In case it helps anyone unfamiliar with the geography, the Okanagan Desert is the northern tip of the arid region which covers the Eastern half of Washington state; it lies in the rain shadow of the Cascade mountains.
It is "technically only semi-arid shrub-steppe." [0] which are "Shrub-steppes are distinguishable from deserts, which are too dry to support a noticeable cover of perennial grasses or other shrubs" [1]
Semi-arid regions are also colloquially called "semi-deserts". As far as the semi-arid regions I have visited go, it seems to have pretty decent vegetation compared to others.
Not really related, but I just wanted to share - there's another desert that almost no one knows about, and it's right in the middle of Europe - in Poland:
That's more of a dustbowl caused by deforestation - doesn't have the arid (or semi-arid) climate of a true desert.
The Osoyoos "desert" isn't really arid enough, either.
Deserts don't have to look like sand dunes, they are any area with a low rainfall. Sometimes the plants that are adapted are virtually a forest, but it's still a desert. For example in the Baja California desert:
https://mbgecologicalrestoration.files.wordpress.com/2015/03...
Desert areas often have unique plants and animals living in them that would quickly die if competing with faster growing lifeforms. This tends to not be a good thing, because in proper deserts, there are times of the year where there is a lot of rain, but a long period of time where there is little to no rain. So, these invasive species will shoot up in the winter and spring, then dry out and die in the summer and fall when there's no rain to keep the plants alive. The resulting tinderbox is ripe for a fire to burn through and cause problems for everyone.
Our only desert? There is a small desert in Yukon, as well: Carcross Desert. At least by my definition of a desert: wind blown sand dunes with little patches of hardy shrubs and scrawny trees.
Maybe the fact that it formed from a lake bed makes it not a real desert?
The difference is that in Saskatchewan the is no some son of the second level Environment Canada manager, who needs a comfortable internship to enter the System.
According to wikipedia, neither of them are actually deserts. The Carcross Desert is really a sand dune and the Okanagan Desert is really a shrub-steppe.
There is the opposite problem, which for me is way more serious: The desert growing. In Spain it grows each year in the South East.
But Spain's desert is small compared to Sahara's, that is as big as Europe. Its dunes are as big as buildings, with pictures you can't really grasp the enormity of this dessert. When Sahara grows each year it literally engulfs entire villages.
In Egypt and center of Africa there are cities that were prosperous in the past that were engulfed by dessert and disappeared.
Honestly I would not shed a tear for big parts of the big dessert going away. When solar energy and desalination becomes cheaper I expect Sahara to be one of the most fertile places on Earth.
You can probably preserve the biodiversity freezing eggs and sperm of the creatures that live there. There are not so much. I believe that with pesticides and herbicides we have destroyed way more biodiversity of our world(not the desert but our forest) and nobody has complained.
Currently a wall of forest is being planned to stop the desertification of southern Africa. The accompanying satellite photo on the wikipedia article is quite telling of the enormous size of the desert.
"a wall of forest is being planned to stop the desertification of southern Africa". Very interesting, no kidding. Who is planning that?
The last successful country in such endeavour is Kazakhstan. And to certain extent - China. Making 'wall of forest' is a programme with planning horizon of more than 50 years. I'd like to know the name of stakeholders.
Thank you. Forest plantations in arid zones are tricky thing. I know that, because I studied that topic for about a year. Expensive too. I wish them 100 years of piece and prosperity to complete that, and will gladly assist, if invited.
The desert growing? Move your family off there. You cannot stop desert growing. You need a degree of social cohesion and education of the adult population they have in Israel to manage consequences of long heavy drought.
I see in some places people are trying to stop deserts from turning into something else and in other places people are trying to stop something else from turning into deserts.
Are we always trying to stop things from changing, and a posteriori inventing arguments for why that particular change is bad? (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all change is equally indifferent either)
Countries at risk of losing 20-30% or more of their arable land over the next decades are not threatened by reduced profits they are threatened by famine, starvation and huge population shifts.
