About the two rhinos, do we have the technology to keep genetic material from animals that are endangered so we can reintroduce them later? I realize the population would be too much of a monoculture, but maybe it's better than nothing.
I am a lay person so please don't just trust what I'm saying, but don't think you need to be an expert in the field to deduce why it won't happen.
First of all, there's no money in it. So the technical reasons, whatever they are, don't really matter.
Second, I don't think it's that simple to just apply CRISPR to this problem, like CRISPR is some kind of magic bullet. This would be asking way more of CRISPR than previous experiments by orders of magnitude. It would be like asking the Wright brothers when they're going to scale their flying technology to get to Mars.
You are in the right track. To actually make CRISPR/CAS-9 work for "reduce inbreeding" issues, we would need to understand how the whole animal genome operates and all possible connections between genes and define what are the recessive genes that might cause some anomaly in the selection coefficient and decrease it.
Without this map, how would we are going to be able to use a technique that alters genes and efficiently change nucleotides to avoid recessive traits?
I was arguing with someone on the internet, and biodiversity became the arguing point. They ended up flat-out asking me why anyone should care about biodiversity.
It's such an ingrained assumption inside my head that everyone should understand the value of biodiversity that I couldn't even answer.
I grew up watching David Attenborough, David Suzuki, and Carl Sagan explaining the natural world.
I can't imagine how much poorer my life would be, if I hadn't grown up with that.
And I can't begin to imagine how to explain my world-view to someone who clearly didn't grow up with them... Other than to sit them down with all those fantastic series, and hope that they take hold in them.
I mean, like, start by watching "Queen of the Trees," and see how inter-connected all of that life is:
Biodiversity is important because biology has been doing chemistry, physics, medicine, and neuroscience far longer than humans have. Many modern technologies exist only through studying nature. There's no need to love the splendor of nature to know that destroying a discovery before we know it exists is shooting ourselves in the foot.
I don't think we understand redundancy as well as we say we do. We have backups and alternatives within cultural and civil systems and we often try to cut them back.
Different organisms have come up with different solutions to the same problem, and because of that they can break in different situations. The 'service' they provide will be affected differently by an environmental shortage or excess. If twenty microbes are responsible for recycling organic matter and dust or drought or some chemical affects 10 of them, the others will expand to pick up some of the slack.
Indeed. Often the drive for efficiency is rooted in the desire to extract economic value that seems to be going unclaimed or wasted (in the present) without regard for structural utility (over time).
Oh I'm talking about existing populations. If you're talking about for instance, "what will eat all of this plastic?" then I agree with you. There is nothing, never has been, and we don't know when there will be something we can happily coexist with.
Aspirin occurs naturally in Willow bark; morphine and codeine from opium poppies; ephedrine and amphetamine is derived from Ephedra sinica (Ma Huang); quinine and it's derivatives from Cinchona calisaya; digoxin from foxglove (Digitalis lanata).
And botox from the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and related species has medical uses primarily for muscle spasticity conditions and migraines.
Salicin occurs naturally in willow, not aspirin. It's a prodrug of salicylic acid, which has some anti-inflammatory effects.
Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. It's also a prodrug of salicylic acid, but it has additional anti-inflammatory and anti-thrombotic effects, because unlike salicylic acid itself, it can irreversibly inactivate COX enzymes (enzymes that synthesize compounds needed for inflammation and blood clotting) by acetylating them. It's also less irritating to the digestive system.
Paper would be my candidate. Being able to store huge amounts of information in thousands of books in a room transformed human societies much more than antibiotics did.
How the humans invented something so incredibly useful? Most probably after watching "useless" social wasps to mash bark to make its nests.
Biodiversity makes life worth living. I want to be able to eat more than potatoes as the only vegetable, or see forests with all the different beautiful plants and trees instead of just desert.
So then this person would respond, "That's great. You and people like you should buy the land, and keep the diversity going. Why is that any of my concern?"
Apart from that person being an asshole this would actually be the right thing to do. Buy the land and give it to the nature. Deep Ecology foundation used to do just that.
Does not seem like this person is arguing in good faith. Do they never go to aquariums, zoos, or a park? Do they never buy flowers for someone? Do they literally have soylent for every single meal? Do they live in a concrete box on a concrete block with all plastic furniture and clothes? There is a reason why far more people want to live in beautiful diverse places and not in the middle of the desert.
I love the idea of biodiversity, I love seeing the huge variety in nature. But for 99.9% of people would make zero difference their lives. except maybe crop extinction
I understand why I'm being downvoted. The point I'm arguing is " They ended up flat-out asking me why anyone should care about biodiversity." If you down vote me please write an note saying how biodiversity makes a difference to the life of the average person.
Exactly, the natural world, nature is disturbing and messy and it is hard to like it. I want conservation to the degree I want to breathe and eat so I do what I can to be green and invest in green tech.
I don't think my life would change materially if I was on a hypothetical space station with very good life support. I suspect the difference is an emotional connection?
We are currently on the only viable space station that we have or know of, Earth.
Until we have a better answer, we should work damn hard to keep this one running. And we don't know enough about how it works, so we should try preserve the current systems as well as we can.
A stiff dose of LSD on a beautiful day away from a big city would probably do.
No, seriously -
We are destroying not just other species' natural habitats; those natural habitats are our own, that's where we evolved. In billions of years of natural history, we and our ancestors have led a "modern" way of life for a few thousand at most.
We're so adaptable that we can thrive in highly technologically altered environments as well; but I'm quite sure that anyone can experience the feeling of recognizing that those aren't truly home for us.
Every time I've tripped on LSD, I end up admiring the trees and nature. Shortly thereafter I am saddened by the society we live in which is so harmful to the very thing I admire.
Obviously you're trying to be funny. But nonconsensual drugging, especially with something as powerful and life altering as LSD can be, is as awful (to me and I assume other's familiar with it) as any other nonconsensual psychic change to someone's life. If you didn't know.
I have observed that people who lack empathy have completely different world view than mine. Ever seen the most beautiful masterpiece on YouTube being disliked by some people? I think people disliking where majority likes are the ones lacking empathy. In your case, a person saying why biodiversity should matter probably lacks empathy as well which could also be the reason they never watched those documentaries in first place because why care?
The point is people see world differently because of some fundamental differences in genetics & childhood nurturing.
Your view on empathy seems all-or-nothing. I have empathy for nature and wildlife which is why I have little empathy for humans, cows, cats, etc.
E.g. Cats kill billions of small birds and mice a year (think what that does to owl populations). It’s shouldn’t be legal to let house cats roam freely outside.
Ok. If there was an abundance of food for the owls then we'd have many, many more owls, and they would kill billions of birds instead. We'd just be sacrificing cats for owls. Why is that better?
> Ever seen the most beautiful masterpiece on YouTube being disliked by some people? I think people disliking where majority likes are the ones lacking empathy.
I do not follow. Are you saying that idiocentric tastes negatively correlate with empathy?
Some time ago I worked for a small company and one of the owners was a pretty nice guy, often talked of his mountain home and being near nature versus in the city. Then one day he mentioned that he had to change the oil in his sons ATV and always did that at the downhill slope of his properties edge. He would park the ATV over a small stream and empty the oil directly into the water.
Of course the staff were all furious at hearing this, which he seemed to enjoy. I asked the other owner if he was serious and he said he 100% was serious. So I approached the owner dumping the oil why he did this, why he didn't just empty the oil into a container, etc. Long/short he said it didn't effect him and couldn't care what any of us hippies though of the practice.
I would say that there is a fundamental difference in the way people are; they either view things in the long-term and strive to ensure the best for all of us. The other side of the coin are people that just want what's best for themselves and maybe their family. They don't care or want to believe such actions have long term effects on them directly.
