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

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

#41

Post by hasmanean » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 12:57 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…

Not over-population. Over consumption.

Actually over-production since a lot of food is wasted before consumption.

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

#42

Post by ekianjo » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 12:58 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…

Thats what happens in countries with powerful welfare states. People will default to think that the government should solve all of their problems

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

#43

Post by iJohnDoe » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 12:58 AM UTC

Every time something like this is reported it seems like there is an opposite report posted, especially on HN. Comments or posts will show up soon that the bird population is at an all time high. Ocean temperatures are normal. Weather has been boring as of late and no unusual occurrences of anything.

So, really nothing to worry about. We can go about our lives as usual.

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

#44

Post by ggurface » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 12:58 AM UTC

jmye wrote: post #34

themitigating wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. That's cultural. Look at nordic countries. Norway has a seed vault and has 80% of new cars are electric. Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/europe-renewabl... You just won't say the real people who are to blame. You want to lay the blame on all people equally

What do you think Norway’s primary export is, speaking of blaming the right people?

Is it seeds?

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

#45

Post by kzrdude » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 12:59 AM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #24

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…

Bullshit. That's cultural. Look at nordic countries. Norway has a seed vault and has 80% of new cars are electric. Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/europe-renewabl... You just won't say the real people who are to blame. You want to lay the blame on all people equally

I think this:

> addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability

applies just as much to Norway as to other rich countries. Maybe not in exactly the same way as in the US, but in their own way.

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

#46

Post by da39a3ee » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:00 AM UTC

Yes, this is called habitat loss. And the current obsession with climate change is to some extent reducing the extent to which humans are paying attention to habitat loss. Caring about the environment is not primarily about climate change and avoiding human suffering and economic damage: caring for the environment is primarily about preserving the remaining natural habitat that the other organisms with which we share the planet depend on for their survival. One should care about climate change because it threatens habitat preservation.

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

#47

Post by themitigating » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:01 AM UTC

leeoniya wrote: post #31

themitigating wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. That's cultural. Look at nordic countries. Norway has a seed vault and has 80% of new cars are electric. Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/europe-renewabl... You just won't say the real people who are to blame. You want to lay the blame on all people equally

> Look at nordic countries. Norway has a seed vault and has 80% of new cars are electric. 80% of 0.001% is a rounding error. scale matters. just because a first-world country of 5M can do something does not make this attainable for the other 99.999% of the human population. > Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed imo, nuclear (not fusion, mind you) + electric, is the only realistic way out of the energ…

I'm referring to their achievements as a country not the impact. My point is it's cultural

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

#48

Post by da39a3ee » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:01 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Yes, this article is a rare example of an article that cares about habitat loss; we have mostly thrown the baby out with the bathwater with the last decade's reframing of conservation as climate change avoidance.

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

#49

Post by themitigating » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:02 AM UTC

jmye wrote: post #34

themitigating wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. That's cultural. Look at nordic countries. Norway has a seed vault and has 80% of new cars are electric. Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/europe-renewabl... You just won't say the real people who are to blame. You want to lay the blame on all people equally

What do you think Norway’s primary export is, speaking of blaming the right people?

They are at fault for being suppliers? If they don't supply oil someone else will. Like blaming prostitutes instead of johns

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

#50

Post by hasmanean » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 1:04 AM UTC

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.

Imagine the headlines when humans try to immigrate to other inhabited planets:

“They’re bringing pollution, they’re bringing Extinction, and some of the I assume might actually enhance the ecosystems they inhabit.”

It’s not such a hard skill. When we see a complex ecosystem is our first instinct to make it better or to exploit and degrade it? Do we even have a metric for what making it better actually means?

Do we even have a way to debate it? Because the whole debate oscillates between destroy(“jobs”) and the minimum (“we need it to survive.”) nobody has the heart actually suggest it might be worth sacrificing anything for just to make it better.

We need more than a utilitarian reason, we should feel pleasure in making nature better the same way we feel pleasure at seeing a well designed race cad like a Ferrari.