But this has nothing to do with preservation efforts, if anything preserving dry subhumid and semi-arid natural habitats can prove to be a good barrier to prevent further desertification countries like Israel and Spain have been doing quite a bit of work in those areas.
Wanting to preserve an existing natural environment and habitat to many species is not antithetical to not wanting to lose arable land to needless man caused or at least accelerated desertification.
I think your arguments against desertification have some merit. But then what's the argument pro desertification (from people who want to keep deserts desert)? Shouldn't you want to NOT preserve deserts, and instead turn them into arable land? It certainly seems more useful to me.
Your post says that someone must be either "all for deserts" or "all against deserts." It's unclear why people seem to want to force this false dichotomy.
The dichotomy that I'm pointing out is not that people are "all for deserts" vs "all against deserts", you misunderstood my position. I'm pointing out a false dichotomy which is "all for environmental preservation" vs the position that "all environmental conditions are irrelevant".
Again this is like being "pro-bear" but not wanting a bear to come out and maul your children at the playground.
And one good way of ensuring that the bears don't come out and play is by not destroying their natural habitats.
I don't know what false dichotomy you are trying to point out but it doesn't exist, no serious preservationist or environmental scientists saying "all for X".
We want to preserve what we can do not cause further needless destruction and degradation in the biodiversity of our ecosystem.
Many environmental problems including desertification are cause by us destroying natural habitats including deserts.
If you have a desert more or less contained in its "natural" state providing a habitat to multiple species do what you can to preserve it.
If you have man accelerated desertification that is threatening to turn your arable land into sand dunes within the next 5 decades you should do what you can to slow it down, stop it, and then reverse it.
The only way of fighting desertification seems to be now to actually try to revert the damage you've done to the natural barriers and local environment in the first place.
Sand dunes that have had migration patterns of barely a CM per year now migrating at rates of a few meters per year are not a "natural" state.
This isn't about "pro-desertification" it's about having negative effect on natural habitats that otherwise have no negative impact on human civilization.
Also I would like to point out that Okanagan is not a desert it's a dry subhumid tundra, preserving it in it's current state would actually combat desertification.
Israel was trying to fight the creeping dunes for decades, it finally figured out that actually trying to convert them into arable land early own was one of the causes that increase desertification, once it realized that it adjusted its policies and now keeping arid and semi-arid regions and building "natural" barriers that prevent the dunes from creeping is its main environmental policy and so far it's been working as the dunes have been receding by as much as 2 meters per year.
But the general argument isn't for "pro-desertification" it's just against unnecessary environmental change, Okanagan is not a desert it's a pretty good arable valley overall wanting to preserve the natural habitat and not fill it with vineyards isn't really a hard argument to make.
You can say that we can and should screw over every piece of land to get everything we can from it, but most of us can agree that we should preserve what we have left and find ways to better exploit in less destructive means the land we've already taken over and if at all possible try to reverse some of the damage we have caused.
I'm really trying to understand why would you think just stripping and entire habitat and doing pretty much nothing with it is somehow useful just so you could grow a few grapes in Canada.
> why would you think just stripping and entire habitat
Again, you completely misunderstood my position. I'm not making a comment on deserts, or this deserts specifically.
I'm making the following comment: "it seems to me that certain people (which I've just learned includes you) seem to believe that any change to any environment is necessarily bad"
I'm not an environmentalist, and again I don't understand how you define "good or bad", you seem to operate on so basic/childish terms that I'm honestly starting to suspect your engagement is nothing more than clever quasi trolling.
We have very little ability to gauge the true impact of environmental changes so far we've learned that for the most part any manmade or man accelerated change has in the long run an adverse effect on humans and the planet as a whole.
There is no conflict between humans being the geoengineers they are trying to stop adverse changes to their global habitat that can threaten them, while wanting to preserve natural habitats that serve as a home to countless other species.
Most people think nature is pretty nice, and well pretty pretty, screwing it over needlessly especially considering that every time we do it gets worse for us is what most of us by now came to define as "bad" because it has a negative effect on our civilization.