As one of those who do care, I think the charitable and more likely interpretation is that this behavior is a response to a lot of the self-righteousness that environmentalists have exhibited. I think if our messaging were more humble (i.e., do we really care about the environment, or is it just a moral issue that we can use to prop ourselves up and cut others down) we would encounter less of this kind of blow back. Moreover, this is all worsened by an increasingly divisive media and social media, so we need to be more careful than ever about our messaging and demeanor. This is just my humble opinion; I'm sure many will disagree.
Yeah I mention the nice guy part because it wasn't like he was a raving asshole day-in-day out. In fact he really was (outwardly anyway) a 'nice guy' pretty much always and didn't view his behavior as wrong at all (it was his 'property', etc).
Even guys that are seemingly nice have very odd beliefs. It really opened my eyes as to what to talk about at work, even if the topic didn't seem 'fringe' to me. Older dudes out west/here in Colorado in particular grew up with a sort of cavalier notion of what freedom and America means to them, and telling them what they can or cannot do on their own property is the heart of the matter.
Yea, but their property doesn't exist in a vacuum. They have neighbours and there's always downstream effects.
I'd say part of this attitude is an effect of rights becoming disconnected from responsibilities. Like, sure, one may "own" the land, but it better be well take care of, be a good steward. Not because there's immediate bad effects, but because those effects diffuse into the real non-human world.
I hadn’t thought about it like this before, but that’s like a twisted version of Kahneman & Tversky’s “losses loom larger than gains.” I wonder if the psychological weighting mechanism is the same.
If my reading of that paper is fair, it suggests a third of people deliberately make choices that cause other people to suffer more than they do even if it increases their own suffering by a lesser amount. And that is terrifying.
I think this explains the state of the world, and given the state of the world: why is this surprising to us.
I guess people tend to believe that everyone else is like them, including those of us that aren't sadistic. And if a full 33 percent are sadistic, is it something that even should or can be corrected?
Now that's terrifying.
However, it is much better to simply look at a flower and meditate on how amazing it is that it exists at all than ruminate on the facts of how cruel the world is.
This educational game has some useful insights. While the distribution of people may not be something that can be corrected or easily altered (one disturbing insight of that Science paper is that personality types seem to be firmly established even in early youth), sadistic policies can be made more costly and thus less effective, reducing the incentive to maintain and reproduce them.
This isn't short term vs long term, it's city vs rural. If his mountain home is sufficiently low population density then everyone in the area could behave this way without causing meaningful harm. These ideas you have about the environment and the right way to behave are a cultural necessity because of the population density within cities.
"California Penal Code 374.3 makes illegal dumping on public and private property punishable by a fine up to $10,000. Also, pursuant to Section 117555 of the California health and Safety Code, a person who dumps illegally is punishable by up to six months on jail."
Colorado, and yeah we all talked privately about reporting him. One of the more upset staff members filed a complaint, I don't know if anything came of it. We never heard anything if it did. This is about 15 or so years back now.
"Is curious, but to park in the limit of your property and watch the trouts going upstream is much more satisfactory since I know that you empty the oil directly in the water"
This is the only type of correct answers for those cases
Do you realize that you just wrote a post about your virtuous outrage viz. your life experiences, without actually explaining why biodiversity is important?
I think you missed that I said, "And I can't begin to imagine how to explain my world-view to someone who clearly didn't grow up with [those shows]... Other than to sit them down with all those fantastic series, and hope that they take hold in them."
I did the introspection you ask for, and "watch those shows" is the best answer I can come up with.
That's not true. GP wrote a post about their inability to clearly explain the value of concept. there were no expressions of anger or outrage. Please don't make untruthful characterizations, it inhibits productive discussion.
There is a kinda cheesy quote from Dhalgren: 'You have confused the true and the real'.
It is purposefully esoteric but I think the dichotomy between the two can account for many differing views, and why humans need to see the 'real' vs the truth they think they have gleaned from behind a screen or book.
I too have had trouble answering that question for the same reason, regardless of whether its biodiversity or ethnic diversity or diversity of thought.
I've spent a lot of time trying to formulate my reasoning and unfortunately, the easiest explanation is the most clinical and least likely to inspire: diversity is necessary (but not sufficient) for long term survival of any nontrivial system - be it a species, civilization, tribe, or business. Dynamic environments driven by random events and emergent phenomenon like weather/climate, food chains, and sentient beings are going to be chaotic and unstable in the short term. Diversity allows better suited individuals to exploit the current environment while preserving a diverse minority contingent that is far more likely to be able to adapt to the next change in the environment without a catastrophic collapse of the system. Without that minority group, the medium to long term probability of survival for the whole is zero and without the majority, the minority group wouldn't survive long enough to make it the next environmental shift.
It's as close as you can get to an abstract natural law of complex systems. It applies to a company's talent pools and its ability to survive pivots or changing market conditions, an ideology's ability to survive the realities of geopolitics, a religion's ability to survive schisms and protests, and much more.
One thing to point out is that global pandemics don't just afflict human populations. Biodiversity within the agricultural crops we grow helps to protect them from being totally wiped out. The Irish potato famine was the result of a lack of biodiversity and an over reliance on a monocrop.
A current example would be the ubiquitous banana. The cavendish banana (the most common variety you'd encounter in your produce isle) is under attack globally and is at risk of being wiped out. And this isn't the first time that's happened. The banana your grandparents grew up with, the Gros Michel, while not extinct is no longer commercially viable.
I don't know anything about the subject, and I can't speak to the authority of this cite, but it contradicts your statements, and so I'd be curious about your response:
I think the argument you cited is a bit of a strange one.
They are arguing that Ireland was not a net exporter of food because a large portion of Irish crop exports were oats, and oats are not food.
The supporting arguments are worse. For instance, they state that oats are usually for horses' consumption. Further, they state that the average farmer would not know how to prepare the oats for human consumption.
All this seems obviously false[1].
As a general point, the obvious point of comparison with Ireland would be the various states of 1840's germany, also heavily reliant on potatoes for sustenance. They also got the potato blight, but there was no great famine.
[1] they also give some figures, which I won't comment on.
Ireland was certainly producing plenty of other crops than potatoes but when I said they were lacking biodiversity I was specifically referencing the potato monoculture. The poor were overwhelmingly reliant on the potato and it was wiped out by a blight that could have been largely avoided with a broader diversity of potatoes being grown. Similarly there are plenty of banana varieties around the world, but the only one sold in grocery stores near me is being wiped out by blight. Imagine if something similar happened to corn or wheat. An aggressive blight on a main cultivar would be pretty devastating, even if there are still lots of heirloom varieties being grown in small quantities around the world.
Was there a potato monoculture? I just ask because, I thought crop monoculture was a relatively modern thing, and because a new disease (like p. blight) are usually pretty broad spectrum, and very capable of skipping between species.
Bananas are kind of a weird case for multicropping, because they are all sterile clones. So this makes them horribly susceptible to every disease under the sun.
The ship was named after this guy instead of being named Boaty McBoatface which was voted by public, and he happily accepted it. This should tell you about his ethics.
Making comments where the actual view of the author is made up by the reader is most of the time not a good idea. Do you mean that he is against democracy? That he is not humble and like things named after him?
I feel like you meant well with the comment, but it's hard to understand what's positive here, except that the people naming the boat thought of Attenborough.
Yes, and I did not say he named the ship after himself. Any person with small bit of self respect would have rejected the name, and he had opportunities to do so, but he happily choosed the alternative
He thinks ships shouldn't be given moronic names just because 4chan/reddit spam an online poll with their shitty memes? If that's what he believes, I agree with him.
Restoration of habitat and setting aside half of earth for the rest of the species would be an easier solution than cloning or Crispr
Human beings procreating responsibly is a major factor in continuing our species to perpetuity. It should not be for religious, economic, political or social reasons.
Species extinction occurs because human beings are outbreeding every other species on earth exploiting all the planet’s resources and keeping it for themselves.
