Birds Are Vanishing from North America • Hacker News Board

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#61

Post by ip26 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

wins32767 wrote: post #20

spodek wrote: post #5

We're swimming in environmental problems. We can come up with makeshift solutions to many, but for solving them all, and not to suggest it's the only solution, but a part of anything comprehensive, is there any environmental problem that a smaller human population doesn't alleviate?

We're exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. The alternatives are either less people on the planet, lower standard of living, or resources from off the planet.

Artificial meat seems like a pretty exciting workaround. Beef has a feed conversion of something like 10:1. So, if you imagine a post-beef world, we will need only 10% of the field corn & soy to produce similar amounts of artificial meat. Corn, by the way, is the US's largest crop.

This has a lot of open questions around, e.g. what happens to all the corn & soy farmers. But if we're just talking about the planet's carrying capacity at Western standards of living, it seems clinch.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#62

Post by carapace » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #36

This apparently isn't a popular opinion, but: this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous . Until we wake up to this fact, we will continue to ennui ourselves and this world into oblivion. It's hard to prove (or even study), but I believe this is the root cause of all the other tragedies. It is not something we will merely engineer our way out of. We don't like religion (or in many cases, even…

Exactly this: we are divorced from nature.

I remember as a kid that going camping was considered an "escape from reality", which made no sense to me because of course Nature is reality and our cities are the artificial "escape".

Geoff Lawton has a quote, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."

It's pretty literal: food, recycling poop and pee, medicine, building materials, not to mention the peace and happiness you have caring for other living things and accepting gratefully their care of you.

It is fun and easy!

- - - -

For practical advice on what to do I recommend Toby Hemenway's videos in re: Permaculture

http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/

Especially "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".

Permaculture is a school of applied ecology (the word itself is a portmanteau of PERMAnent agriCULTURE) that has adherents and practitioners world-wide. It's not the only form of regenerative agriculture either.

See also https://www.greenwave.org/our-work Oceanic 3D farms! And now they are building reefs?

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#63

Post by pretendscholar » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #45

bsmitty5000 wrote: post #2

This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline. I wonder if there's a similar decline in other animals that rely on insects, eg bats. Although, interestingly, the article does mention neonicotinoids as a direct reason for the decline in population. It's hard to imagine humans taking the…

...we die out and the planet recovers on its own. I like to think that the point of humanity is to destroy as many genetic lines as possible, before going extinct ourselves. A trial by fire that weeds out all but the most resilient. Eventually evolving into new, even better intelligence.

Evolution in the sense of natural selection is an incredibly brutal, dumb, and silly subtractive process. I urge my fellow hn commenters not to mistake this for some higher purpose or value. Its an easy mistake to make but the selection pressures that would leave some survivors of the Holocene implies no higher, better intelligence. Often it involves greedy local optimization. Roaches and rats for example are well suited to survive and although clever and resourceful they aren't exactly what might be thought of something that might lead to uberintelligence or something better than our evolutionary path.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#64

Post by throwaway66920 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

pastor_elm wrote: post #44

tylerpachal wrote: post #7

(serious) Is there any hope? Its just one problem after another (probably because everything is linked). What are the chances that we will get our act together or be able to engineer ourselves out of all of these problems?

>What are the chances that we will get our act together or be able to engineer ourselves out of all of these problems? Engineering is what got us into this problem. Foolish to hope it can get us out.

Rowing the boat got us out this far, it would be foolish to think that rowing the boat could get us back /s

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#65

Post by jjuhl » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #51

jjuhl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"try feeding the human race" - How about we reduce our impact on the planet by not feeding all of the human race? Reducing the number of humans on the planet seems like it would be a great first step in solving the overall problem.

Returning to WWII is a scaring but it seems that increasing popular idea. We can do it better, and we must do it better this time.

