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Insects Are in Serious Trouble

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Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#41

Post by dragontamer »

b0rsuk wrote: post #33
dragontamer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He argued the tribe (sorry I don't remember its name) can fully sustain itself by taking things from nature around it. All their wealth is external. They possess little, but whenever they have a need for something - food, medicine, water, paint, clothes, containers(...) they go to a forest, harvest a specific plant and get it IMO, one of the biggest myths is the myth of the primitive but efficient savage. Its almos…

Those "mythical tribesmen" produce no plastic or other materials which take very long to decompose. Poop, bone, leather, wood re-enter the system very quickly.

> Poop, bone, leather, wood re-enter the system very quickly.

I suggest you study the River Ganges and then reevaluate your position. Poop alone can destroy a river on the scale of citywide human populations.

---------

Plastics are actually INCREDIBLE for preventing waste. A plastic bag for groceries is composed of roughly 13mL of LDPE, or roughly 260 "drops" of plastic! LDPE is so incredibly efficient at manufacturing that there's much less waste in its creation than textiles or other materials.

The issue with LDPE is that it doesn't biodegrade very gracefully and thus becomes a pollutant if its disposed of improperly. But from an engineering / manufacturing perspective, its one of the most efficient materials to make and manufacture.

In contrast, a leather bag required you to raise, feed, and then kill an animal. Indeed, the mammoth was likely hunted to extinction by primitive humans, and demonstrates that even at the small scale... humans can affect the environment.

And sure, the leather biodegrades gracefully (at least, more gracefully than an LDPE plastic bag). But you have to consider the environmental costs in creating the leather (water, food, and waste created by the animal before its leather was harvested)

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#42

Post by maxerickson »

lostmsu wrote: post #39
avip wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self-sufficient tribe is romantic, and it worked once upon a time. I believe we're now 1-2 orders of magnitude away (in headcount) from the possibility of returning to the "sustainable tribe" stage.

Nothing is sustainable in the Universe. Heat death seems to be inevitable.

We'd be in pretty good shape if heat death was the obvious catastrophic horizon.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#43

Post by avip »

mikeash wrote: post #18
b0rsuk wrote: post #10

I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good . Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are among the biggest culprits. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. A new, sustainable economy is needed. I think about it each time I see the Race for the Galaxy card. I've seen a radical example of this among…

I like growth. I want to be wealthier or be able to work less (which is really just an aspect of being wealthier). I want everybody else to be wealthier too. I want my children to be better off than I am. The problem is growth without care for the consequences. Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan. But I think that it goes too far the other way to turn around and say that gr…

Is there "growth" without consuming physical resources? If not, we have to accept OP's POV that economic growth is by definition unsustainable.

"Anyone who thinks exponential growth can continue forever is either a madman or an economist"

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#44

Post by mikeash »

b0rsuk wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth does not necessarily need more planet. The same amount of natural resources produces a lot more wealth today than it did a thousand years ago. The style and amount of growth we've seen in the past couple of centuries uses up more and more, but that doesn't have to be the only way.

It doesn't have to be that way ? What else could people compete for ? Facebook likes ? So far, almost all wealth is material in nature. As for digital rewards, data-centers and other computer infrastructure needs constant input of energy. Human population is growing, humans love to copulate and take pride in having children. We need bigger and bigger internets for bigger facebooks.

Most wealth is material, but that doesn't mean you need ever more material for ever more wealth. The obvious common example is electronics. Shrink a computer or smartphone to use half the materials while otherwise maintaining the same capabilities, and you've increased the amount of wealth it represents.

Raw materials aren't worth much. We mostly pay for the arrangement of matter, not the matter itself. A person who owns a few dozen tons of lumber and plastic and metal is not equally wealthy to a person who owns a house of similar mass. The average human today is far better off than a few centuries ago, not because the average human has more material, but because they have access to material that's better arranged.

Population growth is one thing that needs to be limited. People need space. But there's no inherent requirement for economic growth to be the same. We "just" need to grow through more efficient use of natural resources rather than through greater use.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#45

Post by valuearb »

b0rsuk wrote: post #10

I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good . Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are among the biggest culprits. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. A new, sustainable economy is needed. I think about it each time I see the Race for the Galaxy card. I've seen a radical example of this among…

Modern capitalism can be easily sustainable. You just have to do two things.

1) Legislate frameworks for market based solutions to externalities i.e. tragedies of the commons such as air pollution, water quality, etc. Cap and trade would be one framework for addressing CO2.