This is detrimental to our own survival as we are super apex predators. When an apex predator gets hungry, nothing else can survive. And we are always hungry and we keep adding hungry mouths.
If we pick quality over quantity, we will have a healthy stock and sufficient earth resources when the eventual depopulation event occurs. Depopulation is a mathematical certainty.
We can either control population with responsible procreation and resource conservation or we can burn all existing and non renewable resources and perish in a spectacularly tragic and violent way.
The only way to prevent species extinction is to conserve habitat for the species. Since everything is below us, we have to step aside and make space. Without habitat, we will perish as a species.
Being the apex predator, it’s like sitting on the top most branch of a tree and sawing off all the branches. Because apex predators consume everything. Increase in population is like inviting everyone to come and sit on top of the tree too.
Hunters and fishermen know this. That’s why most conservation groups seek hunters and fishermen and NRA support. They donate because they realize the importance of preservation of habitat.
How do we go about this? By removing population pressure from economic activities like work and employment and GDP. This can be easily achieved by automation. Growing high calories, nutritionally dense food to feed the population and investing in local food security by utilizing modern tech like hydroponics and vertical farming on marginal land. Figuring out the environmental cost of replacement rate of human births and helping people gain resources to justify having children rather be a continual drain by incentivizing large families.
When resources disappear, civil unrest and war begins. We have always seen this. Famine and drought have always preceded every major war. From tribes to the latest Syrian incursion. Even way back, primitive tribes will go to war with the the neighbours when there is a famine or drought or food runs low. The men who die remove themselves from the food chain. Women and children are spared and were always spoils of war. The resources are combined for greater survivability of species..not a tribe.
The latest upheavals we see and the protests and revolutions in recent memory have always been due to less resources to distribute amongst a larger population. Densely populated regions revolt when resources are stretched thin. We incarcerated criminals when they show a tendency to appropriate community resources without contributing to the common pot thereby reducing their ability to be multiplying and replicating vectors of DNA. We did not allow the sick and the weak to continue sharing the commons.
If we look at the bigger picture unemotionally, what we pride ourselves with..the genteel fair kind and sociological progress Is what has allowed this resource restriction.
We can’t let go of that progress. The only way out is automation. And removing economic incentives for procreation. And resource allocation and distribution equally by removing speculation over resources that contribute to human survival.
I'm really trying to find somewhere to agree with you...but it sounds like they are taking issue with your "blade runner 2049" strategy, like I'm fairly decent at robotics, I got to the point where I make them out of organic molecules now...but we ain't there chief.
I don't care how many hours you've logged on "ML SAAS" it's not where you think it is
My gardener has 5 children and three grandchildren at age 48. This is irresponsible procreation. An average 2.1 replacement rate in a family unit that doesn’t rely on welfare still relies on tax subsidies, incentives and free public schools.
Both are unsustainable. When there is no cost and only rewards for irresponsible procreation that is resource hogging from the commons, there will be a quick deterioration of available resources for all.
When there is want and scarcity and more demand in the apex predator population, they start stripping the habitat and resources of the species below them in the food chain.
That will eventually threaten the apex predators survival. This is more ‘killing the golden goose’ of Aesop tales than ‘blade runner 2049’ adoption of Philip k dick’s sci fi story.
If I were to explain to a child about apex predators, I would bring up sharks..if sharks eat all the little fish in the sea, when they are out of little fish in the sea, they will die because they won’t have anything more to eat to survive.
I will apologize for the snark, It's monday and I've been in the lab and away from my coffee. I agree with you on principle, humans are apex predators, we are remarkable efficient at fast procreation and finding ingenious ways to outpace every animal/shrub/bush we don't directly exploit.
That being said, I find this a difficult conversation to have online, because "responsible restriction of childbirth" isn't something anyone short of dangerously dictorial, can fathom to hope to achieve. It's a non starter, therefore we have to approach the problem from a end that's not so...thorny..
It's easy to say, "let's just thanos this and get it done" reset at another few thousand years..but the hard question is who gets snapped?
I never said ‘responsible restriction of childbirth’. I said ‘incentivise responsible procreation’.
I don’t know if you twisted my words on purpose or you really don’t see the difference?
Why is it genocide to offer incentives for a greater quality of life for their thoughtful and mindful roadmap to nurture their progeny and to protect the commons from over exploitation. We should be rewarding responsible procreation and parenting.
Human beings like ‘to do the right thing’. We are rationalizing animals rather than rational animals.
Supporting and incentivizing irresponsible procreation economically and empathetically simply gives people reasons to mindlessly offer themselves rationalizations to continue making wrong and harmful personal decisions.
Giving people incentives and support to provide the greatest chances of their gene pool to thrive along with the rest of the human species is a rational solution to the depopulation event that is a mathematical surety to occur within a century.
Having said that, maybe it’s also time to have discussions about ‘thorny’ subjects. The lack of open discourse is why even reasonable suggestions are downvoted here. Because there is nothing to compare common sense with..
1. Remove food insecurity. The job of the govt is to provide basic calories to ALL. In the form of credits. (Like in Switzerland)
2. The subsidized calories will come only from farms that have to follow ecological practices.
3. Housing: everyone gets to live in state housing for diff income levels. On 99 year lease at market rate. This gives generational housing security. And protects housing from speculative shocks.(like in Singapore)
4. Universal health care.
What is provided is a basic quality of life to everyone. Just as everyone deserves a basic quality of life guaranteed hybyeh govt, everyone has to display responsibility. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Downgrades to quality of life if too much is siphoned off from the commons is a reasonable and fair bargain.
This isn't reflective of reality - overpopulation isn't a current issue in the industrialized world. The US for example has been below replacement rate in total fertility rate for a while (and only increasing in population thanks to immigration).
Of course, consumption per capita is still a concern, and global population is still a concern, but it's hard to fault your gardener for having 5 children if you live in an industrialized country with below replacement rate fertility.
> An average 2.1 replacement rate in a family unit that doesn’t rely on welfare still relies on tax subsidies, incentives and free public schools.
This is a totally different kind of commons. Personally I'm much less concerned about funding public schools than I am about overfishing, habitat destruction, etc.
You are missing the trees for the forest. Or is it the other way around?
1. Industrialized countries consume more than the rest of the world.
2. Consumption is many times higher in countries with lower replacement rates.
3. Richer countries typically import and overfishing and destroy habitat of over populated high density developing nations with already depleted resources.
4. China is a special case. China exports a lot of our conspicuous consumption. China in turn imports a lot from developing as well as developed world with its bolstered purchasing power. It takes a lot of maintain 1.4 billion people.
5. One other (bad) solution is to make every nation self sustainable and close borders. And allow them to determine their own replacement rate via births and immigration.
6. Overfishing happens in Asia to feed Americans. Habitat is destroyed in Latin America to feed the China and the rest of the world.
7. Habitat is the most important thing when it comes to resource allocation and resource conservation and exploitation. I like E.O.Wilson’s Half Earth policy because it’s an elegant and fair solution.
7. You should be concerned about funding public schools because the subsidized cheap frozen fish fingers is what’s causing overfishing elsewhere in the world. More children at a higher consumption strata = more habitat destruction.
America IS the 1% of the world. A poor child in America has more resources and nutritional calories and dollar spent/per head than 80% of the world’s children.
8. While there are a lot of begging bowls out in America(and other rich countries), the begging bowls in the rest of the world that sells their resources to America have deeper begging bowls that often don’t get filled.
8. One way to NOT incentivise over population and irresponsible procreation at a macro level is for America and other rich countries to curtail consumption and stop economic exchange of goods that are hostile to habitat preservation. (Example: palm oil)
What you're describing is consumption per capita. We should be concerned with consumption per capita regardless of whether we have a growing or a shrinking population. It's possible to have a net increase in consumption while population is decreasing, for example.
