria is even more difficult.

[1] https://betweenenglandandiowa.com/2018/02/11/cars-route-66-m...

[2] https://route66.com.au/

[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Route-66

I think with the owens valley the population mainly agglomerated to the towns that are there today probably reflecting the sorts of jobs around. I’m sure Bishop is bigger than its ever been today.

> There are two futures, both bad.

Or, more likely, people are extrapolating from current trends, and those trends won’t hold. Not that long ago, people were doing that extrapolation and deciding that overpopulation and worldwide famine were in our future. “The Population Bomb” was a bestselling book along those lines.

The population is likely to shrink, easing strain on resources, and people will look back fondly on “the good old days” when folks had big families. Trends will shift and the population will grow again.

It's a self-correcting problem. The people who don't have children select themselves out of the gene pool and are replaced by those who do have children.

It's debatable if choice/want/accident of having children is based on genetics.

It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies.

If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.

> It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies

That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have less children, which has very little to do with their genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not "replacement" with children who are genetically determined to be fecund.

Humans are animals and animals which do not replicate are selected out of the gene pool. There is nothing to argue here.

Nobody is taking issue with the fact that humans that do not replicate do not pass on their genes

They are taking issue with the ludicrous assertion that falling birth rates are "self correcting" because the offspring of people who do replicate are somehow genetically predisposed to have more children to "replace" them.

Either they'll have children or they won't and the ones who do will replace the ones who don't. It's like I said, whatever people perceive to be a problem is not actually a problem because it corrects itself without any interventions.

It depends on what you consider the problem to be. I personally didn't think there is a problem, but if you define the problem to be "population decline until there are no people left", your solution doesn't work. Unless maybe you consider other mammals to be people too.

I haven't defined any problems or solutions but certain people do seem to have defined the problem like you have. What I said specifically was that whatever people perceive to be a problem with the global human population is self-correcting (from a biological perspective) because those who voluntarily choose to not procreate will be replaced by those who are more than happy to have as many children as possible.

If someone has a different perspective on this then they are welcome to make their version of the problem explicit and concrete and explain what exactly they propose as a valid intervention for fixing it. I suspect and am almost certain they have not thought about the issue as rigorously as they think and are simply parroting popular talking points they've seen and heard on social media platforms about the impending collapse of civilization caused by declining birth rates.

You don't recognize that people can think. You assert that the offspring behave like the parents. You imply that the offspring are defined by their genes. You have no concept of the cultural transmission of ideas. You imagine that looking at everything biologically is correct. Your reasoning is bad, and you should feel bad.

Not really sure if serious or not but good try anyway. For the record I thought your response was very funny.

I didn't really mean it, I was channeling Zoidberg from episode 72 of Futurama ("your music's bad, and you should feel bad"). But I do get the impression that you have cloth ears.

On some days my cloth ears are more dry than on other days so the sounds are more or less muffled depending on ambient conditions.

The problem is usually reframed as factually accurate claims that the number of people in most countries is below the replacement rate, and thus the number of people over working age swells whilst the number of working age people is set to shrink.

The implications of this may have been exaggerated of course. But it's quite clear that it is not being "self corrected" by the offspring of people who do choose to have more children than the replacement rate being genetically [or culturally] predisposed to breed like rabbits...

The elderly vastly outnumbering the working population is a symptom of sudden and drastic population count decline and is a different problem even if it is correlated.

Biology and evolution by definition is determined by those who reproduce offspring, those who do not will be replaced by those who do. Put another way: Generation B and onwards are the offspring of Generation A who reproduced.

I mean, sudden and drastic population declines are literally the subject of the thread.

Or more specifically, that humans in many parts of the world are reproducing at below replacement rate.

Reproduction below replacement rate means that those who do not reproduce offspring are not replaced by the offspring of those who do.

Nobody is arguing that Generation B aren't the offspring of those who reproduced, they're arguing that this detail is essentially irrelevant to how many children Generation B will have and therefore birth rate decline need not be "self correcting" and empirically isn't in much of the world.

I think you're misunderstanding what "replace" means.

Given a long enough time span, everyone alive will be the children of those who reproduced. Generation B will be composed of Generation A reproducers. The world of tomorrow will be owned by those who reproduce today.

>Biology and evolution by definition is determined by those who reproduce offspring

Not true. If my brother reproduces, then about half of my genes are still getting passed on. If my cousin reproduces, 12.5% of my genes are still getting passed on. If the argument is that pure gene selection will determine the outcome, then you can’t treat genetics as some simplistic binary.

Your genes aren't your brother's or cousin's and vice versa. Imagine a tree, if you fail (or choose not) to reproduce then your branch will be a dead end. Other branches who did successfully reproduce will continue the tree.

The predisposition may be cultural rather than genetic.

Religious people belonging to certain religions/sects do have a lot more children even in the contemporary world. Maybe the world of 2100 is going to be a lot more religious than today.

