Hacker News Reader

Comment by snorremd | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is Attenborough has lived to see the destruction of nature he loved so much. His constant warnings have gone mostly unheard. In some ways I think excellent nature programming like his own Nature is doing a disservice by making it seem like there's lots of wild nature left.

I wish humans would come together to re-wild more of the earth. Restoring wild nature and cutting emissions is the only way to really restore natural ecosystems. We're nowhere close to doing that.

View on HN

I would strongly push back on that. In most developed countries, natural wilderness is at its highest rate in hundreds of years. China's turning around the world with solar panels, all that. I wouldn't call the current state of things backsliding at all.

And in developing countries too. People may not realize that when there's no industrialization, people still need fuel. So they cut down tree that they could walk to. Just look at the pictures missionaries and travelers took in China a hundred years ago. Wherever there were people, there were only barren land. Heck, it was like that even in the early 80s in some places.

Too little too late. China's coal emissions declined last year by a whooping 0.3%... after decades of increasing. We should be already reducing emissions, not flattening the curve

Even granting your numbers, you're measuring the wrong thing. Wilderness acreage and emissions trends are not ecosystem health.

Citing a wilderness figure for developed countries is misleading. Most of it is ecologically vacant--second-growth and tree plantations sans apex predators, large herbivores, intact soil biota, etc. Tree cover is not a functioning ecosystem. Developed countries have exported their ecological destruction: the beef, soy, palm oil, and minerals driving habitat loss in the tropics get consumed in the same places where the domestic "wilderness" figures look great.

The Living Planet Index (actual wild vertebrate populations) is down 73% on average since 1970. North American bird populations are down ~3 billion over the same period. Terrestrial insect biomass shows steep decline in studied regions. None of that shows up in "how much undeveloped land exists" or "how many solar panels got installed."

China's solar buildout is great news for climate, but climate is one driver among several. Habitat fragmentation, pollution, and overfishing don't get solved by the energy transition. You can decarbonize the entire grid and still preside over a mass extinction.

You do know that in china while renewables are 30-40% of installed capacity(how many GWh they can theoretically produce), they are a smaller portion of generated capacity because if inefficiency of grid, intermittency if sun and wind. They are a smaller ~9-10% of Total Energy consumed (which is much bigger pie including for e.g. gas cars, jet fuel, diesel etc), right?

They may be able to distribute all solar panels and wind turbines worldwide; in the end that is just tiny-potatoes good because those markets are not that big. But when it comes to getting to energy independence they are using an "all of the above" strategy to get there. Planetary catastrophy can take a back seat to socio-economic unrest due to less/no money and opportunities for people.

Yet the UK has some of the worst biodiversity on the planet.

Every Nature documentary that ends with David Attenborough saying "there is still time to revert this destruction of natural habitat" makes me want to turn of the TV. I understand David's motivation (instill some catalyst for change) but I am with that other David - David Suzuki.

As per David Suzuki: it is shit, it will get shittier, responsible people should act accordingly [0]: <<"The science has said, ‘We have passed a tipping point, we cannot go back,'" Suzuki said. Survival in a warming world, he says, will increasingly depend on the resilience of local communities — and preparation must start now.>>

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/david-suzuki-memoir-life-bir...

I am reminded of Mayer Hillman - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doo...

You want to the documentary to end with David Attenborough saying that it is too late to revert the destruction of natural habitat?

Since this is the truth, yes, I would like the documentary to end by saying it is too late for natural habitat regeneration.

Many things are the truth, so it's really a question of framing. Another truth: humans have done reversible and irreversible damage to their natural environment; they can collectively reverse some of the damage and prevent further reversible and irreversible damage.

To focus on only irreversible damage -- especially as David Attenborough, somebody who over the better half of a century has earned massive respect and trust from people all over the world -- would be wildly irresponsible.

I, too, would appreciate this. "Look at what is getting lost because of YOUR choices and votes." It would be the truth.

