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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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Re: Insect collapse

#131

Post by snikeris »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

For most of those "7 billion stupid-ass humans", "their hedonistic blunder in search of more wealth" means acquiring things like food, water, and shelter for themselves and their families.

Seems like you want them to halt their economic growth?

I'm concerned about the biosphere too, but people gotta live. Check out ecomodernism:

http://www.ecomodernism.org/

It's a more productive way to frame your concern for the environment.

Re: Insect collapse

#132

Post by harshreality »

dharma1 wrote: post #90
titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

It feels like humans lack the capacity to optimise for success beyond reproduction and acquiring power, especially at large scales and timelines. Maybe there is a non-technological solution to this - new ways of organising that enforces better choices for the planet and our long term survival - but it's hard to see that. Perhaps the bit flipping will be the way out of this mess - using machine intelligence to underst…

What's best for the individual is not always best for society or the world. As long as people have a mindset that prioritizes individual well-being, the only roadblock to environmental irresponsibility is to generate enough political awareness so that laws get passed that curtail some of the more harmful individual behaviors (in ways that are enforceable).

Re: Insect collapse

#133

Post by mempko »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

The vast, vast majority of people use so little resources and energy, it's not even worth talking about. Even if there was 1 billion people , but those people were only Americans and Europeans, you would still see such a large collapse of our habitat. Billions of poor people are not the problem.

Re: Insect collapse

#134

Post by nopriorarrests »

rollo wrote: post #123
nopriorarrests wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. What does it mean?

JS is the most popular language. Thus most software is wasting orders of magnitude more energy than it should. The same functionality would require less than a tenth of processing power (and thus energy and physical hardware) if it were implemented properly.

Properly is like what, assembler? So lets spend 100x power on developers notebooks and 100x of their paid time and rewrite eveything in asm so it will work faster? Or what "implemented properly" means?

Re: Insect collapse

#135

Post by astazangasta »

otikik wrote: post #113
astazangasta wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of reasoning is spurious. The people who consume the most resources also have the lowest fertility rates. What we can do other than despair and contemplate genocide is transition to a carbon neutral economy. It really only requires political will.

Sorry but your comment doesn't help me. I can not "transition my society to a carbon neutral economy". I don't know how I can "create political will". Can you be more concrete?

You posited an individual act that could only have a result if realized collectively. I posit the same. Make carbon neutral choices as much as possible, in your personal and professional life; conservation works.

As for political will, it is the same: composed of individual wills. Bill McKibben points out that a major impediment to a carbon-neutral future is that fossil fuel reserves are capital; the powerful people that own them need us to remain dependent on fossil fuels so their capital continues to have value. These people mobilize huge resources to support their goals; in the last generation trillions of dollars, representing engineering, resources and manufacturing, that should have gone to developing a carbon neutral economy was squandered in useless wars to secure access to fossil fuel resources in the Middle East.

At the same time these forces are extremely vulnerable to collective action in the form of an organized populace. Creating political will means: educate yourself and your neighbors and discover ways (protest, lecture, lobby) to stymie their agenda and advance your own.

Re: Insect collapse

#136

Post by Nagyman »

linguistbreaker wrote: post #99
skh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly. Another way to look at it would be that we have a responsibility to raise more responsible people.

Hrm, I'm thinking that all the time one spends raising a single child could be spent educating a lot more children to be responsible. Raising != educating of course, but raising individual responsible children doesn't scale the same way that education can.

Re: Insect collapse

#137

Post by [deleted] »

jellicle wrote: post #124
lotsofpulp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not equivalent since you're already alive. Not producing a child isn't the same as killing one's self in any way.

Of course it is. You can immediately and permanently eliminate all of your CO2 production going forward. That's a big help to the world, not very useful for yourself though. Obviously if we eliminate humanity we also eliminate humanity's impact on the world. You can also get rid of all bugs in your code by deleting the code. That is the exact definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. We're lookin…

[deleted]

Re: Insect collapse

#138

Post by addicted »

voqv wrote: post #20
fsloth wrote: post #11

It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors. This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them. Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it…

For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.

But even that is misleading. A small fraction of humanity has been living really well.

And it’s increasingly apparent they have been able to do so by essentially pushing the costs of their actions to future generations.

Re: Insect collapse

#139

Post by Zoh0eich »

skh wrote: post #94
otikik wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still on the "affected by negativity" phase. May I ask what concrete actions are you taking (besides being optimistic). I spent one morning with a group which plants and looks after trees in a reserve near my place. We were putting protections around young saplings so cows wouldn't eat them. It took my team of three the whole morning to put protections around a single sapling. The whole thing made me sad. There i…

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

There's more one can do than just that. I do not own or use cars. I try limit my meat consumption (not entirely successful on that front). I changed energy providers to buy from renewables sources. I do not travel by air. I don't have air conditioning.

I also sit on a pile of money, not sure what to do with it. Index stocks contain fossil companies which I don't want to support. Maybe I'll throw some at those silicate weathering pilot projects.

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