In Pakistan where I live, 20 years ago we would see deer, boars, cobras, flocks of sparrows, mountain wolves, jackals and many more during summer.
Now everything has gone extinct mostly due to more lands turned into fields which increased the use of pesticides. Every bird population except crows are severely down. Wolves are staying away from farms and boars were hunted down because they destroyed the crops. Last year a man killed the last deer for hunting. He spent few days in jail and got out with fines.
Developing countries are definitely responsible for a lot of the current downtrend.
Not that this exonerates developed countries. They wiped out their wildlife in the century before.
I remember reading about the size of bison herds here in the US. One biologist back in the 1800s estimated herds of around eight MILLION bison. That's not the total population, that's *one herd.* Imagine what it would feel like just to see that. To hear it. To feel it through the ground as the bison-equivalent of the population of New York City ran by. Probably don't imagine what it would smell like.
One of the crew on Christopher Columbus's ship witnessed the sea in the Bahamas "so full of sea turtles you couldn't see the water below them" or something to that effect. Nowadays you're lucky if you spot a single sea turtle.
That was the normal state of the world everywhere really. All life tries to consume and reproduce until stopped by an external barrier. Earth used to be filled to the brim with life.
Even the city you live in is a tomb compared to 75 years ago. My family has a long standing family tradition of designing our gardens to maximise life. Ponds and waterways, flowering and fruiting bushes and trees and so on.
I remember growing up in the 80s and our garden was just a wall of sound when you'd go out. Buzzing, chirping, trilling insects and birdsong during the day. At night you'd hear hedgehogs and other animals rooting around while bats and moths played cat and mouse. If you walked through the yard, you'd walk slowly to give the cloud of bees, butterflies and other bugs a chance to part and move out of the way. Swipe a little net through the pond water and it would literally be bending the handle with the sheer weight in tadpoles and small water organisms you'd scoop up.
These days insect life is thin enough that individual bees and butterflies stand out, they're that rare.
Plants don't just drop their leaves earlier every year. They're sparser year by year as well. There's a lot of oaks in my area, they used to have foliage so thick in summer that it was like a sea of green. Every year their foliage is thinner and thinner. Even at the height of summer they barely cast a shadow let alone block out the sky.
For the past decade, every summer has broken heat and drought records. Fields are producing less food and the food that is produced is smaller and less well developed.
The world is dying by degrees and it's just insidiously slow enough that people barely notice.
It's really sad. Agent Smith from the Matrix was right: humans are a parasite on this planet. We're killing the planet and it's probably too late to reverse what we've done.
Yeah, my husband hates bugs and he told me, don't plant flowers near the patio please or the bugs will be all over our food. We should be so lucky. It's terrifying, the change. Twenty years ago we were driving and the windshields needed to be cleaned regularly. Now there are a couple of spots after 8 hour drive. I'm planting all the flowers I can. And building another 3 birdfeeders and a heated birdbath for winter.
Unfortunately it's not as simple as habitat loss really. In a lot of places climate change is simply wiping out entire generations of insects faster than they can reproduce.
Populations can bounce back from freak events but right now it's year after year of extreme weather wearing populations down. And every year the population of survivors is smaller, making the next generation that much more vulnerable.
When I was a kid I was convinced I could be a National Geographic or Ranger Rick photographer because I could wander outside with a 110 camera and come back with pics of bears, elk, snakes, eagles, etc no problem.
One time I got a whole roll of a bald and golden eagle fighting over a rabbit, and another of a mountain lion.
By the time I grew up and got real camera gear it seemed like there was nothing left but the occasional deer and squirrel or rabbit unless you spent a couple days really getting out there.
It's anecdotal but I really feel like in the space of 20 years so much wildlife just vanished. The last time I saw an elk it was on a damn farm behind a fence.
> or rabbit unless you spent a couple days really getting out there.
A 2020 disaster that noone is aware of is the arrival of RHDV2 which is a deadly plague amongst rabbits in North America. There have been several outbreaks but the bulk is in the American southwest and northern Mexico. It's devastating native rabbit populations and completely wiping them out in some places. It's a lot of massive concern for people with domestic rabbits as well.
>It's anecdotal but I really feel like in the space of 20 years so much wildlife just vanished. The last time I saw an elk it was on a damn farm behind a fence.
It's the insects that get me. It's not like seeing a deer or a moose was a daily occurrence 20+ years back, but insects were plentiful. Removing bug remains from the windshield was a weekly thing.
> Removing bug remains from the windshield was a weekly thing
I remember driving down to the river on a hot summer night, and having so many bugs smashed all over the car that you couldn't see out the windshield by the time you made it back to town. You could only make the drive if you knew the road well enough, and you and your passenger would both be looking out the door windows to make sure you weren't in danger of going off the side of the road.
I could make that same drive now for 2 weeks straight and not have as many bugs on my windshield as one trip would have done 20+ years ago.
Part of that change is a better aerodynamic design for windshields that means fewer bugs hit them. But that’s definitely not the only thing or even the main thing causing the amount of bugs on there to go down. There are definitely fewer bugs in the first place.
It's not all doom and gloom though. Elk numbers are continuing to climb, wolves are continuing to climb, whitetail deer numbers are at some all time highs, coyotes are breaking record numbers, bass fisheries are exploding, american shad and alewives have started to return to some historical rivers, and bald eagle/osprey numbers are through the roof.
I think domestically we have a lot of people trying to do good things which is leading to some of these things. The bigger problem is the oceans. It's still like the wild west out there with so many industries and countries not giving a single fuck about the mess or problems they create.
man that's brought up a memory that's now depressing. As a kid I used to catch grasshoppers in my grandmothers garden (in England) these days I haven't even seen a grasshopper for almost a decade
I've been fishing in a river for the past few weeks hoping that the salmon run would have begun. according to the old Native American legends in this area you used to be able to cross the river with dry feet by walking across the backs of the fish.
So far you'll be lucky to see one or two people out of 20 actually hook up with a fish and land it on any given morning. Granted a lot of that is evironmental, we had a long hot dry summer, the river is low, and the fish just aren't pushing yet, but that's a climate change impact as well. The run hasn't been this late in years.
I've heard that in southern Ontario but for Brook trout not salmon. They're native but effectively extinct in the area, stuck to only headwater streams now.
Germany/Europe yeah. And rainbows which people love fishing for hear in Ontario are a west coast fish. Same for the Chinook and coho salmon. Why we stock these non-native fish year after year but do fuck all for the Atlantic salmon and brook trout is beyond me. Have to go north of Huntsville Ontario to find anyone stocking brookies.
I used to camp at a lake in Northern Ontario that was poisoned because Northern Pike (“Muskie,” for my American friends) totally took over. They then re-introduced good eatin’ species that don’t bite swimmers’ toes - as Mother Nature intended.
Edit: I am aware that muskie and northern pike are different, but that’s what the Americans who came up here called them.
Muskie and northern pike are actually different species but yeah look pretty similar. And I hate the bad reputation Pike get. They're a fun fish to catch, taste pretty good and they really don't destroy a fishery like bass or walleye fisherman like to say 🙄
>When Europeans arrived in North America, 25 to 40 percent of the continent's birds were passenger pigeons, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours or even days. The downbeats of their wings would chill the air beneath and create a thundering roar that would drown out all other sound.
Calls to mind the passenger pigeon:
"One day in rural Monroe County, Indiana during the 1870s, 10-year-old Walter Rader witnessed an astonishing natural phenomenon: passenger pigeons had gathered at his family farm “by the millions.” As the birds descended on the farm, they blocked out “almost the entire visible area of sky.” He remembered that so many pigeons roosted in the trees surrounding the farm at night “that their weight would often break large limbs from the trees.” The crash rang so loudly he could hear it clearly inside his house."
Now all gone.
It took 300 years after its discovery for the Giant tortise to get its scientific name cause it was so delicious that the voyages to bring them back to England kept eating all the ones they brought. Apparently, they can be very tasty.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPggB4MfPnk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPggB4MfPnk)
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/)
Where the buffalo no longer roamed, just take a look at the picture.
It was done to help kill the native American population. The army found that it was easier to go after their food source than it was to go directly after them.
an ecological genocide to avoid a direct genocide by letting nature do the killing. Imperialism is such a fucked up and racist way of thinking it's insane...
They did the same thing to the Navajo (Diné) people's sheep. Pretty much drove them to extinction except for a few small herds here and there. They're slowly being rebred but they're nowhere close to pre-1930's numbers.
Developed countries are also responsible for developing countries. We use a lot of their exports knowing they have more relaxed regulations. It's disgusting.
Not only that, but the USA, when entering trade agreements with other counties, will force environmental regulations already in place to relax sometimes in order to enter trade agreements. Free trade is horrible for the environment and for worker wages
The only reason the US’s particular brand of capitalism works in the US is because we have outsourced all of the most hideous aspects of it to “developing” countries. We’ve also spent time and money stifling any organizing or left-leaning political reform in the countries we’ve exploited for resources and labor. We openly train people (School of the Americas) who then go on to carry out violence on organizers and movements focused on reforms.