"It's too late" and "It's your fault" are two different claims. The second one is clearly true, but it's never too late to stop making things worse.

Many people here like the bougie narrative that we’re all equally to blame, for obvious reasons. A vote is a vote is a vote.

Well to make matters worse remember we're about to add another ~2 billion humans (Quark DS9 voice) peaking at around 10 in the 2080s.

Most of the growth will be in Africa, not exactly the most lawful place in the world so it looks kind of bleak for the environment and animals there.

Those 2 billion will all want a nice home and a smartphone, computer, TV, car etc…

Earth Overshoot Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

It's not looking great, not even if we got nuclear fusion reactors figured out tomorrow.

Hopefully by 2080 the value of solar plus storage (or something even better) makes things like coal uneconomic.

fwiw a lot of his programming has for decades included explicit conservation messaging and warnings about climate change, disappearing habitats, etc. It's an old strategy (and one he helped invent) of making people care about the thing they're seeing before telling them it's being destroyed.

Looking at EU, the problem do not seem that his warning has not been heard. People see how thing has gotten worse and have heard the warning. The problem is that people can't agree on what to do next. Just looking at the energy discussion in EU, half of those want to use natural gas in Peaker Plants, and the other want to use nuclear, and the result was that both strategy got the EU stamp of green with neither side agreeing with each other. By both sides opposing each other strategy, the result is that very little change happen at all.

A similar situation exist with hydro power. We know that it is causing major extinction of species that depend on migration, with major harm to the ecosystem, and yet no one want to give it up despite being fully aware of the harm. Removing hydro do not fit any of existing strategies and so the current situation, as unreasonable it is, continues unchanged.

I have also seen similar issues here on HN when people discuss emission per capita vs absolute emissions. A large portion of people who heard the warning and are aware of the effect of global warming, would still argue that reducing emissions where emissions are being created is unfair if emissions per capita is relative lower compared to other places. The two camps created from this has opposing strategies, even if both camps agree with the current situation.

Ultimately, it speaks to people's lifestyle choices. In the US people are used to a particular standard of living: driving big cars and eating big steaks. If you tell people you can't have those things, they will have a visceral reaction. Politicians caught wind of this and turned it into a divisive left vs right debate. Im oversimplifying, but at the core its an incentives problem: Why should I tighten my belt today for some future payoff I may not even be around to see?

It's more like - why should I tighten my belt today when the celebrities, politicians and corporations making a big fuss about climate change are still flying around in private jets, buying up coastal property, eating steaks and are responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions?

What kind of argument even is that? What's next - "why should I care about hurting you when there's so many sociopaths out there that clearly don't"?

The people spreading fear about environmental collapse and claiming to be terrified of it, are displaying behaviors that contradict their claims. The people saying the ocean is rising and going to swallow communities while buying mansions on the coast and flying around in private jets, are either displaying extreme cognitive dissonance or aren't really that concerned with the environment collapsing. If it were one or two individuals displaying this behavior I'd blame cognitive dissonance, but it's pretty much every high-profile politician / celebrity.

David Attenborough saw more clearly than most what was being lost. But even he stopped short of fully applying that logic to animals themselves.

Rewilding at scale, deep emissions cuts, and a serious move away from animal agriculture are the same project.

Modern agriculture, both animal and non-animal versions, are bad for the environment. Artificial fertilizers, replacing forests with farm land, and drainage of wet lands are all heavily contributing to emissions and water pollution, destroying local ecosystems as well as warming the planet. Artificial fertilizers is particular bad since its production uses fossil fuels, has large amount of accidental green house emissions, and causes eutrofiering to the point of areas like the baltic sea becoming basically dead from loss of oxygen. Runoff from farms are also now the primary cause of ecosystem collapse in fresh water lakes.

The most impactful elements of modern agriculture are entirely animal-based. Full-stop.

