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

ourworldindata.org

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

#401

Post by hunter-gatherer »

socialismisok wrote: post #322
fnimick wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Or by choosing to source your meat from places that treat animals well. Local, humane farmers. It's pricier, but it's much higher quality and skips the industrial treatment of animals.

In addition to this, and for those who live in places where this isn't feasible, I recommend some serious thought into the amount of meat consumption. I tried the vegetarianism thing, and basically felt awful the entire time. I don't know why, but I found I just needed some read meat every now and again. However, I learned I only needed a small fraction of what I had before. I end up consuming a moderate portion once a week opposed to one a day and an able to supplement the rest.

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

#402

Post by chriswarbo »

garren wrote: post #363
generalizations wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the first. Sounds like we're not consuming our entire food supply, but rather generating more as we need it. And there's a lot of other things besides cow farts contributing to global warming, which can have a much bigger effect for much less effort than making the world vegetarian.

Clearing huge swaths of Brazilian rainforest, “the lungs of the planet”, to make way for cattle seems like a pretty significant contributing factor though, would you agree? Less demand for meat, less demand for eliminating large pieces of a rather important natural carbon sink.

Even more maddening: clearing land for growing crops, which are fed to cattle.

We can just cut out the middle man (cow)

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

#403

Post by hayst4ck »

wumpus wrote: post #392
hayst4ck wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Militant-ism isn't going to win people over. The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away. There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job. Killing rodents, mosquitos, and ants is something most people will do without a second thought. I've sprayed a wasp nest with wasp kil…

Wow. That you attack someone who merely said they're a vegetarian in these terms, and your comment isn't flagged and dead, is extremely embarrassing for HN. I mean, I have low expectations (on HN) for anything involving vegetarians and vegans, but you've gone lower.

Can you see why a person would find trivializing diet restriction a little militant?

I'm not sure the rest could be considered an "attack."

If being vegetarian feels righteous, that's great, and I am happy for anyone who feels good about restricting their diet for ethical reasons. The rest of my post is stating that I don't think (ethical) vegetarians are better people, and the corollary, that I am not a bad person because I choose to spend my ethical attention on things other than avoiding chicken. There is clearly no shortage of ethical endeavors.

I am not even an ideological enemy. The post I was originally responding to was somebody who successfully made a website showcasing an emotional appeal to the amount of animal consumption in the US. I added the information of an emotional intensifier (male chicks getting macerated en masse) as something that would intensify the web page and something that causes me (someone who doesn't have a lot of qualms about meat consumption and its consequences) discomfort and cognitive dissonance.

When it's you vs me, that guarantees there will be conflict. When it's us vs the problem, there is a chance.

> You can "handle that" by no longer eating meat. It's that easy.

What do you think would have happened if the person had instead said "What prevents you from giving up eating chicken?"

Alternatively, what do you think would have happened if this person had instead said: "I saw something like that and was motivated enough to give giving up meat a go, I found it much easier than expected and haven't regretted my decision for two years." Same content, wildly different level of righteousness, conviction, and condescension.

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

#404

Post by myshpa »

hsn915 wrote: post #336
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.

Land surface ... 71% habitable land, rest glaciers & barren land

Habitable land ... 50% agriculture, 37% forests, 1% urban and built-up land

Agriculture ... 77% meat and dairy, 23% crops

We would need just 25% of agriculture land we're using to feed the world on vegan diet, no shrinking necessary.

But on the meat diet? We'll shrink for sure, just you wait. We'll diminish and go to the west.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

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

#405

Post by rpastuszak »

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/

I'm obviously overthinking it, but I love that the visual style manages to somehow marry minimalist typography with a 90s geocities vibe.

I was trying to see if there's a way of "visualising" some of these numbers using audio, but at 285Hz (for chickens), we're at C#4/D4. For the other animals you can distinguish between the specific beats, but this is just uniform noise. (cue the quote about one death being a tragedy, 1000s a statistic lost in the noise)

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

#406

Post by xorfish »

goatlover wrote: post #381
notch656a wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you make it sound easier than it is. I also decided over dinner one evening. Then I realized meat was in almost every meal I loved. I tried them without meat and hated it. Habit I guess. Then I realized I'd rather be a bad person than a miserable person; that it was wrong, but I'd do it anyway. This is what you're up against -- the sad but brutal reality of apathy and willful disregard. Mea culpa.