On the other hand if you say make an argument that we found the cure for cancer but to make it we need to harvest every blue belly turtle in the planet and cause the species to go pretty much extinct I don't think many people including me would have much of a moral objection to it since while I do feel bad for the blue belly turtle (I made this species up, it might exist but i don't know :)) the positive effect on human civilization is most likely going to outweigh any negative effects the extinction of this turtle will have on the environment.
Well, you SHOULD understand. I'm speaking in term of "loss of lives over the long run". Your words. More "loss of lives over the long run" is the bad alternative, when an alternative exists of less "loss of lives over the long run", which is the good one.
You seem to be writing your responses as if I were claiming that "it's ok to trash the environment", or something, which is not true (see my other comments in this thread).
Is this claim based on any evidence or research?
"Countries at risk of losing 20-30% or more of their arable land over the next decades are not threatened by reduced profits they are threatened by famine, starvation and huge population shifts."
I say - that is bullshit. Belarus lost more than 20% of arable land and around 30% of forest land after Chernobyl accident in 1986. It suffered literal hell in social sphere after the USSR was ruined by its elites in 1991. But just 20 years later, by imposing special 17% tax on all businesses that was used to recover arable lands and forest lands from radionuclide contamination, balanced social policy and successful research in agriculture, it is doing just fine!
It is HOW you deal with loss of arable land that matters. 2008 - Syria. They stupidly dug deeper wells until exhausting their precious ground waters to nothing. Result - 2 mln former farmers filled favelas of large Syrian cities. At the same time, same area, same problem - Israel invested into desalination tech and plants and successfully kept its agriculture running.
It is not lost per se that causes famine and social shifts, it is right or wrong policy of the society that does it. We are humans - we can change things. But not 'saving deserts' or 'save beavers'. We are damn good at saving ourselves when we are together. Like Jews.
This is because social parasites, calling themselves 'environmentalists' want their piece of taxpayers money, no matter how bullshit their ideas are. They have to pay for college for their kids, sort of. And the mortgage. Do not get me wrong, I worked with US EPA, Environment Canada, Japanese JICA and swedish SSNC on a number of projects. I know what I am talking about. Humanity is not geological force. Everything changes. This is natural.
UPD: for those interested, this interest to this desert has only one reason, Environment Canada wants some budget. And I am calling these guys parasites from pure ecological point of view. They inhabit intestines of the state system providing no value in return. Because those who can provide value work in business.
A) You provide no evidence for your major claim (that the people fighting change are doing it for selfish motivations). Neither in general, nor in the case of this specific desert.
B) Even if the _motivations_ for doing something were selfish, it could be that the actual environmental concerns themselves were valid.
Don't get me wrong, the phenomenon that you speak of (social parasites) does exist. But in this case I was hoping for a more environmental (as opposed to sociological) discussion. Just to be clear, you don't disagree that valid environmental concerns could exist, right?
there is no such a thing 'environmental concern'. There is only concern for power of some certain individuals. All, I repeat, all environmental protection agencies are political instruments of certain power groups to impose rules on some businesses. This is far wider topic to elaborate it here in detail. When was the last time humanity saved a single species, by restoring its unique habitat and mantaining the balance of energy and materials for ecosystems? For A-B, finance me, I will get you evidence or disapprove myself. But It took me 17 years to understand clearly how these tricks work, and what actually is 'raising environmental awareness'. I myself spent tens of thousands EU taxpayers money to 'save endangered species'. Believe me, after final report NO ONE ever will ask you about the outcome.
How can you say there is no environmental concern? If my environment is unlivable (for example because I can't find water, or air etc), isn't that a concern? Look at Beijing and its atrocious air polution, of Flint and its water polution. How is this not a concern?
You keep talking about agencies, or about saving species (the benefit of which can be debatable depending on the species) and aren't really addressing my point. Conditions of the environment exist that will kill you.