You in fact rightfully but incompletely recognize : artificial fertilizers (for giant mono-crop fields of soybeans to feed to cows and pigs [0]), replacing forests (to clear room for soybean fields and pasture for cows and pigs [1][2]), and runoff of these fertilizers and manure into waterways. The parent comment is right - if we want to fix these problems, we must stop killing and eating animals at such an industrial and horrendous scale.

0. https://www.ucs.org/about/news/extent-emissions-created-mass...

1. https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

2. https://gfw.global/39qbPdC

3. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

If it was a competition in who did more harm the distinction may be relevant but in terms of saving the environment and turning back the ecosystem back to a sustainable one, the distinction between animal based or non-animal based is mostly irrelevant. Modern agriculture are not sustainable for the environment. The fossil fuels that are pulled from the earth and put on fields are not sustainable, and the amount of run off that goes into the water are destroying ecosystems with no time table if they ever can recover. When different species goes extinct they stay extinct, and the distinction that "well, its not as harmful as animal-based agriculture" will not bring them back. The Baltic Sea an loud warning signal of what happens if we continue to go down this path of modern agriculture.

One of the few areas of sustainable farming is aquaculture like shellfish and seaweed, which could actually be used to reduce the negative effects caused by modern farming. If there were a competition in least amount of harm, those would likely be the winners.

Fields of corn or soybeans will still exist without animal-based agriculture, especially with current demand for biofuels. As long as the land can be farmed to generate revenue, people will farm it. Artificial fertilizers is the primary enabler of this.

> in terms of saving the environment and turning back the ecosystem back to a sustainable one, the distinction between animal based or non-animal based is mostly irrelevant

this is simply false - did you follow any of the citations? you’re welcome to find something to support your position but as they say: if it can be asserted without evidence, it can be dismissed without evidence.

No one is saying fields of corn and soybean wouldn't exist, but we would have far less of them without animal agriculture. You are creating a false dichotomy of "sustainable"/"not sustainable" the reality is human societies would be much more sustainable without animal agriculture. More sustainable does in fact result in less extinctions/ecosystem impact and reduced climate change.

Maybe I'm wrong but reading your comment it feels like you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and you use your conclusion that we will never be sustainable as your excuse to continue to eat animals.

> No one is saying fields of corn and soybean wouldn't exist, but we would have far less of them without animal agriculture

There is no evidence that there would be far less farm fields without that. Farm fields exists if there is profit to be had. Right now the demand for biofuels are directly competing with the demand for animal feed. Farmers will primary grow and sell crops based on what pay the most, and can easily switch if one pays more than the other.

https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/360637/?v=pdf The Impact of Market Prices on Farmers' Crop Choices in Ghana https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373480516_Farmers'_... Farmers’ risk rating and crop portfolio choice in Kewot Woreda, North Ethiopia https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X2... Understanding factors influencing farmers’ crop choice and agricultural transformation in the Upper Vietnamese Mekong Delta

Notice that none of those says that farmers would not use the fields if the current most price worthy crop would go away. Farmers choose what to farm based, among other things, the market. If you remove animal agriculture, you don't get far less fields. You get fields with a different crop in them.

The only thing that will stop farming is either if the external cost of farming is applied, such as pollution, or if climate change makes farming the land unprofitable. Currently that pollution is not applied as a cost. A carbon and water pollution tax could be a strategy that addressed this, and would impact all farming regardless of crop. If that is "perfection" and "enemy of the good", then the definition of perfection is not shared.

Bit of a fallacious argument here - why do you presume to know how farm land will be used in the future?

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

> If you remove animal agriculture, you don't get far less fields. You get fields with a different crop in them.

we just simply cannot know this. but, we do know the impact of our current practices, not to mention the (supposedly) debatable ethical element of killing hundreds of billions of animals each year.

> The most impactful elements of modern agriculture are entirely animal-based.

If we step back a bit, the most impactful bit is true human wish for growth.