Bad person according to whom, though? What makes eating meat wrong? That some people decide it is? There's no consensus or laws that make it so, unlike the case with eating humans. You decided you didn't want to be miserable, but I guess you feel guilty because you decided it was wrong? I've decided it's not wrong, and I don't see that anyone can make me think otherwise.

So eating humans is only wrong, because other people think it is wrong and there are laws against it?

I find that really shortsighted. Slavery isn't bad because we as a society have decided it so. It always has been bad.

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

#407

Post by throwawaylinux »

pencilguin wrote: post #389
throwawaylinux wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a "hint", meat is a desirable food, a very good source of protein, can be a good income for poor farmers and can be raised in places that aren't suitable for cropping. But even if you set aside meat, modern lifestyles necessitate the killing of other life. Take your protein-rich plant food, for example. Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out? The idea is basically to create a ho…

> "meat is a desirable food" Yet I do not desire it. > " Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out? " I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way. I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours. You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is nece…

> Yet I do not desire it.

Irrelevant.

> I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.

Maybe. Maybe not grown in a way that's sustainably capable of feeding the world's population or even accessible to many.

> I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours.

You think it is, I'm sure. And you believe yourself to have the moral high ground.

> You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.

And so are you. Unlike your assumptions about my carbon footprint, I actually do know that with certainty because you are posting this message here which consumes energy. What's more your level of comfort itself is almost certainly far beyond most people on earth, and far beyond what you need to barely keep yourself alive, therefore you have made choices for your own comfort at the expense of many other life forms.

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

#408

Post by throwawaylinux »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #391
throwawaylinux wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well no it's not. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-crop-yield-vs-fert... Yep, fossil fuel based fertilizers and other chemicals aren't going away. > Said population (which we should be stabilizing) can be sustained on a fraction of the land used today by eliminating the inefficient uses such as ethanol, cattle and almonds. How about computer games and instagram and google searches and air travel and cars i…

> Yep, fossil fuel based fertilizers and other chemicals aren't going away. Yes that sentence was definitely about the fossil fuel bit and not the land use of cattle vs other protein sources. Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plant…

> Yes that sentence was definitely about the fossil fuel bit and not the land use of cattle vs other protein sources.

You directed it generally. Now you're upset that I replied to what you wrote.

> Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plants and free range chickens? How much even if you sacrifice some yield to use organic methods?

I don't know the numbers. Chicken is a very cheap source of protein, much cheaper than a huge range of plant based protein actually. Are we moving the bar for sinning to "thou shalt not consume any plant protein more expensive than chicken"? How about bugs? You have to kill them to eat them, right? Or does the holy book have some kind of complicated sin taxonomy here?

> And almost all of those countries have laws specifically criminalising whistleblowing or documenting violations or turns the burden of proof for libel onto the defendant. Here's one that criminalises having footage.

That does not support your false claim that these countries do not have basic animal right or environmental regulation though.

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

#409

Post by xorfish »

PostOnce wrote: post #394
ISL wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be helpful to add the total number of meals consumed per unit time as well, and perhaps the number of humans born/dying. We eat a lot because there are a lot of us.

There aren't as many hungry kids as there used to be. There aren't as many hungry adults, either, for that matter. Global hunger is declining. I am rather more worried about hungry kids than dead cows. I also don't care if people can subsist solely on vegetables; subsistence is not our aim -- we can live in appalling conditions, but we got out of those circumstances deliberately. It took a great deal of time and hard…

We have also learned quite a bit about animals and their capacity to suffer.

Sorry to break it to you, but humans just aren't that special.

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

#410

Post by rcarr »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #317
rcarr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day, whilst eating a burger in a pub and thinking about the food chain, I ran a thought experiment in my head. I imagined being hungry and someone offering me a choice between a ham sandwich or a vegan sandwich. I could only select the ham sandwich if I was willing to shoot a pig in the head. I wouldn’t have to butcher the pig or anything else, just be responsible for its death. I decided that I would choose the…

2 short thoughts. 1. Just eating less meat would go along way without the social awkwardness. Have a burger with friends once a week who cares. But reduce otherwise. 2. I’ve been drinking huel and it has good nutrients and lots of protein. Might be easier to be vegan without feeling like trash these days.

These are both good points.

1. This is something I would consider unlike the ridiculous points above some of the absolute militant vegans are trying to make. If I was going to do something again it would be more like this rather than strict veganism.

2. Huel is great. I drank it a lot at the time and still drink it today. It’s pricey though.

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