Do you live in Beijing? Flint? So why are you protecting spending on Canadian desert problem, instead of pushing the directing of money to solve acute Flint water quality problem? Ask yourself, be consistent. It is not environmental concern that bothers you. Would Beijing air pollution be of your concern, you'd be volunteering in China R&D putting all your inherited money to find tech solution and establish political framework to limit or stop air pollution. But you dont, wich means you do not have environmental concern. Do not lie to yourself. Your only concern is to live healthy, and support your family where you live. As for 'conditions that will kill you', you know, as a life form with energy flow based on oxydation, I am totally aware of my limited lifespan.
Negative consequences for what species? Negative to humans - better for rats and cockroaches. Honestly, from biological point of view Homo sapiens and Rattus norvegica are just different species, but it seems your views are quite biased to favour only one, is it not?
@oneloop. HN does not techically provide me reply link, so I reply here - Sure thing. I told you earlier, I am based on oxydation as a life form. Remove oxygen - I die. And speaking of desert - me and you will die there too, being left in the middle of it. So what?
Sure thing. I told you earlier, I am based on oxydation as a life form. Remove oxygen - I die. And speaking of desert - me and you will die there too, being left in the middle of it. So what?
Sure thing. How else can I get into stakeholders bio and discover their real relationship, not PR they publish. Would Canada really need to increase volume of their desert ecosystem, it could employ Rio Tinto to make one.
"The Indian Express reports that the Intelligence Bureau submitted a report to the prime minister’s office saying Greenpeace was “negatively impacting economic development” through political activism and its anti-fossil fuels agenda. The reports says that Greenpeace activities have reduced the country’s GDP by 2 to 3 percent a year."
And to be precise about the topic - it is Lael Parrott's selfish interest to finance her 'research' in Okanagon that stinks from this PR article.
Those are 2 different things, and usually both are caused by humans.
Desertification is a big problem and it has many human linked causes, large cities change rainfall patterns, deforestation causes soil migration changes the mineral content of the soil and reduces its moisture content and most importantly desertification affects humans as it creeps into arable land increasing the cost of growing crops or in some areas making it almost impossible.
The other problem is the destruction of natural deserts due to buildup of man made structures, agriculture, diversion of water sources, overall climate change (a desert doesn't have to be a "hot" place, many deserts are actually in danger due to rising temperatures which increase rainfall, melt glaciers, or soil locked ice) and many other things.
No one is inventing posteriori arguments and decides arbitrary what is good and what is bad, one environmental change can drastically affect human civilization including costing human lives in the long run, the other is unnecessary destruction or damage to existing natural habitats which do not have much (negative) impact over human civilization or lives but can and should be prevented if not reverted.
This is not different than any other preservation effort, you want bears in the wild, doesn't mean you want them living in the woods just by your house, and it also doesn't mean that you would not shoot them if they come and endanger human lives.
But much like you say "humans have an impact on what's around them, causing it to change, and eventually that could cause loss of lives", you can also say that for anything at all, can't you? Replace humans with X = bears, trees, anything...
Humans are not really subjected to natural selection anymore, we need to really screw up the planet for that to happen and by that time it would be too late.
Nature tends to balance itself out, this is slightly harder to do with humans which have the technology to geoengineer their habitats.
But even if it was so it doesn't matter, no person in their right mind would think it's ok for me to die, and for millions or billions of other people to die just because it's the natural order of things.
And for the most part you can't even hide behind it's a "natural process" because humans are geoengineers we build huge concrete cities, we build dams, we divert rivers, we strip whole mountains and dig the decomposing biomass of our "ancestors" and burn it as fuel.
Ok, so your argument is to object to my claim that things other than humans can have an impact that leads to loss of lives? I ask this because of your final comment that "bears and trees don't do that".
