A third of North America’s birds have vanished • Hacker News Board

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#71

Post by leeoniya » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:19 AM UTC

zizee wrote: post #65

leeoniya wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people don't change even with the threat of human life being lost then there's no way they care if multiple species of birds goes extinct. people won't change. they are addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability. which is also great for corporate profits. as a species, humans plan and invest very little beyond our own lifetimes. but we're just animals after all. all the…

> all the talk about becoming an interplanetary (mars) species for our own survival has to be the most absurd statement that can be made to dismiss the very real problems...but billionaires need an excuse to play Tony Stark. This is a thinly veiled dig at Elon musk. It's so weird that you think what he's doing is the problem, with his efforts bringing about electric cars earlier than what would have happened. He migh…

the guy dropped how much coin on a social media platform that could have gone to the very environmental causes that he claims to want to advance?

what do you think $44 billion in climate/epa lobbying would look like?

teslas still have to be manufactured. he probably would've had a greater climate impact if he purchased everyone on earth the same model bicycle that can be repaired/reused indefinitely.

we should be trying to remove cars, reduce production, and replace it with public transit, etc. but that's neither cool nor profitable; electric cars are both of those things.

electric energy storage, on the other hand, is useful. so making batteries cheap is a good thing, and tesla definitely helped that a lot.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#72

Post by krainboltgreene » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

23B1 wrote: post #35

One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning". Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy). What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of proble…

> What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of problems, is viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up, and in the following hierarchy:

You want magic. The thing you are describing is called magic.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#73

Post by arrosenberg » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

zizee wrote: post #65

leeoniya wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people don't change even with the threat of human life being lost then there's no way they care if multiple species of birds goes extinct. people won't change. they are addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability. which is also great for corporate profits. as a species, humans plan and invest very little beyond our own lifetimes. but we're just animals after all. all the…

> all the talk about becoming an interplanetary (mars) species for our own survival has to be the most absurd statement that can be made to dismiss the very real problems...but billionaires need an excuse to play Tony Stark. This is a thinly veiled dig at Elon musk. It's so weird that you think what he's doing is the problem, with his efforts bringing about electric cars earlier than what would have happened. He migh…

> He might be a loud mouth jerk, but surely he's not symbolic of the real problem here?

Elon Musk, the guy who floats insane ideas like tunneling and hyperloop to derail public transit projects?

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#74

Post by xwdv » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:22 AM UTC

leeoniya wrote: post #5

climate change is always framed in terms of how many coastal people it will affect when sea levels rise a few meters. the canadian wildfires going on now. the only thing i hear about it in the media is how bad the air quality will be in this or that city, or how many oil/gas/logging jobs will be lost. the amount wildlife that is being displaced or burned alive? fuck it! did you hear that 10k humans had to be evacuate…

We don’t deserve this planet, but also we don’t owe this world a thing.

Fact is, humanity’s fate was sealed the moment we decided to stop living like savage animals and become civilized.

As simple creatures, humans could live indefinitely until the world ends or a major extinction event, but surviving as a civilization for millions of years is definitely going to take the sacrifice of a couple planets along the way, at the rate we’re growing. No way around that. When we’re done with Earth, we will have to use the resources of several more planets, and we will continue this until we reach some stable equilibrium or simply die out entirely.

That’s assuming we don’t start implementing some rigorous eugenics and population control, but that does not seem popular, though personally I think it’s a better solution than having an unquenchable thirst for natural resources.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#75

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:22 AM UTC

joshuahedlund wrote: post #19

MrVandemar wrote: post #13

The estimate is about 200 species go extinct every day from the actions of human beings -- ecosystem destruction, degredation, climate change etc. We are a meatgrinder to the biosphere.

Very few bird species have gone extinct this century though, and many that were on the utter brink have rebounded (California condor, whooping crane, and kakapo to name a few). Conservation works.

It works, but not fast enough.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#76

Post by klipklop » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

23B1 wrote: post #35

One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning". Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy). What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of proble…

The point isn’t to have you save the birds, it’s to get you to give up certain freedoms to a group that claims they can save the birds.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#77

Post by krainboltgreene » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

leeoniya wrote: post #38

nostromo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions habitat destruction and agriculture as the driving issue, not climate change. > The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.

pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change are not all different things. i guess you can blame all the above on a single root cause, though: human over-population. we just don't have plagues and famines like we used to; we're really good at killing everything that we don't like. i see my neighbors dousing their lawn with weed killer and pesticides every season, followed by grass nutrients! then burn 2gal of g…

> human over-population

in no way is this the root cause, in any real scientific analysis. it is literally just the rallying call of right wing politics.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#78

Post by quinn3604 » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

23B1 wrote: post #59

kelseyfrog wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate state of things is that we've run out of the problems that we can solve and are left with the problem we can't solve. Our society/species is pretty terrible with problems that involve diffuse responsibility. Part of the problem is that we don't have social technologies equipped to handle diffuse responsibility, and another is that we have social agents who exploit this social bug to make money.

Well put. I thought about bringing up the many, many solar panel scams. What an absolute shame.

are there many solar panel scams? I had no idea

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#79

Post by JKCalhoun » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:24 AM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #18

leeoniya wrote: post #5

climate change is always framed in terms of how many coastal people it will affect when sea levels rise a few meters. the canadian wildfires going on now. the only thing i hear about it in the media is how bad the air quality will be in this or that city, or how many oil/gas/logging jobs will be lost. the amount wildlife that is being displaced or burned alive? fuck it! did you hear that 10k humans had to be evacuate…

Pollution is a problem for everyone. We need government regulations and every single person changing their lifestyle but guess what, it won't happen. We had peak awareness in the 80s and 90s, I remember in school time was dedicated to ecology and the environment. Now half the US is actively working against environmentalism. You're blaming the media for not talking about species going extint but about flooding. If peo…

> We had peak awareness in the 80s and 90s, I remember in school time was dedicated to ecology and the environment.

You can go back to the 70's.

There was a fascinating amount of experimentation in education when I grew up in the 70's. I went to two rather interesting "experimental" schools — one public, one private. But regardless, there was a Zeitgeist in the 70's both of danger (over-population, pollution) but also of optimism — that we could change course as a society if we wanted.

As an anecdote, I remember a fascinating visitor when I was in elementary school. A man showed up in our class with a fascinating machine that was described as a "computer"! (This was perhaps 1973 or so — it may well have been an analog computer.) The thing was upright and perhaps the size of a Pachinko machine. He explained that you could set some dials to represent perhaps human growth, energy use ... something like that. I mean, I was quite young so I think a lot of it flew over my head — perhaps his audience was generally an older age. In any event it was supposed to calculate ... something ... maybe how many years before we ran our of food or fissile fuel or space on the planet....

Afterword: Sadly, speaking of Zeitgeist, it seems something happened around the close of President Carter's term and when Reagan's presidency began. The Metric System they had taught us in elementary school was out the window. Ha ha, even national markers in the U.S. that had added Metric to the Imperial(?) units would dropped the metric units....

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#80

Post by d0mine » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:24 AM UTC

23B1 wrote: post #35

One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning". Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy). What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of proble…

If individuals are responsible for just 1% of the issues then even if we eliminate them "bottom-up" completely, we are still left with 99% of issues that should be fixed at another level.

For example, consider what would save more water: 10 million people stopping showering completely or one corporation stopping production of water-intensive crops in a desert.