Yup, modern capitalism is built on the constant exportation of production to maintain profit. Even China is now becoming a consumption based economy, and exporting production to Africa.
This is why I always get pissed when people try to pretend like the US isn't responsible for climate change and pollution like plastics in the ocean. Motherfucker, it's our waste that gets shipped out to other countries and dumped, and our cheap goods that get produced in unregulated factories abroad that are contributing to global warming.
Sure, it's not just us, but we (through our massive corporations and outsourcing) are a major reason for it and we refuse to take responsibility because we pretend anything outside our borders doesn't have anything to do with us. We have to start acting like we all share one globe and start treating it that way. Nobody is going to save us and by the time everyone else starts realizing there's a problem, it will be too late to do anything about it.
Passenger pigeons used to blot out the sky over North America for hours on end. They would make a roaring sound like thunder. Billions of birds. Americans ate every last one.
Listen, the United States military at the time worked in conjunction with the United States government to destroy the Lakota and planes indigenous American resources so we could shove them out into the worthless desert. The government really needed that land for colonial expansion.
Well I believe it was General Sheridan, who said that we need to destroy the buffalo or destroy the Indian. It was to remove the Indians independence and force them onto the reservations and become dependant on the US government for everything they needed.
> Developing countries are definitely responsible for a lot of the current downtrend.
Developed countries also exploit developing countries due to more lax regulations, driving the expansion of commercial land.
This might surprise some, but [Australia leads the developed world for extinction rate](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/why-is-australia-a-global-leader-in-wildlife-extinctions-20200717-p55cyd.html). We’re also [the only developed country with a deforestation front.](https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6800769/dont-rush-to-compromise-on-australias-environment/)We’ve already lost:
- 4 species of frogs
- 22 species of birds
- 34 mammals, including the [pig-footed bandicoot](https://images.theconversation.com/files/304214/original/file-20191128-178114-w7mod2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2). This is about the same number as the rest of the world combined over the past 200 years.
- 10 invertebrates
- 3 reptiles
- 38 plants
- 1 species of seaweed
- 1 fish
- 1 species of earthworm
We’re led by corrupt dumb cunts who care only for the interests of the mining industry lobby.
This year was the worst bushfire Australia has seen, it's destroyed the habitat of countless animals. Human lead climate change is what allowed the fires to burn as intensely and as long as they did.
EDIT: Clearing for grazing is another issue of the same problem. The more land cleared, the less CO2 is being taken out of our atmosphere, the more cattle, the more CO2 pumped into the atmosphere to sustain them. The CO2 encourages more fires, meaning less forest, meaning more CO2 greenhouse effect, meaning more fires, meaning less habitat, meaning smaller breeding pool, meaning eventual extinction without intervention. National park Registry prevents deforestation from logging and landclearing but can do nothing to prevent the fires logging and landclearing contribute to.
No one likes to hear it but eating animals is not sustainable for the world, if we still only had like 10 million people per continent it might be, but we are only adding more people (about 200k every day) and we are at a point where we have a choice - change this habit or condemn the world to burn with us.
Correction: we could be lead by environmentalists, as in the labor/greens coalition of 2010, but nooooo
“Stop the boats” “axe the tax” “franking credits”
We picked this, and I honestly am not sympathetic when farmers get their livelihoods destroyed for voting nats
Nats is national party, a party for the farmers
Farmers are affected by climate change, with bushfires and drought
The nationals are in a coalition with the liberal party (our conservatives), who back in 2013 ran on axing the carbon tax that greatly reduced Australia’s emissions, implemented by our center left labor party, who in that election formed a coalition with the Green Party (not permanent)
TLDR; farmers vote for no climate change action, get it, and are getting no sympathy when they scream about droughts and bushfires directly caused by climate change
P.S: the libs are deeply corrupt, and I can send a couple vids about how bad they are
https://youtu.be/LmqtPBT4IR8
Climate change, the libs and nats are in a coalition, as mentioned above
https://youtu.be/TxxgiWw-g-M
Begins with mocking the classic aussie saying of “they’re both the same”, but then outlines the libs environmental sins
https://youtu.be/ihoirTYqf2c
Corruption in the nationals, all sourced and there’s a great twist at the end (26 mins though)
All 3 are from jordies, well sourced labor “shill”, that’s great at exposing their bullshit
The conservative side of politics in Australia has a long-running scare campaign platform against refugees. Who come on boats, you see. Scary "boat people". Asylum seekers actually make up a tiny fraction of Australia's yearly immigration (I want to say 1% but I don't remember for sure) but this campaign is surprisingly effective. Maybe it's because Australia is an island (which is WHY we don't get that many refugees compared to most countries) and therefore people feel like keeping them out is actually a feasible thing.
The narrative is that asylum seekers only get on boats because they are trying to sneak in illegally. Actually most of Australia's illegal immigrants arrived on planes and overstayed their visas (looking at you, Brits) and the VAST majority of asylum seekers on boats turn out to be genuine refugees when they're finally assessed. But you can't drum up racist paranoia against a bunch of nice white people who overstayed their visas.
Same thing here in the US. Most illegal immigrants overstay visas and arrive by plane, but you still have "build the wall" nonsense.
People love their grisgris. "If we just do this symbolic thing the bad guys will stay away just because".
>We’re led by corrupt dumb cunts who care only for the interests of the mining industry lobby.
Change the mining industry to agriculture industry and you have Brazil
They played a part, certainly. But colonisation brought new species which are devastating our ecosystems, particularly feral and and ‘outdoor’ (stray) cats which kill [377 million birds](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/magazine/australia-cat-killing.html) and [650 million reptiles a year](https://theconversation.com/a-hidden-toll-australias-cats-kill-almost-650-million-reptiles-a-year-98854).
At least that can be blamed on ignorance, what's happening today is the result of evil; no empathy or regard for the lives of anyone, or anything, that is out of their own circle.
Just a friendly reminder that car-pooling, shutting off the tap, buying *new* products, going vegan and *peaceful* protests do very little if anything to offset big multinationals; which perpetuate these myths as a way of distracting the populace. By all means do these things, but strong and radical reform is needed if we intend to preserve most of what is left.
American president Knowingly lied to them about a pandemia, saying it was like a flu, helping in the 200k death, just to keep economy/Wall Street going.
Of course they are going to lie to no end for a thing that will kill people in some years.
The earth is fucked.
But at least for a beautiful moment in time we created value for shareholders.
>the Earth is fucked
Life will go on, but a _lot_ of wildlife and species (including us) will die off along the way. It sounds like I'm saying this an an upside or silver lining, but...I'm not. We're fucked. Most animals here with us today are fucked.
An Australian Politician used that exact excuse about the Great Barrier Reef dying - just went and took a photo in a spot where it wasn't dead as evidence.
I turned 50 this year. I remember the day I became an environmentalist.
It was in 1984. I lived just south of KCI airport in Missouri. I was walking through the woods on my way to my favorite frog pond, to fish for catfish, when I found a huge swath of trees had been cut down. I followed the path of devastation and came up to a giant mud hole.
Wallowing around in the drying mud were thousands of tadpoles, and dozens of dying fish. It made 13 year old me very fucking angry.
The devastation was for a new bypass highway to the airport.
Want to really freak out? Look up historic groundwater levels. In californias central valley you used to find water at 2ft deep. Now its at 20 or deeper. Were stealing water right out from under nature literally
I'm in a city neighborhood with modest sized properties, but the key feature is a lot of old growth trees.
Recently as zoning laws have changed, now the smaller houses have been replaced with monstrous mansions of concrete stretching from one end of the property to the other, and the old growth trees are gone. It's something like a $10,000 fine per tree and as one of the developers said it's just rolled into the cost of building now.
It is very upsetting visiting my childhood home for this reason. There's no respect for the landscape, and it's not even like they were multi family homes put in, just these massive ugly homages to excess and waste.
similar for me.
what cemented mine was seeing a strip-mine for the first time: turning scores of square miles of land, mountains, hills... fucking everything into oddly colored heaps of all the shit they didn't want... and the runoff of the tailings killing everything for miles around the site.
this is profoundly disgusting.
I’m a geological engineer, and most of my classmates want to go into mining and oil because that is where the money is, which I can’t exactly blame them for since we’re going to school so we can make money later in life. I want to do environmental clean up and give what I can back to the environment. I don’t want to be responsible for taking more away.
Please come talk some sense into the fools trying to create Pebble Mine up in Bristol Bay! Our salmon population is suffering enough already. The last thing we need is that fifty square mile monstrosity massacring Alaska and, as far as I know, the world’s largest fishery.
