Bird populations declining fast across North America

The blame is on reflective windows?

>(A 2014 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Smithsonian study found that between 365 million and one billion birds die each year across the U.S. as a result of window strikes.)

That seems unreal. So I want to read said study.

https://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/pdf/management/lossetal20...

Oh wait... its cars hitting birds? Why did they seem to exclude this important detail? And the study clearly puts it that around 339 million is max? So the billion birds number is made up?

This article also seems to dance around the actual problem?

https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph240/scherr1/

The massive increase in windmills is the source of death. Every single typical windmill will kill dozens of bird and bats every year.

The gymnastics that OP is doing is to cover up the mass death by windmills.

An even bigger cause of decline is birds that are never born due to habitat loss and pesticide use that fundamentally disrupts their food chain because no insects = no birds.

Windmill bird mortality is some extreme, irrelevant outlier that does not matter at all. It's a manufactured issue that follows a formula discussed by Albert Hirschman in his 1991, "The rhetoric of reaction". Specifically it uses the framework of the perversity thesis: “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.”

This is used as a scripted template to smuggle agendas through "think tanks" (which is a polite term for "propaganda factories") and then onto some theatrical "they aren't telling you this on mainstream media" sphere where they are peddled as "talking points" and "facts".

In this case, as in most, they load it up with common logical and rhetorical fallacies. The go-to here is to represent the extreme statistically insignificant outlier as if it's the normal and then advocate for policy focusing around the outlier.

It's not about the outlier, in this case birds. Instead, it's about whoever paid the think-tanks to use the classic Hirschman tools and push the narrative through the channels. Most of the think tanks are funded by oil and gas so ...

If we focus on the other 99.99% of the deaths and the other 100% of the non-death declines then the problems will actually be addressed instead of say, firing up coal fire power plants, drilling for oil, decommissioning wind farms and having it have zero effect on the downward trend.

It might be hard to figure out why publicly traded oil and gas companies would feel fiscally obligated to invest in campaigns to increase their market share, but I'm sure we can connect the dots.

Unless you honestly think they are abandoning their fiduciary duty, are squandering company money because they're all a bunch of rabid birders, and just happened to read the numbers wrong. I mean sure, ok.

And I'm not making any predictions, just observations. This might come down to semantics on what exactly you suppose sustainable to mean or whether or not it is desirable, but causing an ongoing mass extinction event does not meet my definition of sustainable.

I'm talking about environmental sustainability to be clear (hopefully it was from the context but I may not have been explicit enough). I don't doubt we could physically feed billions more people at least as long as we have cheap energy and fertilizers from fossil fuels if we accepted ever increasing environmental destruction.