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Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

bbc.com

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Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#21

Post by tuatoru »

laurent92 wrote: post #4
Hokusai wrote: post #2

> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials," This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition. The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to…

We are addicted to high population density, making babies and helping get everyone to what we consider is the minimum level of consumption, which is exactly 2x higher than the Earth can provide sustainably. At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.

We are not addicted to making babies, or at least not endlessly. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of countries by total fertility rate, and then google for charts showing what's been happening to it over the last few decades.

Most countries, the significant exceptions being in Sub-Saharan Africa, have TFR below or near replacement (2.1).

When girls are allowed to learn to read, and when people move to cities women don't have all that many kids.

Most of the world's current population growth is due to increasing lifespan.

So don't worry about managing population. In a few decades the worry will be about keeping it up, not down. (With Sub-Saharan Africa, again, as the exception.)

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#22

Post by holoduke »

To me (at least in the area I live in) the easiest and quickest win is to plant trees massively. There is so much space available. But somehow people/governments wants to have grass vegetation as a filler between roads, inside parks etc.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#23

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

mc32 wrote: post #3
Hokusai wrote: post #2

> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials," This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition. The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to…

“... The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc...” Just as often as big operations contributing to this, it’s the mom or pop or children doing this in a subsistence manner. A contributing factor is encroachment due to local population growth.

Indeed. Madagascar is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe because every family has many children and each of those children eventually needs to slash-and-burn rainforest in order to plant enough rice to sustain themselves. Also a lot of tree-felling to make charcoal, because for whatever reason Malagasy villagers cannot afford e.g. kerosene to cook with. The result is the steady eradication of all those cool lemurs and other rainforest wildlife, but the perpetrators of this destruction are not millionaire industrial fatcats like people often imagine, they are dirt-poor subsistence farmers.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#24

Post by monktastic1 »

vharuck wrote: post #7

>New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food. I'm pessimistic with this claim. From my experience, if a productive process like agriculture becomes more efficient, we scale up output. The resources being used up, in this case land, won't be reduced. For an analogy, consider how adding m…

Sounds like Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand."

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#25

Post by tuatoru »

laurent92 wrote: post #4
Hokusai wrote: post #2

> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials," This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition. The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to…

We are addicted to high population density, making babies and helping get everyone to what we consider is the minimum level of consumption, which is exactly 2x higher than the Earth can provide sustainably. At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.

Second reply: Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology.

The problem is not rising population, it's rising affluence and inert technology.

As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars, and plane trips in particular.

Meanwhile we're not improving core technologies quickly enough.

We make buildings using Portland cement. Cement making is responsible for about 1/20 of total carbon emissions by itself. Planes are not electric yet; nor are cars. Cities are badly designed for pedestrians. Meat substitutes aren't good enough or cheap enough yet. We burn coal to make electricity, thanks to the coal industry's astroturfing campaign against nuclear in the 1960s and 1970s.

We also burn coal to make steel. We cut down forest to make biofuels, a bizarre and depraved practice.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#26

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

airstrike wrote: post #12
rcpt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with population density. We'd do better to have people living in dense city centers instead of sprawled out into every corner of the wilderness.

COVID-19 begs to differ

North Dakota has more than 10x the per-capita COVID-19 infection rate of New York City right now, despite having only about 0.03% of the population density.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#27

Post by ojnabieoot »

philips wrote: post #9

I find it notable how indirect the author is about the “Why” in this story: > New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food. > The British TV presenter and naturalist Sir David Attenborough said the Anthropocene, the geological age during which human activity has come to the fore, could b…

Many people consider anthropogenic extinction immoral and the ongoing human-caused mass extinction event to be an urgent moral crisis.

But let's suppose you were going to take a cynical argument along the lines of "these species are going extinct due to their poor adaptations to a changing environment, it's just evolution," or let's just say you think moral objections are irrational. Then from this (ignorant and needlessly cruel) perspective,

- the destruction of the Amazon is likely to have profound climatological/geochemical impacts, including increased C02 in the atmosphere

- widespread defaunation of predators could very well lead to increased pests or disease-carrying animals

- loss of insect life could be catastrophic to industrial agriculture

- overharvested fishing and agricultural resources means diminshing returns (and possibly famine) for future generations

More generally, the destruction we've wrought upon the world in the last 150 years is scientifically uncharted territory, and it's deeply naïve to assume that 150 years of strong economic growth can be extrapolated to suppose that destroying the planet will work out for humans in the long term.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#29

Post by Falling3 »

coolspot wrote: post #15
okcwarrior wrote: post #10

Ok, this is a crazy comment, but I have been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 a lot and almost every piece of land has something, somewhere built on it. Farm, suburb, etc It's depressing but maybe it helps me understand that we are using too much of earth. Do we really need endless farms?

We got a lot of people to feed. The only right way to stop/reverse climate change is to control population growth. Others ways, like reducing each individual’s carbon footprint or clean energy just gives us excuse to breed more and overwhelm the planet, but later.

Completely disagree. Tje richest 10% of the world is responsible for 50% of CO2 output. I don't know about other metrics, but that I'm sure that pattern isn't just limiter to carbon footprint. We don't have a population problem. We have a problem with Greer and resource use that slashing ourr population - even drastically - will not in any way solve.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#30

Post by aaron695 »

Lucky we have the doomsday cult to keep telling us the world is warming and will wipe out the animals in 100 year so let's not concern us with local problems.

In reality it has and always will be local.

And the solution has and will be for a few more decades use fossil fuels to help. (The doomsday cult sunk nuclear)

This applies to both the environment and if you have empathy, other humans.

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