The development is certainly visible in, say, Israel, or even migrant communities in Europe. Europeans must now be a bit careful not to insult Islam; that wouldn't be the case fifty years ago.

Animats wrote that in the top level comment.

> The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.

>There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."

I can imagine some other developments. Maybe parenting will become professionalized, kids will be born in artificial wombs and specialized pairs will take care of 10 of them at once.

It sounds wild, but we already professionalized a lot of other activities that were "naturally" done by households, such as fuel gathering, cooking, home construction and small agriculture.

What a brave new world. But what happens when the machine stops?

What happens if other machines stop? The ones that carry food into megacities or provide drinking waters to millions?

We are now very, very far from our hunter-gatherer roots.

I'm aware of that. That's why I questioned the validity of the idea, because it seems too risky to rely on. Probably unsustainable because the ever faster changes of the 'meteorological machine' will disrupt many other mechanisms, because they are too slow to adapt.

The idea of mechanizing/automating/centralizing that stuff is irking me in general. One could argue that the biologisms which evolved us, and we with and through them, are just another, rather imperfect way of doing this, by slow, biologic means.

IMO this only leads to transhumanism, which I consider BS, because it will produce shadows/weak simulations of the real thing and philosophical zombies.

Didn’t ECHR take note of a Austro Hungarian imperial law still in the books to that effect?

Far from being "ludicrous", there are genetic predispositions for literally everything that humans (and other species) do, especially including core features of biology like the strength of reproduction motivations.

The pool of replicators can prune itself in many ways (indeed, it must), but that doesn't mean that those prunings are having any effect on the pool of genes. The relative frequency of fertility-relevant alleles is just as likely to remain stable. It's called Hardy Weinberg equilibrium and it's the default state for large populations that are not experiencing predation or expanding into new niches.

That's good to know.

Personality traits are a whole lot more heritable than it's fashionable to admit.

Birth rate doesn’t seem to be very heritable, given the amount it can change over relatively short periods of time.

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File%3A1910-... shows it going from 8 around 1940 to 12 around 1957 and back down to 7 around 1972 in the USA.

If you are barking mad ane propagate , i choose you, evopokemon

That's oversimplifying.

Do the people who don't have children send resources to relatives who do? Making the family more succesful?

Not to mention it isn't a binary really. There is a middle ground of simply having less children. A family that has a single child is still below replacement and quite different from a family with 5. Regardless, genes are still being passed on.

Sounds like you agree that there is no problem.

If by problem you mean some variant of: humans are going to stop having babies and go extinct, then yes, i agree that is rediculous.

However i disagree with the mechanism you propose. Having less children can be evolutionarily advantous in some circumtances. People will have less children when it makes sense, and have more children when conditions change and that make sense.

Great, it's always good to reach a clear resolution.

Do you see this happening a lot on modern industrial societies?

Modern industrial societies (with strong womens rights) are a relatively new thing. We'll adapt. Most likely by making it much easier to have and raise children so that educated, rich folks don't avoid it so long.

Ah, the optimism.

Well this path feels incomplete:

Having kids early precludes education and career focus -> Education and career focus gets you money and prestige -> Folks want money -> Folks want to avoid having kids early -> Fewer kids.

It's all based on a couple misconceptions that a) you can't have what you want now if you have kids and b) you'll want what you want now when you have kids.

Try this thought experiment on for size:

Initially, you don't have kids b/c you don't want to avoid this vacation ($5k?) and that opportunity (A few years at a good job?)

But consider the reverse: If you had kids, and they were going to die if you didn't turn over $X, what value of X is "too high"? There is no value of X that is too high, you'd happily give everything you have to bring your kids home safe. Why don't we give a meager few years of our lives to have kids and get them through the infant stage until our lives return somewhat to normal?

Why do we all pretend that $5k before kids is somehow not the same as $5k after kids? It's not a trap - parents do want their children, do love them, and are willing to drop money to have them, but we only recognize this after they have them. Substitute money for a job change, a spouse choice, etc.

It's a weird cognitive dissonance that we don't recognize this for ourselves when we're young, and I'd argue it's mostly this cognitive dissonance that stands in our way. So, some tangible improvements and a slight increase in number of successful people having kids would probably dispel that misconception.

Have you had kids while both parents are working?

I have, and it’s miserable for the parents and often traumatic for the kids. At least if the jobs are at all challenging.

Well I'm super happy that I never had kids. I'm nearly in my 50s and I still live as a younger person because I never had to have much responsibility. As such I can enjoy my own life much more. I still go out dancing until 6am every weekend and move to a different country every decade or so. I couldn't do any of those things if i had a 'stable' family.

Yes, I think both effects are prominent in developed societies.

That's a perversion of the idea of evolution. Survival of the genes only applies to individuals, because they are each completely unique in their genetic makeup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection

That's not correct. There's substantial evidence for kin selection and inclusive fitness:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection

(Used to be a biologist)

I'm very skeptical to kin selection in general, but for humans it is out of the question. Genghis Khan is all the evidence you need against it.

