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Insects Are in Serious Trouble

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Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#91

Post by thesagan »

derekp7 wrote: post #87
eximius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember fireflies? They've all but disappeared in cities because of mosquito spraying.

There was an article posted here recently about fireflies disappearing. The conclusion was more that they have a rather limited range, and prefer certain (damp, wooded) environments, and it is these environments which are disappearing.

To your point, I think a lot of folks forget how much "terraforming" we're doing all of the time. Entire expanses of grasslands and forests are growing and being re-leveled.

A look at Google maps satellite demonstrates changes of color (dark green to light green and vice versa) across parts of several continents, changes that ebb and flow in big ways over just decades. I think this would very much affect insect (and animal and plant) populations.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#92

Post by hjfhwuu383 »

sxates wrote: post #67

Years ago when I lived in suburban Texas with a typical suburban house with a back yard that had open space behind it I had a terrible insect problem. Exposed skin would get a mosquito bite-per-minute, the dogs were coming inside covered in fleas, etc. So I went to Home Depot and bought this yard spray that promised to kill mosquitos, fleas, ticks, etc. and I hosed down the back yard in a desperate attempt to reclaim…

Free market capitalism has replaced confession to a priest as our new "get out of jail free" card.

So long as you're supporting the Almighty consumerism, no guilt.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#93

Post by Sophistifunk »

sxates wrote: post #67

Years ago when I lived in suburban Texas with a typical suburban house with a back yard that had open space behind it I had a terrible insect problem. Exposed skin would get a mosquito bite-per-minute, the dogs were coming inside covered in fleas, etc. So I went to Home Depot and bought this yard spray that promised to kill mosquitos, fleas, ticks, etc. and I hosed down the back yard in a desperate attempt to reclaim…

Nuts to that, I don't want to spend every summer covered in weeping sores from whatever infection the local mosquitos carry. The wife and I look like crackheads half the summer. If I could I would DDT my whole neighbourhood and wouldn't bat an eye.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#94

Post by hjfhwuu383 »

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…

Why do we need to be wealthier?

Can't we provide healthcare and basics for learning complex things without new Ferraris, Porsches, iPhones, and 5 homes each year?

WTF kind of logic is "We have to chew up all the resources so we can all have everything?"

We should be focusing on equitable outcomes, as Adam Smith and the rest of his lot, advocated for hundreds of years ago.

All we're doing now is fighting for our own wealth and collection of symbolic trinkets, which is traditionalism

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#95

Post by hjfhwuu383 »

mikeash wrote: post #82
pygy_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sustainable growth is an oxymoron. The economy is a dissipative system. It consumes energy/creates entropy to sustain itself. In its current state it already consumes more than the earth/sun can supply. Having it grow even more means consuming ever more energy (fossil and nuclear fuel is finite, the sun light is constant), and generating ever more entropy (i.e. pollution, heat, and ecosystems destruction). Edit: also…

Human energy consumption isn’t anywhere close to what the sun supplies. We just don’t capture much of it. Life is a dissipative system too. It consumes energy and generates entropy. This can’t go on forever, but I wouldn’t take that as an argument against life.

Life is the leading cause of death.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#96

Post by ConceptJunkie »

indescions_2017 wrote: post #81
TheMissingPiece wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just moved from California to Tennessee and only recently got to experience fireflies for the first time in my life. They're incredible :) I don't see them in the city, but that doesnt surprise me... there are tons once you leave downtown, though.

we like to call them "lighting bugs" back here on the east coast ;)

We called them "lightning bugs" when I was living in Pennsylvania (as I recall), but since then I've lived in North Carolina and Virginia and now think of them as "fire flies".

Maybe it's a north/south thing, too.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#97

Post by FooHentai »

gaius wrote: post #34
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…

Banks are among the biggest culprits. Oh come on. There were no investment banks in Soviet Russia yet the Soviets drove economic growth as hard as they could. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. So what? You can easily grow an economy without consuming more raw materials and a simple thought experiment will prove it: consider that you buy some paper and a pen a…

>You can easily grow an economy without consuming more raw materials and a simple thought experiment will prove it: consider that you buy some paper and a pen and write a book. What is the economic value? Well it could be zero, or negative because you've wasted perfectly good paper and the time of everyone who read it. Or it could be billions because it's the next Harry Potter.

Isn't that dependent on the economic school of thought you subscribe to? While that may generate economic activity, unless you're exporting it won't generate economic growth, as no new tangible value has been realized. As per the current trope of selling houses to each other at ever-increasing prices.

A billion dollars flowing from thousands of people to a few, all within a single economy, doesn't seem like growth, it just seems like activity.

Now, foreign market sales or flogging off the international film rights to said book - That's growth.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#98

Post by eximius »

derekp7 wrote: post #87
eximius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember fireflies? They've all but disappeared in cities because of mosquito spraying.

There was an article posted here recently about fireflies disappearing. The conclusion was more that they have a rather limited range, and prefer certain (damp, wooded) environments, and it is these environments which are disappearing.

Can you link that? I'm somewhat skeptical.

My skepticism is rooted in having fireflies where I lived 20 years ago in a neighborhood that wasn't new. Now, there are no fireflies there. Unless the die-off is very slow, my experience clashes with your report that their limited range / terraforming are to blame.

If the article is merely stating that terraforming has MORE of an impact than pesticides... well, that could be true merely because we build more than we spray.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#99

Post by zzalpha »

athenot wrote: post #9
j_s wrote: post #2

I believe the primary source was discussed last week. (Discussion is still open but ain't nobody got time for that once it's off the front page!) 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074 (Oct 2017, 428 comments)

Last week's article motivated me to plant Milkweed ( Asclepias tuberosa and Asclepias incarnata ) in my garden next year, to help with the population of Monarch butterflies and bees. On the other hand, I'll still be deploying my organic mosquito control based on plant oils injected into a mister system. I really don't think mosquitoes fulfill any role in the ecosystem that can't be filled in by other species; but the…

I really don't think mosquitoes fulfill any role in the ecosystem that can't be filled in by other species

This is literally the exact kind of hubris that got us in this mess in the first place...

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#100

Post by eplanit »

pygy_ wrote: post #77
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…

Sustainable growth is an oxymoron. The economy is a dissipative system. It consumes energy/creates entropy to sustain itself. In its current state it already consumes more than the earth/sun can supply. Having it grow even more means consuming ever more energy (fossil and nuclear fuel is finite, the sun light is constant), and generating ever more entropy (i.e. pollution, heat, and ecosystems destruction). Edit: also…

Discussions of "sustainable" are, to me, disingenuous and incomplete, because nobody ever wants to confront the root issue: population size. Really, no ecological practice is "sustainable" in the face of ever-increasing population size. If we could achieve stability and predictability in the size and scope of the human species, then we can find truly sustainable practices. Without that, it's just a buzz word.
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