161–170 of 285 posts
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The farm lobby isn't standing in the way of terraforming Mars.
Well maybe by the time we get there it will. The thing about mars is that we can't just export the parts of society we like and leave out the rest. When humans colonize a new 'utopia', we tend to bring all the normal human problems with us too.
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"Perfectly good" is an overstatement. Efficacy wasn't that great (80% or so) and there was some evidence of side effects. Overall, the vaccine should almost certainly have not been taken off the market but it's not a near-perfect vaccine vs. FUD story either. See, for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
> Overall, the vaccine should almost certainly have not been taken off the market It's no longer patented so nothing is stopping you from selling it if you think there's a market.
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I agree, you'd have to carefully protect your trees until they reach a reasonable size that they can hold their own. Sheep will definitely prevent reforestation, although they are less likely than goats to harm saplings of a certain size.
The problem is that "carefully protect your trees" doesn't scale. And it's completely impossible for natural propagation, which is the only realistic way of meeting the goal of reforestation.
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There are upsides and downsides to enabling Javascript. If you want to enjoy the NYT rich web content, you need to have it on. Just the way it is.
Not the person you were replying to, but if they want to sabotage my experience because I don't wish to be tracked or infected with malware, then that's their business I guess. I hope they don't expect me to think delightful thoughts about them for doing it.
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Indeed the little ice age of the middle ages is what made Greenland uninhabitable. Birch is a pioneer species, they produce millions of seeds a year, they chased the retreating ice cap as melted northwards in Europe. It would appear they need to be planted out, perhaps they need soil to take. Otherwhise it should be a fairly simple case of just broadcasting billions of birch seeds over Iceland.
Greenland didn't become uninhabitable during the little ice age, there's people living now in Greenland descended from people who survived that supposedly uninhabitable country. The Norse colony got wiped out, but it's unknown whether that was because of war, famine or some other reason. We just know life would have been hardier in those years. What little we do know suggests that they were unwilling to learn the tra…
The more modern theory is that walrus tusk (which was extremely valuable until elephant ivory became available) prices crashed meaning the ships had little reason to travel to Greenland for trade.
I think that this coincided with the Black death which truly devastated the Norwegian population.
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It appears a simple solution of allowing hunting to occur would solve the problem. Why is hunting restricted?
The hunting restrictions are basically why the deer population recovered to the absurd levels they have. They need some tuning the other way, maybe extend the season (eg, shorten the exclusive bow-hunting season and lengthen the regular hunting season). If you're not allowing hunting on your property, it would also be good (albeit expensive) to fence it, so deer cannot easily move through, to reduce their available f…
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Greenland didn't become uninhabitable during the little ice age, there's people living now in Greenland descended from people who survived that supposedly uninhabitable country. The Norse colony got wiped out, but it's unknown whether that was because of war, famine or some other reason. We just know life would have been hardier in those years. What little we do know suggests that they were unwilling to learn the tra…
Perhaps worth noting that the natives got wiped out too. Modern Greenlanders are descended from people arriving on the scene well after the Scandinavians did.
I think you're thinking about Dorset culture which arrived in the south of Greenland after the Norse disappeared, but as the map shows when the Norse disappeared the Thule culture coexisted with them in Greenland far in the north where conditions were worse.
Which shows you that the problem was not that the area was uninhabitable, but that the Norse didn't have the knowledge or desire to survive there.
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I was in Iceland a few weeks ago and the people, museums, info plaques, etc. talked about deforestation and how the early settlers chopped down all the forests. Also mentioned was forestation and how they were slowly replanting. The grazing by horses and sheep were never mentioned as a problem. I did hear about how flocks of sheep are just let loose in the highlands in the summer to graze and the sheep herders separa…
That photo is a sharp (and fascinating) reinforcement of the grazing sheep point. Is there any other reason those trees would grow clustered right there and nowhere else? Was that area not accessible by sheep?
For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…
There is actually a similar problem in the Northeastern United States. Deer are overpopulated (in my area 6x traditional level) because they have no predators and hunting is restricted. The deer eat all of the hardwood saplings. In many mid-Atlantic forests there are very few 10-20 year old hard wood trees, they don't survive the deer.
In VA, many local parks are opened to bow hunting through winter [1] in an effort to control the deer population. Signs posted all over parks to warn users [2].
1- https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/living/wildlife/archery/archer... 2- http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bOyirfPSn0g/Vhv3vlBCh0I/AAAAAAAA0Q...
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I don't know what the case is in NE US, but in my town in British Columbia, the deer population is out of control in the metropolitan area, and every time a cull is mentioned, animal rights activists put a stop to it through loud and effective lobbying. It's quite irritating.
Even if they were allowed to hunt deer, it probably wouldn't help. So much of the land deer graze over in the Midwest is suburban and have laws in place regarding setting off a firearm. This limits hunting to public lands, of which, there might be 2-3 within an hour drive of the city. So no matter how much the hunters kill, they aren't likely to effect the populations in the surrounding suburbs. There are more huntin…
It makes me very sad to go south and see the huge numbers of roadkills on the side of the highway. Where I'm from, we try real hard to inflate the deer population, since the winters and the coydogs keep the population down so much that the hunting isn't real easy.