But isn’t a “gene” a frequency of certain amino acid combination? And as a frequency, can’t exist in any individual?

I believe you are describing the plot of Idiocracy.

I'm not making any value judgements. Intelligence is not necessary for replication.

If natural selection were that effective, no species would ever go extinct. And yet most do. Relying on natural selection to shrug off problems is like making lottery tickets your retirement plan.

Strongly disagree with that take.

Genetics can only have a minor influence on number of offspring, because the genetic makeup of basically every industrialized nation did not change completely within 20 years.

If there was no other factor apart from genetics, it is decidedly unclear if that could stabilize population numbers on its own.

But it won't have to, almost for certain, because non-genetic mechanisms will balance this in all likelyhood ("organized" incentives from states and also emerging ressource over-supply), and those mechanisms will work MUCH faster than genetics ever could.

He's not saying that genetics caused the problem, but that natural selection will solve the problem. Natural selection also need not be obviously genetic. For example certain religious groups maintain very healthy fertility rates, while secular populations tend to have quite poor fertility rates. So this logically leads to an outcome very few would intuitively expect - the percent of humanity that is religious will likely increase over the coming decades and centuries.

Also collapsing populations will lead to resource scarcity. One of the many negatives of low fertility is that you end up with far more elderly than working age people. Any given market will also naturally decrease in size, all other things being equal. These factors, amongst others, will completely wreck economies which may well end up creating a vicious cycle against fertility.

Another reason I think 'organized incentives' will be unlikely to achieve much is that Scandinavia had been at the forefront of fertility collapse in Europe and they have both an exremely strong social safety net as well as great minimum maternity benefits. Clearly there are other factors than economic inability driving people to go childless or to only have 1.

Japan and France have tried incentives, with little effect. Japan is even cutting their social security payments to pay for increased subsidies for children.[1] France has a benefit scheme for parents with two or more children.[2] It's about EUR75 per month, so not that big.

[1] https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/06/3918e2481936-japa...

[2] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F13213?...

The math on the French website seems to indicate EUR 75 "per child" (~150 total) per month for 2 kids, 110+ per child per month for 3.

IIRC France has a higher fertility rate than neiboors.

Because France has more Muslim immigrants, not because of their policies.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...

In humans, memes are a stronger driver of fertility than genes. It is a self correcting problem, but that's because having more children than you can support is an antimeme. Even if they survive and reproduce, they won't pass on the "large family" trait.

I don't think the predisposition to have children is genetic though. At least not mostly. It's more an effect of circumstances and living conditions. A lot of people just had kids as a retirement fund (basically still the case in poor countries) or because it was pushed on them by religion.

Personally I just think it's just a lot of hassle and I don't think it adds much value to my life. Others will of course differ in opinion hugely.

One thing is sure to me though, humanity isn't going to die out. Our planet is overpopulated as it is.

I believe we're in a correction period. All through history it was dangerous and debilitating for women to have children. As women's reproductive and voting rights and freedom increased (a nanosecond ago history wise), more couples self-selected out of that and if they had kids they had them later. Myself and my spouse included. Add to that - it's expensive and difficult to raise kids without support. Either you buy support or you neglect huge opportunities and say near parents.

Right now, we pay more for our nanny than we do for our house, and combined both are pretty huge chunks of our income - and we're both fairly successful professionals.

Eventually, there will be better resources for working couples to have kids. It's a fairly easy problem to solve: More childcare options, more housing supply (so its cheaper to live), and more childcare workers by e.g., reducing regulations and improving immigration policy. USA has no reason to do this - we have good demographics b/c of immigration and (frankly) Calthocism and its ilk.

When I married into a catholic family I inherited 100s of cousins, and there's 1000s of relatives in our state now.

> More childcare options, more housing supply (so its cheaper to live), and more childcare workers by e.g., reducing regulations and improving immigration policy. USA has no reason to do this - we have good demographics b/c of immigration and (frankly) Calthocism and its ilk.

How do you square this with huge childcare costs in the US? The costs come from childcare ratios and liability, and those regulations are there for a reason.

Where are all the workers going to come from? Won’t the growing and politically powerful old population want workers for their needs/wants?

Population shrinking is going to annihilate the current economic system we have where everyone puts their retirement into stocks. Then the shell-shocked people will be even more poor and unable to afford having children. You have to have new entrants to the pyramid to buy the stocks that the people all want to sell to finance their retirement.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-009-9179-9

Places like Japan and Korea aren’t having the sort of birth rate turnaround you are discussing.

The neocapitalist system needs to change anyway. As it's been going ever more wealth is ending up with ever fewer people and that can't possibly end well. It never has in history.

