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Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

bloomberg.com

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Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#221

Post by [deleted] »

cedilla wrote: post #201
throwaway5752 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is just the latest attack angle. Office buildings and cats kill ~4 orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines ( https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k... ). Let's also not wonder about the land cost of pumps/pipeline/refineries, or the rare metal content of the cracking catalysts, catalytic converters on all of the IC cars. The arguments start from bad faith attempts to sabotage…

Yeah. There is no modern consumption without detrimental effects. And the thing is that the total effects of a system are difficult to estimate even for experts. And when we talk about birds, let's not forget the devastating effect of light pollution, which seems to get only worse with the availability of cheap, power-efficient LEDs...

[deleted]

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#222

Post by lou1306 »

reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #126
holografix wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest cinematographic disappointments I’ve ever witnessed. Harrison Ford’s involvement in the movie was tragic. He acted lazily, his character had very little to add to the storyline. Inexplicably he was into Elvis can you imagine your grand children, when old, being huge Elvis fans? It was all so lazy. The only saving grace was the concept that creation of life is a continuous, inescapable circle, that…

The plodding and limp segment in the ruins of Las Vegas really killed the pace and punch of that whole film. Even assuming there was any point in having Deckard in it all, 15 minutes of that could have easily been cut out with almost no impact to the story.

There was a point in having him: he fathered a replicant-born child (while possibly being a replicant himself), aka the central theme of the movie. Execution could have been better, though. And at least the Vegas section had great cinematography ad times: I take much more issues with the final fight, which I thought was anticlimactic both visually and story-wise.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#223

Post by jelliclesfarm »

davexunit wrote: post #170
nemo44x wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it reminds of Nassim Taleb's idea of anti-fragility in that because our monoculture and reliance in chemicals to sustain it, it would only take a certain devastating thing to endanger the national food supply. Do you have examples of or references to regenerative farming practices? I ask because I'm curious about them to see if they scale like modern Ag which for all of its problems (many you pointed out), h…

Sure, starting really generally: "regenerative agriculture" and "permaculture" are good keywords. I think looking for any solution to scale the way industrial agriculture does is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. The scaling of industrial agriculture is the problem. I don't think any one alternative is "the" solution, but rather that many alternative methods need to be applied where appropriate and at…

None of this works at scale. The problem is that we are past carrying capacity. We need to control population. I am in favour of E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth solution where we set aside half the planet for habitat and inhabit only half of the land and leave the oceans alone.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#224

Post by duck »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #107
slavik81 wrote: post #36

I saw a figure[1] the other day that blew me away. If you exclude pets and livestock, then human beings comprise ~90% of all mammals (by weight). All wild whales, bears, lions, deer, moose, mice, rabbits, wild horses, camels, beavers, buffalo, elephants, tigers, rhinos, chimpanzees, pandas, goats, etc... are in that remaining 10%. [1]: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...

That's because we've spent several millennia figuring out how to live more and more densely and we do the same with our livestock. If beavers invented a lifestyle that enabled them to live at densities up to thousands per square mile they'd compromise a hell of a lot of biomass too. The fact that there's more humans doesn't imply anything about the other animal population (though I suspect that it's not good for the…

I recently listened to a great podcast talking about beavers and it mentioned some population stats for North America (can't recall the numbers now). Beavers are right behind humans in terms of how they have shaped the land.

https://www.kuow.org/stories/the-wild-episode-4

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#225

Post by sgt101 »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #217

We are past carrying capacity. If we don’t bring down population to 1-3 billion, when the natural trend of depopulation happens, there won’t be enough resources to feed the population on the spoils of a collapsing eco system. When the apex predator gets hungry, everything gets eaten. Not only are we a super apex predator, we are also the most hungry and are outbreeding all other species and devouring eco systems. It…

Are you actually advocating genocide?

