Definitely a good thing, but i cannot think of any other mammal that so enrages land owners. If you have beavers on your land, you are now on thier land. There just isnt any way to prepare a house, road, field or any other area the beavers want to inundated. You jut have to give up and biuld elsewhere.
I can't imagine beavers can raise water levels by more than a foot or so - would such a water level rise not also be possible in heavy rains? So would that simply just not be a great place to build anyway?
"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England."
They can definitely raise things more than a foot and they can cover huge areas of land, and they breed pretty quick and then spread into neighbouring properties.
My parents let the beavers restore a low lying area on their property back to marsh. But he still had to put in a kind of escape valve pipe (with some tricks to stop the beavers from plugging it) or it would flood out a very large area near their home.
And he has to do some population control on them, too, or they just continue flooding all the surrounding areas.
I applaud this approach. its partial re-wilding. It incurs costs (both sides) and its not entirely free. But, you get wildlife, and you get something closer to nature, and the upsides can include significant improvements to biodiversity and water retention in the ground, as well as downstream flood mitigation effects.
It's good people are overt "yea I like it overall but it has issues" because pretending there are no issues is silly.
People who don't want to do it will magnify the cost side issues to the expense of benefit. People who want to do it will minify.
It's tricky though. My father is now almost 80, and it's getting too much for him to monitor and control them. What happens to the land when he can't?
There is, unfortunately a perception of nature being a naturally-balancing system. But it's really not. It's dynamic, constantly changing, and beavers can be a real chaos wildcard, creating outcomes that can modify hundreds, even thousands, of acres of land.
Not to minimise your dilemma it's no different to other risky and tricky questions about succession planning in Farming.
It's no coincidence that alongside commercial fishing, farming has a horrendous accident rate.
If e.g. you have any livestock much over the size of a chicken your near 80yo parent could be at significant risk from unexpected animal behaviour. Cattle yards cause horrific crush injury.
I don't mind their dens, but they actively attack plants in strange ways.
I've had some arborvitae shrubs for years that were left completely alone... Up until this last winter, when one day they were all destroyed, practically right down to the ground. There wasn't a shortage of food, and these weren't good for den building- there's acres of forest between my house and the closest den anyway.
All of our trees along the river bank have to be wrapped in chicken wire to keep the critters away. There's thousands of others along the river banks to choose from; I can only guess they like that the trees are in open lawn rather than surrounded by taller grasses or ferns.
Deer have also left them alone for years. Not 20 feet away is the edge of the forest where there's plenty of other food.
We have many hostas and other plants deer typically go for that are left completely alone. The loss of the arborvitaes just seemed really random.
Other than that, the only problem we have had with wildlife in the past 5 years it so is remembering to not leave bird feed out over night- either the black bears or raccoons will steal it rather promptly.
Beaver dams and ponds are generally about a meter deep. That is deep enough that your field isnt a field, your road is impassible, and your house is now an island. They actively want to create ponds. You can fight the process, you can drain the ponds even and destroy the dams, but it is an uphill struggle.
Depending on location there's enough underappreciated indirect economical benefits to them ('ecosystem services' is the term used these dayss). For example a city I live nearby is largely protected from flooding because it's main river is, close to city's borders, embedded in a big wetland serving as a buffer, as it has been since the river started to exist. Last severe rainfall (which was close to an anomaly) it became like 80% full. The costs of the thing not being there would be several orders of magnitude larger than what one can make in a lifetime using it as farmland for instance, yet there are people thinking that way.
> There just isnt any way to prepare a house, road, field or any other area the beavers want to inundated.
Huh? Are you talking about the legal quirks of some particular place? Because there are plenty of practical measures.
For example: Trapping the beavers, for relocation or some other fate); protecting trees with fencing or a sand/paint mix they dislike; putting in some cage-protected piping that limits the water-level in their dam; and various techniques to prevent beavers from blocking culverts and drains.
Interestingly, beaver dam-building instincts are affected by the sound of rushing water (rather than a detailed understanding of flows and pressure) which means there's some acoustic engineering that can be done to prevent them from perceiving dam-opportunities.
I think that’s kind of his point. Now any time you want to do something in your property, “figure out how to deal with the beavers” is now the first item on the list.
The idea is, that nature can take care of its own quite well, if left in peace and bird feeding can be actually harmful, as you bring in more nutrients artificially with the result, that an ecosystem than has more birds, than it can sustain on its own, which can lead to local collapse of that ecosystem (too much duck shit in the lake for example).
Practically speaking, it can depend on garden design; fill it with concrete / slabs or fake grass will discourage any nature, but plants and healthy soil will encourage it. We went from a green-looking (ivy walls) but ultimately desert-like back yard to a pretty lush haven for birds, bugs, bees and butterflies. And the occasional mouse or frog, but I think the cats bring those in.
True, we should let them search for food, especially when there's enough food around.