There are very few if not zero number of countries going back to replacement levels after they fell from it. The world on average is getting richer and richer countries have falling birthrates

But you don't need to extrapolate. Current rates are far more than sufficient for catastrophe. It's merely that the effects of dangerously high fertility rates are immediate while the effects of dangerously low fertility tend to lag the advent of said reduction by around 60 years.

So for instance Japan is still living the good times relative to what's yet to come since they collapsed in the 80s. South Korea hasn't even begun to really feel the consequences of their actions since they only collapsed in the 90s. And places like Finland or the Western world in general only collapsed even more recently.

But collapsed they have. And because our fertile window in life, for women at least, closes long before we die - most, if not all, of these places will, unavoidably, see dramatic population declines, screwed age ratios (with consequent impacts on the labor/retiree pool/costs), shrinking economies, and so on. And we're left to rely on some ever smaller generation(s) down the line to start having large families in this context.

It will be "fixed" by just killing off old people in large numbers through some combination of high pressure euthanasia campaigns and denial of healthcare subsidies. Just no one wants to be honest about it.

Our political culture is not a high integrity, high honesty culture but one that relies on a lot of indirect communication and symbolism. In this the west has become a lot more like east Asian stereotype. So in my view this crisis will be solved, just not in a way that people want to acknowledge. A lot of the nonserious "attempts" to address the issues are just performances to make it look like the facially palatable policies have been tried before they inevitably fail.

It's not the most intuitive thing, but how long we live has no long term impact on population levels. Think about a fertility rate of one - this means each successive generation will be half the size of the one prior. This makes simplified population sims very simple because it's simply powers of 2.

If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years.

You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction.

I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.

Or just cut all the socialized medical programs old folks disproportionally rely on while telling everyone in the group that you aren’t.

Hmm, which is what the current plan for the next US president seems to be….

It has. If you are born into work camp slave status, doomed to starve to keep the gerontocropolis warm, your motivation to put kids into that labour camp will be below zero.

This is very topical in the UK at the moment, as Parliament has just voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its second reading in the Commons. What that means is that it will probably soon be possible for individuals who are slowly dying to request their own euthanasia.

There has been a lot of debate in the press and online (and no doubt also in private across the whole country). The arguments range from the risks of potential cooercion to the morality of a 'coup de grâce'. Yet your point is also pertinent, as 'quality of life' often has as much to do with the quality of care as it does with the affliction itself, and quality of care is largely down to how much society pays for it.

There's also many old people that are so demented they're just sitting in a chair drooling, totally unaware of their surroundings. They receive as much care as they can get but it's not really improving their quality of life. They basically exist only as a reminder for the people that knew them.

I do think that euthanasia would make sense in these cases. The real person, their mind, has died a long time ago, it's just their body that lives on.

Of course the decision should be up to these people (while they're still capacitated) and their family. It shouldn't be imposed on them. But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.

> But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.

In such a situation I'd be inclined to agree. I think my question is rather how many of the candidates for humane euthanasia would be in that condition if preventative healthcare was better.

Clearly there will be some people whose conditions could not be prevented by any medical intervention, but cuts to healthcare funding would probably result in more people getting terminal illnesses in total. Witnessing the suffering of patients is a big part of reminding people why healthcare is important (which of course is why medical charities advertise in this way). Thus, personally, my chief concern is that compassionate euthanasia could end up hiding fixable problems in our healthcare system.

The big issue with aging is general cognitive decline. In some people it can happen faster, or slower, but it happens to all of us and is no more avoidable than muscular decline.

It makes it increasingly difficult for people to care for themselves, and highly vulnerable to exploitation, even when in 'perfect' health.

I thought the UK bill required people to have no more than six months left.

If it won’t decrease life span by more than six months, how will it affect population?

The idea that populations always need to grow is so American. Or really religious in general, many religious groups in Europe also proclaim this. It's important to realise that this is the method of survival of religions, this is why it's so ingrained in their dogma. The organism of religion depends on it.

However it's totally unsustainable. Sure, countries like Japan will have a tough time as the bulk of the ageing population matures but after that they will be in a better position for a stable occupancy. Less pressure on resources and housing, more ecological sustainability.

Our planet really doesn't benefit from having many billions of us around. And many of the problems we see, like climate change and pollution, are a direct result of that.

Fertility changes are exponential. They can be approximated (assuming a population with a common fertility rate among generations) as having a fertility_rate/2 scalar impact on population per 20 years.

So imagine a fertility rate of 1. The scalar would be 1/2 so the population would declining by about 50% every 20 years.

And this doesn't stop until you go extinct or start having more children. And you'd have to start having more children in the midst of economic collapse.

So think about a period of just 80 years, a single human lifetime - that would be a decline of 1-(1/2)^4 = 15/16ths of your previous population. The US would go from 345 million to 22million, about the size of Sri Lanka or Chile.