Who said anything about WWII? I certainly did not. All I'm saying is that we would be a lot better off with less than 4billion people on the planet than 9billion. How we get there I didn't say anything about.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#66

Post by MFLoon » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #36

This apparently isn't a popular opinion, but: this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous . Until we wake up to this fact, we will continue to ennui ourselves and this world into oblivion. It's hard to prove (or even study), but I believe this is the root cause of all the other tragedies. It is not something we will merely engineer our way out of. We don't like religion (or in many cases, even…

I think there is actually a quite simple, coherent framework for such a thing: probability theory. You could say highly improbable is a more scientific synonym for miraculous.

I don't think the problem is that people are unaware per se of the miraculousness/improbability of life, but rather that said awareness is deeply frightening and most people would prefer to sublimate it. The fact that we've all already cheated the infinite oblivion of never existing is incredibly lucky (to non-pessimists), but deeply meditating on this fact is psychologically similar to having a near death experience. So we narrativize to reassure ourselves that our existence isn't just dumb luck, in any manner of ways, both mystical and pseudo scientific: our lives are preordained by God, or by a purely deterministic set of physical laws, or by the operators of our universal simulation, or by the anthropic principle.

All of these belief systems are roughly analogous to saying "Everything happens for a reason", which is something you hear even intelligent people parrot in times of distress. But as Quentin Meillassoux argues in "After Finitude", the only truly universal law of metaphysics is in fact the negation of that platitude: "Things could be as they are, or they could be otherwise."

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#67

Post by dec0dedab0de » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

pretendscholar wrote: post #63

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...we die out and the planet recovers on its own. I like to think that the point of humanity is to destroy as many genetic lines as possible, before going extinct ourselves. A trial by fire that weeds out all but the most resilient. Eventually evolving into new, even better intelligence.

Evolution in the sense of natural selection is an incredibly brutal, dumb, and silly subtractive process. I urge my fellow hn commenters not to mistake this for some higher purpose or value. Its an easy mistake to make but the selection pressures that would leave some survivors of the Holocene implies no higher, better intelligence. Often it involves greedy local optimization. Roaches and rats for example are well su…

That's why I prefaced it with "I like to think" to indicate a sense of wistfulness

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#68

Post by pretendscholar » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

glogla wrote: post #21

point78 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trim the world population

Overpopulation rhetoric is eugenics.

Eugenics implies reducing the gene frequency of genes bad for society either through sterilization or mass killings. Reducing the population proportionately through evenly reduced fertility rates like the one child policy wouldn't change gene frequency.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#69

Post by monktastic1 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #56

blablabla123 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the modern, post-religious intellectual discourse has not even space for metaphysics. Anything in this direction is considered mumbo jumbo. :-) Materialism probably hasn't reached its peak yet.

The history of metaphysics is people denying that they're doing metaphysics. Materialism and scientific realism in science and various forms of Platonism and structuralism in mathematics are just too prevalent for people to even notice them at this point.

Can't agree strongly enough. Even with meditation, where the whole point is (in a sense) to wake up to one's entire field of experience, people are generally unwilling to dig under their own metaphysical layers. They write this off as "oh, I don't do metaphysics." Yes, you do; you're just unwilling to face it.

I updated my post above with a link to a first draft of a site where I go into a little more detail.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#70

Post by ff317 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

technothrasher wrote: post #16

bsmitty5000 wrote: post #2

This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline. I wonder if there's a similar decline in other animals that rely on insects, eg bats. Although, interestingly, the article does mention neonicotinoids as a direct reason for the decline in population. It's hard to imagine humans taking the…

> or we die out and the planet recovers on its own. That makes it sound like there's some kind of natural 'ideal state' for the planet to recover to. Without us, the planet would just go on changing, without anything to judge the current environment at any point as good or bad to any particular standard. Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

+1 - I think the kind of marketing and messaging that makes environmentalism all about saving "the planet" and "the animals" and "the natural environment" really doesn't serve us well. A better strategic approach would be to highlight (with the right crafty messaging) that a very tiny statistical slice of earth's historical states and potential future states are any good at supporting large human populations comfortably like we do today, and our goal is preserving this state in our own self-interest. It's not environmentalism at all, it's human self-interest.