> You should be concerned about funding public schools because the subsidized cheap frozen fish fingers is what’s causing overfishing elsewhere in the world. More children at a higher consumption strata = more habitat destruction
Funding public schools is orthogonal to whether that school churns out cheap frozen fish fingers. You could add funding on the stipulation that the funding needs to be used on sustainably grown local produce, for example.
> One way to NOT incentivise over population and irresponsible procreation at a macro level is for America and other rich countries to curtail consumption and stop economic exchange of goods that are hostile to habitat preservation. (Example: palm oil)
I'm sorry, you're suggesting that if rich countries stop trading environmentally hostile goods this will disincentivize reproduction locally? How do you reason this? Am I going to have less children because I eat local organic produce?
Consumption per capital increase with quality of life. For global increase in a good quality of life implies more consumption.
A good example is our smart phones. I am old enough to remember when there were only land lines. And not everyone had one. Now everyone from India to Africa to USA and even our homeless in CA have a smart phone. Smart phones that are indispensable now use rare metals that are mined. Cell towers have to be placed to ensure connectivity. People have to afford the bills. Every like, upvote, reply, games, online order, tweet is a tiny bit of a carbon foot print.
And consumption grows exponentially. More people means more jobs and more services. Larger carbon footprint. More consumption. More to support that population. We don’t live on 500 sq.ft, air and sunlight alone. It takes a lot to sustain humans.
Take dairy for example. Traditionally China never had dairy in their cuisine. But with a better quality of life, they need cows and fodder for cows. They can’t grow it because the aquifers are poisoned or have run dry. So the cows come from NZ and the alfafa from California sent to China during a Californian drought when we didn’t have water for our citizens but enough to fill the empty shipping containers that carried iPhones and would have gone back empty otherwise.
As quality of life increased in India, everyone drives a car when they used to have public transport. An automobile is a marker of a better quality of life. Human beings like social hierarchies and the way to exhibit this is by possessions.
As the world becomes a better place, we consume more and that has a price too: environment and habitat and eco systems.
Funding of public schools subsidizes education for all which is a noble endeavor, but it takes responsibility away from parents. When unionized public schools = unfunded pension liabilities, the education suffers. More public schools, more subsidized education = more teachers = more unfunded pension liabilities. More work to compensate for the needed taxes = more workers = more employment = more 40 hour work weeks = more commutes = more fossil fuels = more consumption. It’s a Ponzi scheme.
Cutting tax burden to only provide for free public schools will result in more responsible and mindful family planning.
Your final point: if rich countries started looking at sustainability goals, they will consume less. This would make importing more expensive. Only surplus has to be exported.
Let me explain: Commons = environment, air quality, water quality, cultivable land, natural resources. These should not be owned and traded for private profit. I am not against private profit but we can’t have private enterprise exploiting the commons for profit. That’s how we end to with nestle selling bottled water when communities have to pay more to water utilities for their potable water during a drought.
Let me clarify your understanding of my words: I am saying that when rich countries stop trading environmentally hostile goods, this will lead to less exploitation of land and sea. And habitat. And even when it does, it will be for the local population to sustain them.
If there is no market or buyers for habitat destroying palm oil or tiger bones or rhino horns, the stream of income dries up and people can realistically gauge whether their economies and environment can handle more population or less population.
I also don’t know how you went from all this to ‘eating local organic produce’ to ‘less children’. Organic has nothing to do with anything. Resources from the commons should be exploited locally only. Bounded resource exploitation reduces the false sense of prosperity.
Once people taste a better quality of life, they will never go back. Poorer countries have a better quality of life and never at par with what we have in western countries. Give them a taste of a superior quality of life and no one is going to go back to a lower quality of life.
Countries that are less populous are richer than higher density countries. Why? Because when you don...
>feed the population and investing in local food security by utilizing modern tech like hydroponics and vertical farming on marginal land.
I think your hearts in the right place but this is misguided. Marginal land should not be farmed, via any method. Re-wilding marginal lands is one of the best ways to restore ecological health and diversity on a wide scale.
Hydroponics are also not a silver bullet, the tech has conformed to the hype curve just as predictably as anything else. You can produce leafy greens, and even some meat via aquaponics, but not significant calories or staples.
>The only way out is automation.
I know you had a few ‘and’ after this but nevertheless, hard disagree. A major contributing factor to mankind’s abuse of the natural world is abstraction from it. We will not solve that by going deeper into the darkness where kids grow up believing the food that sustains then springs into existence via inexplicable magic. We need to become closer to nature and the origins of our food, not further away from it via automation, urbanisation and increasing specialisation. All of these further the ignorance, misunderstanding, and abuse of the natural world on which we depend.
Is it most efficient to have more people return to rural environments and become involved in food production? No. But seeking greatest efficiency is one of the biggest errors we are committing here - nature is not efficient, it is broadly stable and able to support great diversity of life, at the cost of efficiency. We should be seeking to emulate nature in these regards, instead of attempting to extract and refine the parts of it we believe we need to maintain our particular version of life.
I think I understand what you are saying. My reasoning was that right now we are using good farmland for frou frou crops like lettuce that have a quick turn around(45-60 days)..they use a lot of fossil fuels, have to transported long distances and involves labour exploitation for very low calorie/nutrition. And then strawberries that require the soil to be fumigated with really nasty stuff like methyl bromate fungicide. These are kind of crops are better grown in urban spaces indoors and vertically where there is soil already contaminated and is essentially warehoused.
Using solar, better led lights and maybe hacks like placing them near water treatment plants etc can be a good optimization of energy and resources that are other wise underutilized. Further aquaponics that is also fish farming is even more environmentally friendly as it’s a closed loop system with minimal inputs.
By marginal lands, I mean abandoned factories and soil contaminated with heavy metals that is difficult to remediate without a lot of expenses. Growing highly perishable produce like lettuce and strawberries indoors in these spaces is a win-win. My 2c.
I dream of little nuclear ‘suitcases’ that can power cities for weeks or months. Factories that can be run with solar as well as nuclear energy. Hopefully we will find a way to dispose and dismantle nuclear installations safely in the future.
Your other point: if we are to emulate nature and get back closer to natural growth and evolution of civilization as we know it..we could model it around the Nile valley or the Indus Valley. I think having clusters of small self sustaining villages with intra trade and further away trading for other wgat we can’t produce is better. If we can create village clusters networked to other clusters connected together to bigger and bigger fractal systems of both tech and environment and wilderness, we can have it all.
In the future, a lot of trade would be services. For small scale sustainability, we would need automation. This frees up labour force to do other things. Even a simple adjustment like a 4 day work week or 20 hour workweek or working remote would have a massive impact on how we consume and our collective footprints.
The wildfire smoke has brought that future that we'd feared and daydreamed (daymared?) about; where we can actually see the posibility and impetus for living in self-contained bubbles of breathable atmosphere and livable temperatures.
Now is the time that we are finally transitioning to electric vehicles and hopefully toward sustainable policies and economies, but has the collective level of consciousness risen to empower us to meet these challenges?
Electric vehicles are just one piece of the solution. We stop the output of new CO2 emissions for private and commercial transportation. Then we gotta do agriculture. Then we gotta decentralize the power grid. Then we gotta further decentralize agriculture again. Then we gotta better manage tens of millions of acres of hardly traversable terrain that's been fuel loading for a century. The list goes on and on. We've lost decades of progress by side-tracking ourselves with complete bs narratives being pumped out of monied interest groups that prefer things stay they way they are. I hate to be a pessimist but we might be right and truly fucked at this point.
I've been watching Sir David Attenborough since I was a kid, and I am now middle aged.
And I've known about species extinction since I was a little kid. They've happened and keep happening. Little to nothing seems to have done to prevent them during my lifetime.
I feel powerless and have no idea what to do about it.
I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling.
And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.
> I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling.
I think if we all do more to make a little difference, we'll make a big difference as a group.
