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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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Re: Insect collapse

#181

Post by ryanmercer »

scott_s wrote: post #71
11235813213455 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I believe we can act about it. My environmental fingerprint is probably At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically…

Local food is not necessarily more environmentally friendly. According to a paper on food transportation and reducing its carbon footprint, about 11% of typical US food consumption's carbon footprint comes from transportation [1]. If the food you're eating from the area you're in is not suited well for growing that kind of food, it's quite possible the local farmers are making more of a carbon impact versus growing i…

Transporting food is a lot more than just fuel consumption, the farther you transport a given amount of food the greater your loss potential is to spoilage/contamination/infestation etc. It also promotes unsustainability, the US exports an insane amount of grain and imports nearly half of it's fruit for example, using land in America to feed livestock and people in China, Russia, India etc while eating fruit year round by importing it from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, New Zealand etc.

Re: Insect collapse

#182

Post by ryanmercer »

toasterlovin wrote: post #169
throwaway5752 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reconcile the future warfare and famine risk to your N existing children caused by the additional carbon of your hypothetical N+1 vs your utility of having an N+1th child, though? Because that is the actual formulation.

You reconcile it by reading some history books and realizing that life has always been tough and that the future probably won't be any tougher than the past.

Except for the fact we are, in decades, affecting climate in a way that took several millennia previously and we've contaminated the water and air with not only microplastics but all sorts of outright toxic compounds.

Then of course we are making species go extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate because we are contaminating ecosystems, clear-cutting ecosystems and causing ecosystems to collapse by directly influencing climate making it impossible for parts of those ecosystems to survive.

Life is already orders of magnitude 'tougher than the past'.

Re: Insect collapse

#183

Post by jelliclesfarm »

mrob wrote: post #76
vixen99 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem at all! So put tigers at the top of your list and work slowly but surely down the the list of 'nasty' animals and plants. Doubtless we can eliminate the whole damn lot if we really try. You'll be a hero! Or maybe not.

I'd put malaria carrying mosquitoes at the top of the list, not tigers. The concept of a tiger is an important part of human culture, and it would be a pity if nobody could see a real one, but they breed in captivity, so people can see them in zoos. It's easy to romanticize the idea of "wild tigers" when they live far from you, and you're at no risk of one eating you or your livestock. Humans killed most wild tigers…

Human beings have become destructive apex predators. In nature, apex predators.. even though they are keystone species...have an impact on prey density and regulation of the eco system. They do not destroy the very system that sustains them.

Human beings are not supposed to be apex predators but we have taken over that role without embracing the intricacies of the responsibilities involved with it.

Re: Insect collapse

#184

Post by toasterlovin »

ForHackernews wrote: post #177
toasterlovin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you care about the environment, you should have children. I wrote a whole blog post on this, but the gist is that people are going to have children whatever you decide to do. If people like you, who are thoughtful and conscientious about the future of our species, decide not to have children, then the world will just be filled with the offspring of people who don't really care abo…

This only makes sense if you assume "caring about the environment" is highly heritable and that individuals "caring about the environment" in the abstract somehow translates into large-scale public policy that's better for the environment (I would suggest available evidence shows that it does not).

As I pointed out, children get their nature and their nurture from their parents. And I don't know how you can reconcile the success of the environmental movement in the developed world in the past 5 decades with your position that somehow people caring about the environment doesn't have any real world effects.

Re: Insect collapse

#185

Post by ryanmercer »

addicted wrote: post #138
voqv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"living really well" is highly subjective,

>5 billion people now have a mobile phone connection, according to GSMA data.

Per https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have...

That alone should be an indication people are living quite different now than just 10 years ago.

Re: Insect collapse

#186

Post by ryanmercer »

refurb wrote: post #172
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #154

Speaking as a farmer..We should return half the earths landmass to nature. We must change how we grow food. We must even reconsider our ‘food for survival and fuel’. We can all do without pork and HFCS and kale to live. We can’t live without this planet and it’s natural systems sustaining us. We should waste less. Use less fossil fuel. Every time I hear another VC flog their investment with the tired old line ‘we mus…

But 1/2 of the world is already wilderness.[1] I think people underestimate just how big Russia and Canada are and the fact that for most the part, they are completely undeveloped. [1] https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/12...

I think they meant more along the lines of

"We should take half of the 17,235,800 square kilometers of cultivated land in the world and return it to nature"

Or even

"We should take half of the 1,549,600 square kilometers of permanent cropland"

Re: Insect collapse

#187

Post by artur_makly »

Nagyman wrote: post #136
linguistbreaker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

do both and gain extra insights into humans overall.

Re: Insect collapse

#188

Post by kamaal »

sethammons wrote: post #179
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reaching out and talking to people will help. 1. If everyone has 1/2 surviving child then in 150 years, our population will become stable. 2. It’s not transferable because we still need species diversity 3. People will be incentivized with ubi and all their needs taken care of if they agree to #1. 4.stop animal based foods. 5. Return half planet back to nature to reforest and rewind. 6.reverse acidification of oceans…

Human populations grow slower the more advanced they are. Most of the first world, including the US, is below replacement fertility rate of 2.1. Without immigration and the like, the US would start contracting. Bringing the third world up to first world is what is needed. That and the other things you said. [EDIT] Links help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

>>Bringing the third world up to first world is what is needed.

Again, the biggest hurdle to that is politics. There are deep geo political ramifications on any thing that causes change in economic equations at such massive levels.

Mostly its also the will of the people. The world is indeed a giant stack ranking system, and people do indeed believe in ruining anything it takes to score the most points. Most people do believe in things like their civilization, nationalism and racial supremacy.

If you think of it as a whole, space, asteroids and what humans could do if they work together. The very concept of economy feels like something that limits human progress.

Re: Insect collapse

#189

Post by pohl »

peacetreefrog wrote: post #175
pohl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?

I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.

HN has never been that narrow, in my experience. I don't recall ever seeing a day on HN without something of mere general science interest (although I've only been here since '09.)

Come to think of it, there are HN guidelines that explicitly state that HN isn't that narrow:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Insect collapse

#190

Post by kamaal »

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.

>>It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children.

And then who pays for your social security checks, pensions and other debt that was raised to fight wars?

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