When food is scarce (winter) it may be a different story, though. And water fountains in the summer are good not only for the birds, but for other wildlife as well.
Only if you leave them enough of an ecosystem to do so. That's probably the most important part of "taking care of nature", and one we're currently failing at terribly.
> not many care about the responsibilities like taking care of nature
Our farming practices (deforestation, pesticide/herbicide use, insect die offs ...) and diet preferences are driving many species, including birds, to extinction.
We could significantly reduce the damage by restructuring our diets; however, not many people seem to care about that.
We could raise consumption while expanding the area of protected wetlands by building more nuclear power plants to power vertical farms, and expanding industry and energy harvesting outside of Earth.
This avoids having to convince people to deny themselves their preferred foods, and arguably, reduce their quality of life, to protect natural habitats. It's a better strategy for both humanity and nature.
Someone posted a research paper [1] a few months ago that says that due to energy consumption, the use of vertical farming doesn’t provide a net space savings for caloric dense foods.
I’m curious what you think of that paper and what it would change about your suggested solution.
It seems that paper is based on the assumption that energy costs the same as it does now. I'm assuming we can make energy much more abundant with nuclear power.
This response bewilders me: the GP presents something with immense political and practical challenges, and the response is to ask us to consider an even harder set of political and practical problems?
Abolishing agriculture subsidies won't cause a reduction in meat consumption, as the demand for meat is huge, and can continue to grow without the subsidies.
As for convincing governments to protect more forests: that be will be vastly easier if abundant energy and a multitude of vertical farms makes horizontal farms less competitive in the market, and results in a situation where protecting forests won't come at the expense of the income/purchasing-power of citizens.
> Abolishing agriculture subsidies won't cause a reduction in meat consumption ... can continue to grow without the subsidies
Without subsidies animal ag is deeply unprofitable. Removing them and taxing the negative externalities "properly" would mean the price of such products would be a multiple of what it's now, so it would be out of reach for most of the population.
> that be will be vastly easier if abundant energy
Yes, it would. But we don't have it at the moment, and it will require a lot of fossil fuels and time to get there.
At the same time EROI of fossil fuels is falling down. It's at 5 IIRC, down from more that 100+ at the start of the previous century - meaning that previously for every 1 barrel of oil invested into extraction you'd get 100-150 barrels back, now it's about 5 barrels. Soon it could become unprofitable to extract more oil, as it would cost more energy to get it out of the ground that what would be gained, no matter how much is still in the ground.
I don't think there's any historical basis for this claim. More strongly worded: the history of limited human consumption is literally orders of magnitude longer than the history of nuclear power, much less the history of industrial spaceflight.
Humans have always consumed at the limits of their abilities, and we're in an era of exponentially increasing ability.
There is no history of consumption being artificially restricted at a global scale. A few socialist countries have managed it, and everyone there wants to escape.
In an era of exponentially expanding abilities, we should be massively increasing clean energy output through technologies like nuclear reactors.
Having both a bone to pick with socialism and using a “this time it’s different” argument in the same comment is more than a little incongruous.
Note that nobody in this conversation has disagreed about the virtues of building more nuclear power. The observation is solely that you’re asking for something that’s substantially harder than anything else humanity has ever done while handwaving everything else away. That just isn’t good argumentation.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by me making a "this time it's different" argument, and how it's incongruous with my criticism of socialist governments?
>The observation is solely that you’re asking for something that’s substantially harder than anything else humanity has ever done while handwaving everything else away. That just isn’t good argumentation.
I think mass-production of nuclear reactors and vertical farms (to give a couple of examples) is substantially easier and more realistic than coordinating global caps and reductions in consumptions through mandatory limits on private industries and citizens.
> Once we reach those limits, growth will naturally slow and stop
It's already stopping. What comes next is the rapid decline of the carrying capacity of the environment and the collapse of the species dependent on that environment.
> With that many people, it's even harder to coordinate a unanimous reduction in meat consumption
No, see my previous comment. Every country on earth has animal ag subsidies, although animal ag is a leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, atmospheric pollution (15-25%), eutrophication, soil erosion, and overfishing, all things that dangerously degrade our likelihood to survive. It's more bad then people usually realize.
There's already 80% less insects (in last 25 years), and 90% of sharks are missing (meaning the collapse of fishing populations is on the horizon). Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970.
The last 20 years witnessed the most rapid rate of economic growth in human history, amidst mass-extinction, huge reductions of natural habitats and the collapse of numerous ecosystems.
Your analysis underestimates the adaptability and technological capabilities of human civilization. We can continue to expand even as the natural ecosystem is destroyed.
So a better way to protect natural environments, than pushing for reductions and caps on consumption, is to provide an alternative path for development that protects the environment while allowing even more economic growth.
> the most rapid rate of economic growth in human history, amidst mass-extinction, huge reductions of natural habitats and the collapse of numerous ecosystems
And that's supposed to be a good thing?