We moved for a better quality of life, and part of that was reducing our commute. We were able to cut the commute back from 3hrs a day to about 30min a day per adult, if that. There's a calculator here that can help you figure out the carbon savings: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/household-carbon-footprint-...
When our water heater failed, I did some research and realized the state where we were living at the time would pay for a replacement tankless combined water heater and furnace. That saved us about $4k from the cost of the system, plus it is super efficient so our heating and cooking costs dropped, plus we had endless hot water for showers.
I realized one day it's like working on legacy software: if you look at it as a whole, it looks like a completely intractable problem. But if you start making incremental changes, over time you can change and have an impact.
The hard truth is that all the changes you made have little impact. The worst case scenario for species and the environment is pretty much on track to play out. But we don't like the truth do we? I see myself getting voted down for this.
What you describe is a good way of coping with individual anxiety but doesn't really get us closer to tackling the bigger problem. If this approach was so great, why isn't it working already? I think you're assuming that everyone else is embracing optimality and that everyone else sees the mutual benefit in that. In reality, many people don't care and quite a few find negative outcomes sufficiently profitable that they're willing or even eager to sacrifice your future wellbeing for their benefit.
Hey, you can be proud for having spent time thinking about it to start with. And for having tried! Feeling responsible for it yourself alone is not necessary, it's bigger than that.
Here's a thought or two by Attenborough on overpopulation, one of the drivers of these problems [0]
The problem will solve itself however (with certainty), and I cannot explain it better than George Carlin [1]. Enjoy!
>And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.
I suspect that if it was a lot more deadly, it would have triggered a stronger government response (at least in the U.S.) and ultimately killed fewer people.
Then again, I've repeatedly underestimated just how incompetent this administration could be.
To the extent that the US administration (slightly worse than France) is incompetent, the British, Belgian, Italian, Spanish, Peruvian, Swedish and Chilean administrations are all worse and some significantly so if you look at deaths per 100,000. Brazil has lower per capita deaths than the US.
I hear you. I have been watching Sir.David Attenborough for 2/3rds of my life. While I have a lot of respect for his work and his presence, hearing his voice causes PTSD.
Not long ago, I told someone that every time I hear his voice, either some creature is going to die or something is going to go hungry. There is no happy ending to this earth saga. I feel helpless most of the time and don’t know how to leave this world a better place.
I don’t know how pay my debt back to this planet. So far my plan is to arrange for my estate to consolidate all my assets to buy land and return it to nature. Not Ag..not gardens. Not habitat. Just return it to nature and let nature do what it wants.
The conservationists shared a portion of the revenue from the park with the adjacent villages. This helped create a symbiotic relationship between the gorillas and villages.
Not saying that this solution will work with poachers but there is probably a combination of approaches needed to preserve the biodiversity. One national park in India has given legal protection to park rangers if they were to kill to poachers and that has had a dramatic impact on the population of single horned rhinos. In 2015 park rangers shot dead more poachers than poachers killing rhinos for Chinese medicine.
We'll struggle to address this until we get the global population under control, particularly in the 3rd world where regard for the Environment is much lower than in the West.
At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
>as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
Those people won't cease to exist. They'll just stay in poorer nations. In fact, wouldn't accepting them into a wealthy nation reduce the average number of children they have? And if these nations can drastically reduce the impact of their citizens, all the more reason to start recruiting migrants.
The reduced number of potential children is offset by the significantly higher net increase in emissions from moving from a poor country to a rich country, and participating in a more CO2-intensive economy.
Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens.
With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.
It totally makes sense for someone to try to capture the public attention about the impacts of climate change and habitat destruction on species most of don't get to see on the other side of the planet. Those impacts are important, and worth discussing.
But would you expect it would convince anyone to change their lifestyle or behavior, given the other evidence that people seem to just accept as the new normal? The west coast of the US is burning. And when California isn't burning, Australia is. Chunks of Florida already regularly experience "nuisance flooding" related to sea level rise, and it's frankly confusing to me that people are still building stuff in Miami. Rising temperatures have meant that the ranges of some infectious diseases have expanded in rich countries (e.g. Lyme disease in parts of Canada, Zika and Dengue in parts of the US). But most Americans, Canadians, Australians and others haven't substantially reorganized their lives to stop emissions.
If direct impacts on the lives of people living in rich and powerful countries doesn't cause people in those places to change their behavior, why would you expect them to be moved or motivated by threats to pangolins or rhinos?
I live near Seattle and I’m astounded to see people going about their normal lives while the air they are breathing is literally toxic. It makes me wonder how much people actually know or care about the problem as they are willing to sacrifice their lungs in order to ignore it.
This also further solidifies my belief that asking people to change their lifestyles in ineffective in tackling the climate disaster. Given the choice people will carry out their normal businesses (even as the world is burning around them).
What we really need is actual policy that combats this. We need the state to build the infrastructure and enact restrictions on polluting behavior so people aren’t given the choice of carrying out our polluting destructive business.
What's the alternative? Should everyone on the west coast have dropped what they were doing and fled over the mountains? Are we supposed to be helping to put out the fires? Or are you just astounded that we haven't all retreated to the personal hyperbaric chambers we've all pre-constructed in our respective bomb shelters?
> People with heart or lung disease, older adults, children and teens: Avoid physical activities outdoors.
>
> Everyone else: Avoid strenuous outdoor activities, keep outdoor activities short, and consider moving physical activities indoors or rescheduling.
I’ve been staying indoors, and so have many people. You definitely should not go fishing, golfing, play football in the park, etc. like I’ve been seeing people doing
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadSD zoo just made a horse!
https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewal...
First of all, there's no money in it. So the technical reasons, whatever they are, don't really matter.
Second, I don't think it's that simple to just apply CRISPR to this problem, like CRISPR is some kind of magic bullet. This would be asking way more of CRISPR than previous experiments by orders of magnitude. It would be like asking the Wright brothers when they're going to scale their flying technology to get to Mars.
Without this map, how would we are going to be able to use a technique that alters genes and efficiently change nucleotides to avoid recessive traits?
It's such an ingrained assumption inside my head that everyone should understand the value of biodiversity that I couldn't even answer.
I grew up watching David Attenborough, David Suzuki, and Carl Sagan explaining the natural world.
I can't imagine how much poorer my life would be, if I hadn't grown up with that.
And I can't begin to imagine how to explain my world-view to someone who clearly didn't grow up with them... Other than to sit them down with all those fantastic series, and hope that they take hold in them.
I mean, like, start by watching "Queen of the Trees," and see how inter-connected all of that life is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM
Different organisms have come up with different solutions to the same problem, and because of that they can break in different situations. The 'service' they provide will be affected differently by an environmental shortage or excess. If twenty microbes are responsible for recycling organic matter and dust or drought or some chemical affects 10 of them, the others will expand to pick up some of the slack.
Aspirin occurs naturally in Willow bark; morphine and codeine from opium poppies; ephedrine and amphetamine is derived from Ephedra sinica (Ma Huang); quinine and it's derivatives from Cinchona calisaya; digoxin from foxglove (Digitalis lanata).
And botox from the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and related species has medical uses primarily for muscle spasticity conditions and migraines.
Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. It's also a prodrug of salicylic acid, but it has additional anti-inflammatory and anti-thrombotic effects, because unlike salicylic acid itself, it can irreversibly inactivate COX enzymes (enzymes that synthesize compounds needed for inflammation and blood clotting) by acetylating them. It's also less irritating to the digestive system.
How the humans invented something so incredibly useful? Most probably after watching "useless" social wasps to mash bark to make its nests.
Our oceans are collapsing. Warming, acidifying, over-fished, pollution.
What are we supposed to do?
I understand why I'm being downvoted. The point I'm arguing is " They ended up flat-out asking me why anyone should care about biodiversity." If you down vote me please write an note saying how biodiversity makes a difference to the life of the average person.
I don't think my life would change materially if I was on a hypothetical space station with very good life support. I suspect the difference is an emotional connection?