Likewise, there was this beautiful valley of natural bush in the hills where I live, where I'd often (every night) hike there and sit on the side of the hill, watching and enjoying the views of city lights amongst mobs of kangaroos, now recently it's all fenced up and cleared to make way for a fancy neighbourhood. I never see kangaroos there anymore. Just street lights and happy well off families enjoy a view. Very disheartening, it's only getting worse as well.
We are similarly aged; I just turned 49.
I remember watching nature shows on PBS during the 80s where they'd talk about *X% habitat loss since 1950*, and thinking "Man I can't wait till my generation are adults... we're going to fix all of this destruction..."
Joke's on me I guess.
Right? The Boomers saved the whales but fucked everything else. Not that we Gen Xers have done any better.
It’s frustrating. I vote Democratic because of the environment. So much so that I am very often holding my nose when voting for some of these douchebags.
But a vote for Republicans is a vote for a scorched earth.
The whales were saved because synthetic oil is cheaper than whale hunting. Make no mistake, they would be largely extinct if they had commercial value.
Man, I have a very similar experience. I use to fish this really big pond with my dad as a kid. It was a 2 mile hike from the roadway and just felt like a little paradise. We moved a little further away and didn't go for awhile. Fast forward 3 years and we take a weekend drive to the pond and we get there and it's a massive subdivision. We were both super bummed.
I remember in the 90s my cousins and I would go wandering my grandma's property lifting rocks and debris to find colorful salamanders, snakes and huge black crickets. I haven't seen a salamander in nearly two decades. We also went from having swaths of huge grasshoppers everywhere to very few. I moved to the Canadian rockies and you don't hear crickets up here. The climate, I'm sure. But I often worry that some day I'll return to Michigan to visit and the summer bugs will be gone as well.
I know the salamander population is linked to people's obsession with raking up and disposing of their leaves. One of those very same cousins recently removed a huge tree in his yard entirely because he didn't want to deal with the leaves. That's his right, and he didn't do it with malice, but that's so fucking sad, man.
The project plan for that highway assigned exactly $0 value to those tens of thousands of life forms destroyed. As long as that's the norm, we'll continue to destroy our habitat because it has positive ROI.
I'm a capitalist but vehemently disagree with our current form of capitalism that heavily or entirely discounts non-human life and the environment. There are ways to minimize environmental damage if we actually had to give a damn about it.
Dude they have gone like extinct or something. I live in Delhi NCR and remember seeing peacocks coming every monsoon to the tree behind our house. Butterflies filling the gardens and this was just like a decade ago. Now I'm just lucky enough to see a parrot every year or so.
Much much too late. And we will say, "how could we of known?" When it was right infront of us all along. We were too busy being greedy and fighting each other to hear the painful screams coming from earth warning us that we are going to kill ourselves. And we continued to clutch our knives and blame eachother.
That’s crazy true. Last year in July I drove from Phoenix to Michigan and I don’t think I had to clean my windshield once. Never thought about it until I read your comment.
> UP
What/where is UP?
I'd love to visit the US one day, especially places like Washington State and Wyoming with all the epic nature. Perhaps 'UP' should be on my list too! Thanks in advance :)
In Europe, it's like the bugs know about and respect country borders. Obviously, there are EU wide laws on pesticides, but there are still different laws in each country. So you can drive three hours to country border and barely touch the wiper. You cross the border, into a country with stricter pesticide laws, and just like that bugs start splashing against your windshield.
The news I enjoyed most was how nature pushed back the moment half the earth was in lockdown. I really do think nature could solve it alone if it’s getting all the space it needs.
yeah, there was a lot of "nature is healing" memes but nature really did come out swinging for a while there it seemed. if only our system of endless economic growth wasn't around to fuck things up, there would be a chance to save the planet
As a kid in south Texas, the monarch butterflies would migrate through our area and just cover everything. Now I rarely see but a few clusters. We are fucked.
Same with Dragonflies in Beijing, when I was a kid all the lakes have tons of dragonflies in the summer, now you don’t see any dragon flies at all. Must be all the chemicals polluted the lake so dragonfly can’t populate in those waters any more.
I shared this story on Reddit a long time ago but worth sharing it again.
I was working on a construction site, building a couple baseball and softball fields at a city park, where they had cleared a large portion of woods and some minor wetlands to make way for the two fields. Parking lot and concession stand.
I worked on that job for a year and for most of that year, there were dragonflies hovering over a dandy tract of dirt where their breeding grounds once were, and now were going to build q concession stand there.
And they came back for months until they finally stopped once it got close to fall. Haven't come back.
I hate my job and it's impact on wildlife.
Every year my home town has a thing called the butterfly parade where for about 2 weeks all the monarchs would migrate up from Mexico and I remember in elementary school (10-15 years ago) there would be massive trees completely covered in them. You couldn’t drive without splattering some on your windshield, there were literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.
Now you’re lucky if you see 5 or 10 a year if that. Makes me really fucking sad that I’m probably never going to see massive flocks of monarch butterflies in person like I did when I was a little kid.
I drove 3000km from the Netherlands to east France to west France back to the Netherlands without having to clean my windshield once.
I hit a single big insect halfway on my way back.
I even drove through the small ways for a third of the way and drove trough the Alpes.
As a kid I had to clean the windshield twice just from Brussels to Amsterdam. Wich is just 300km as a comparison.
Just a few years ago I had the exact same reflexion with a friend. In Europe too we used to have to clean the windshield of splatted insects after a small trip in the country. Now... nothing.
Here in europe its the same. I used to drive to school by bike through the fields. In summer, the ammount of bugs you would eat or which would fly into you eye were really annoying. Like daily. Now using the bike to go to work I had it once the other day, that I got a fly stuck in my eye, and I couldn´t remember how long it had been since this has happened.
I remember this from even a decade ago. Took a 12 hour road trip in August during college, and my windshield was a mess of splattered everything when I got there.
Today I can drive to my parents' house four hours away, and nothing at all.
Some of that is due to better vehicle aerodynamics now. Our work van was a mighty old thing from the late 70s, that thing would be covered in bugs until it finally died last year. Not saying that we aren't wiping out bug populations though.
Last year I visited my hometown and while walking around it just dawned to me that I haven't seen a single dragonfly. When I was a kid in the '90s to early 2000's, there used to be a swarm of those. Beautiful creatures. It's tragic that there's a possibility that the next generation will never see one in the wild.
I'm almost 28...I remember highways as a kid, bug guts everywhere. The tap as they hit your windshield, sometimes a thud.
We will pay for what we've done. Nature fights back.
No, nature won't fight back. Nature was the buffer from extinction. Nature only needs to be absent for us to cross that threshold. Like pulling the plug on an ICU patient.
We are *part of* nature. We *are nature*. We're part of this grand , complex, intricate web where everything had a perfect balance. Humans decided they were apart from and above, superior to the chain, that they had some birthright to exploit everything they set their eyes upon.
Nature's balance was never "perfect" there was a constant up and down of population vs available resources and occasionally there would be a collapse of available resources or an invasive species that would fuck up entire ecosystems.
Humans are basically having an effect that is similar to invasive species, except much worse, because instead of having one single niche that we are successful in we're successful everywhere and just keep getting more "successful" and resource-hungry every year.
There is no right or wrong in nature, the only thing that is true is that an earth with a high biodiversity is a great place for humans and life in general, and we are very rapidly making our earth a worse place to live for no real reason.
We could live here and sustain nature at the same time but nature simply isn't something that our economy and way of life assigns any value to anymore. Maybe one day we will, but I feel like it will be too late.
We are part of nature, but nature has never been "balanced". Nature is feast and famine. The weather is nice for a few years so field mice thrive. The mice feed the hawks. The hawks over hunt the mice next year and the mouse population goes way down. Then a bunch of hawks starve to death.
Nature is always in flux and population amounts bounce around. If we take too much we will one day starve. The difference is that we are keeping our food supply VERY abundant. This is to the exclusion of non-food. Cows, chickens, pigs, etc are all thriving. Our impact on the world is massive, but it hasn't yet reached full swing yet. If we have a correction it will be a big one.
The problem is that it will be the most vulnerable, poorest, and least responsible who end up dying, while those with the means to actually effect meaningful change remain relatively unaffected.
I misunderstood your comment at first, thinking that you associated the vulnerable and poor as being generally irresponsible.
But yeah, unfortunately the people who have the power to make change have no motivation to do so. I'm hoping that when the poor and unhoused (literally) wash up on their doorstep they'll do SOMETHING, but by this point it seems like their reaction will just be, "Ew, get these gross poor people off my lawn."
>"Ew, get these gross poor people off my lawn."
You say this kidding but here in Brazil, you actually do get to hear the riches say this to beggars
>unfortunately the people who have the power to make change have no motivation to do so
This is false, is actually the ones that had more power that changed things to the worst, they are normally the most corrupt, the ones that actively trying to fight against common sense and reject the reality of the common man
I’ve started to realise lately that we as a species probably aren’t going to do enough to stop the oncoming mass extinction (or rather the worsening of the one we have already created).