> We can continue to expand even as the natural ecosystem is destroyed
No, without the ecosystem we're done. Not much of it remains.
> is to provide an alternative path for development that protects the environment while allowing even more economic growth
Not enough time before last pieces are gone.
What's about the economic growth that you find so valuable? Don't you see that money are just stupid tokens in a very stupid game? That the economy is rigged? That healthy environment is much more valuable than ... what? Tons of plastic everywhere and elevator music in a supermarket? Do you have children? How do you explain to them that we don't have forests and wild animals anymore because you've loved burgers and big cars too much? But honey look how rich I got. You'd really rather have blade runner than star trek future?
It negates the appeal you could make to people that their standard of living will decline unless they accept steep cuts now. If people's consumption can grow in the face of ecological disaster, then there's nothing to suggest it won't continue to grow as the natural environment continued to be paved over.
>>Not enough time before last pieces are gone.
I think it will take less time than convincing all the major economies to institute caps on meat eating.
I'm not saying that the environment should not be protected. I'm arguing that the most effective path for doing that is to go full bore toward expanding the production of clean energy, especially from the source that seem the most capable of fully replacing baseline fossil fuel based power plants, which is nuclear reactors.
It should not be a choice between consumption and the environment. I consider both to be good things, all other things being equal, and I would like to see both maximized. High levels of production/consumption means more enjoyable lives with more opportunity, and lower poverty.
>When people switch, they realize they've been taking something that wasn't theirs in the first place.
If you're making a reference to the life of the farm animal: that's an entirely different argument.
Right now we're debating whether natural habitats can be protected while current consumption patterns are maintained and ramped up.
>High consumption != more enjoyable lives
1. High consumption means less death. Per capita production/consumption is strongly correlated with life expectancy.
2. People consistently choose high consumption when given a choice, so even if you want to use a definitin of happiness that is not aligned with the way of life people choose, the fact remains that high consumption is the preferred way of life, as expressed by people's choices.
>High levels of production = more destruction (mining), more pollution (almost always), more exploitation
There is asteroid mining and recycling as alternatives to mining the Earth's crust. The damage of mining can also be reduced with precision techniques and through rehabilitation of old mines.
Another possibility is to compensate for the damage done by a mine by artificially enhancing other habitats to make them more vital, e.g. use some of the revenue generated by a mine to create an artificial lake to create more wetlands, to make up for the environmental damage done by the mine.
>Degrowth, basic income, free housing & healthcare. Problem solved.
The world doesn't produce enough to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing.
We need far more production for that. And you can see that for yourself by just looking at the global per capita GDP and seeing that it's ~$18,000, and then looking up to see what goods/services that level of income can afford each person.
And innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity of human civilization.
Raising productivity is a moral imperative. The degrowth ideological narrative is utterly baseless in its economic rationale.
> Right now we're debating whether natural habitats can be protected while current consumption patterns are maintained and ramped up
Not with animal agriculture in the world we have (population growth, developing regions, overshoot, existing levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss etc.).
> high consumption is the preferred way of life, as expressed by people's choices
I don't think people have much choice to live how they'd like. Their choices are being forced by the system. Many would choose something else if it was possible.
> The world doesn't produce enough to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing
> per capita GDP and seeing that it's ~$18,000
If we're discussing UBI and degrowth, we must consider abolishing money as we know it now for various reasons.
Firstly, economics is not what most people think it is; it's a pseudoscience with imprecise models that often ignore negative externalities, such as environmental impacts, GDP is a meaningless metric, and the entire financial system is rigged.
Why is it rigged? A significant portion of the money in the economy is credit/debt, created by banks when someone takes out a loan. There is a premium on this money that must be paid, usually a few percent every year, and this leads to exponential growth. However, exponential growth is unsustainable in a finite environment like ours. While space and other planets might be options in the future, currently, this planet is all we have.
Around 40-70% of people are employed in bullshit jobs. These jobs are unnecessary or even harmful, consuming resources for commuting and job-related needs. People are forced to pretend they contribute just to secure a place to live and food in their fridge.
> to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing
Yet (almost) nobody dies of hunger (in our countries, anyway, nor should they) and (almost) everyone has a roof over his head, when the day ends. It's all a matter of distribution. We already produce enough food for 10B people, and e.g. US has enough free flats for every homeless person (and then some).
The problem is distribution, nothing else. Money doesn't work well in this regard.
> innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity
Scientists would still work even with UBI. Doctors would too, as well as teachers and artists. They are all motivated by factors other than money. And they would be compensated too.
Currently, only 2% of people are employed in agriculture (and provide food for the 98%). However, even if we needed 6% for a more sustainable plant-based agricultural food production, under UBI, we could find individuals who would be happy to move from meaningless jobs to work in nature. People are not doing this now because they need to sustain themselves, and the current system doesn't allow for it. Money is not an accurate measure of value; we learned this when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and we realized that some sectors are more valuable than their compensation suggests.
