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Birds Are Vanishing from North America

nytimes.com

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Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#191

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #189
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just no. This is exactly how the flat earth thing took off - people passed it around as a laugh, but at some point someone wasn't in on the joke and really ran with it. If that stuff continues pretty soon people will be shooting birds because they think they are drones or something. Let's not propagate that insanity, even if you do find it funny.

by that logic, any satire should be rejected, a bit of a boring world.

I guess we need to figure out where satire ends and crazy conspiracy theories begin. The difference seems to be with how often repeated and fervent the claim is.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#192

Post by guerrilla »

magduf wrote: post #149
pvaldes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Returning to WWII isn't going to do anything useful, even if you do want to go down this intellectual rabbit-hole. I've actually looked into this before. Go look at how many people died in WWII. Was it a lot? In absolute numbers, sure. As a percentage of the human race? No, not really. It barely made a dent in the worldwide population. You can look at population graphs over time, and it barely registers, if at all. R…

> war just isn't a very good form of population control any more

That's because war isn't a form of population control. It's a form of conflict resolution.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#193

Post by Scarblac »

tgarv wrote: post #103
amatecha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never use the phrase "ideal state", but rather "natural state". Though, even that is not quite accurate as humans are naturally-occurring too, but the things we do (and do to the planet) are not quite so "natural". While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than…

I was actually wondering recently if there has ever been a huge spike in, say, a new species of algae or something, that caused a large change in the atmosphere. I know that what we're doing as a species isn't "natural", and we know better and could avoid it if we really wanted to, but it still had me thinking about what kinds of things the planet has gone through before that would have been alarming at the time if s…

The Great Oxidation Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event) was exactly that. Oxygen-producing organisms caused the extinction of almost all life, over two billion years ago.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#195

Post by guerrilla »

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?

I have a suggestion for obtaining perspective. If we could find the right kind of biologist, we might ask them to estimate how many other species went extinct by destroying their environment. How common is that? I know it happens with deer and rabbits on islands but what about more generally. I know our situation is different, but I'd still like to know and factor it in to a larger answer.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#196

Post by chadcmulligan »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #191
chadcmulligan wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by that logic, any satire should be rejected, a bit of a boring world.

I guess we need to figure out where satire ends and crazy conspiracy theories begin. The difference seems to be with how often repeated and fervent the claim is.

> I guess we need to figure out where satire ends and crazy conspiracy theories begin

how exactly? I remember when I was at Uni we used to joke about project echelon - the crazy conspiracy theory about the NSA recording everyones phone calls and storing them under Cheyenne mountain :-)

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#197

Post by tzs »

hanniabu wrote: post #98
ip26 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that wetland bird populations are actually growing is a strong sign that we can fix this, if we try. Bird conservation efforts in the last few decades mainly focused on wetlands. See DDT, national wildlife refuges, and the duck stamp. So, it's not like the decline is inexorable. But it's not going to fix itself.

All those wetlands are filled with water, which we are polluting. Trump removing the Clean Water Act last week also doesn't help the situation. Eventually this water will get contaminated, insects and species will die. There's no doubt in my mind of that if we keep putting money first.

The Trump administration's reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Treat Act of 1918, which protects migratory birds, also doesn't help.

They interpret it to only prohibit intentionally killing protected birds. So, if you wanted to, say, drain a wetland that migratory birds depended on to build a parking lot, which would wipe out nesting grounds and lead to a lot of bird deaths--that would be fine under the Trump interpretation as long as you aren't building the parking lot to intentionally kill the birds.

This has already started having an effect. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, for instance, no longer stops loggers from cutting down trees with nests of protected birds in them, killing eggs or chicks.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#198

Post by guerrilla »

JackRabbitSlim wrote: post #151
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?

No. John Forbs Nash did the math 40 years ago. Nothing changes until its profitable to change and it will only be profitable to change when its already to late.

That's if we leave it to the market. There are other options, such as direct action, collective action and various forms of state intervention.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#199

Post by habosa »

I went to Australia and spent a day hiking in the blue mountains. I remember thinking that the bird noises were so loud. Not just "huh listen to all the birds" but "it sounds like someone is pumping this in through speakers". Never heard anything like it in America.

Maybe that noise level is just normal? I've only been doing meaningful hiking for the past ~10 years. Does anyone older than I am remember birds being much louder in the past?

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#200

Post by soulofmischief »

rjf72 wrote: post #140
soulofmischief wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm saying man this behavior is just beyond selfish. And we are leaving nothing for the next generations to use in terms of raw materials in order to help us become a space-faring species. Society is perverted to the core.

There's a fun catch here though. Earth is going to face a natural destruction sooner or later. Be it by a gamma ray burst, a super-volcanic eruption, an asteroid impact, or any of other other practically infinite number of ways it can happen, has happened (multiple times), and will happen again soon or later. So we're all effectively living on borrowed time. You can't create a permanently sustainable Earth in a beaut…

That doesn't mean we aren't grossly misappropriating and wasting our resources and reducing our chances of achieving long-term civilization.
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