> No one is inventing posteriori arguments and decides arbitrary what is good and what is bad, one environmental change can drastically affect human civilization including costing human lives in the long run
You completely nailed it. First you say that no one is inventing posteriori arguments, and then you go on to say that "changes can have effects". But, but non-changes can also cost human lives in the long run. However, you CHOOSE to defend non-changes under the (in my view, irrational) belief that the changes might cause loss of lives, even though you are perfectly content with the consequences of the non-changes, which might also cause loss of lives in the long run. Example: "if we had fewer deserts, we would have more arable land, and so food would be cheaper, and so fewer lives would be lost". So we have one argument that says that changing might cause loss of lives and another one that says that not changing might cause loss of lives. Why do you always pick the non-changing? (when I say "you" in the previous phrase, I'm referring to people who call themselves environmentalists, who always make the argument that change might cause loss of lives, and never the opposite, not you personally).
Desertification can cost us anywhere between 25 to over 50% of the global arable land over the next 50-75 years.
The destruction of natural habitats can also have a negative effect on human lives, if only by denying future generation from being able to visit them.
We gain nothing from destroying them in the long run, many of them even if they are deserts can be natural barriers to desertification, and again there is no dichotomy in this case I'm really having hard time trying to uncover any argument you might be attempting to make.
> The destruction of natural habitats can also have a negative effect on human lives
Simple question: do you concede that in some cases keeping the natural habitats as they are might be worse than changing them, in terms of loss of life over the long run? If I can't get a yes or no on this, I don't think there's much point in continuing the conversation.
It depends, if it's the last liveable place on the planet and our species survival depends on it it's a no brainer.
If it's to make some grapes so Canada can make more shitty wine while causing irreversible damage to the local wildlife and causing even worse desertification and other environmental changes in the future then no.
There is no black and white, yes and no, good or bad, I don't understand why you are continuing to form these dycohomotic arguments I honestly suspect you are simply trolling at this point.
The question of "are there any circumstances under which ..." is dichotomy. The circumstances either can conceivably exist, or it cannot. And I still haven't gotten an answer from you, so I guess there's no point continuing.
It's an utterly pointless question, it's like asking can something happen that you could never predict? this is pretty quasi rhetorical question which has absolutely no value or argument behind it.
Yes by not destroying some natural habitat and causing the white tailed ferret to go extinct humans might bring their own extinction because in 3048 they are going to become the natural carriers of the Z virus bringing the oh so anticipated zombie apocalypse.
But meantime in the real world from what we know so far from both research and experience negatively affecting the environment causes negative effects on the human civilization.
Follow up to the above comment. After making this comment two users (dogma1138 and ommunist) showed up that reinforce my point.
On one side, according to dogma1138 (it appears from his comments) that any change to the environment is inherently bad. Talk about change and he will quickly point out the loss of lives. I asked several times whether there were any exceptions from this and got no compromise. On the other side, according to ommunist, any concerns that anyone can have about the environment are necessarily misconceptions stemming from corporate propagandist shills, and no compromise here either.
This topic is so polarised that it's impossible to have a productive discussion.
You have failed to understand dogma1138's point. He wasn't denying that change can be good, he was refusing to engage an oversimplification you were presenting. They're not the same thing, and your attempts to present binary questions are what derailed the productive discussion.
"There are almost as many definitions of deserts and classification systems as there are deserts in the world. Most classifications rely on some combination of the number of days of rainfall, the total amount of annual rainfall, temperature, humidity, or other factors. In 1953, Peveril Meigs divided desert regions on Earth into three categories according to the amount of precipitation they received. In this now widely accepted system, extremely arid lands have at least 12 consecutive months without rainfall, arid lands have less than 250 millimeters of annual rainfall, and semiarid lands have a mean annual precipitation of between 250 and 500 millimeters. Arid and extremely arid land are deserts, and semiarid grasslands generally are referred to as steppes"
Interesting, why this main stakeholder in this "desert issue" removed their financial reports from their website?
http://vpfinance.ubc.ca/reporting/
So the link about budget of this respected institution from http://www.ubc.ca/about/ is dead! Very suspicious.
So who this Lael Parrott is? https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/author/lael-parrott-2/
Famous in modelling ancient Maya ecological footprint. Professor of Sustainability.
Are you god damn serious about giving any credit to this kind of 'research'?