Other sectors would also require people to work, and there would be different incentives, such as societal appreciation, travel credits, or the opportunity to switch from an apartment to a house with a bigger garden. We would find suitable motivations for individuals to contribute to these sectors.
> Raising productivity is a moral imperative
Degrowth is a moral imperative. Wait. You've been talking about production/consumption earlier, now about productivity. Those are not the same things.
>Not with animal agriculture in the world we have (population growth, developing regions, overshoot, existing levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss etc.).
Not this very instant of course, but nothing on that scale—including your plan of capping/reducing meat consumption—can be done in an instant.
A transition to mass-nuclear-power and vertical farms would dramatically reduce the damage human civilization does to natural habitats while enabling massively more consumption.
>I don't think people have much choice to live how they'd like.
People having a choice between more consumption and less consumption is ubiquitous, and people almost always choose the former, because it almost always confers a higher standard of living.
This idea that you have that a higher standard of living is possible with less consumption shows your ideas are removed from reality.
>If we're discussing UBI and degrowth, we must consider abolishing money as we know it now for various reasons.
I was using money as a yardstick for the value of economic resources consumed by each individual. If we eliminated money and moved to the Communism that it is now apparent you support, the economy would collapse, and we'd see mass-impoverishment.
Money enables far more sophisticated economic coordination than would otherwise be possible. It is one of the important innovations in human history:
>Firstly, economics is not what most people think it is; it's a pseudoscience with imprecise models that often ignore negative externalities, such as environmental impacts, GDP is a meaningless metric, and the entire financial system is rigged.
Conspiracy theories like this form the basis of any fringe movement.
>Why is it rigged? A significant portion of the money in the economy is credit/debt, created by banks when someone takes out a loan.
This is a misguided trope. Money is created by issuing credit against real world assets, like houses. This enables larger-scale economic coordination as people with surplus resources are able to invest those resources in enterprises in need of resources that raise future productivity.
>Around 40-70% of people are employed in bullshit jobs. These jobs are unnecessary or even harmful, consuming resources for commuting and job-related needs.
These are speculative theories, and on the basis of this speculation, you're making massive leaps of logic about how the world works.
Next time you advocate a reduction in meat eating, you should disclose the fact that your advocacy is premised on conspiracy theories and radical social plans, like economics being a pseudoscience used to legitimize exploitation, and eliminating money and substituting it with central economic planning bureaus being the best way forward, respectively.
People deserve to know that the basis of the changes you advocate are fringe theories utterly rejected by mainstream Economics.
>Yet (almost) nobody dies of hunger (in our countries, anyway, nor should they) and (almost) everyone has a roof over his head, when the day ends. It's all a matter of distribution.
People die from the daily grind associated with privation, in the form of non-existent or sub-standard housing, processed low-nutrition food, or the long-commutes and physically punishing jobs needed to avoid that privation.
>The problem is distribution, nothing else.
A portion of goods produced will always be lost to waste. Your solution of nationalizing all production in the name of better distribution would still have sources of waste, and it would destroy the complex interconnected web of private arrangements that incentivize and sust...
Climate change is just one of many problems our civilization faces.
Our civilization is an extemely complex system.
I appreciate it as much as you do, but its negative externalities endanger both our continued existence and the health of our environment.
The system's rules also harbor numerous inefficiencies and injustices.
You might not agree, but I believe we should address as many of these issues as we can, and do so urgently.
You might feel that minor adjustments to the system are sufficient or that technological progress will eventually provide solutions.
I'm genuinely concerned that such an approach isn't feasible. From my perspective, we need to overhaul the system's rules and reboot it.
Anything less is superficial and inadequate. It might postpone the inevitable decline, but eventually, it will crumble, much like Rome or a Jenga tower.
If you can move beyond the beliefs like the "current system is an immutable physical reality and best possible version" and "anything other than capitalism equals communism," and start to consider even a fraction of the challenges we face — delving deeper and aiming for the system's ideal state (while being wary of local optima) — you'll realize that transformative changes are crucial.
I studied economics in college long time ago and now view much of it as a safeguard, an upholder of status quo, as overly simplistic, even naive. I've lived in both socialism and capitalism, and each of those systems has its own, serious problems. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I'm convinced that addressing the systemic issues is the key to resolving our problems.
I wish I had the time to write a more concise or refined comment. I'm sorry, but unfortunately, I don't. Thank you for the discussion.
As growing climate change impacts are experienced across the globe, the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall is unambiguous. Yet the Emissions Gap Report (EGR) 2022: The Closing Window – Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies finds that the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.
Those (if you want the latter at a survivable level, without some kind of coercion for the able to work with UBI removing the normal financial coercion of capitalist economy) are mutually incompatible.
If you want a viable strong safety net, especially with UBI, you can’t have degrowth.