And you're right religious groups do retain healthy fertility rates, so we're bee-lining to a world where secular educated individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool, while highly religious, less educated individuals are thriving. Guess what the world would thus look like in the future and how concerned it might be with your issues of choice, like climate change.

Children are essentially your voice in the future - have no children, have no voice.

Which religious groups in Europe proclaim that populations always need to grow? I am not qualified to speak about America, but the claim does not ring true to me as a European.

Even if they are promoting population growth, they must be doing a bad job of it. An article from 2015[1] shows that religious groups are shrinking quickly in Europe, and that their fertility rate is only slightly higher than that of the group of 'unaffiliated' individuals. The population growth in total is also slowing, if not actually on a downward trend[2].

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/europe/

[2]: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-e...

Most woman in the free world, vote for oppression with their feet.

> There are two futures, both bad.

The more likely scenario is a natural oscillation between these two outcomes, similar to how animals maintain oscillating population equilibrium that's controlled by space, resources and predation.

I mean one thing many people, myself included, have been clamoring for ages is that people can't afford to live and own property anymore. People can't afford to think about raising kids if they're stressed about your next paycheck and making rent.

This is probably oversimplified and naive, but go back to the 80's economically where families could afford a family-raising sized home and a comfortable life on a single income. Bring jobs back to the smaller towns, which are safer and healthier places to raise families.

This sentiment is interesting and coexists in a world where real estate is super cheap the second you move out of urban centers.

Combine this with the fact that is has never been easier to work remotely.

From my perspective it is a matter of preference - people decide that their life style in urban centers is more important than having a resource surplus and starting a family.

> that is has never been easier to work remotely.

Which still means it's almost impossible for almost everyone almost everywhere

TFR was low even back in the 1980s, and especially the 1970s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA

I am guessing the bump from late 1980s to 2000s was almost entirely due to immigrants, especially Latin American. Similar to a bump seen in other countries where immigrants coming from places with higher TFRs bumped it up, and within a couple decades, even those immigrant populations now have lower TFRs.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...

At least here people, including my grandparents who lived through WOII, lived outside cities, had to travel hours for work and worked the land for food. They had 10 kids and they helped in the household and on the land (only for their own food: animals, veg and fruit) while the dad was away 12+ hours of the day (4+ hours commute) (my dad also travelled 4+ hours every day for work by the way; fairly normal in the 80s here; not sure what happened). This is still just possible; you don't need to live in a city and, again at least where I live, the prices drop sharply only a few hours drive from every large city (1.5m euro vs 1000s to 10ks for land and houses). Everyone can afford a house or land, but everyone wants to live on the city where they generally can't. If you want to raise (many) kids, you can choose the same life as my grandparents had (who also could not afford a house in the big city but wanted one so built multiple (one for them and later for their kids including my parents) with their own hands in a small village), but it's not an easy thing; it never was an easy thing.

If I am not mistaken we had other depopulation events in history and we rebounded from it. Especially in the past where surviving the first years was far from guaranteed and nutrition levels and hardship frequently imposed a tax on women’s fertility. Combine this with lower life expectancies and we had the recipe for quite a few depopulation events.

The point is. There’s no much you can do if people don’t want to have kids. And this is probably generational, so you won’t change the mind of the current generations.

We will need to learn to live without it. Retirement while healthy and capable of work, will probably become a thing of the past.

Also, we will probably have to rethink compound interest and inheritance rights. Compound interest on investments require by necessity monotonically increasing economy outputs in the long run.

Honestly, I think you could adjust population growth in many western countries by just spending more on schools, providing generous parental leave and generally making having kids less daunting. But it seems like everyone who wants this outcome is entirely comfortable with going full Nazi on the subject.

No way, we need to pay interest to the boomers so they can buy Motorhomes, Boats, Harley Davidsons and travel across the world.

Stop this school and health care nonsense! This is communism!

The data says that the benefits provided by the Scandinavian and European countries are not enough, or that providing benefits is not going to lift TFR to replacement rate. And also TFR was declining a lot all the way back since the 1950s, when kids were not as daunting and real estate costs and schooling costs were lower and people were buying houses on single incomes.

I have a suspicion that there is almost no amount of realistic benefits that can incentivize having sufficient kids to the level of replacement rate. The problem is that once sufficient women do not have 2 children, it is unrealistic to expect a sufficient amount of the remaining women to have 3+ children to offset those that have 0 or 1 child.

The big change from 100 years ago is that being a couple is now completely optional with no social stigma for being single, so if 30% or even 20% opt out of the compromises required in a relationship (due to their financial independence and safety in society), then you're fighting a losing battle (to keep TFR at replacement rate).

I have longed come to the conclusion that we are social beings even more than we are economic beings.

Reversing fertility drops will require social solutions in addition to economic solutions. I.e we need economic incentives but we also need to find ways to “make it cool” to have babies and have women in child bearing age be in close social circles with women having kids. And we have to all that while respecting all the gender equality gains we have made in the modern world. Not an easy solution

That or make the economic incentives super huge

In general, in crisis, people aren’t going to go for the complex solution. They’ll go with the simple one.