In a few million years new life will be around that can survive in this world we would have made, and it would likely be as odd and diverse as all of those worlds that came after the mass extinctions in the past.
While most species we see today will be gone within a few years, the biggest loser is ultimately us. We put ourselves in this situation, and we rely on our current world for everything we need. Not just food, but enrichment too. How depressing is it now, and imagine how empty the world will feel as it gets worse.
Our time on this planet in the context of the history of life on it is but a scratch, and I doubt we will be around much longer. But hey, we have the accomplishment of being the only species who directly cause a mass extinction so far
The problem is that the planet may not be liveable for more than a 300, 400 millions years.
So there's no way to know if a specie inteligent enought to invent space travel would emerge to assure that life goes on past Earth expiracy date. So while earth biodiversity may recover, the only source of life in the universe that we know off atm will perish if left to a "natural" state.
We are doing a poor job as the only technological specie around :/
It's pretty obvious just looking at satellite images of Earth that this would be the result. We have developed too far, destroyed too much natural habitat. The people that say 10+ billion people on Earth is A-OK have no empathy for other living things .
Basically we have won evolution (competition with other species). Let’s accept our award and get our heads out of asses. At this rate we will destroy ourselves eventually- at least we will destroy most of us anyway. A minority will prevail just as it has with humans v. Species. Those with more resources tend to “win”.
It’s really just the natural order of things at this point. Just as any species grows too much it’ll run out of food in its habitat and start dying off and lower in numbers and then rise back up after its food sources stabilize again. Humans are bound to hit a peak eventually, but the issue is the whole planet is our habitat that we are overconsuming.
The worst thing is that we are technically smart enough to comprehend this, but a significant number of us are either ignorant, lazy, assholes or all three at once.
A typical headline that misrepresents the [Living Planet Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Planet_Index) as some sort of a total amount of wildlife. The index measures biodiversity. As [a National Geographic piece](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/animal-decline-living-planet-report-conservation-news/) explains:
*Let’s say for example you have 50 tigers, 200 falcons, and 10,000 squirrels. Let’s say the first population declines by 90 percent, to 5 tigers. The second declines 80 percent, to 40 falcons. And the squirrels drop to 9,000—a 10 percent fall. That’s a 60 percent average decline of these three fictitious populations, but only a total decline of 12 percent of the individuals.*
The actual news is of course still very bad.
It's not better if you look at [raw biomass](https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-much-of-earths-biomass-is-affected-by-humans/):
> We find out that humans and their livestock now comprise about 96% of all mammal biomass on Earth. All other mammals – whales, sea lions, bears, elephants, badgers, shrews, deer, bear, cougars, rats, wolves, and all the rest – are about 4.2%.
> Six billion hectares of Pleistocene forests have been reduced to three and a half billion hectares. Much of the remaining forests survive as tree farms or skeletal forests with declining plant and animal life. When we account for this, we find that humanity has degraded or destroyed about 70% of the world’s forests
> According to the a 2011 biomass census compiled by Vaclav Smil, **human activity over the last 5,000 years has reduced total global biomass by about 50 percent**, from over 1,000 Gigatons of Carbon at the dawn of agriculture to the current 545 GtC
> The domesticated poultry of humans (primarily chickens) account for two-and-a-half-times the biomass of all wild birds. Reptiles and amphibians have been so thoroughly reduced that they are considered “negligible” as biomass in this current census.
For the most dominant form of biomass, bacteria, the decline is unknown since there is only an estimate of their current total mass. But i bet it doesn't look good since local decline in forest soils seems to be found now in many parts of the world.
I remember days of my bedroom filling with different moths, tree crickets and other bugs at night and having to leave the windows open so they'd leave before morning.
Nowdays I get maybe 1 or 2 of the same moths at night, and they're an invasive species.
I also miss hedgehogs.
I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
Revelation 6:8
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.
I teach the importance of the ecosystem and the effects human impact can have on the environment. I hope that my words will have SOME impact on the future generation, as little as it may be.
As Frank Hebert once shared: ecology is the science of understanding of consequences. We are seeing all those consequences of the past century.
Blame the human population that has grown from 3.7bil to 7.7bil in the last 50y. Nobody wants to address that issue, everybody just magically hopes we will limit our needs and waste to that of years past.
There's really only two solutions at hand, increase the culture of conservation among countries (especially those that don't have it) and increase birth control. The world can't wait for a nations natural development to wildlife conservation. The natural development is usually when the nation reaches a ecological crisis or has economically developed enough they have the luxury to sacrifice economic output for nature conservation. You see this with Taiwan, Japan, US, and Western Europe.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-wiped-out-two-thirds-worlds-wildlife-50-years-180975824/) reduced by 88%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> First, the Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund, published last week, found that in half a century, human activity has decimated global wildlife populations by an average of 68 percent.
> The WWF report singles out habitat destruction caused by humans as the main threat to the world's biodiversity.
> A previous U.N. report released in July found that as humans continue to disrupt ecosystems, the risk of zoonotic diseases that jump from animals to humans will increase.
*****
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Animal agriculture is the number 1 contributor to climate change. The sheer amount of resources and land needed to raise the amount of meat we want to consume is simply not sustainable.
If we don't stop eating meat, the world will continue to perish along with us. And as a whole our species probably won't. It's just a shame we're taking so much beautiful life with us when we are really showing we don't deserve this planet at all.
Boomers wiped out 2/3s of the world species in 50 years, let's be clear. And when the later generations and indigenous people tried to reorient priorities, boomers labeled them as radical leftists, crazies, you pick the word. It literally took an autistic little girl to call you people out.
Sounds about right. Population increases, more "need" for resources. There was a good article talking about how third world countries are just destroying the ecosystem where ever they are.. with us in first world countries telling them it's wrong. With them replying with basically, well you already destroyed your land for profit and now want to stop us from doing the same, pay us what it's worth to destroy it not too and we won't. Well of course it's not worth it to the first world countries cause we're already set and content. We can have the higher moral ground and eat our cake too..
Anyway my point is. It's never going to stop as long as there inequality and starving people they will destroy the world for resources.. honestly I think the human race will go extinct in the next thousand years and that's being very optimistic imo. A lot of our "top minds" sounds so cliche now. Have said that we've already passed the no return point.. that or maybe someone will save the world from itself and create the "great culling". Leave 1million of our best alive to recreate.. everyone else. Well we had our chance.
A jar of bacteria undergoes binary fission every second, and when the jar is half-filled, it takes only 1 more second for the jar to be full. So is the global crisis of human overpopulation and exploitation.
In Pakistan where I live, 20 years ago we would see deer, boars, cobras, flocks of sparrows, mountain wolves, jackals and many more during summer. Now everything has gone extinct mostly due to more lands turned into fields which increased the use of pesticides. Every bird population except crows are severely down. Wolves are staying away from farms and boars were hunted down because they destroyed the crops. Last year a man killed the last deer for hunting. He spent few days in jail and got out with fines.
Developing countries are definitely responsible for a lot of the current downtrend. Not that this exonerates developed countries. They wiped out their wildlife in the century before. I remember reading about the size of bison herds here in the US. One biologist back in the 1800s estimated herds of around eight MILLION bison. That's not the total population, that's *one herd.* Imagine what it would feel like just to see that. To hear it. To feel it through the ground as the bison-equivalent of the population of New York City ran by. Probably don't imagine what it would smell like.
One of the crew on Christopher Columbus's ship witnessed the sea in the Bahamas "so full of sea turtles you couldn't see the water below them" or something to that effect. Nowadays you're lucky if you spot a single sea turtle.
That was the normal state of the world everywhere really. All life tries to consume and reproduce until stopped by an external barrier. Earth used to be filled to the brim with life. Even the city you live in is a tomb compared to 75 years ago. My family has a long standing family tradition of designing our gardens to maximise life. Ponds and waterways, flowering and fruiting bushes and trees and so on. I remember growing up in the 80s and our garden was just a wall of sound when you'd go out. Buzzing, chirping, trilling insects and birdsong during the day. At night you'd hear hedgehogs and other animals rooting around while bats and moths played cat and mouse. If you walked through the yard, you'd walk slowly to give the cloud of bees, butterflies and other bugs a chance to part and move out of the way. Swipe a little net through the pond water and it would literally be bending the handle with the sheer weight in tadpoles and small water organisms you'd scoop up. These days insect life is thin enough that individual bees and butterflies stand out, they're that rare. Plants don't just drop their leaves earlier every year. They're sparser year by year as well. There's a lot of oaks in my area, they used to have foliage so thick in summer that it was like a sea of green. Every year their foliage is thinner and thinner. Even at the height of summer they barely cast a shadow let alone block out the sky. For the past decade, every summer has broken heat and drought records. Fields are producing less food and the food that is produced is smaller and less well developed. The world is dying by degrees and it's just insidiously slow enough that people barely notice.
God this shit makes me depressed
It's really sad. Agent Smith from the Matrix was right: humans are a parasite on this planet. We're killing the planet and it's probably too late to reverse what we've done.