If we were satisfied with a comfortable stasis, that would be helpful.

strongly disagree; we can quantify the differences. our current population levels are sustainable if we stopped overfishing our oceans and raising billions of animals each year for slaughter. check my other comment for a bunch of citations!

He did mention in one of the planet earth 2/3 series how so much of the land is used for farmed animals. And, for the sake of completeness of argument, for restoring what was lost, the challenge is how to raise the standard of living fast enough for people so they give a damn about anything apart from ourselves was THE challenge to combat climate change and global ecological disaster. He specifically mentioned e.g. educating girls and making older-aged societies more propsperous. Prosperous people can make better choices about farmed animals as food.

Extremely insightful re: capacity to care for others.. though the trend of "NIMBY" and "petite-bougie" ideology (a more modern term being "temporarily embarrassed billionaires") and pretty much the guiltless profit maximization of the oligarchy point to that hypothesis being another form of trickle down economics (only the "prosperous" part. the educating women part should be a given, but if you read the comments in a recent frontpage post about humanitarian aide, the findings of those with decades in direct involvement pointing to "gender empowerment" and road infrastructure as most impactful long-term were met with the same "pronoun" schtick.

Population 1926: ~2 billion

Population 2026: ~8.3 billion

Can't escape this and its consequences on the environment.

> I wish humans would come together to re-wild more of the earth. Restoring wild nature and cutting emissions is the only way to really restore natural ecosystems. We're nowhere close to doing that.

A big issue is cost and economic opportunity. For example, a lot of land in the SF Bay Area cannot be developed. This is great for the environment, but not so great for housing costs.

Long term, it’s likely worth it to save the environment, but let’s not ignore its immediate cost to everyone besides the upper class.

They’re not necessarily at odds. Manhattan has something like 75x the population density per mile. You could rewild 4/5 of the the SF Bay Area while also building 10x the housing stock under that development pattern. Single family homes are just an extremely expensive and ecologically destructive way to live. They require a ton of infrastructure per person.

Unfortunately, I think that housing unaffordability is just a desired feature - people who live there don’t want to live near people who couldn’t afford to live there. It’s much more segregated than many other parts of the country I’ve lived in.

Unlike the East Coast, we have earthquakes and more NIMBYs

Tokyo has plenty of earthquakes, it's not a showstopper. NIMBYs, yeah, they came out in force when height limits were discussed in San Mateo. It was always pretty annoying how progressive SF Bay residents claim to be vs. how progressive they act.

'Cutting emissions'. Trouble is that if folk are convinced this is so negative they'd do something about it - and they do not. Conclusion?

The renewables revolution has been accompanied by a steady increase in emissions. For emissions read carbon dioxide (no argument from anyone about toxic gases) which is a carbon source for plant growth and as we know, is pumped into greenhouses to increase production. Satellite pictures confirm greening of the Earth in many areas.

This does not have to be a counter argument but the emission story would be more convincing to a lot of people if other factors like this (and the difficult question of just how do you decrease energy use without impoverishing people?) were discussed in the public forum in a balanced way as with dissenting views from those distinguished scientists evidently holed up on luxury yachts financed by the oil industry. 'I think you are wrong because ...' or 'you have a point in that respect but ... '. In a nutshell let's get the discussion onto what used to be called 'an adult level'.

Example: Today's Guardian "In case of any doubt about Norway’s commitment to maintain – and expand – its production of gas and oil offshore, the energy minister, Terje Aasland, has a pithy response: “We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/09/norway-oil-and...

Things were so much worse in the 1970s.

Sadly I don't think the outlook is very positive on that. I saw an article from McKinsey about the Himalayan country of Bhutan which has famously put restrictions in place to keep the country heavily forested. Good for nature, good for preserving culture, not so great for capitalism.

The article I saw basically outlined in more detail what I said above and then followed it with: "....but what if that forest could be made productive?" It's rare that I want to reach through the screen and choke somebody but they got me that day.