> We could raise consumption while expanding the area of protected wetlands
There are many more problems with animal ag, not just the area.
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot. Agriculture is a key culprit in 5 out of 7 of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture.
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
>>Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot. Agriculture is a key culprit in 5 out of 7 of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture.
Most of those are area-related. If we didn't need to cover so much of the planet with crops grown to be feedstock for farm animals, those problems would vanish.
No, we can't keep current consumption patterns, if we want our civilization to survive. Animal ag is driving us towards its collapse, and fast.
We could switch to plant based diets and free upto 80% of all agriculture lands, some 35% of habitable earth, the area a size of Africa, and reforest/rewild that.
That's probably the only feasible option we have at this moment to stop us from environmental collapse.
Your solution is technological in nature. While theoretically possible, it doesn't meet the timescale and amount required.
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectare. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation. Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time.
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.
Technological solutions are far more realistic than effecting a global shift to a plant-based diet. People choose meat, and people in the developing world are consuming more meat as their incomes rise.
Mass-production is something human civilization has proven adept at, and mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that.
This could easily be solved by removing animal ag subsidies and with taxing of negative externalities.
That's one law, the market (= higher prices) will take care of the rest.
> people in the developing world are consuming more meat as their incomes rise
I'm aware :) However, that made sense when there were 1 B of humans, not when our needs overshoot the environmental capacity of our environment. If everyone ate like we westerners do (and they will want to, when we still do) then we'd need something like 4-5 earths to sustain everyone.
> mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that
Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
Abolishment of animal ag subsidies is a piece of paper and few signatures.
>>This could easily be solved by removing animal ag subsidies and with taxing of negative externalities.
Considering how strong people's preference for meat are, you could raise prices and inevitably demand will start growing again when incomes rise sufficiently.
>>Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
The resources needed to build those out will be more than made up for by the resources saved from switching to an abundant non-CO2/pollutant emitting energy system.
Better than asking everyone to change their diets would be to change government subsidies and other agriculture programs to encourage regenerative agriculture practices. Sure it might impact diet via a change in prices, but the goal should be to reduce harm first, not force a particular diet.
You can wean off subsidies pretty easily, if you give enough time.
The easiest way is to just freeze them and let inflation remove them; nobody will intentionally start farming corn if the subsidy remained at the original dollar amount.
The rural/urban :: Republican/Democrat split combined with our less than representative democracy means the farm lobby is pretty damn powerful. It'll be real hard to lower subsidies, more likely would be to subsidize different activities. Paying farmers to not farm is pretty common now, but God forbid someone be on welfare without looking for a job.
To prevent farm price collapses, the government tries to regulate the amount of certain products that are made. For example, if the USA can eat one million pounds of soybeans a year, and this year less than one million were grown, the price will skyrocket. So next year all the farmers grow soybeans, because it was a huge money maker, and three million pounds is the result - but that floods the market and the price of soybeans drops to nothing, and all the farmers go bankrupt.
To prevent that, the government tries to convince farmers NOT to grow whatever crop they think there will be too much of, and pays them to fallow fields.
It's memed as "paid not to farm" but it's much more complicated than that, and it's not a guaranteed money-maker (seen by the absolute demise of the small farm over the last 50 years).
No, you just have to fallow the land (plant nothing) - as far as I know.
The latter is done for some products in various ways but that's a more fine-grained solution (which destroys poor countries agriculture entirely, which is another horror story).
As of 2008, 2.7% of US corn is eaten by humans. More of US corn is is used to make ethanol than to feed livestock. US corn is more a subsidy heaven than a food source.
As I alluded to, I'd found that page already. I'd like to know what they do that's more destructive than beavers flooding your land. Why single out the fisher like that?
I mean, wolves and foxes can wreak havoc on farm animals, but at least they don't turn your land into a swamp.
A healthy ecosystem provides enough shelter to the preys for sustaining both preys and predator. It does not modify the ecosystem in the way than a beaver does. Not even close.
I understand you, but at the same time, an individual beaver has far more environmental impact than an individual human.
For example, it is very hard to build these days, without environmental assessments. The days are long gone, at least where I am, where you can build waterfront property and clear the shoreline of reeds and such.
Which is fine!
But my point is, a beaver colony turns a river into a marsh, kills grassland, endless trees both due to flooding and feeding, prevents water from flowing downstream, stops fish from spawning, utterly changing the landscape.
If left unchallenged, they would do as goats do, destroy.
People get upset if we remove one ecosystem for another, yet that's just what beavers do.
All animals, including humans, are destructive. Some more than others.
Life, other than humans, has shaped the environment more than we ever have. We didn't used to have o2 in the air before, and its addition caused mass extinction at the time!
(note: I like living, and like my fellow humans, so want to stop large scale climate change... but I think we all need a bigger view sometimes)
By slowing down the flow of water, they reduce the risk of floods during heavy rains and ensure a steady water supply during drier periods.