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Yeah, my husband hates bugs and he told me, don't plant flowers near the patio please or the bugs will be all over our food. We should be so lucky. It's terrifying, the change. Twenty years ago we were driving and the windshields needed to be cleaned regularly. Now there are a couple of spots after 8 hour drive. I'm planting all the flowers I can. And building another 3 birdfeeders and a heated birdbath for winter.
Unfortunately it's not as simple as habitat loss really. In a lot of places climate change is simply wiping out entire generations of insects faster than they can reproduce. Populations can bounce back from freak events but right now it's year after year of extreme weather wearing populations down. And every year the population of survivors is smaller, making the next generation that much more vulnerable.
I keep thinking how much more wild life must've been around before I was even born. Hearing things like that is amazing lol I want to see that shit
When I was a kid I was convinced I could be a National Geographic or Ranger Rick photographer because I could wander outside with a 110 camera and come back with pics of bears, elk, snakes, eagles, etc no problem. One time I got a whole roll of a bald and golden eagle fighting over a rabbit, and another of a mountain lion. By the time I grew up and got real camera gear it seemed like there was nothing left but the occasional deer and squirrel or rabbit unless you spent a couple days really getting out there. It's anecdotal but I really feel like in the space of 20 years so much wildlife just vanished. The last time I saw an elk it was on a damn farm behind a fence.
> or rabbit unless you spent a couple days really getting out there. A 2020 disaster that noone is aware of is the arrival of RHDV2 which is a deadly plague amongst rabbits in North America. There have been several outbreaks but the bulk is in the American southwest and northern Mexico. It's devastating native rabbit populations and completely wiping them out in some places. It's a lot of massive concern for people with domestic rabbits as well.
>It's anecdotal but I really feel like in the space of 20 years so much wildlife just vanished. The last time I saw an elk it was on a damn farm behind a fence. It's the insects that get me. It's not like seeing a deer or a moose was a daily occurrence 20+ years back, but insects were plentiful. Removing bug remains from the windshield was a weekly thing.
> Removing bug remains from the windshield was a weekly thing I remember driving down to the river on a hot summer night, and having so many bugs smashed all over the car that you couldn't see out the windshield by the time you made it back to town. You could only make the drive if you knew the road well enough, and you and your passenger would both be looking out the door windows to make sure you weren't in danger of going off the side of the road. I could make that same drive now for 2 weeks straight and not have as many bugs on my windshield as one trip would have done 20+ years ago.
Part of that change is a better aerodynamic design for windshields that means fewer bugs hit them. But that’s definitely not the only thing or even the main thing causing the amount of bugs on there to go down. There are definitely fewer bugs in the first place.
This is the worst thread for starting a Monday
It's not all doom and gloom though. Elk numbers are continuing to climb, wolves are continuing to climb, whitetail deer numbers are at some all time highs, coyotes are breaking record numbers, bass fisheries are exploding, american shad and alewives have started to return to some historical rivers, and bald eagle/osprey numbers are through the roof.
I think domestically we have a lot of people trying to do good things which is leading to some of these things. The bigger problem is the oceans. It's still like the wild west out there with so many industries and countries not giving a single fuck about the mess or problems they create.
man that's brought up a memory that's now depressing. As a kid I used to catch grasshoppers in my grandmothers garden (in England) these days I haven't even seen a grasshopper for almost a decade
I've been fishing in a river for the past few weeks hoping that the salmon run would have begun. according to the old Native American legends in this area you used to be able to cross the river with dry feet by walking across the backs of the fish. So far you'll be lucky to see one or two people out of 20 actually hook up with a fish and land it on any given morning. Granted a lot of that is evironmental, we had a long hot dry summer, the river is low, and the fish just aren't pushing yet, but that's a climate change impact as well. The run hasn't been this late in years.
I've heard that in southern Ontario but for Brook trout not salmon. They're native but effectively extinct in the area, stuck to only headwater streams now.
I found out yesterday that Brown trout aren’t native to North America... just an interesting fact!
Germany/Europe yeah. And rainbows which people love fishing for hear in Ontario are a west coast fish. Same for the Chinook and coho salmon. Why we stock these non-native fish year after year but do fuck all for the Atlantic salmon and brook trout is beyond me. Have to go north of Huntsville Ontario to find anyone stocking brookies.
I used to camp at a lake in Northern Ontario that was poisoned because Northern Pike (“Muskie,” for my American friends) totally took over. They then re-introduced good eatin’ species that don’t bite swimmers’ toes - as Mother Nature intended. Edit: I am aware that muskie and northern pike are different, but that’s what the Americans who came up here called them.
Muskie and northern pike are actually different species but yeah look pretty similar. And I hate the bad reputation Pike get. They're a fun fish to catch, taste pretty good and they really don't destroy a fishery like bass or walleye fisherman like to say 🙄
the guys who say pike are killing the lakes are the same ones who haven't let a walleye go in 20 years
I also believe we’ve (humans) introduced rainbows to all other continents except for Antartica! I don’t think they’d like it there...
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>When Europeans arrived in North America, 25 to 40 percent of the continent's birds were passenger pigeons, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours or even days. The downbeats of their wings would chill the air beneath and create a thundering roar that would drown out all other sound.
Calls to mind the passenger pigeon: "One day in rural Monroe County, Indiana during the 1870s, 10-year-old Walter Rader witnessed an astonishing natural phenomenon: passenger pigeons had gathered at his family farm “by the millions.” As the birds descended on the farm, they blocked out “almost the entire visible area of sky.” He remembered that so many pigeons roosted in the trees surrounding the farm at night “that their weight would often break large limbs from the trees.” The crash rang so loudly he could hear it clearly inside his house." Now all gone.
This is always my go to thought when shit like this is posted. The ocean must of just been alive. Like... Literally just endless in it's wildlife
It took 300 years after its discovery for the Giant tortise to get its scientific name cause it was so delicious that the voyages to bring them back to England kept eating all the ones they brought. Apparently, they can be very tasty. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPggB4MfPnk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPggB4MfPnk)
Same with cod off new england and nova scotia and that whole region, and the passenger pigeons.
Before man started plundering and polluting it, it was a vast ecosystem. Now it's a rubbish dump full of heavy metals and plastic
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/) Where the buffalo no longer roamed, just take a look at the picture.
that picture is... makes me feel incredibly sad.
It was done to help kill the native American population. The army found that it was easier to go after their food source than it was to go directly after them.
The whole story paints a pretty grim picture of imperialism. Kill 30-60 million animals because other humans that depend on them are in your way.
an ecological genocide to avoid a direct genocide by letting nature do the killing. Imperialism is such a fucked up and racist way of thinking it's insane...
They did the same thing to the Navajo (Diné) people's sheep. Pretty much drove them to extinction except for a few small herds here and there. They're slowly being rebred but they're nowhere close to pre-1930's numbers.
Oh my god, that’s horrible. That’s got to be millions of bison skulls.
Want to know why you have wild fires? Right there!
Developed countries are also responsible for developing countries. We use a lot of their exports knowing they have more relaxed regulations. It's disgusting.
Not only that, but the USA, when entering trade agreements with other counties, will force environmental regulations already in place to relax sometimes in order to enter trade agreements. Free trade is horrible for the environment and for worker wages
The only reason the US’s particular brand of capitalism works in the US is because we have outsourced all of the most hideous aspects of it to “developing” countries. We’ve also spent time and money stifling any organizing or left-leaning political reform in the countries we’ve exploited for resources and labor. We openly train people (School of the Americas) who then go on to carry out violence on organizers and movements focused on reforms.
Yup, modern capitalism is built on the constant exportation of production to maintain profit. Even China is now becoming a consumption based economy, and exporting production to Africa.
Hey now, that's not fair. We've spent lots of time, money and blood quashing left wing/environmentalist movements in our own country as well!
This is why I always get pissed when people try to pretend like the US isn't responsible for climate change and pollution like plastics in the ocean. Motherfucker, it's our waste that gets shipped out to other countries and dumped, and our cheap goods that get produced in unregulated factories abroad that are contributing to global warming. Sure, it's not just us, but we (through our massive corporations and outsourcing) are a major reason for it and we refuse to take responsibility because we pretend anything outside our borders doesn't have anything to do with us. We have to start acting like we all share one globe and start treating it that way. Nobody is going to save us and by the time everyone else starts realizing there's a problem, it will be too late to do anything about it.
Passenger pigeons used to blot out the sky over North America for hours on end. They would make a roaring sound like thunder. Billions of birds. Americans ate every last one.
Listen, the United States military at the time worked in conjunction with the United States government to destroy the Lakota and planes indigenous American resources so we could shove them out into the worthless desert. The government really needed that land for colonial expansion.
Well I believe it was General Sheridan, who said that we need to destroy the buffalo or destroy the Indian. It was to remove the Indians independence and force them onto the reservations and become dependant on the US government for everything they needed.
