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Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

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Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#331

Post by cat_plus_plus »

GuB-42 wrote: post #326
hayst4ck wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an unrepentant meat eater, but your visualization was absolutely fantastic. I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die per minute to give it scale. My understanding is also that we destroy an absolutely phenomenal amount of chicks in an entirely gruesome way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling I have trouble handling that.

Chick culling is certainly gruesome, but not so shocking to me. It terms of animal suffering, I have seen much worse, still not enough to stop me from eating meat though. I've seen videos of these chick grinders, from fully live chick to ground meat, it takes something like 1/10 of a second, I am not even sure their brain have time to register what happens before there is no brain anymore. Culling also happens very e…

What happens to birds in the wild? Is it ethically significant that a particular one is predated upon by a human rather than another animal?

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#332

Post by pencilguin »

prvc wrote: post #252
arcticbull wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

>Almost 40% of all food in the US is wasted each year and that's enough to feed every hungry person on earth. You have a feasible plan to distribute all the wasted food in the U.S. to all the world's hungry people that you'd like to share?

Easy: eliminate the zoning restrictions that forbid corner grocery stores.

When you can walk five minutes to the store, you can buy just what you need for today (and maybe tomorrow). Then you will eat it and not throw it out.

It will cost more per, but since you are not wasting any of it, you still pay less.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#333

Post by netmonk »

SCUSKU wrote: post #109
retrac wrote: post #25

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…

I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are. https://zach.ws/meat/

Could you add the total amount of wasted meat (and food) per day also ?

From several sources like WHO or WEF the annual wasted pourcentage of food is around 50% in the world.

Guess where the inflation come from.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#334

Post by pencilguin »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #282
nemo44x wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.

Strange this is getting downvotes. Protein consumption was traditionally one of the fundamental measures of social health, wealth, and quality of life, and it is on track to massively expand as population grows and huge parts of Asia and Africa (and others) continue to catch up in wealth. Apparently now we're in upside-down world were the richest and most highly consuming people on the planet believe that the product…

Hint: you do not need to eat any meat to get plenty of protein.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#335

Post by groffee »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #255
Spivak wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course people are going to be proud, the horrors of capitalism aside, we’ve completely eliminated hunger in the US (not implying we’re the only place). Not one single person is starving because we are unable to feed them. And we’re able to feed everyone with the absolute top tier of food desired by humans. It used to be an event only for special occasions to slaughter your lifestock. The only people who got a stea…

Where do you live? The greater cruelty is that we can feed everyone, but choose to throw it away instead if they can't pay. My mother worked at inner city schools in Ohio, let me tell you if the schools didn't have a free lunch and breakfast program (something a lot of politicians hate) a lot of kids wouldn't be eating at all. Saying hunger is solved in America is absurd. Maybe it is in a technical sense but it's far…

No post body was provided.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#336

Post by hsn915 »

myshpa wrote: post #59

The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed. We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture). Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defi…

You are advocating contradictory points.

If we return land to wildlife, that entails shrinking the human population by a hgue margin.

The supposed benefit is what, new medicine and regenrative dna? But why would we need that? Shrinking human population and human longevity are incompatible goals.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#337

Post by pencilguin »

porknubbins wrote: post #223
notch656a wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cow was worth about 10 months of skilled labor in ancient Rome [0]. If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat. That's about 0.01666 of a month's salary for a pound of meat. So if you were willing to spend 10% of your salary on meat, you could have a quarter pounder everyday. Not cheap, but if you really liked meat and you had a semi-skilled job you could afford to eat it everyday. [0] htt…

Thats an interesting way of looking at it, but seems kind of misleading to use a cow. Pigs can live anywhere and eat pretty much anything and are a much more common meat. Beef has always been a luxury meat in most places.

Cows can eat what people can't. This may have been the source of the semitic proscription on pork: that they compete with people for the same calories.

Of course now we feed cows mostly corn.

If everyone gave up eating meat from animals fed farm output, the looming climate catastrophe would just fade away.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#338

Post by nine_k »

netmonk wrote: post #333
SCUSKU wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are. https://zach.ws/meat/

Could you add the total amount of wasted meat (and food) per day also ? From several sources like WHO or WEF the annual wasted pourcentage of food is around 50% in the world. Guess where the inflation come from.

I suspect the majority of wasted food is fruits and vegetables which spoil pretty easily. Meat is likely a minority.

Amounts of grain or potatoes produced / consumed per second, in square kilometres of fields, would be impressive, too.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#340

Post by nine_k »

xyzzyz wrote: post #329
arcticbull wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're throwing out 40% of the food they buy, then raising prices slightly and not throwing out 40% of the food should be accessibility-neutral no? Instead of buying 2 milks and throwing 1 milk out, you buy 1 milk for 2X the price and throw out 0 milk. At the end of the day you still drank 1 milk for the same effective price. They already have significantly more than they need. Americans already pay less as a per…

> At the end of the day you still drank 1 milk for the same effective price. Why don't then people just buy 1 milk today at today price instead of buying 2 and throwing one away? They'd still have drunk 1 milk, but for half effective price. Why aren't people already doing that? People often make fun of economists with their very specific mathematical models of perfectly round customers, production functions, etc. The…

Because they hope to drink the other jug of milk tomorrow, and sometimes it works, sometimes, sometimes some of the milk gets sour.

The problem is that spending an hour to drive to a grocery store and an hour driving back also costs something, in fuel and labor / time, so it totally makes sense to buy milk with some excess just in case more would be needed.

As said upstream, eliminate most zoning restrictions, make living more densely more accessible. (I line in NYC and the fact that I can walk most anywhere I need is great.)

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