Diverse wetland habitats increase biodiversity, of both plant and animal species. During heavy rainfall, the dams can slow down and retain water, preventing downstream flooding.
In times of drought, the dams help maintain water levels in streams and wetlands, providing a more stable water supply for plants and wildlife.
Beaver ponds and wetlands can have a cooling effect on the surrounding landscape. The presence of water bodies can moderate local temperatures, reducing the risk of extreme heat events in the area.
Beaver activity promotes soil health by increasing organic matter in wetland areas. The accumulation of organic material can improve soil fertility and water retention, benefiting vegetation and enhancing the overall health of the ecosystem.
In areas where ecosystems have been degraded by human activities like deforestation or mining, beavers can play a role in restoring wetlands and improving the ecological conditions of the region.
an individual beaver has far more environmental impact than an individual human
I wouldn't be so sure of that, if you look at the total impact over an average human's lifespan so including what it takes for food, all the stuff people buy, cars, travel, ... (and not just the land occupied for a house which I think is what you mean)
But my point is, a beaver colony turns a river into a marsh, kills grassland, endless trees both due to flooding and feeding, prevents water from flowing downstream, stops fish from spawning, utterly changing the landscape.
This makes it sound as if this is somehow unnatural, and you're doing that by only highlighting what you consider as the negatives. It's not like these marches are dead, on the contrary. They are just a different type of ecosystem and it's not because it doesn't have trees or grassland (and I'm saying that as a huge grassland lover because in my area there's really not a lot of original grasslands left and most of its inhabitatnts are in serious decline) that it doesn't have its own, rich biodiversity of plants and insects and birds etc which thrive (or even can only survive) in such landscape. Beavers have existed for longer than the current form of humans and have their spot on earth, as do goats in their natural surrounding (not the same as a mass herd held for human food!), even though they might be perceived as doing damage on some scale.
but I think we all need a bigger view sometimes
Exactly, and then you see that beavers have always been there and just because humanity grew they started to be 'in the way' of humans and are getting a bad reputation. Whereas the bigger view would be that beavers just do as they do, but then humans start complaining because the result isn't useful or inhabitable. Which is understandable, but doesn't mean the rhetoric of 'beavers are bad, mkay' is super logical.
I think your argument is even stronger when you consider that a lot of life evolved to specifically thrive in the ecosystems that beavers create. So it's hard for me to argue to limit the beavers from doing just about anything they want.
This makes it sound as if this is somehow unnatural,
No, merely that other species are capable of devastation as well.
The time of biblical reasoning is over, we tend to view the world through that historical optic. We are not separate from nature, as the bible states, we are part of nature, everything we do is natural, as well.
I find it amusing, that some of your arguments are directly counter to environmentalists arguments against hydro electric. Before "green concrete" was discussed, these arguments revolved around damaged ecosystems, blocking fish spawning, and turning forest into lake, and marsh.
All things that beavers do.
This was supposedly bad, because some species would be replaced by others, but apparently it's good, if beavers do so? Some beaver colonies change the environment so much, their impact can be seen from space.
Note that at no point did I say beavers are bad, but here's an example. Where I live, in rural Quebec, there is a mountain range. It hosts 100s of species found no where else.
Some of those species are at risk, as they occupy a small area, from beaver activity.
Beavers are not bad or good, but they are destructive by their very nature. And that means, the result may be bad.
you are not wrong. they can be very destructive. it is why most places keep an eye on them but mostly try to leave them alone. if they get near something like a road and flood it out they get captured and moved.
there are other parts of the US where they are basically extinct. we have literally decimated the beaver population in the US and Canada and are just starting to understand what that means. so some of those places are moving them back in to good effect. those areas have turned into basically deserts. there are no roads are farming near them because the beavers are no longer replenishing the aquifers and those guys left long ago. the fish are long gone because the rivers run dry every year now. once they put them back the fish return the banks start to grow with new growth and the rivers do not run dry every year. the best things that beavers do is what is called water linger. letting the water soak in and help the surrounding area.
in other areas like where you are from they are considered a nuisance because you have enough of them to fill the area up which is your point.
the downside to these sorts of conversations is everyone wants to do 'that one ting' but to properly fix these sorts of things is not planting some trees or dropping a beaver in. you have to have an ecosystem around them that supports that sort of thing. all the way up from the rocks, dirt, microbes, moss, bugs, small animals (birds and rodents), grasses, trees, and larger animals like beavers or foxes or bears. pluck one of those things out and the whole system hurts as there becomes an imbalance and stuff will die out or like you point out overrun the rest of the area. if your area is overrun with something there is probably some sort of imbalance.
>> But my point is, a beaver colony turns a river into a marsh, kills grassland, endless trees both due to flooding and feeding, prevents water from flowing downstream, stops fish from spawning, utterly changing the landscape.
The linked article shows a case where those seem to be good things.