If addressed sooner, then it won’t be a crisis. Do you think that will happen?

This is going too get increasingly hard due to our political system. We have more older people and they have more political and economic capital, so the incentive is going you keep voting and allocating more societal resources towards the old and away from the young, which further skews the demographics, which then leads older people with more resources and power and ability to vote themselves more resources

Eh, frankly that is like saying you could have a larger army if you paid your soldiers better and treated them well.

Not wrong, especially in relative peacetime and when things are going well.

But there is a reason the first thing Ukraine did when they got invaded was a draft.

> There’s no much you can do if people don’t want to have kids.

"Don't want" to have kids. Just like people "don't want" to own their own house and "don't want" to have a retirement when they get old and "don't want" to have a living salary.

Man, I know people who actually DON'T WANT to have kids. Some of them rich people who could afford an expensive education and all the help they could get, and they really don't want kids.

There are also people that have had their kids weaponized against them, (or were weaponized against their parents), and frankly never ever want to play that game again.

Nope. Look at Israel - their Kibbutz system allows for communal raising of children and that means women have the ability to do more than be stuck at homes. They serve in the IDF, have careers, and population growth is 3 children per woman. Israel has the right model - governments who figure out how to support their mothers with proper childcare and education for the kids will get a developed society with proper population growth.

As usual, religion is to blame for this high rate:

> In 2020, the total fertility rate among ultra-Orthodox women in Israel was 6.6, while the rate among Arab women was 3.0, and among secular women, it was 2.0 — still well above the OECD average — according to a report from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-birth-rate-remains-hig...

> They serve in the IDF, have careers, and population growth is 3 children per woman.

The women that do the above most certainly have a TFR closer to 2 rather than 3.

See table 1 at top of page 7 and figure 2 on page 8.

https://www.taubcenter.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Dem...

> There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."

One data point against this dichotomy is that most women in the West generally report wanting more children than they have.

A different view is that, in the first world, men and women have become more neurotic and risk averse. E.g. "we can't afford kids with this market"

> "we can't afford kids with this market"

This seems like a gross simplification. In western world, the pressure is to raise kids well rather than just so-so, since one can easily see how much this helps them with rest of modern complex life. For example emotional stability, maturity and resilience is not something that comes automatically regardless of quality (and quantity) of parenting. This aspect alone is enough to make or break literally any conceivable talent or wealth under our sun.

And raising kids well these days is... hard, very hard. If it would be just question of money, rich folks would be all having 10-15 kids yet even those who are pretty horrible parents via ignoring their kids most of the time (with corresponding results later in life) very rarely do so, and if they do its normally the result of their instabilities and mental issues rather than part of a bigger plan.

> If it would be just question of money, rich folks would be all having 10-15 kids

Well, Musk certainly does... the thing is, for the really rich, more kids means more complex inheritance schemes and the risk of their wealth going down the drain in inheritance fights. Here in Germany for example, there was a ridiculous multi year fight in the empire of the Albrecht clan (the ones behind Aldi, I think in the US it's Trader Joe's?).

The number of kids a man has is irrelevant for population statistics because it simply offsets another man’s child. That’s why total fertility rate only takes into account how many children a woman has, since they are the rate limiting factor.

Depends on your point of view, and which statistics, I guess?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Jacob_Meijer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habsburg_family_tree

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...

I don’t see how this math could depend on a point of view.

You can have 100 men and 1 woman, and predicting future population will have nothing to do with how many men there are (as long as there is at least 1 fertile man).

But if you have even just 1 man, having 10 women versus 100 women makes an enormous difference in potential future population.

But those asymmetries are artificial, made up.

The only other way I can explain this is that to project population, all you need to know is the the number of women now and the rate at which women are giving birth (assuming births are 50/50 male/female). At least, those are the more direct parameters to use than the number of men or the rate at which men impregnate women.

There are Aldi's in the US also.

source? here is recent Pew Research data in the US

family relationships - parenting report Jul 25, 2024 The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children

The U.S. fertility rate reached a historic low in 2023, with a growing share of women ages 25 to 44 having never given birth.

> There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."

Overly pessimistic. Our culture and economy have been structured to yield low fertility. That will eventually pass. There's no need for oppression to get replacement rate fertility.

> Overly pessimistic. Our culture and economy have been structured to yield low fertility. That will eventually pass.

But I don't see succesful attempts culture/economy changed to be family friendly?

Realistically our culture/economy right now "will pass" by being replaced with the virile Amish.

> But I don't see succesful attempts culture/economy changed to be family friendly?

The fertility crisis is fairly new, and the public's consciousness of it is still barely there. That means we've not had enough serious attempts at fixing this. But it will happen. First we're seeing tax policy being altered to incentivize family formation in some places (very few). Second we'll see at some point that newer generations will place more value on early family formation and that will then lead to a change in the culture. That's my prediction, but who knows.

