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Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

latimes.com

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Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#151

Post by jshevek »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #135
aklemm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately we need fewer people in order to preserve the natural world. We can start by disincentivizing and de-emphasizing growth.

How come the people who propose this strategy never put up their hands volunteering to make the required sacrifices?

>How come the people who propose this strategy never put up their hands volunteering to make the required sacrifices?

I've known many environmental activists in my lifetime, and can confidently say your extreme characterization is wrong. It is common in the environmental activist subcultures in the US to choose not to have children while advocating for the reduction of population growth. It is also not uncommon to for them to live lives of severely reduced consumption of material goods, consumption of energy, and production of C02.

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#153

Post by romanovtexas »

jshevek wrote: post #122
romanovtexas wrote: post #115

I wonder if we can create ways in which this will remain enabled even post the COVID crisis. Limit the amount of visitors, keep the parks open only during certain months of the year, etc.

I'm excited about the possibility that the covid experience (and data) will strengthen the arguments and motivations for various ecologically sound cultural shifts, but I'm less sure about the specific issue of bears getting comfortable in close proximity to human campgrounds.

Wasn't talking about the bears specifically, but yes, this should enable us for a greater call to action to save our ecological systems.

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#154

Post by exolymph »

salimmadjd wrote: post #147

OT - One of my most personal profound moments was chasing this winter photo [0] and sharing it with a coyote. I wanted to take a night shot of the Cathedral Rock (that I had seen a few years earlier but didn't take a good photo of it) under the full moon and fresh snow. It took me several years of driving up to Yosemite when there was snow storm and one night I got lucky. It was around 11 PM when the storm stopped an…

Beautiful shot. Thank you for sharing the photo and the story!

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#155

Post by eloff »

mcnamaratw wrote: post #81
eloff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well of course not. The Gaia hypothesis is dead. Makes for good fiction though.

I never believed it for a millisecond, but is it dead? What killed it?

The lack of any evidence or potential mechanism to the contrary. You can't prove a negative, but after a long enough while of no evidence, nobody will take it seriously anymore.

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#156

Post by munk-a »

ummonk wrote: post #42
spking wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm truly sorry to hear about your health issues and the lack of resources available to you. Of course I would like to see better healthcare available to everyone as well. Can't we focus our attention on making healthcare (even specialized treatments like yours) more accessible and affordable, instead of artificially propping up a massively wasteful industry in perpetuity?

How would we make specialized healthcare more locally accessible? By flying specialist doctors and equipment in from the coasts when needed?

I think you pretty much don't - but what you can do is shift the burden of healthcare off of an employment expense so that when someone is in this terrible situation they can move to a location where they can receive better care without being concerned that they will be unable to continue receiving insurance from their employer.

The poster above is between a rock and a hard place, it's a really terrible situation to be in no matter what safety nets are in place. But the US tends to go out of its way to make things just that little extra bit terrible.

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#157

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jrockway wrote: post #109
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, you can tax carbon, especially passenger automobiles... but you will cause a much larger recession than Coronavirus as people suddenly can't afford to go to work anymore. What you do is give the proceeds of the carbon tax back to the populace, as Canada is doing. There may be some hardship, but it should mostly work out—on the whole, the rich create more carbon than the poor, so wealth will be redistributed t…

I am not sure that works as well as you think it does. People don't live far away from work and commute 2 hours a day because they're rich. They do it because they can't afford to live near their workplace. I can walk to work, but pay $2700 a month in rent. Most people do not have that luxury. (OK, the Bay Area is different. Well-off people do commute two hours a day because there simply isn't any housing near where…

Then they'll still drive to work and pay the tax. If everyone does that, there will be more money in the fund and so the rebate will be higher too.

Now of course, if everyone just pays the tax and gets the rebate, there won't be much emissions impact. But over time, people will realize they can get ahead by buying smaller cars instead of SUVs, or carpooling, or lobbying their local governments for more public transit, or switching jobs.

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#158

Post by throwaway894345 »

dang wrote: post #74
hentrep wrote: post #5

As noted in the article, the headline is misleading. The population obviously hasn't quadrupled since Yosemite closed to visitors on March 20th. It is remarkable though to see how quickly wildlife is willing to re-enter areas that have historically been overrun with humans!

If you say that the population of a city has doubled, it mostly means that people moved there, not that they were born there. The headline is fine. All: Obviously the bears weren't born in the last month. Please assume basic intelligence in your fellow readers. Edit: Ok you guys, I surrender. There is no fighting the dreaded title fever. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... .

Thanks for changing the title. When I checked, the top comment pretty clearly interpreted the title's claim literally, so I think people were genuinely confused. Thank you for your faith in us, but it seems it was perhaps misplaced this time. :)

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#159

Post by djrogers »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #101
hentrep wrote: post #5

As noted in the article, the headline is misleading. The population obviously hasn't quadrupled since Yosemite closed to visitors on March 20th. It is remarkable though to see how quickly wildlife is willing to re-enter areas that have historically been overrun with humans!

They define "population" as the number of bears living in that area. That could easily quadruple if bears move there from surrounding areas, which is to be expected if humans are out of the equation. This is no different from the human population of cities - it goes up or down not just due to births and deaths, but also due to individuals moving in or out.

Yosemite Nat'l Park is 1,187 square miles. There is no way that enough bears have migrated into the park to have quadrupled it's population from surrounding areas. The title references a quote regarding bear sightings in the tiny part of the valley that is normally populated with people. It's not only an inaccurate title, it's doubly misleading...

Re: Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park

#160

Post by bkandel »

MikeKusold wrote: post #19
0xB31B1B wrote: post #10

I hope this inspires our generation. I hope we remember that the way things were recently aren’t they way have to be, or the way things naturally are. We need more pollution controls, clean power, and less driving. I also think we need to reduce how many people visit certain places as the harsh reality is that impact is clearly related to visits. It will mean a shared sacrifice but a healthier planet. Hopefully limit…

National Parks are the sacrificed land that gets people interested in preserving public land. It's much easier to get national support to "Save Yellowstone" than to get people to care about saving Bridger-Teton National Forrest. However, the policies that benefit one often benefit the other. Let as many people in to Yellowstone as possible so that they can look back on that one trip through Wyoming and feel like they…

I think it's a bit more nuanced than this -- even within the "name-brand" national parks, like Yosemite or Yellowstone, the sacrificed part has the hotels and other facilities that cater to humans, but there's still a ton of land that is actually preserved and is ecologically significant. E.g. 90% of Yosemite is preserved wilderness with much more limited access to humans than in the valley (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosemite_National_Park#Nationa...).
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