If beavers truly did destroy land, North America would have been a wasteland millennia ago. They may transform the landscape as we see it today, but it is very likely that they’re restoring it in a historical sense.
It depends. In this case, wouldn't the beavers have settled there organically if it wasn't for human intervention? Would the water level be higher or lower?
The local ecosystem that was full of beavers until the last couple hundred years when people removed in a failed attempt to far the place? I think it will do ok.
> “Prior to beaver trapping, beaver dams were just about everywhere in the West. So what we’re attempting to do is to bring beaver dam densities back to historic levels where possible”
How can beaver dams be considered good for the environment but man-made dams get so much resistance despite producing some of the cleanest energy and reducing carbon emissions?
Surely humans know how to design/divert waterways better than a beaver.
"The environment" is a really big subject. It's like saying "How can chemotherapy be considered bad when it actually helps cure cancer?" You can see how in this statement things are confusing because chemotherapy is very dangerous and harmful, but in a bigger picture, it's very helpful and life-saving.
A man-made dam is good for the global environment when it offsets coal burning. A man-made dam is terrible for the local ecosystem when it completely obliterates the local ecosystem by putting it underwater. It also has much more surface area for evaporation than rivers leading to water loss. They also promote extreme anerobic bacteria compared to rivers causing dramatic increase in greenhouse gas production in the water. Dams also prevent rivers from delivering silt, nutrients, and other things that help Ocean ecosystems including reducing the oceans ability to sink carbon. They also can contribute to earthquakes. Finally, once they fall into disrepair, they become a huge dangerous hazard and most countries do not want to pay to maintain and decommission.
So is a dam good or bad? It becomes a question of the net benefit. For the chemotherapy, we say that there is a net positive benefit. For man-made dams, there is a current debate and I won't say what I think.
And finally Beaver dams are often considered good because they are not large-scale. They don't flood a whole region, they just slowly turn a small area into a wetland. They slow down fast-moving streams, reduce erosion, provide buffers against storm surges and help control flooding. Beavers can be a keystone species and a healthy beaver population has a dramatically positive effect on the local ecosystem.
Beaver dams are a serious factor in flood prevention that we mostly removed from our world.
A pond behind a small dam will swell up and hold water when it rains, slowly releasing the water downstream over time. Thousands of such dams add up, leading to a major rainstorm's water taking a longer time to fully dissipate into the rivers downstream. The same total water (almost) will go through the river, but with a lower peak load, and over a longer time.
The rivers are less likely to burst their banks. Homes, towns, cities are saved massive damage.
And as this article shows, the areas behind the dams stay wet much longer, reducing drought and fire risks.
All we have to do is, when possible, let the beavers build their dams.
The counter argument is that the civil engineers didn’t consult with the beavers on where to build their roads either.
There’s going to be some give and take here. If you want the benefit from a natural solution (beavers), you’ll have to work around whatever that solution is.
You should watch Post10 on YouTube. He's a guy who, for fun, cleans out clogged culverts. He'll find some washed out road and then figure out why. The why is usually "beavers."
I don't disagree that they can cause problems. But there are a lot of ways to mitigate the problems.
Biologists can tell you what kinds of locations are good beaver spots - so we shouldn't just build a road too close without some planning. We also shouldn't remove beaver dams so that we can build human structures- the dam will be back soon enough.
And when you do need to build near one, there are lots of techniques to strengthen structures to avoid erosion. My favorite: plant trees. Willows will grow like mad near a pond and their root system will strengthen a bank very well.
Wetlands not only slow water, but they help to purify water by allowing it to move slowly. Plants and gravity do a wonderful job of cleaning water on its way to the sea.
On top of that, forested land is more conducive to rainfall. By allowing these areas to flourish, you not only slow and retain water but increase catchment overall as well. The chance of forest dying in drought decreases, and your chance of rainfall increases (slightly, yet meaningfully when balances are so delicate).
Beavers also produce habitat which benefits many other native species. More water is generally more life in North America.
There are thousands of reasons why beavers building dams is horrible for the environment. General rule of thumb, if humans do something they have better reasons than a wild animal, even if they don't know it or it's not immediately apparent to the naive observer.
One of my favorite recent games - Timberborn - is based on the concept of beaver civilization altering and improving the landscape. Recommended if you like sim/builder games.
These kinds of changes would really benefit from mosquito eradication.
It looks lovely from above, and in a remote location of Idaho there's no one to care, but I'm sure it's absolutely teaming with mosquitoes, a kind of perfect habitat. And a perfect habitat for all sorts of other creatures and plants who bother no one.
It's not just because of beaver trapping that this waterform has been so systematically eliminated; people go to great lengths to remove backwaters just because of mosquitoes. If we made mosquitoes extinct – not just the disease-carrying mosquitoes, but any that bite humans – I think we'd see attitudes change surprisingly quickly, a sudden peace in an ecological war has lasted millenia.
