Collapse != extinction
Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
111–120 of 165 posts
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#112Humanity will never go extinct as long as the Earth supports photosynthesis generally. If the ecosystem collapses, we might suffer for a little while, but our technology can overcome any environmental problem. Environmental damage, no matter how severe, is not an existential threat, and hyping it up as so does nobody any favors.
That said, environmental damage is expensive, and we should mitigate it. But we should do so with an accurate, not inflated, knowledge of the consequences.
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Repeated hysterical predictions of human-level catastrophic events are the single largest impediment that environmental causes face -- because when they repeatedly fail to come true people update their priors accordingly. The worst part is that the people making the exaggerations think they are helping.
There are billions of people on the planet and there's no way to stop some of them from being hysterical. It would be a shame to fail as a species because we didn't like the way the message was delivered.
If only a few fringe outliers were crying wolf, I would not be so concerned about the credibility issue.
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about people who can't afford it now, though? There are literally billions of them.
But for those people the food needs to be free, not cheaper - feeding them shit quality food just so they can afford it is the wrong solution as well. We need to be growing good quality food and those who can't afford it need to be given support to get it. Canned pasta and corn is not a solution just because it's cheap.
Famines and food insecurity are usually caused by sudden unavailability rather than slowly rising costs, aren't they? The ongoing famine in Yemen seems to be the result of blockaded ports and disrupted agricultural infrastructure, and the most recent famines in Africa were the result of drought.
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if we instead gave them means (technology) to grow it themselves and encouraged them to group in small communities that grow together? Aquaponics is getting more and more popular and can be very cheap. I imagine that a good "how to" guide and a small monetary donation could help a lot of people.
You're not thinking like a poor person, you're thinking like a comfortably wealthy person. Poor people often don't have the time, energy, or mental well being to run organizations or take on another line of work. Money is a tool for overcoming barriers to cooperation. People who can't self-organize to cheaply produce food for survival will continue to not be able unless enough money is available.
That’s not true - most of the time they just don’t know about alternatives. It’s not that they are not thinking about them, it’s that they literally don’t know what’s possible.
In terms of growing your own food, poverty of post USSR Russia is an interesting case study. The concept of a “dacha” became hugely important in subsistence. In last years of USSR shops became empty in most regions. You literally could not buy food even if you had money. Limited rations were provided so people didn’t die of starvation.
A lot of families turned to weekend farming. Usually not any kind of livestock, just vegetables. Potatoes, onions, garlic, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers and such. Pesticides were expensive, so not an option. Composting and dun from the villages who had livestock were primarily used.
My grandparents weekend farm produced enough to feed several families and we often gave away or bartered extra sacks of potatos. In all, the land used for this was less than .2 acre. Worked by 2 adults part time with rudimentary tools more reminiscent of 18/19th century than a modern operation.
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody here is ignoring yield per acre. RoundUp, for all its faults, drives the yield number up. More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? I…
> More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. This feels like saying we absolutely need multiple GB of RAM to display a website because how else would Angular work otherwise? If the increased yield per acre is used primarily to support todays industrial-scale meat production, maybe we should address the latter first. The way meat production works today seems to have almost exc…
I agree we overconsume meat and that reducing meat consumption is one of the best ways to start addressing food/environmental issues, but to my knowledge the farmland producing feed or grazing material for livestock is not fungible in the sense that the land could just as easily be used to produce crops for human consumption.
That is, you can’t just swap out corn/hay fields for rice and bean fields. I would love to be proven wrong though, it would help me rationalize further reducing my meat consumption
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody here is ignoring yield per acre. RoundUp, for all its faults, drives the yield number up. More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? I…
> More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. This feels like saying we absolutely need multiple GB of RAM to display a website because how else would Angular work otherwise? If the increased yield per acre is used primarily to support todays industrial-scale meat production, maybe we should address the latter first. The way meat production works today seems to have almost exc…
We only have a few percent more food production than humanity needs, if I remember correctly. Roundup and other pesticides combined with fertilizer increased yields ... it doubles and triples them, and it prevents famines resulting from sudden insect plagues, which were common (as in every 30 years on average) for most of human history.
If these numbers are even close to accurate, eliminating roundup and modern farming would kill BILLIONS of humans.
I would love to get more accurate numbers, but what do you intend to do about the little "humans need food" issue in general ?
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody here is ignoring yield per acre. RoundUp, for all its faults, drives the yield number up. More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? I…
> If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? The argument above, if I'm not mistaken, is that we should produce less food, and so if that is the objective, we can farm the same acreage with a lower yield per acre just fine. Less s…
What about the humans who eat that food ? Should we kill them now or just let them starve ? (there's only a few percent more food than needed, so ...)
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extinct is click bait, but it could definitely harm us. It also makes the world less interesting.
How would it harm us? It's never made clear.
The food we eat and the air we breath all depend on living things - on the ecosystem that we evolved to live in.
Re: Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody here is ignoring yield per acre. RoundUp, for all its faults, drives the yield number up. More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? I…
Can just eat less meat and gain 10x efficiency.
Meat is made, inefficiently, true, from grass. Where grass grows, it is generally so because nothing else will grow there.
So in a lot of places you can't swap out meat for, say, corn. It's meat ... or nothing (well, grass, which I guess you could make plastic from but little else).
All of agriculture is also pretty inefficient btw. From the sunlight to calories (before any processing) there's ~1.8% efficiency.