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Birds Are Vanishing from North America

nytimes.com

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Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#271

Post by masklinn »

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…

> Trantor in Foundation, just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs

Trantor required continuous supply from 20 agricultural worlds to survive. Pretty much all necessities of life for trantorian were externally sourced, with the possible exception of water.

Once that shut down after the 260 sack and the Imperial Family leaving for Neotrantor, population crashed from 40G to 100M.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#272

Post by masklinn »

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…

Outdoor cats (both domestic and feral) don't help either.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#273

Post by frutiger »

NeoBasilisk wrote: post #181
refurb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A beaver dams a river, flooding the shores and killing off the ecosystem. That’s natural. A group of humans do it and it’s unnatural?

It's a question of scale. There aren't 7 billion beavers. If there were only 300 million humans, we wouldn't be having these issues.

What do you think of cyanobacteria and the poisonous oxygen they emitted hundreds of millions of years ago?

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#274

Post by frutiger »

rectang wrote: post #233
refurb wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m challenging the predominant belief that anything humans do is “bad and unnatural” and anything animals do is “good and natural”, even though man is just as natural as any other organism on earth. That premise doesn’t really hold up to rationale examination. To continue the thought experiment, if the beetle infection was not due to any impact of humans, should we try and stop it to preserve the forests? By the abo…

The universe is indifferent. Humans don't have to be.

Humans are a subset of the universe.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#275

Post by frutiger »

__jal wrote: post #218
refurb wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing when humans build dams, right? We're creating new ecosystems.

Get back to me when beavers are causing the extinction of thousands of other species and arguing about how to warn their descendants about radioactive waste.

Many species have caused widespread extinction on a level humans have barely approached. Cyanobacteria, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#276

Post by frutiger »

saagarjha wrote: post #263
refurb wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacteria can mutate quite quickly and wipe out an entire species pretty fast, reducing biodiversity.

Can they wipe out thousands of species?

Yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#277

Post by frutiger »

Donald wrote: post #121
tgarv wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Species are created on geologic timescales. Human activity is, in comparison, instantaneously destroying biological diversity. Evolution simply doesn't have enough time to adapt species to the sort of exponential changes we're seeing in their environments.

Evolution is like gravity. It doesn’t have to adapt to anything on any timescale that is important to our anthropological ideas of “change” or “environment”.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#278

Post by frutiger »

commandlinefan wrote: post #80
technothrasher wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves I wonder, though... we know, for example, that bees pollinate plants, and that we need plants to be pollinated for our survival. But if the bees die out, we can figure out another technical way to pollinate plants - it might be a pain to carry out, and we might be kicking ourselves for not saving the bees before it got to that point, but it can be done. If it comes…

Incidental, but almost all plants pollinate by wind, not by insects (and even fewer by bees): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemophily

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#279

Post by Jweb_Guru »

frutiger wrote: post #273
NeoBasilisk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a question of scale. There aren't 7 billion beavers. If there were only 300 million humans, we wouldn't be having these issues.

What do you think of cyanobacteria and the poisonous oxygen they emitted hundreds of millions of years ago?

They were hugely disruptive and set off a massive extinction event... not to moralize the actions of cyanobacteria (who obviously act without agency), but the only reason we think what they did was fine is that we breathe oxygen!

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#280

Post by NeedMoreTea »

corey_moncure wrote: post #248
anigbrowl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your approach will fail for the same reason than an ethical environmental appeal does. Enough humans who feel and fear their impending mortality are selfish and vindictive enough to obstruct change because they want to conserve whatever material comforts they have now and do not care about what happens to other people after they're dead. I would go so far as to say that some of them take a perverse pleasure in the id…

>say that some of them take a perverse pleasure in the idea of everyone else being worse off, going by the number of facially specious arguments and overtly sadistic rhetoric deployed by many self-styled 'skeptics'. We don't even have to look at arguments and rhetoric. Simply go outside and observe. You can immediately see people driving conspicuously huge vehicles, and some of them have modified their vehicles to in…

Hopeless? Aye.

I think part of the problem is we have become so hugely separated from the natural world. Nature and the environment isn't part of many people's lives, at all.

Go outside and look might reveal a few artificially manicured bits of monoculture grass, endless asphalt, concrete, poles, boxes and wires. Meat, milk, fruit, veg comes in plastic packs, and quite often ready cooked and prepared.

One of the things that stuck with me most reading The Uninhabitable Earth - the most strident and urgent call to action on climate and environment I ever came across, was in his preamble. [paraphrasing badly from memory here] He talks of being perfectly chilled at achieving growth by imposing a cost to nature, he's just not a "nature guy", and wouldn't dream of going near it for a holiday. It's OK to crow about being top of the food chain. Something about not caring about the cow so long as he can get the hamburger, not seeing an issue being a good city dweller, with completely separating ourselves from nature, from paving the planet in concrete and getting everything in packets. Sure, he goes on to say how he misunderstood, but FFS.

OK, now I start to appreciate the scale of the problem.

Hopeless? Feels that way, doesn't it?

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