Until we have a better answer, we should work damn hard to keep this one running. And we don't know enough about how it works, so we should try preserve the current systems as well as we can.
The term to research for why biodiversity is useful in a utilitarian anthropocentric way is "Ecosystem Services".
The only way we know how to keep what we have is with biodiversity.
No, seriously -
We are destroying not just other species' natural habitats; those natural habitats are our own, that's where we evolved. In billions of years of natural history, we and our ancestors have led a "modern" way of life for a few thousand at most.
We're so adaptable that we can thrive in highly technologically altered environments as well; but I'm quite sure that anyone can experience the feeling of recognizing that those aren't truly home for us.
The point is people see world differently because of some fundamental differences in genetics & childhood nurturing.
What is your measure?
E.g. Cats kill billions of small birds and mice a year (think what that does to owl populations). It’s shouldn’t be legal to let house cats roam freely outside.
Ok. If there was an abundance of food for the owls then we'd have many, many more owls, and they would kill billions of birds instead. We'd just be sacrificing cats for owls. Why is that better?
Why is it better to introduce hundreds of millions of bored free-range emotional-support predators into any given ecosystem than to not do this?
Seems tone deaf to ask this in a thread about biodiversity and species extinction.
Because there are wayyyy more cats than owls. So we have more biodiversity.
I do not follow. Are you saying that idiocentric tastes negatively correlate with empathy?
Of course the staff were all furious at hearing this, which he seemed to enjoy. I asked the other owner if he was serious and he said he 100% was serious. So I approached the owner dumping the oil why he did this, why he didn't just empty the oil into a container, etc. Long/short he said it didn't effect him and couldn't care what any of us hippies though of the practice.
I would say that there is a fundamental difference in the way people are; they either view things in the long-term and strive to ensure the best for all of us. The other side of the coin are people that just want what's best for themselves and maybe their family. They don't care or want to believe such actions have long term effects on them directly.
It's not merely selfishness, it's sadism.
Doesn't sound like a nice guy.
Even guys that are seemingly nice have very odd beliefs. It really opened my eyes as to what to talk about at work, even if the topic didn't seem 'fringe' to me. Older dudes out west/here in Colorado in particular grew up with a sort of cavalier notion of what freedom and America means to them, and telling them what they can or cannot do on their own property is the heart of the matter.
Most people believe crazy things, even those that don't tend to not behave in consistent alignment with what they believe to be true or good.
Yea, but their property doesn't exist in a vacuum. They have neighbours and there's always downstream effects.
I'd say part of this attitude is an effect of rights becoming disconnected from responsibilities. Like, sure, one may "own" the land, but it better be well take care of, be a good steward. Not because there's immediate bad effects, but because those effects diffuse into the real non-human world.
There's a certain personality type that derives more pleasure from the loss of another than a gain of their own.
I guess people tend to believe that everyone else is like them, including those of us that aren't sadistic. And if a full 33 percent are sadistic, is it something that even should or can be corrected?
Now that's terrifying.
However, it is much better to simply look at a flower and meditate on how amazing it is that it exists at all than ruminate on the facts of how cruel the world is.
https://ncase.me/trust/
Gore Vidal's vversion is well-known: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/
NY for example:
"Thus, for example, even a spill of a gallon of oil into a ditch is covered."
https://ag.ny.gov/environmental/oil-spill/oil-spills-homes-a...
California:
"California Penal Code 374.3 makes illegal dumping on public and private property punishable by a fine up to $10,000. Also, pursuant to Section 117555 of the California health and Safety Code, a person who dumps illegally is punishable by up to six months on jail."
https://pw.lacounty.gov/epd/illdump/penalty.cfm
Calcycle page on illegal dumping:
https://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/illegaldump
This is the only type of correct answers for those cases
I did the introspection you ask for, and "watch those shows" is the best answer I can come up with.
I've spent a lot of time trying to formulate my reasoning and unfortunately, the easiest explanation is the most clinical and least likely to inspire: diversity is necessary (but not sufficient) for long term survival of any nontrivial system - be it a species, civilization, tribe, or business. Dynamic environments driven by random events and emergent phenomenon like weather/climate, food chains, and sentient beings are going to be chaotic and unstable in the short term. Diversity allows better suited individuals to exploit the current environment while preserving a diverse minority contingent that is far more likely to be able to adapt to the next change in the environment without a catastrophic collapse of the system. Without that minority group, the medium to long term probability of survival for the whole is zero and without the majority, the minority group wouldn't survive long enough to make it the next environmental shift.
It's as close as you can get to an abstract natural law of complex systems. It applies to a company's talent pools and its ability to survive pivots or changing market conditions, an ideology's ability to survive the realities of geopolitics, a religion's ability to survive schisms and protests, and much more.
A current example would be the ubiquitous banana. The cavendish banana (the most common variety you'd encounter in your produce isle) is under attack globally and is at risk of being wiped out. And this isn't the first time that's happened. The banana your grandparents grew up with, the Gros Michel, while not extinct is no longer commercially viable.
Not so. Ireland was a net food exporter for the duration of the famine. The problem was political and economic.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-202289...
Do you have a better source, which you think refutes their arguments?
They are arguing that Ireland was not a net exporter of food because a large portion of Irish crop exports were oats, and oats are not food.
The supporting arguments are worse. For instance, they state that oats are usually for horses' consumption. Further, they state that the average farmer would not know how to prepare the oats for human consumption.
All this seems obviously false[1].
As a general point, the obvious point of comparison with Ireland would be the various states of 1840's germany, also heavily reliant on potatoes for sustenance. They also got the potato blight, but there was no great famine.
[1] they also give some figures, which I won't comment on.
Bananas are kind of a weird case for multicropping, because they are all sterile clones. So this makes them horribly susceptible to every disease under the sun.
I feel like you meant well with the comment, but it's hard to understand what's positive here, except that the people naming the boat thought of Attenborough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Nam...
We're trying for something a bit different than internet default here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Having seen how easily the electorate can be manipulated and how dumb people are, I've been seriously questioning democracy lately.
Human beings procreating responsibly is a major factor in continuing our species to perpetuity. It should not be for religious, economic, political or social reasons.
Species extinction occurs because human beings are outbreeding every other species on earth exploiting all the planet’s resources and keeping it for themselves.
This is detrimental to our own survival as we are super apex predators. When an apex predator gets hungry, nothing else can survive. And we are always hungry and we keep adding hungry mouths.
If we pick quality over quantity, we will have a healthy stock and sufficient earth resources when the eventual depopulation event occurs. Depopulation is a mathematical certainty.
We can either control population with responsible procreation and resource conservation or we can burn all existing and non renewable resources and perish in a spectacularly tragic and violent way.
The only way to prevent species extinction is to conserve habitat for the species. Since everything is below us, we have to step aside and make space. Without habitat, we will perish as a species.
Being the apex predator, it’s like sitting on the top most branch of a tree and sawing off all the branches. Because apex predators consume everything. Increase in population is like inviting everyone to come and sit on top of the tree too.
Hunters and fishermen know this. That’s why most conservation groups seek hunters and fishermen and NRA support. They donate because they realize the importance of preservation of habitat.
How do we go about this? By removing population pressure from economic activities like work and employment and GDP. This can be easily achieved by automation. Growing high calories, nutritionally dense food to feed the population and investing in local food security by utilizing modern tech like hydroponics and vertical farming on marginal land. Figuring out the environmental cost of replacement rate of human births and helping people gain resources to justify having children rather be a continual drain by incentivizing large families.
When resources disappear, civil unrest and war begins. We have always seen this. Famine and drought have always preceded every major war. From tribes to the latest Syrian incursion. Even way back, primitive tribes will go to war with the the neighbours when there is a famine or drought or food runs low. The men who die remove themselves from the food chain. Women and children are spared and were always spoils of war. The resources are combined for greater survivability of species..not a tribe.