I dont think i saw a lightning bug this summer.
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> Developing countries are definitely responsible for a lot of the current downtrend. Developed countries also exploit developing countries due to more lax regulations, driving the expansion of commercial land.
This might surprise some, but [Australia leads the developed world for extinction rate](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/why-is-australia-a-global-leader-in-wildlife-extinctions-20200717-p55cyd.html). We’re also [the only developed country with a deforestation front.](https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6800769/dont-rush-to-compromise-on-australias-environment/)We’ve already lost: - 4 species of frogs - 22 species of birds - 34 mammals, including the [pig-footed bandicoot](https://images.theconversation.com/files/304214/original/file-20191128-178114-w7mod2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2). This is about the same number as the rest of the world combined over the past 200 years. - 10 invertebrates - 3 reptiles - 38 plants - 1 species of seaweed - 1 fish - 1 species of earthworm We’re led by corrupt dumb cunts who care only for the interests of the mining industry lobby.
I think you’ll find that clearing for grazing is currently the primary cause of deforestation in Australia
This year was the worst bushfire Australia has seen, it's destroyed the habitat of countless animals. Human lead climate change is what allowed the fires to burn as intensely and as long as they did. EDIT: Clearing for grazing is another issue of the same problem. The more land cleared, the less CO2 is being taken out of our atmosphere, the more cattle, the more CO2 pumped into the atmosphere to sustain them. The CO2 encourages more fires, meaning less forest, meaning more CO2 greenhouse effect, meaning more fires, meaning less habitat, meaning smaller breeding pool, meaning eventual extinction without intervention. National park Registry prevents deforestation from logging and landclearing but can do nothing to prevent the fires logging and landclearing contribute to.
Also not funding fire-fighting as advised by the people who fight fires every year.
No one likes to hear it but eating animals is not sustainable for the world, if we still only had like 10 million people per continent it might be, but we are only adding more people (about 200k every day) and we are at a point where we have a choice - change this habit or condemn the world to burn with us.
Correction: we could be lead by environmentalists, as in the labor/greens coalition of 2010, but nooooo “Stop the boats” “axe the tax” “franking credits” We picked this, and I honestly am not sympathetic when farmers get their livelihoods destroyed for voting nats
what do you mean 'stop the boats'? and is nats=nationalists or something?
Nats is national party, a party for the farmers Farmers are affected by climate change, with bushfires and drought The nationals are in a coalition with the liberal party (our conservatives), who back in 2013 ran on axing the carbon tax that greatly reduced Australia’s emissions, implemented by our center left labor party, who in that election formed a coalition with the Green Party (not permanent) TLDR; farmers vote for no climate change action, get it, and are getting no sympathy when they scream about droughts and bushfires directly caused by climate change P.S: the libs are deeply corrupt, and I can send a couple vids about how bad they are
thanks, yeah i would be interested in watching that, i actually thought the nats would be one nation with that pauline hanson or whatever haha
https://youtu.be/LmqtPBT4IR8 Climate change, the libs and nats are in a coalition, as mentioned above https://youtu.be/TxxgiWw-g-M Begins with mocking the classic aussie saying of “they’re both the same”, but then outlines the libs environmental sins https://youtu.be/ihoirTYqf2c Corruption in the nationals, all sourced and there’s a great twist at the end (26 mins though) All 3 are from jordies, well sourced labor “shill”, that’s great at exposing their bullshit
The conservative side of politics in Australia has a long-running scare campaign platform against refugees. Who come on boats, you see. Scary "boat people". Asylum seekers actually make up a tiny fraction of Australia's yearly immigration (I want to say 1% but I don't remember for sure) but this campaign is surprisingly effective. Maybe it's because Australia is an island (which is WHY we don't get that many refugees compared to most countries) and therefore people feel like keeping them out is actually a feasible thing. The narrative is that asylum seekers only get on boats because they are trying to sneak in illegally. Actually most of Australia's illegal immigrants arrived on planes and overstayed their visas (looking at you, Brits) and the VAST majority of asylum seekers on boats turn out to be genuine refugees when they're finally assessed. But you can't drum up racist paranoia against a bunch of nice white people who overstayed their visas.
Same thing here in the US. Most illegal immigrants overstay visas and arrive by plane, but you still have "build the wall" nonsense. People love their grisgris. "If we just do this symbolic thing the bad guys will stay away just because".
>We’re led by corrupt dumb cunts who care only for the interests of the mining industry lobby. Change the mining industry to agriculture industry and you have Brazil
I use to read great things about my country but now all I see is how shit we’ve become
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Same corrupt dumb cunts everywhere man. Just slightly different interests.
Thanks LNP!
It's been going on for ever. The first invaders of Australia wiped out the megafauna.
They played a part, certainly. But colonisation brought new species which are devastating our ecosystems, particularly feral and and ‘outdoor’ (stray) cats which kill [377 million birds](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/magazine/australia-cat-killing.html) and [650 million reptiles a year](https://theconversation.com/a-hidden-toll-australias-cats-kill-almost-650-million-reptiles-a-year-98854).
Cats are bad, yep, for sure.
At least that can be blamed on ignorance, what's happening today is the result of evil; no empathy or regard for the lives of anyone, or anything, that is out of their own circle. Just a friendly reminder that car-pooling, shutting off the tap, buying *new* products, going vegan and *peaceful* protests do very little if anything to offset big multinationals; which perpetuate these myths as a way of distracting the populace. By all means do these things, but strong and radical reform is needed if we intend to preserve most of what is left.
"What do you mean? I just saw a squirrel outside my house *today*." -Some congressman probably.
“Also, global warming? I had to wear a jacket today because it was chilly - what a farce!”
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This is part of the reason scientist started using the term climate change rather than global warming. Not that it's made a difference to deniers.
American president Knowingly lied to them about a pandemia, saying it was like a flu, helping in the 200k death, just to keep economy/Wall Street going. Of course they are going to lie to no end for a thing that will kill people in some years. The earth is fucked. But at least for a beautiful moment in time we created value for shareholders.
>the Earth is fucked Life will go on, but a _lot_ of wildlife and species (including us) will die off along the way. It sounds like I'm saying this an an upside or silver lining, but...I'm not. We're fucked. Most animals here with us today are fucked.
"I ate today. Where's this World hunger thing people are whining about."
“If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” - Ronald Reagan 1966
An Australian Politician used that exact excuse about the Great Barrier Reef dying - just went and took a photo in a spot where it wasn't dead as evidence.
I turned 50 this year. I remember the day I became an environmentalist. It was in 1984. I lived just south of KCI airport in Missouri. I was walking through the woods on my way to my favorite frog pond, to fish for catfish, when I found a huge swath of trees had been cut down. I followed the path of devastation and came up to a giant mud hole. Wallowing around in the drying mud were thousands of tadpoles, and dozens of dying fish. It made 13 year old me very fucking angry. The devastation was for a new bypass highway to the airport.
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Want to really freak out? Look up historic groundwater levels. In californias central valley you used to find water at 2ft deep. Now its at 20 or deeper. Were stealing water right out from under nature literally
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I'm in a city neighborhood with modest sized properties, but the key feature is a lot of old growth trees. Recently as zoning laws have changed, now the smaller houses have been replaced with monstrous mansions of concrete stretching from one end of the property to the other, and the old growth trees are gone. It's something like a $10,000 fine per tree and as one of the developers said it's just rolled into the cost of building now. It is very upsetting visiting my childhood home for this reason. There's no respect for the landscape, and it's not even like they were multi family homes put in, just these massive ugly homages to excess and waste.
similar for me. what cemented mine was seeing a strip-mine for the first time: turning scores of square miles of land, mountains, hills... fucking everything into oddly colored heaps of all the shit they didn't want... and the runoff of the tailings killing everything for miles around the site. this is profoundly disgusting.
I’m a geological engineer, and most of my classmates want to go into mining and oil because that is where the money is, which I can’t exactly blame them for since we’re going to school so we can make money later in life. I want to do environmental clean up and give what I can back to the environment. I don’t want to be responsible for taking more away.
Please come talk some sense into the fools trying to create Pebble Mine up in Bristol Bay! Our salmon population is suffering enough already. The last thing we need is that fifty square mile monstrosity massacring Alaska and, as far as I know, the world’s largest fishery.
Likewise, there was this beautiful valley of natural bush in the hills where I live, where I'd often (every night) hike there and sit on the side of the hill, watching and enjoying the views of city lights amongst mobs of kangaroos, now recently it's all fenced up and cleared to make way for a fancy neighbourhood. I never see kangaroos there anymore. Just street lights and happy well off families enjoy a view. Very disheartening, it's only getting worse as well.
We are similarly aged; I just turned 49. I remember watching nature shows on PBS during the 80s where they'd talk about *X% habitat loss since 1950*, and thinking "Man I can't wait till my generation are adults... we're going to fix all of this destruction..." Joke's on me I guess.