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#226

Post by bluGill »

tw04 wrote: post #32
nemo44x wrote: post #18

I guess it was alluded to in the article but my main concern is the amount of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides we use. As we clear more land for Ag we are of course limiting habitat for animals but also zapping them constantly with these chemicals. Fertilizers get into water and decimate the life in there. Herbicides coupled with pesticides decimate insect ecosystems. The development of land gives larger anima…

But we also don't even take the most basic actions to prevent that fertilizer from making it into our waterways. Farmers insist on putting in thousands of miles of drain tile and running it straight into creeks and streams. They plow their fields right up to the very edge of marshes and streams instead of leaving grass strips to act as a barrier to runoff. It's shocking how little people seem to realize or care about…

Farming has changed since 1930. I know your history textbooks stopped covering it then (for good reason, after 1930 farming hasn't been significant), but that doesn't mean farming has stood still. Plowing as practiced in your history books is out of style and only rarely done. Farmers are well aware that soil washed away is gone forever, and are working to conserve it. Farmers are aware that fertilizer is a significant cost and what washes off is wasted money. No-til, strip til or other minimal till farming is the normal for many farmers. Cover crops are fast becoming popular. The old plows often are sold for scrape when in perfectly good shape (plows wear out fast in use)

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#227

Post by lilactown »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #217

We are past carrying capacity. If we don’t bring down population to 1-3 billion, when the natural trend of depopulation happens, there won’t be enough resources to feed the population on the spoils of a collapsing eco system. When the apex predator gets hungry, everything gets eaten. Not only are we a super apex predator, we are also the most hungry and are outbreeding all other species and devouring eco systems. It…

We are not beyond carrying capacity. We have enough food and other resources to clothe, house and feed everyone in the world and forever if we could organize ourselves. Capitalism has failed us in doing so. We need a new way of organizing.

The Malthusian idea of "there are too many people" leads us to only one logical conclusion: eugenics, genocide. Don't fall into that trap. The basis is provably not true.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#228

Post by sgt101 »

christiansakai wrote: post #118
macspoofing wrote: post #56

One of the issues of plunging headlong into solar and wind (and bio-fuels) is that those sources require huge land-areas around mining of rare metals, deployment, and finally waste. As our global population and energy needs grow, this problem gets bigger and bigger and therefore place stress on existing, and already stressed, ecosystems. On the other end, nuclear is energy dense, and requires tiny amount of land for…

I was surprised that ESGV (Vanguard Index for responsible environmental friendly investing) does not include nuclear power there. I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?

There are three problems:

1) Generations of nuclear engineers either told big lies or made huge errors of engineering; resulting in staggering disasters in Russia & Japan which will mark our planet for a period far longer than current human history.

2) The main use of nuclear plants was to create refined product for nuclear weapons, now we have vastly more of that stuff than you can imagine lying around. We don't need or want any more. I believe that a single facility in the north west of england has sufficient plutonium for 40,000 nuclear weapons.

3) They are wildly expensive compared to other forms of "clean" power - solar, hydro and wind are just far far cheaper in terms of both invested carbon, $ and collateral environmental damage.

Apart from that fission is just fine.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#229

Post by MiroF »

michael1999 wrote: post #156
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because we've spent several millennia figuring out how to live more and more densely and we do the same with our livestock. If beavers invented a lifestyle that enabled them to live at densities up to thousands per square mile they'd compromise a hell of a lot of biomass too. The fact that there's more humans doesn't imply anything about the other animal population (though I suspect that it's not good for the…

You need to include our food production spaces when talking about population density for that to be a fair comparison. Our urban density is mirrored (and supported) by the sparseness of our farmland.

Yeah but it's still clearly way better than wild animals of comparable mass

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#230

Post by bluGill »

rmah wrote: post #75
alangibson wrote: post #41

Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.

I'm in my 50's... and I remember filthy air you could barely breath and horribly polluted rivers that caught on fire. I remember people tossing trash on the side of the road without regard. I remember trash floating in our lakes, which were so filthy you were scared to let the water touch you, much less eat the fish (if any) in them. I remember when all cars belched clouds of black smoke. I remember national parks wi…

Earthworms are often an invasive species and so the local DNR will cheer on their loss since the harm they do to local forests is significant.

The above depends on where you live of course. In their place they are good. Out of place they destroy the natural ecosystem.

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