That area is just the northern tip of a larger "desert" area in Washington State. There's plenty of "desert" in that area. It's just mostly on the other side of the border.
It looks more like Silicon Valley in dry season than a real desert.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadaren't deserts defined by being arid regions?
It is "technically only semi-arid shrub-steppe." [0] which are "Shrub-steppes are distinguishable from deserts, which are too dry to support a noticeable cover of perennial grasses or other shrubs" [1]
Semi-arid regions are also colloquially called "semi-deserts". As far as the semi-arid regions I have visited go, it seems to have pretty decent vegetation compared to others.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okanagan_Desert
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrub-steppe
Nope ;-) https://www.flickr.com/photos/83908676@N02/12262674976/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%82%C4%99d%C3%B3w_Desert
It's slowly disappearing though.
The Osoyoos "desert" isn't really arid enough, either.
Deserts don't have to look like sand dunes, they are any area with a low rainfall. Sometimes the plants that are adapted are virtually a forest, but it's still a desert. For example in the Baja California desert: https://mbgecologicalrestoration.files.wordpress.com/2015/03...
Maybe the fact that it formed from a lake bed makes it not a real desert?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcross_Desert
But Spain's desert is small compared to Sahara's, that is as big as Europe. Its dunes are as big as buildings, with pictures you can't really grasp the enormity of this dessert. When Sahara grows each year it literally engulfs entire villages.
In Egypt and center of Africa there are cities that were prosperous in the past that were engulfed by dessert and disappeared.
Honestly I would not shed a tear for big parts of the big dessert going away. When solar energy and desalination becomes cheaper I expect Sahara to be one of the most fertile places on Earth.
You can probably preserve the biodiversity freezing eggs and sperm of the creatures that live there. There are not so much. I believe that with pesticides and herbicides we have destroyed way more biodiversity of our world(not the desert but our forest) and nobody has complained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union
Canada's 'rare and fragile' ecosystem is just a PR pont for Lael's Parrott attempt to get finance for another bogus 'research'.
Are we always trying to stop things from changing, and a posteriori inventing arguments for why that particular change is bad? (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all change is equally indifferent either)
One, to conserve current state of nature because it is worth something - see UNESCO Natural Reserves, etc
Two, because profits would be threatened by change. (Look at the constant work to keep the island Sylt from moving, for example)
But this has nothing to do with preservation efforts, if anything preserving dry subhumid and semi-arid natural habitats can prove to be a good barrier to prevent further desertification countries like Israel and Spain have been doing quite a bit of work in those areas.
Wanting to preserve an existing natural environment and habitat to many species is not antithetical to not wanting to lose arable land to needless man caused or at least accelerated desertification.
I don't know what false dichotomy you are trying to point out but it doesn't exist, no serious preservationist or environmental scientists saying "all for X". We want to preserve what we can do not cause further needless destruction and degradation in the biodiversity of our ecosystem.
Many environmental problems including desertification are cause by us destroying natural habitats including deserts.
If you have a desert more or less contained in its "natural" state providing a habitat to multiple species do what you can to preserve it. If you have man accelerated desertification that is threatening to turn your arable land into sand dunes within the next 5 decades you should do what you can to slow it down, stop it, and then reverse it.
The only way of fighting desertification seems to be now to actually try to revert the damage you've done to the natural barriers and local environment in the first place. Sand dunes that have had migration patterns of barely a CM per year now migrating at rates of a few meters per year are not a "natural" state.
Israel was trying to fight the creeping dunes for decades, it finally figured out that actually trying to convert them into arable land early own was one of the causes that increase desertification, once it realized that it adjusted its policies and now keeping arid and semi-arid regions and building "natural" barriers that prevent the dunes from creeping is its main environmental policy and so far it's been working as the dunes have been receding by as much as 2 meters per year.
But the general argument isn't for "pro-desertification" it's just against unnecessary environmental change, Okanagan is not a desert it's a pretty good arable valley overall wanting to preserve the natural habitat and not fill it with vineyards isn't really a hard argument to make.