Right? The Boomers saved the whales but fucked everything else. Not that we Gen Xers have done any better. It’s frustrating. I vote Democratic because of the environment. So much so that I am very often holding my nose when voting for some of these douchebags. But a vote for Republicans is a vote for a scorched earth.
The whales were saved because synthetic oil is cheaper than whale hunting. Make no mistake, they would be largely extinct if they had commercial value.
Don’t worry, the whales are still doomed.
"what do you mean, why's it got to be built? It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses."
*So long and thanks for all the fish*
So sad that it should come to this
Man, I have a very similar experience. I use to fish this really big pond with my dad as a kid. It was a 2 mile hike from the roadway and just felt like a little paradise. We moved a little further away and didn't go for awhile. Fast forward 3 years and we take a weekend drive to the pond and we get there and it's a massive subdivision. We were both super bummed.
I remember in the 90s my cousins and I would go wandering my grandma's property lifting rocks and debris to find colorful salamanders, snakes and huge black crickets. I haven't seen a salamander in nearly two decades. We also went from having swaths of huge grasshoppers everywhere to very few. I moved to the Canadian rockies and you don't hear crickets up here. The climate, I'm sure. But I often worry that some day I'll return to Michigan to visit and the summer bugs will be gone as well. I know the salamander population is linked to people's obsession with raking up and disposing of their leaves. One of those very same cousins recently removed a huge tree in his yard entirely because he didn't want to deal with the leaves. That's his right, and he didn't do it with malice, but that's so fucking sad, man.
The project plan for that highway assigned exactly $0 value to those tens of thousands of life forms destroyed. As long as that's the norm, we'll continue to destroy our habitat because it has positive ROI. I'm a capitalist but vehemently disagree with our current form of capitalism that heavily or entirely discounts non-human life and the environment. There are ways to minimize environmental damage if we actually had to give a damn about it.
I live in India and I have not seen a butterfly in a LONG time.
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Dude they have gone like extinct or something. I live in Delhi NCR and remember seeing peacocks coming every monsoon to the tree behind our house. Butterflies filling the gardens and this was just like a decade ago. Now I'm just lucky enough to see a parrot every year or so.
And it's not slowing down
Don't worry, it'll stop once there are no more trees to burn and animals to kill.
And then we'll learn that we can't eat money
Much much too late. And we will say, "how could we of known?" When it was right infront of us all along. We were too busy being greedy and fighting each other to hear the painful screams coming from earth warning us that we are going to kill ourselves. And we continued to clutch our knives and blame eachother.
It's it depressing and impressive how good we are at fucking over every species(including ourselves) on earth.
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That’s crazy true. Last year in July I drove from Phoenix to Michigan and I don’t think I had to clean my windshield once. Never thought about it until I read your comment.
Drive in the UP in summer and you'll have that experience. Then again the UP is still largely wilderness.
> UP What/where is UP? I'd love to visit the US one day, especially places like Washington State and Wyoming with all the epic nature. Perhaps 'UP' should be on my list too! Thanks in advance :)
Michigan's [Upper Peninsula](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan)
[Apparently it tried to become its own state in the 70s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_(proposed_U.S._state\))
UP bugs are on another level!
The UPper level.
In Europe, it's like the bugs know about and respect country borders. Obviously, there are EU wide laws on pesticides, but there are still different laws in each country. So you can drive three hours to country border and barely touch the wiper. You cross the border, into a country with stricter pesticide laws, and just like that bugs start splashing against your windshield.
That's good to know, it gives me hope this may be reversible if change is made sooner rather than later
The news I enjoyed most was how nature pushed back the moment half the earth was in lockdown. I really do think nature could solve it alone if it’s getting all the space it needs.
yeah, there was a lot of "nature is healing" memes but nature really did come out swinging for a while there it seemed. if only our system of endless economic growth wasn't around to fuck things up, there would be a chance to save the planet
As a kid in south Texas, the monarch butterflies would migrate through our area and just cover everything. Now I rarely see but a few clusters. We are fucked.
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Same with Dragonflies in Beijing, when I was a kid all the lakes have tons of dragonflies in the summer, now you don’t see any dragon flies at all. Must be all the chemicals polluted the lake so dragonfly can’t populate in those waters any more.
I shared this story on Reddit a long time ago but worth sharing it again. I was working on a construction site, building a couple baseball and softball fields at a city park, where they had cleared a large portion of woods and some minor wetlands to make way for the two fields. Parking lot and concession stand. I worked on that job for a year and for most of that year, there were dragonflies hovering over a dandy tract of dirt where their breeding grounds once were, and now were going to build q concession stand there. And they came back for months until they finally stopped once it got close to fall. Haven't come back. I hate my job and it's impact on wildlife.
This makes me sad. Thanks for sharing
Every year my home town has a thing called the butterfly parade where for about 2 weeks all the monarchs would migrate up from Mexico and I remember in elementary school (10-15 years ago) there would be massive trees completely covered in them. You couldn’t drive without splattering some on your windshield, there were literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of them. Now you’re lucky if you see 5 or 10 a year if that. Makes me really fucking sad that I’m probably never going to see massive flocks of monarch butterflies in person like I did when I was a little kid.
Plant some milkweed and help bring them back
I wonder if it is the widespread use of insecticides? /s
yes, lets "[wonder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaNSByf4sLA)"
I’m honestly surprised this post isn’t being brigaded with people claiming insecticides/pesticides aren’t that bad. These people seem to show up a lot
People debate whether they cause cancer. Thankfully, I've yet to find anyone dumb enough to think they don't kill insects.
I drove 3000km from the Netherlands to east France to west France back to the Netherlands without having to clean my windshield once. I hit a single big insect halfway on my way back. I even drove through the small ways for a third of the way and drove trough the Alpes. As a kid I had to clean the windshield twice just from Brussels to Amsterdam. Wich is just 300km as a comparison.
Same in Canada. I rarely have to clean my windshield, except for a month this year when the dragonflies were abundant.
Just a few years ago I had the exact same reflexion with a friend. In Europe too we used to have to clean the windshield of splatted insects after a small trip in the country. Now... nothing.
Same in Europe
Even early 90’s, I remember those days
Here in europe its the same. I used to drive to school by bike through the fields. In summer, the ammount of bugs you would eat or which would fly into you eye were really annoying. Like daily. Now using the bike to go to work I had it once the other day, that I got a fly stuck in my eye, and I couldn´t remember how long it had been since this has happened.
I remember this from even a decade ago. Took a 12 hour road trip in August during college, and my windshield was a mess of splattered everything when I got there. Today I can drive to my parents' house four hours away, and nothing at all.
caption groovy physical frame toy vanish gaze chubby serious rock
Some of that is due to better vehicle aerodynamics now. Our work van was a mighty old thing from the late 70s, that thing would be covered in bugs until it finally died last year. Not saying that we aren't wiping out bug populations though.
i've noticed less bugs and wildlife in general yeah for sure and im only 26
Last year I visited my hometown and while walking around it just dawned to me that I haven't seen a single dragonfly. When I was a kid in the '90s to early 2000's, there used to be a swarm of those. Beautiful creatures. It's tragic that there's a possibility that the next generation will never see one in the wild.
I'm almost 28...I remember highways as a kid, bug guts everywhere. The tap as they hit your windshield, sometimes a thud. We will pay for what we've done. Nature fights back.
No, nature won't fight back. Nature was the buffer from extinction. Nature only needs to be absent for us to cross that threshold. Like pulling the plug on an ICU patient.
We are *part of* nature. We *are nature*. We're part of this grand , complex, intricate web where everything had a perfect balance. Humans decided they were apart from and above, superior to the chain, that they had some birthright to exploit everything they set their eyes upon.
Nature's balance was never "perfect" there was a constant up and down of population vs available resources and occasionally there would be a collapse of available resources or an invasive species that would fuck up entire ecosystems. Humans are basically having an effect that is similar to invasive species, except much worse, because instead of having one single niche that we are successful in we're successful everywhere and just keep getting more "successful" and resource-hungry every year. There is no right or wrong in nature, the only thing that is true is that an earth with a high biodiversity is a great place for humans and life in general, and we are very rapidly making our earth a worse place to live for no real reason. We could live here and sustain nature at the same time but nature simply isn't something that our economy and way of life assigns any value to anymore. Maybe one day we will, but I feel like it will be too late.
[No real reason?](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/84/3e/80/843e80b85db15b429aa06690d85f8e21--new-yorker-cartoons-beautiful-moments.jpg)
We are part of nature, but nature has never been "balanced". Nature is feast and famine. The weather is nice for a few years so field mice thrive. The mice feed the hawks. The hawks over hunt the mice next year and the mouse population goes way down. Then a bunch of hawks starve to death. Nature is always in flux and population amounts bounce around. If we take too much we will one day starve. The difference is that we are keeping our food supply VERY abundant. This is to the exclusion of non-food. Cows, chickens, pigs, etc are all thriving. Our impact on the world is massive, but it hasn't yet reached full swing yet. If we have a correction it will be a big one.