> Realistically our culture/economy right now "will pass" by being replaced with the virile Amish.

This is just the The Handmaid's Tale fantasy some people have. That's quite clearly not in the cards. And it's not like that's what our culture was like in the past (it wasn't), nor like that's the only way back to replacement level fertility (why would it be?).

>That means we've not had enough serious attempts at fixing this. But it will happen. First we're seeing tax policy being altered to incentivize family formation in some places (very few).

The biggest problem is that countries want to incentivize good family formation, not just family formation. And that's a seemingly impossible nut to crack with government incentives. You can't just throw cash at people, you would end up with people you don't want having kids raising them to become adults you don't want.

Low birth rates happen because it takes effort (and money) to raise children. There is a lot of satisfaction too, but for many couples the breakeven point is at one child, or less.

But with the advent of AI, it is quite likely that some of the effort will be gone. Imagine a robot that does the dishes, folds clothes, or changes diapers. Or a robot that teaches patiently a child to speak a foreign language, or teaches them algebra. Maybe with a human (read parent) in the loop. I know this can easily slide into becoming stuff of nightmares (e.g. M3GAN), but with a bit of trial and error I'm sure we'll be able to strike a balance where the AI will be useful but not dangerous. After all, fire can kill yet we use it in our kitchens.

Do you have kids?

I do, but what are you trying to say?

I’m trying to figure out if your comments about AI helping raise kids is from experience or speculation.

Since you’re a parent, then I’m going to take it a lot more seriously. I’ll reflect on how AI might help in my own parenting.

If you weren’t a parent, I’d probably be more dismissive.

Well, it's early days of AI. But I can already get some help. My oldest child is in high school, and my wife and I can help him with math and coding. But when it comes to biology, or ELA, or history, our help is quite limited. And in these situations AI can be a real help. Of course, you still need to get involved as a parent, otherwise the kid is tempted to just copy/paste the ChatGPT answers.

Life After People is a TV show that covers some answers to the title, from several points of view.

> As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

This always confuses me. If I were abandoning my home of my own volition, I'd take my possessions with me.

Every time I've moved, it involved getting rid of piles of stuff. And my next move will probably be a downsize. I'm already on a mission to get rid of X cubic foot of stuff per year. After helping my mom downsize, I've lost my nostalgia for keeping old stuff around. And my kids want none of it -- they don't know if they will ever own a house, or necessarily what country they'll even live in.

And of course I wonder why stuff piles up. The reasons include laziness and probably a mild hoarding instinct.

Eventually we all die and our heirs if we have any tend to value our possessions closer to the market rate ($0) than we do.

Christmas decorations and nappies both strike me as the sort of thing that would get left behind, they're pretty poor in the value/space tradeoff, not to mention that a lot of these houses were left behind when elderly people died. It's not uncommon for elderly people to have stuff they accumulated over the years, it would not surprise me if there's christmas decorations that have been unused for decades in my grandmother's attic, or nappies that were once for grandchildren that are now adults. In a country where the population is growing, this stuff just gets dumped as the heirs clear out the house to sell, but what are these houses in the middle of nowhere with infrastructure that has crumbled away worth?

Those old homes are usually used as storage for things that don't fit into their new, urban homes. The market value and taxes are low, so there's no point in selling.

Then eventually, without realizing, you have gone there for the last time, and there's nothing left to move to your new home.

Alternatively, the last old person who lived in the house dies or goes into a care home, and their kids (if they have any) never find the time to clear out the old place. There's no one to sell it to, anyway, so they have all the time in the world.

After I watched the old mario bros movie i thought that dinosaurs might have built a civilization but we see no traces of their deeds. It was very sad to think about that.

Check out the DMZ in Korea and Chernobyl.

Afaik, the region which is now the DMZ was never industrialized. So this is a very special case with little toxic waste (other than the occasional landmine).

Covid was a great example of how the natural world returns to harmony when human antagonism via noise/sound pollution and so forth is suddenly halted. I think a lot of dolphins in the sea rejoiced.

The article actually argues that the idea that nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way is not correct. A lot of what we view as stable ecosystems are stable because of our management and influence over millennia. Nature on it's own is not a thing, there are no checks and balances, no intention, no morality. The quote from the article is that nature does not organise it's self into neat parables.

This is called the "baseline" problem among conservationists.

Why is it a problem? It's not like people are somehow special. We eat and shit like every other mammal but without us the water and land would not be full of synthetic chemicals and plastics. Seems very obvious to me that human industries change the baseline to a polluted state vs what it would have been without industrial activities. But even without industrial activity the historical record is very clear on the effect that human populations have on the surrounding flora and fauna.

Well, if you want to be optimistic, I think we got coal from lignin/wood being uneatable for hundreds of millions of years (I think).