You can say that we can and should screw over every piece of land to get everything we can from it, but most of us can agree that we should preserve what we have left and find ways to better exploit in less destructive means the land we've already taken over and if at all possible try to reverse some of the damage we have caused.
I'm really trying to understand why would you think just stripping and entire habitat and doing pretty much nothing with it is somehow useful just so you could grow a few grapes in Canada.
Again, you completely misunderstood my position. I'm not making a comment on deserts, or this deserts specifically.
I'm making the following comment: "it seems to me that certain people (which I've just learned includes you) seem to believe that any change to any environment is necessarily bad"
We have very little ability to gauge the true impact of environmental changes so far we've learned that for the most part any manmade or man accelerated change has in the long run an adverse effect on humans and the planet as a whole.
There is no conflict between humans being the geoengineers they are trying to stop adverse changes to their global habitat that can threaten them, while wanting to preserve natural habitats that serve as a home to countless other species.
Most people think nature is pretty nice, and well pretty pretty, screwing it over needlessly especially considering that every time we do it gets worse for us is what most of us by now came to define as "bad" because it has a negative effect on our civilization.
On the other hand if you say make an argument that we found the cure for cancer but to make it we need to harvest every blue belly turtle in the planet and cause the species to go pretty much extinct I don't think many people including me would have much of a moral objection to it since while I do feel bad for the blue belly turtle (I made this species up, it might exist but i don't know :)) the positive effect on human civilization is most likely going to outweigh any negative effects the extinction of this turtle will have on the environment.
You seem to be writing your responses as if I were claiming that "it's ok to trash the environment", or something, which is not true (see my other comments in this thread).
Anyway, I'm bored, sorry.
I say - that is bullshit. Belarus lost more than 20% of arable land and around 30% of forest land after Chernobyl accident in 1986. It suffered literal hell in social sphere after the USSR was ruined by its elites in 1991. But just 20 years later, by imposing special 17% tax on all businesses that was used to recover arable lands and forest lands from radionuclide contamination, balanced social policy and successful research in agriculture, it is doing just fine!
It is HOW you deal with loss of arable land that matters. 2008 - Syria. They stupidly dug deeper wells until exhausting their precious ground waters to nothing. Result - 2 mln former farmers filled favelas of large Syrian cities. At the same time, same area, same problem - Israel invested into desalination tech and plants and successfully kept its agriculture running.
It is not lost per se that causes famine and social shifts, it is right or wrong policy of the society that does it. We are humans - we can change things. But not 'saving deserts' or 'save beavers'. We are damn good at saving ourselves when we are together. Like Jews.
A) You provide no evidence for your major claim (that the people fighting change are doing it for selfish motivations). Neither in general, nor in the case of this specific desert.
B) Even if the _motivations_ for doing something were selfish, it could be that the actual environmental concerns themselves were valid.
Don't get me wrong, the phenomenon that you speak of (social parasites) does exist. But in this case I was hoping for a more environmental (as opposed to sociological) discussion. Just to be clear, you don't disagree that valid environmental concerns could exist, right?
You keep talking about agencies, or about saving species (the benefit of which can be debatable depending on the species) and aren't really addressing my point. Conditions of the environment exist that will kill you.
You rhetoric style makes it really difficult to have a rational conversation with you.
@oneloop. HN does not techically provide me reply link, so I reply here - Sure thing. I told you earlier, I am based on oxydation as a life form. Remove oxygen - I die. And speaking of desert - me and you will die there too, being left in the middle of it. So what?
So you do agree that some conditions of the environment will have negative consequences for humans, or don't you?
Are you really saying that you need financing to get evidence to back up your original claims?
"The Indian Express reports that the Intelligence Bureau submitted a report to the prime minister’s office saying Greenpeace was “negatively impacting economic development” through political activism and its anti-fossil fuels agenda. The reports says that Greenpeace activities have reduced the country’s GDP by 2 to 3 percent a year."