The latest upheavals we see and the protests and revolutions in recent memory have always been due to less resources to distribute amongst a larger population. Densely populated regions revolt when resources are stretched thin. We incarcerated criminals when they show a tendency to appropriate community resources without contributing to the common pot thereby reducing their ability to be multiplying and replicating vectors of DNA. We did not allow the sick and the weak to continue sharing the commons.
If we look at the bigger picture unemotionally, what we pride ourselves with..the genteel fair kind and sociological progress Is what has allowed this resource restriction.
We can’t let go of that progress. The only way out is automation. And removing economic incentives for procreation. And resource allocation and distribution equally by removing speculation over resources that contribute to human survival.
CRISPR would have been a ‘sci fi’ fantasy years ago. And it’s now reality. Environmental stewardship as fantasy is the sad reality we face now.
I don't care how many hours you've logged on "ML SAAS" it's not where you think it is
My gardener has 5 children and three grandchildren at age 48. This is irresponsible procreation. An average 2.1 replacement rate in a family unit that doesn’t rely on welfare still relies on tax subsidies, incentives and free public schools.
Both are unsustainable. When there is no cost and only rewards for irresponsible procreation that is resource hogging from the commons, there will be a quick deterioration of available resources for all.
When there is want and scarcity and more demand in the apex predator population, they start stripping the habitat and resources of the species below them in the food chain.
That will eventually threaten the apex predators survival. This is more ‘killing the golden goose’ of Aesop tales than ‘blade runner 2049’ adoption of Philip k dick’s sci fi story.
If I were to explain to a child about apex predators, I would bring up sharks..if sharks eat all the little fish in the sea, when they are out of little fish in the sea, they will die because they won’t have anything more to eat to survive.
That being said, I find this a difficult conversation to have online, because "responsible restriction of childbirth" isn't something anyone short of dangerously dictorial, can fathom to hope to achieve. It's a non starter, therefore we have to approach the problem from a end that's not so...thorny..
It's easy to say, "let's just thanos this and get it done" reset at another few thousand years..but the hard question is who gets snapped?
I never said ‘responsible restriction of childbirth’. I said ‘incentivise responsible procreation’.
I don’t know if you twisted my words on purpose or you really don’t see the difference?
Why is it genocide to offer incentives for a greater quality of life for their thoughtful and mindful roadmap to nurture their progeny and to protect the commons from over exploitation. We should be rewarding responsible procreation and parenting.
Human beings like ‘to do the right thing’. We are rationalizing animals rather than rational animals.
Supporting and incentivizing irresponsible procreation economically and empathetically simply gives people reasons to mindlessly offer themselves rationalizations to continue making wrong and harmful personal decisions.
Giving people incentives and support to provide the greatest chances of their gene pool to thrive along with the rest of the human species is a rational solution to the depopulation event that is a mathematical surety to occur within a century.
Having said that, maybe it’s also time to have discussions about ‘thorny’ subjects. The lack of open discourse is why even reasonable suggestions are downvoted here. Because there is nothing to compare common sense with..
It's fine to tow this line of thinking, but give it 100 years or so to implement.
1. Remove food insecurity. The job of the govt is to provide basic calories to ALL. In the form of credits. (Like in Switzerland)
2. The subsidized calories will come only from farms that have to follow ecological practices.
3. Housing: everyone gets to live in state housing for diff income levels. On 99 year lease at market rate. This gives generational housing security. And protects housing from speculative shocks.(like in Singapore)
4. Universal health care.
What is provided is a basic quality of life to everyone. Just as everyone deserves a basic quality of life guaranteed hybyeh govt, everyone has to display responsibility. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Downgrades to quality of life if too much is siphoned off from the commons is a reasonable and fair bargain.
Of course, consumption per capita is still a concern, and global population is still a concern, but it's hard to fault your gardener for having 5 children if you live in an industrialized country with below replacement rate fertility.
> An average 2.1 replacement rate in a family unit that doesn’t rely on welfare still relies on tax subsidies, incentives and free public schools.
This is a totally different kind of commons. Personally I'm much less concerned about funding public schools than I am about overfishing, habitat destruction, etc.
1. Industrialized countries consume more than the rest of the world.
2. Consumption is many times higher in countries with lower replacement rates.
3. Richer countries typically import and overfishing and destroy habitat of over populated high density developing nations with already depleted resources.
4. China is a special case. China exports a lot of our conspicuous consumption. China in turn imports a lot from developing as well as developed world with its bolstered purchasing power. It takes a lot of maintain 1.4 billion people.
5. One other (bad) solution is to make every nation self sustainable and close borders. And allow them to determine their own replacement rate via births and immigration.
6. Overfishing happens in Asia to feed Americans. Habitat is destroyed in Latin America to feed the China and the rest of the world.
7. Habitat is the most important thing when it comes to resource allocation and resource conservation and exploitation. I like E.O.Wilson’s Half Earth policy because it’s an elegant and fair solution.
7. You should be concerned about funding public schools because the subsidized cheap frozen fish fingers is what’s causing overfishing elsewhere in the world. More children at a higher consumption strata = more habitat destruction.
America IS the 1% of the world. A poor child in America has more resources and nutritional calories and dollar spent/per head than 80% of the world’s children.
8. While there are a lot of begging bowls out in America(and other rich countries), the begging bowls in the rest of the world that sells their resources to America have deeper begging bowls that often don’t get filled.
8. One way to NOT incentivise over population and irresponsible procreation at a macro level is for America and other rich countries to curtail consumption and stop economic exchange of goods that are hostile to habitat preservation. (Example: palm oil)
> You should be concerned about funding public schools because the subsidized cheap frozen fish fingers is what’s causing overfishing elsewhere in the world. More children at a higher consumption strata = more habitat destruction
Funding public schools is orthogonal to whether that school churns out cheap frozen fish fingers. You could add funding on the stipulation that the funding needs to be used on sustainably grown local produce, for example.
> One way to NOT incentivise over population and irresponsible procreation at a macro level is for America and other rich countries to curtail consumption and stop economic exchange of goods that are hostile to habitat preservation. (Example: palm oil)
I'm sorry, you're suggesting that if rich countries stop trading environmentally hostile goods this will disincentivize reproduction locally? How do you reason this? Am I going to have less children because I eat local organic produce?
A good example is our smart phones. I am old enough to remember when there were only land lines. And not everyone had one. Now everyone from India to Africa to USA and even our homeless in CA have a smart phone. Smart phones that are indispensable now use rare metals that are mined. Cell towers have to be placed to ensure connectivity. People have to afford the bills. Every like, upvote, reply, games, online order, tweet is a tiny bit of a carbon foot print.
And consumption grows exponentially. More people means more jobs and more services. Larger carbon footprint. More consumption. More to support that population. We don’t live on 500 sq.ft, air and sunlight alone. It takes a lot to sustain humans.
Take dairy for example. Traditionally China never had dairy in their cuisine. But with a better quality of life, they need cows and fodder for cows. They can’t grow it because the aquifers are poisoned or have run dry. So the cows come from NZ and the alfafa from California sent to China during a Californian drought when we didn’t have water for our citizens but enough to fill the empty shipping containers that carried iPhones and would have gone back empty otherwise.
As quality of life increased in India, everyone drives a car when they used to have public transport. An automobile is a marker of a better quality of life. Human beings like social hierarchies and the way to exhibit this is by possessions.
As the world becomes a better place, we consume more and that has a price too: environment and habitat and eco systems.
Funding of public schools subsidizes education for all which is a noble endeavor, but it takes responsibility away from parents. When unionized public schools = unfunded pension liabilities, the education suffers. More public schools, more subsidized education = more teachers = more unfunded pension liabilities. More work to compensate for the needed taxes = more workers = more employment = more 40 hour work weeks = more commutes = more fossil fuels = more consumption. It’s a Ponzi scheme.