So wood would stack up, not rot, get covered by dirt and turned into coal due to physical processes, not biological ones.

So coal deposits of the existing magnitudes couldn't be created now.

I am very optimistic. I don't remember where I read it but whatever remains after the current industrial civilization will not have access to the energy resources necessary for reindustrialization. Might have been Derrick Jensen but I can't remember which book exactly.

I have no idea what book might have first explored this idea, but it's a very common theme online whenever this type of discussion comes up: someone will inevitably point out that any post-human-extinction civilization that might evolve on Earth won't have such easy access to energy as we've had.

It's obvious once you think about what enables our current industrial activity: millions of years of biological growth and sedimentation. But it's all equivalent to solar radiation that was incident on the planet over millions of years which we have burned up in less than a few hundred. Once you understand this basic reality the logical conclusion is very clear and obvious: the current rate of consumption is unsustainable. The obvious next question is what can be done about it but no one wants to think about it so it never gets addressed. Presumably someone higher up the political and economic hierarchy is thinking about it and they will manage things as best as possible but based on how people reacted to COVID lockdowns I'm not sure they know what they're doing.

I think you are missing the point. The "problem" is the question of what you baseline you want humans to restore it to and then actively maintain.

Many people want to restore nature, but the natural state is usually one of flux which is deeply unsatisfying to many advocates of it's restoration.

It is an interesting question.

Nature is much too complex to fit into people's anthropocentric perspective. Either we dial back the production of industrial poisons or the natural world will continue withering from our consumption of natural resources. The fundamental problem is that industrial activity is unsustainable but it's neither politically nor economically expedient to actually address the root causes of why that's the case.

Sure, but that a complete tangent from the problem/challenge the parent post was talking about and you were attempting to critique.

Your tangent does not negate the point, as it has practical applications for public policy and managing interest groups.

One of my favorite examples to illustrate the challenge is restoration efforts around the Salton Sea. The lake is drying, causing dust, and there is a major environmental movement to restore it. The challenge comes in that the entire lake was created by accident in 1905, so the benchmark for restoration is critical. Restoring it to the dry lakebed of 1904 would not help with fish life and dust reduction. Dial the clock back to 1700, and it was a enormous lake again, but we would have to reroute the entire Colorado River from the current path along the Arizona boarder, because the Colorado river has shifted 200 miles east 300 years ago.

In any event, good luck with whatever plans you think will restore natural balance. I've made my points as clear as possible.

troll alert

yep, or someone engaging with enough bad faith that the distinction makes no difference. I usually give folks the benefit of the doubt once and then move on.

All my responses are always of utmost sincerity.

So I get the sense that we can be considered part of nature, and however much or little influence we exert is a part of the overall system. It can balance to an extent with our presence and will do so without it.

The article doesn't claim that 'nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way'. It says

>> Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists.

...

>> To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough

In the 1960s there was a long overdue correction to the Australian constitution because the preamble mentioned the continent's "flora and fauna" in a way that implied Aborigines were part of the "fauna." The wording was grossly racist, and had to be changed because of the politics, but from an ecological standpoint, there was some truth to it. Australia's ecosystems were stable because of how Aborigines interacted with them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_and_Fauna_Act_myth

I stand corrected.

Learning about logistic map, phase spaces and attractors helped a lot with understanding the fundamentals of natural evolution. It doesn’t really answer any question (akin to Newton laws don’t really answer how to build Ford). But it makes you grasp the whole model. It’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor all the way down.

Tldr, things get stable until they aren’t and then they may remain unstable for a while, and you never know how, why and how long in general, unless it’s something really obvious and measurable.

We are part of the natural world and your natural world is a place of constant savagery.

Some years of great success ended by a rust nuclear plant suddenly exploding.

Humans can have a positive ecological impact. For example large parts of the Amazon were cultivated forest gardens with biochar used to build the soil. The issue lies with modern consumerism. Where large corporations capture governments & mandate ecological problems. If we get back to our roots of homesteading, growing our own food, managing the health of our soil, we can get back to being a net positive.

It would be cool to plant a food forest. Give it 60-80 years and it might just change into a garden of Eden.

One of the more interesting photography books I've seen is 'The Past from Above' by Georg Gerster. 2005, ISBN 0-89236-817-9. Hundreds of aerial shots of long-abandoned archeological sites.

Equilibrium is near.

The perspective of the entire article is confused. Abandonment doesn't overcome and infuse something. It's not an action; it is a state. And what happens TO nature? No, what does nature DO when humanity stops what it does to nature. Réclamation, from the proper perspective; abandonment is from the human perspective.

It is all about aesthetics. Humanity is also part of nature.

As I understand it, it's not about aesthetics per-se, but rather that "nature" is a semantic concept defined by us humans for anything that is outside of the human sphere - i.e. something is "natural" or "out in nature" or "nature's way" if it's what would have been if humans hadn't been involved.

In the manner of an algal bloom, yes.

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