2) Eliminate mercantilism, where government policies are used to interfere in market forces, usually for the benefit of wealthy business owners. I.e no more subsidies, of any business, no more "incentives" to overbuild, overproduce, etc.

Boom done. For those of you who say yea, but it's impossible that those 2 things could ever be legislated successfully, I say, yea, your right. But that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge the solution. And for those of you who say, but capitalism bad! I say, yea but those two things are just as impossible to implement under socialism, communism, marxism or any other system you can devise.

In reality, the only solution is to have a Julius Caesar conquer the known world, declare himself or herself dictator for life, and then say, you idiots, we need to have a sustainable planet, and just implement those changes by edict.

Unfortunately the new Caesar would then drop by the senate for a session, and senators backed by the dozen biggest corporate welfare recipients would stab him or her to death. And the senate would immediately repeal the new laws.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#46

Post by lkrubner »

b0rsuk wrote: post #10

I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good . Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are among the biggest culprits. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. A new, sustainable economy is needed. I think about it each time I see the Race for the Galaxy card. I've seen a radical example of this among…

As Robert Kennedy said in 1968:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#47

Post by omegaworks »

b0rsuk wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth does not necessarily need more planet. The same amount of natural resources produces a lot more wealth today than it did a thousand years ago. The style and amount of growth we've seen in the past couple of centuries uses up more and more, but that doesn't have to be the only way.

It doesn't have to be that way ? What else could people compete for ? Facebook likes ? So far, almost all wealth is material in nature. As for digital rewards, data-centers and other computer infrastructure needs constant input of energy. Human population is growing, humans love to copulate and take pride in having children. We need bigger and bigger internets for bigger facebooks.

> humans love to copulate and take pride in having children.

Developed countries are actually experiencing a population decline. As people get wealthier they tend to have fewer children, in some places less than 2 (replacement level).

"All wealth is material in nature" ignores centuries of intellectual property.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#48

Post by aldoushuxley001 »

flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #8

Just some wishful thinking here... Is it possible that the local insect populations got wise to these malaise traps that the researchers were using in western germany? Apparently the way that a malaise trap works is that it waits for insects to fly into it's wall, hopes that they crawl up the wall, and then hopes that they crawl right into a bottle filled with ethanol. Now I do not know anything at all about insects…

The amount of times insect populations are sampled (sparingly) means that there's simply not enough deaths proportional to the population to have a meaninful effect on selecting for those traits.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#49

Post by yayana »

leephillips wrote: post #29
b0rsuk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm repeating that argumentation after Marcin Popkiewicz, a Polish climate expert. He wrote a few fat books about it. No one forces you to take bank loans, but banks definitely foster geometric growth. They want geometric returns on investment. If you don't have constant business growth, borrowing money from bank is losing money. I don't know what would be the right answer. I know what human population is growing at…

I'm no economist, but: If I borrow from a bank to buy a hotdog stand, and the payback is two years at $500/month, I need to earn $500/month + other expenses + profit every month for two years (or default and give the bank the stand, which is the collateral). I don't need to grow. The bank gets its interest, and I get an income from my business. Win-win. Where is "growth" required?

Your hot dog stand was the growth and now they need a 10% bigger next investment for their return on it. They need you to have a competitor with a better stand so they can loan you both money or they need prices to have gone up thanks to other Banks finding speculations and you wanting to sell. Otherwise, they now have 10% more money they need to invest and less of a solution than 2 years ago.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#50

Post by autokad »

njarboe wrote: post #30
mikeash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like growth. I want to be wealthier or be able to work less (which is really just an aspect of being wealthier). I want everybody else to be wealthier too. I want my children to be better off than I am. The problem is growth without care for the consequences. Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan. But I think that it goes too far the other way to turn around and say that gr…

I think one of the main problems is that GDP is used as the measure of national prosperity. GDP goes down when people decide to work less. Some kind of net wealth measurement would be much better parameter for a country to try and maximize. Include natural resources and the biosphere in that wealth. In this scheme taking oil from the ground and burning it would likely be a net negative on national wealth while using…

nothing is neither created nor destroyed, by that very law there cannot be a crop that does not take from the soil. If I eat a banana that has potassium in it, it lends to the fact that it took potassium out of the soil.

farmers do add fertilizer and other stuff back to the soil, though we are finding that maybe there is more to the equation. certain methods like tilling are done to kill parasites, etc, but it may also make the soil vulnerable to erosion. luckily engineers and farmers are looking at these things more closely now.

its also important to note this is just 1 study. just 1 region. 1 particular type of trap. there is still lots to know / find out, but I think its wrong to be jumping to huge conclusions just yet.

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