Cutting tax burden to only provide for free public schools will result in more responsible and mindful family planning.
Your final point: if rich countries started looking at sustainability goals, they will consume less. This would make importing more expensive. Only surplus has to be exported.
Let me explain: Commons = environment, air quality, water quality, cultivable land, natural resources. These should not be owned and traded for private profit. I am not against private profit but we can’t have private enterprise exploiting the commons for profit. That’s how we end to with nestle selling bottled water when communities have to pay more to water utilities for their potable water during a drought.
Let me clarify your understanding of my words: I am saying that when rich countries stop trading environmentally hostile goods, this will lead to less exploitation of land and sea. And habitat. And even when it does, it will be for the local population to sustain them.
If there is no market or buyers for habitat destroying palm oil or tiger bones or rhino horns, the stream of income dries up and people can realistically gauge whether their economies and environment can handle more population or less population.
I also don’t know how you went from all this to ‘eating local organic produce’ to ‘less children’. Organic has nothing to do with anything. Resources from the commons should be exploited locally only. Bounded resource exploitation reduces the false sense of prosperity.
Once people taste a better quality of life, they will never go back. Poorer countries have a better quality of life and never at par with what we have in western countries. Give them a taste of a superior quality of life and no one is going to go back to a lower quality of life.
Countries that are less populous are richer than higher density countries. Why? Because when you don...
I think your hearts in the right place but this is misguided. Marginal land should not be farmed, via any method. Re-wilding marginal lands is one of the best ways to restore ecological health and diversity on a wide scale.
Hydroponics are also not a silver bullet, the tech has conformed to the hype curve just as predictably as anything else. You can produce leafy greens, and even some meat via aquaponics, but not significant calories or staples.
>The only way out is automation.
I know you had a few ‘and’ after this but nevertheless, hard disagree. A major contributing factor to mankind’s abuse of the natural world is abstraction from it. We will not solve that by going deeper into the darkness where kids grow up believing the food that sustains then springs into existence via inexplicable magic. We need to become closer to nature and the origins of our food, not further away from it via automation, urbanisation and increasing specialisation. All of these further the ignorance, misunderstanding, and abuse of the natural world on which we depend.
Is it most efficient to have more people return to rural environments and become involved in food production? No. But seeking greatest efficiency is one of the biggest errors we are committing here - nature is not efficient, it is broadly stable and able to support great diversity of life, at the cost of efficiency. We should be seeking to emulate nature in these regards, instead of attempting to extract and refine the parts of it we believe we need to maintain our particular version of life.
Using solar, better led lights and maybe hacks like placing them near water treatment plants etc can be a good optimization of energy and resources that are other wise underutilized. Further aquaponics that is also fish farming is even more environmentally friendly as it’s a closed loop system with minimal inputs.
By marginal lands, I mean abandoned factories and soil contaminated with heavy metals that is difficult to remediate without a lot of expenses. Growing highly perishable produce like lettuce and strawberries indoors in these spaces is a win-win. My 2c.
I dream of little nuclear ‘suitcases’ that can power cities for weeks or months. Factories that can be run with solar as well as nuclear energy. Hopefully we will find a way to dispose and dismantle nuclear installations safely in the future.
Your other point: if we are to emulate nature and get back closer to natural growth and evolution of civilization as we know it..we could model it around the Nile valley or the Indus Valley. I think having clusters of small self sustaining villages with intra trade and further away trading for other wgat we can’t produce is better. If we can create village clusters networked to other clusters connected together to bigger and bigger fractal systems of both tech and environment and wilderness, we can have it all.
In the future, a lot of trade would be services. For small scale sustainability, we would need automation. This frees up labour force to do other things. Even a simple adjustment like a 4 day work week or 20 hour workweek or working remote would have a massive impact on how we consume and our collective footprints.
Now is the time that we are finally transitioning to electric vehicles and hopefully toward sustainable policies and economies, but has the collective level of consciousness risen to empower us to meet these challenges?
And I've known about species extinction since I was a little kid. They've happened and keep happening. Little to nothing seems to have done to prevent them during my lifetime.
I feel powerless and have no idea what to do about it.
I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling.
And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.
I think if we all do more to make a little difference, we'll make a big difference as a group.
I've been making a focused effort to buy food produced locally. Details on how this helps here: https://www.terrapass.com/eat-your-way-to-a-smaller-carbon-f.... Lettuce from across the country costs the same, and isn't as fresh.
We moved for a better quality of life, and part of that was reducing our commute. We were able to cut the commute back from 3hrs a day to about 30min a day per adult, if that. There's a calculator here that can help you figure out the carbon savings: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/household-carbon-footprint-...
When our water heater failed, I did some research and realized the state where we were living at the time would pay for a replacement tankless combined water heater and furnace. That saved us about $4k from the cost of the system, plus it is super efficient so our heating and cooking costs dropped, plus we had endless hot water for showers.
I realized one day it's like working on legacy software: if you look at it as a whole, it looks like a completely intractable problem. But if you start making incremental changes, over time you can change and have an impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem#Soci...
Here's a thought or two by Attenborough on overpopulation, one of the drivers of these problems [0]
The problem will solve itself however (with certainty), and I cannot explain it better than George Carlin [1]. Enjoy!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRPmLWYbUqA
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
I suspect that if it was a lot more deadly, it would have triggered a stronger government response (at least in the U.S.) and ultimately killed fewer people.
Then again, I've repeatedly underestimated just how incompetent this administration could be.
Not long ago, I told someone that every time I hear his voice, either some creature is going to die or something is going to go hungry. There is no happy ending to this earth saga. I feel helpless most of the time and don’t know how to leave this world a better place.
I don’t know how pay my debt back to this planet. So far my plan is to arrange for my estate to consolidate all my assets to buy land and return it to nature. Not Ag..not gardens. Not habitat. Just return it to nature and let nature do what it wants.
Not saying that this solution will work with poachers but there is probably a combination of approaches needed to preserve the biodiversity. One national park in India has given legal protection to park rangers if they were to kill to poachers and that has had a dramatic impact on the population of single horned rhinos. In 2015 park rangers shot dead more poachers than poachers killing rhinos for Chinese medicine.
At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
Those people won't cease to exist. They'll just stay in poorer nations. In fact, wouldn't accepting them into a wealthy nation reduce the average number of children they have? And if these nations can drastically reduce the impact of their citizens, all the more reason to start recruiting migrants.
Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens.
With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.
But would you expect it would convince anyone to change their lifestyle or behavior, given the other evidence that people seem to just accept as the new normal? The west coast of the US is burning. And when California isn't burning, Australia is. Chunks of Florida already regularly experience "nuisance flooding" related to sea level rise, and it's frankly confusing to me that people are still building stuff in Miami. Rising temperatures have meant that the ranges of some infectious diseases have expanded in rich countries (e.g. Lyme disease in parts of Canada, Zika and Dengue in parts of the US). But most Americans, Canadians, Australians and others haven't substantially reorganized their lives to stop emissions.
If direct impacts on the lives of people living in rich and powerful countries doesn't cause people in those places to change their behavior, why would you expect them to be moved or motivated by threats to pangolins or rhinos?
This also further solidifies my belief that asking people to change their lifestyles in ineffective in tackling the climate disaster. Given the choice people will carry out their normal businesses (even as the world is burning around them).
What we really need is actual policy that combats this. We need the state to build the infrastructure and enact restrictions on polluting behavior so people aren’t given the choice of carrying out our polluting destructive business.
What have you been doing?
> People with heart or lung disease, older adults, children and teens: Avoid physical activities outdoors.
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> Everyone else: Avoid strenuous outdoor activities, keep outdoor activities short, and consider moving physical activities indoors or rescheduling.
I’ve been staying indoors, and so have many people. You definitely should not go fishing, golfing, play football in the park, etc. like I’ve been seeing people doing