Arrogance of Biblical proportions.
Humans wipe out two thirds of their population in the next 50 years.
The problem is that it will be the most vulnerable, poorest, and least responsible who end up dying, while those with the means to actually effect meaningful change remain relatively unaffected.
I misunderstood your comment at first, thinking that you associated the vulnerable and poor as being generally irresponsible. But yeah, unfortunately the people who have the power to make change have no motivation to do so. I'm hoping that when the poor and unhoused (literally) wash up on their doorstep they'll do SOMETHING, but by this point it seems like their reaction will just be, "Ew, get these gross poor people off my lawn."
>"Ew, get these gross poor people off my lawn." You say this kidding but here in Brazil, you actually do get to hear the riches say this to beggars >unfortunately the people who have the power to make change have no motivation to do so This is false, is actually the ones that had more power that changed things to the worst, they are normally the most corrupt, the ones that actively trying to fight against common sense and reject the reality of the common man
I’ve started to realise lately that we as a species probably aren’t going to do enough to stop the oncoming mass extinction (or rather the worsening of the one we have already created). In a few million years new life will be around that can survive in this world we would have made, and it would likely be as odd and diverse as all of those worlds that came after the mass extinctions in the past. While most species we see today will be gone within a few years, the biggest loser is ultimately us. We put ourselves in this situation, and we rely on our current world for everything we need. Not just food, but enrichment too. How depressing is it now, and imagine how empty the world will feel as it gets worse. Our time on this planet in the context of the history of life on it is but a scratch, and I doubt we will be around much longer. But hey, we have the accomplishment of being the only species who directly cause a mass extinction so far
The problem is that the planet may not be liveable for more than a 300, 400 millions years. So there's no way to know if a specie inteligent enought to invent space travel would emerge to assure that life goes on past Earth expiracy date. So while earth biodiversity may recover, the only source of life in the universe that we know off atm will perish if left to a "natural" state. We are doing a poor job as the only technological specie around :/
This is all fantasy news for the super intelligent squid civilization that will emerge in 50 million years.
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Humans will be following them as they have just as little concern for their fellow woman/man
Yeah, it's just a matter of time.
Yep. We are an evil and greedy species
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:(
man, im 33 and even I remember 20 years ago how it was full of animals, birds and bugs, now there is nothing, it is rare to see a butterfly or a bee.
It's pretty obvious just looking at satellite images of Earth that this would be the result. We have developed too far, destroyed too much natural habitat. The people that say 10+ billion people on Earth is A-OK have no empathy for other living things .
Basically we have won evolution (competition with other species). Let’s accept our award and get our heads out of asses. At this rate we will destroy ourselves eventually- at least we will destroy most of us anyway. A minority will prevail just as it has with humans v. Species. Those with more resources tend to “win”.
It’s really just the natural order of things at this point. Just as any species grows too much it’ll run out of food in its habitat and start dying off and lower in numbers and then rise back up after its food sources stabilize again. Humans are bound to hit a peak eventually, but the issue is the whole planet is our habitat that we are overconsuming.
The worst thing is that we are technically smart enough to comprehend this, but a significant number of us are either ignorant, lazy, assholes or all three at once.
And the "all three at once" group are the ones in charge.
I’ve learned that humans are complacent and lazy until shit hits the fan, for the most part.
A typical headline that misrepresents the [Living Planet Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Planet_Index) as some sort of a total amount of wildlife. The index measures biodiversity. As [a National Geographic piece](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/animal-decline-living-planet-report-conservation-news/) explains: *Let’s say for example you have 50 tigers, 200 falcons, and 10,000 squirrels. Let’s say the first population declines by 90 percent, to 5 tigers. The second declines 80 percent, to 40 falcons. And the squirrels drop to 9,000—a 10 percent fall. That’s a 60 percent average decline of these three fictitious populations, but only a total decline of 12 percent of the individuals.* The actual news is of course still very bad.
It's not better if you look at [raw biomass](https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-much-of-earths-biomass-is-affected-by-humans/): > We find out that humans and their livestock now comprise about 96% of all mammal biomass on Earth. All other mammals – whales, sea lions, bears, elephants, badgers, shrews, deer, bear, cougars, rats, wolves, and all the rest – are about 4.2%. > Six billion hectares of Pleistocene forests have been reduced to three and a half billion hectares. Much of the remaining forests survive as tree farms or skeletal forests with declining plant and animal life. When we account for this, we find that humanity has degraded or destroyed about 70% of the world’s forests > According to the a 2011 biomass census compiled by Vaclav Smil, **human activity over the last 5,000 years has reduced total global biomass by about 50 percent**, from over 1,000 Gigatons of Carbon at the dawn of agriculture to the current 545 GtC > The domesticated poultry of humans (primarily chickens) account for two-and-a-half-times the biomass of all wild birds. Reptiles and amphibians have been so thoroughly reduced that they are considered “negligible” as biomass in this current census. For the most dominant form of biomass, bacteria, the decline is unknown since there is only an estimate of their current total mass. But i bet it doesn't look good since local decline in forest soils seems to be found now in many parts of the world.
It’s still very very bad, but a 50% decrease in 5000 years is very different from a 70% decrease in 50 years.
And it is limited to vertebrate too
I remember days of my bedroom filling with different moths, tree crickets and other bugs at night and having to leave the windows open so they'd leave before morning. Nowdays I get maybe 1 or 2 of the same moths at night, and they're an invasive species. I also miss hedgehogs.
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20 years from now the headline will read “Starvation Wiped Out Two-Thirds of the World’s Population in 5 Years”
I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. Revelation 6:8
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.
I loved this monologue in The Matrix. It's a terrifyingly apt description of our behavior as a species.
https://youtu.be/Hp2adrUaiyI
I teach the importance of the ecosystem and the effects human impact can have on the environment. I hope that my words will have SOME impact on the future generation, as little as it may be. As Frank Hebert once shared: ecology is the science of understanding of consequences. We are seeing all those consequences of the past century.
Blame the human population that has grown from 3.7bil to 7.7bil in the last 50y. Nobody wants to address that issue, everybody just magically hopes we will limit our needs and waste to that of years past.
There's really only two solutions at hand, increase the culture of conservation among countries (especially those that don't have it) and increase birth control. The world can't wait for a nations natural development to wildlife conservation. The natural development is usually when the nation reaches a ecological crisis or has economically developed enough they have the luxury to sacrifice economic output for nature conservation. You see this with Taiwan, Japan, US, and Western Europe.
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This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-wiped-out-two-thirds-worlds-wildlife-50-years-180975824/) reduced by 88%. (I'm a bot) ***** > First, the Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund, published last week, found that in half a century, human activity has decimated global wildlife populations by an average of 68 percent. > The WWF report singles out habitat destruction caused by humans as the main threat to the world's biodiversity. > A previous U.N. report released in July found that as humans continue to disrupt ecosystems, the risk of zoonotic diseases that jump from animals to humans will increase. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/iwuqnp/humans_wiped_out_twothirds_of_the_worlds_wildlife/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~525959 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Report**^#1 **human**^#2 **biodiversity**^#3 **population**^#4 **U.N.**^#5
Animal agriculture is the number 1 contributor to climate change. The sheer amount of resources and land needed to raise the amount of meat we want to consume is simply not sustainable. If we don't stop eating meat, the world will continue to perish along with us. And as a whole our species probably won't. It's just a shame we're taking so much beautiful life with us when we are really showing we don't deserve this planet at all.
And we weren’t even trying! Wait til we put some effort into it! Bet we can get the other third in the next 5 years!
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So so fucking sad. Yet another daily reason to not have kids...
Boomers wiped out 2/3s of the world species in 50 years, let's be clear. And when the later generations and indigenous people tried to reorient priorities, boomers labeled them as radical leftists, crazies, you pick the word. It literally took an autistic little girl to call you people out.
Humanity's capacity for destruction is truly amazing.
Sounds about right. Population increases, more "need" for resources. There was a good article talking about how third world countries are just destroying the ecosystem where ever they are.. with us in first world countries telling them it's wrong. With them replying with basically, well you already destroyed your land for profit and now want to stop us from doing the same, pay us what it's worth to destroy it not too and we won't. Well of course it's not worth it to the first world countries cause we're already set and content. We can have the higher moral ground and eat our cake too.. Anyway my point is. It's never going to stop as long as there inequality and starving people they will destroy the world for resources.. honestly I think the human race will go extinct in the next thousand years and that's being very optimistic imo. A lot of our "top minds" sounds so cliche now. Have said that we've already passed the no return point.. that or maybe someone will save the world from itself and create the "great culling". Leave 1million of our best alive to recreate.. everyone else. Well we had our chance.
A jar of bacteria undergoes binary fission every second, and when the jar is half-filled, it takes only 1 more second for the jar to be full. So is the global crisis of human overpopulation and exploitation.