And to be precise about the topic - it is Lael Parrott's selfish interest to finance her 'research' in Okanagon that stinks from this PR article.
Desertification is a big problem and it has many human linked causes, large cities change rainfall patterns, deforestation causes soil migration changes the mineral content of the soil and reduces its moisture content and most importantly desertification affects humans as it creeps into arable land increasing the cost of growing crops or in some areas making it almost impossible.
The other problem is the destruction of natural deserts due to buildup of man made structures, agriculture, diversion of water sources, overall climate change (a desert doesn't have to be a "hot" place, many deserts are actually in danger due to rising temperatures which increase rainfall, melt glaciers, or soil locked ice) and many other things.
No one is inventing posteriori arguments and decides arbitrary what is good and what is bad, one environmental change can drastically affect human civilization including costing human lives in the long run, the other is unnecessary destruction or damage to existing natural habitats which do not have much (negative) impact over human civilization or lives but can and should be prevented if not reverted. This is not different than any other preservation effort, you want bears in the wild, doesn't mean you want them living in the woods just by your house, and it also doesn't mean that you would not shoot them if they come and endanger human lives.
Nature tends to balance itself out, this is slightly harder to do with humans which have the technology to geoengineer their habitats.
But even if it was so it doesn't matter, no person in their right mind would think it's ok for me to die, and for millions or billions of other people to die just because it's the natural order of things.
And for the most part you can't even hide behind it's a "natural process" because humans are geoengineers we build huge concrete cities, we build dams, we divert rivers, we strip whole mountains and dig the decomposing biomass of our "ancestors" and burn it as fuel.
Bears and trees don't do that.
You completely nailed it. First you say that no one is inventing posteriori arguments, and then you go on to say that "changes can have effects". But, but non-changes can also cost human lives in the long run. However, you CHOOSE to defend non-changes under the (in my view, irrational) belief that the changes might cause loss of lives, even though you are perfectly content with the consequences of the non-changes, which might also cause loss of lives in the long run. Example: "if we had fewer deserts, we would have more arable land, and so food would be cheaper, and so fewer lives would be lost". So we have one argument that says that changing might cause loss of lives and another one that says that not changing might cause loss of lives. Why do you always pick the non-changing? (when I say "you" in the previous phrase, I'm referring to people who call themselves environmentalists, who always make the argument that change might cause loss of lives, and never the opposite, not you personally).
Desertification can cost us anywhere between 25 to over 50% of the global arable land over the next 50-75 years.
The destruction of natural habitats can also have a negative effect on human lives, if only by denying future generation from being able to visit them. We gain nothing from destroying them in the long run, many of them even if they are deserts can be natural barriers to desertification, and again there is no dichotomy in this case I'm really having hard time trying to uncover any argument you might be attempting to make.
Simple question: do you concede that in some cases keeping the natural habitats as they are might be worse than changing them, in terms of loss of life over the long run? If I can't get a yes or no on this, I don't think there's much point in continuing the conversation.
No, I'm not trolling.
Yes by not destroying some natural habitat and causing the white tailed ferret to go extinct humans might bring their own extinction because in 3048 they are going to become the natural carriers of the Z virus bringing the oh so anticipated zombie apocalypse.
But meantime in the real world from what we know so far from both research and experience negatively affecting the environment causes negative effects on the human civilization.
On one side, according to dogma1138 (it appears from his comments) that any change to the environment is inherently bad. Talk about change and he will quickly point out the loss of lives. I asked several times whether there were any exceptions from this and got no compromise. On the other side, according to ommunist, any concerns that anyone can have about the environment are necessarily misconceptions stemming from corporate propagandist shills, and no compromise here either.
This topic is so polarised that it's impossible to have a productive discussion.
I was under the impression it holds the largest piece of "soft desert" in Canada, but maybe that's wrong.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/deserts/what/
As I understand it Carberry gets 300-500 mm of rain per year.
It looks more like Silicon Valley in dry season than a real desert.
What does that look like? Antarctica is the largest desert in the world, does it look like "a real desert"?