The cult of Line Go Up will continue to win. They will destroy what we have and then sell us the solution to the mess they created. This will be coupled with a morality tale around individual hard work and personal accountability.

The "cult of line go up" is why we aren't living in caves and eating each other. Come on, we can criticize the deleterious aspects of modern society without disparaging the idea of growth itself.

LOL

1. At a certain point, the idea of growth must be criticized. Unless, of course, you think infinite growth is possible.

2. Claiming the modern capitalism’s “cult of line go up” has anything to do with humans leaving caves is a stretch at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Humans left caves out of a desire to create better lives. Stable shelter, better quality and variety food, tools to make life easier, clothing to protect us, etc. Plus probably some human desire for exploration. None of that is driving capitalists who insist “line must go up”.

We have more than enough to go around. We cannot grow infinitely. Greed is holding us back from caring for our entire human population.

Why shouldn't infinite growth be possible?

The Himalayan country of Bhutan has seen 6% of its population emigrate since 2020. People enjoy the preservation of nature, but they also enjoy having more and better stuff, and a healthy society can't just tell people the second impulse is wrong and they need to give it up.

"People" and their "wants" or "enjoyments" are manufactured by culture (which is in turn now dominated by corporate propaganda). They are not fixed by nature. Any examination of the range of 'wants' in human history will inevitably conclude that, beyond a few corporeal basics, they are endlessly plastic. This is hard to see from the centres of Empire (especially highly mediated ones) where local and highly propagandised 'desires' are seen as 'natural'.

Agricultural societies are machines for creating large numbers of humans. In any democracy (or sufficiently responsive government) the kinds of persons that are created is a powerful determinant of what subsequently happens. Corporations choose to make consumer-humans. Many other types have existed, so ipso facto are possible.

I agree that agricultural societies are machines for creating large numbers of humans. That's why every agricultural society on the planet is working hard to grow and become wealthier. They're not infected by "corporate propaganda"; they know that subsistence farming sucks, and they want to join the rest of us in the post-agricultural future where food is so abundant nobody has to do it.

Bhutan historically pushed "Gross National Happiness" and such as part of a propaganda program to maintain their largely agricultural society against this pressure. Again, this absolutely did not work, and they're now setting up a proper capitalist center in Gelephu to try and convince young people that they don't need to leave the country to have a prosperous life. The precise details of what people want may vary from culture to culture, but there's very few where the average person would not like to have more and fancier stuff.

57 companies are responsible for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. I'm very tired of people trying to tell others that not eating meat or driving a vehicle with an internal combustion engine is the key to solving the problem, because it's not and never has been.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/04/just-57-...

This is extremely reductive. Noting that oil, gas, and cement companies are responsible for pollution is ignoring that oil, gas, and cement are inputs to everything we consume and the infrastructure used to transport goods. Exxon Mobil isn’t extracting oil and burning it for no reason, it gets refined into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. Cement is used in concrete which is what infrastructure is made of, along with steel. Everyone uses infrastructure, either directly or indirectly. Everything you buy was transported on a truck, and possibly a plane or a ship. The supply chains for the components of products you consume, and so on. It’s impossible to avoid if you want to maintain the current global population. We could stop using oil and cement, but there would be mass starvation and our current infrastructure would degrade and crumble over time.

Right - so how is me not eating meat or not driving an ICE vehicle going to help change the situation? The people with the capital to actually change things seem to be more interested in mongering fear while continuing to profit off of their ecosystem-destroying industries, than trying to come up with effective solutions to the problem.

It's not. Not eating meat or driving a hybrid car doesn't help to save the environment, it helps YOU feel better.

The gigatonnes of CO2 linked to a small number of fossil fuel producers are also linked to a very large number of people putting it in their ICE vehicles. People not driving ICE vehicles is clearly going to change that quite a lot...

The list you linked explicitly excludes emissions from agriculture, you are talking about %70 of what they measured, not overall emissions. If everyone stopped eating meat, it would reduce overall global emissions by a third which is hugely significant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com