"At field-realistic levels of pollution, neonicotinoids and fipronil generally have negative effects on physiology and survival for a wide range of non-target invertebrates in terrestrial, aquatic, marine and benthic habitats"
It's true that getting rid of mosquitoes won't bring peace between humans and insects. But it would help, and if we could make them extinct then we could avoid all the collateral damage that occurs due to our efforts at partial suppression. Insecticides do more harm than the insects they target do good, so if we could target individual species for extinction (obviously a technological feat, but within the realm of possibility) we'd ultimately have a more diverse and healthy ecology.
I've lived in the mountain west much of my life, and have a fascination with 19th century US history. People nowadays would be shocked to discover how drastically we have altered the climate out here. To be clear, I'm not referring to traditional "climate change," I'm talking about human activity as a result of settling and taming this land.
The amount of grass and trees in the west used to be decent, but the grass was grazed almost to extinction and the trees stripped from nearly everywhere except mountain passes by the pioneers and early settlers. There used to be large meadows and forests around in the valleys and mountain summits, but now they are barren wastelands. For a specific example, look up the history of Mountain Meadows. It has a major stain in history from the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but think about the landscape and climate. At the time it was a lush meadow with plentiful water, grass, and trees. Now it's a barren wasteland because of overgrazing and stripping.
This activity is a sunk cost, but was also necessary to settle here (given the tech and understanding at the time), and I don't begrudge them doing what they needed to survive.
Life was hard. But, we should be seriously trying to restore things to the way they were for thousands of years. Anyone who has tried to grow stuff out here understands the cycle. When trees are present, grasses and other plants fluorish underneath them. You can have a lightly forested field with grasses and other things, but when you cut the trees down it becomes a barren wasteland where even new trees can't grow because they can't get deep enough roots to survive the summer. It took nature thousands, millions of years to slowly spread the trees and grasses around because moving one tree closer to barren land takes almost a generation. Cutting them down devastates that overnight.
It would benefit everyone in many ways to restore things to the way nature had them before we got here. Doing so would make a much more beautiful place for not only our children and granchildren, but us.
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[ 151 ms ] story [ 3229 ms ] threadMy parents let the beavers restore a low lying area on their property back to marsh. But he still had to put in a kind of escape valve pipe (with some tricks to stop the beavers from plugging it) or it would flood out a very large area near their home.
And he has to do some population control on them, too, or they just continue flooding all the surrounding areas.
It's good people are overt "yea I like it overall but it has issues" because pretending there are no issues is silly.
People who don't want to do it will magnify the cost side issues to the expense of benefit. People who want to do it will minify.
There is, unfortunately a perception of nature being a naturally-balancing system. But it's really not. It's dynamic, constantly changing, and beavers can be a real chaos wildcard, creating outcomes that can modify hundreds, even thousands, of acres of land.
It's no coincidence that alongside commercial fishing, farming has a horrendous accident rate.
If e.g. you have any livestock much over the size of a chicken your near 80yo parent could be at significant risk from unexpected animal behaviour. Cattle yards cause horrific crush injury.
I've had some arborvitae shrubs for years that were left completely alone... Up until this last winter, when one day they were all destroyed, practically right down to the ground. There wasn't a shortage of food, and these weren't good for den building- there's acres of forest between my house and the closest den anyway.
All of our trees along the river bank have to be wrapped in chicken wire to keep the critters away. There's thousands of others along the river banks to choose from; I can only guess they like that the trees are in open lawn rather than surrounded by taller grasses or ferns.
I would not describe this as 'strange ways'. It's herbivores eating tasty plants.
We have many hostas and other plants deer typically go for that are left completely alone. The loss of the arborvitaes just seemed really random.
Other than that, the only problem we have had with wildlife in the past 5 years it so is remembering to not leave bird feed out over night- either the black bears or raccoons will steal it rather promptly.
He goes around clearing out culverts and other drainage ways, including ones blocked by beavers.
The water level difference can easily be over a foot, with water overflowing an embankment and causing erosion damage.
Without the beaver dams, the drains would be able to handle a heavy rain.
Huh? Are you talking about the legal quirks of some particular place? Because there are plenty of practical measures.
For example: Trapping the beavers, for relocation or some other fate); protecting trees with fencing or a sand/paint mix they dislike; putting in some cage-protected piping that limits the water-level in their dam; and various techniques to prevent beavers from blocking culverts and drains.
Interestingly, beaver dam-building instincts are affected by the sound of rushing water (rather than a detailed understanding of flows and pressure) which means there's some acoustic engineering that can be done to prevent them from perceiving dam-opportunities.
Everyone demands rights but not many care about the responsibilities like taking care of nature. Sad reality
And if you want to do something good for birds, ideally you do something good for insects.
Otherwise it strongly depends what kinds of birds you feed.
I think a reasonable reading of the first comment understood all that.
When food is scarce (winter) it may be a different story, though. And water fountains in the summer are good not only for the birds, but for other wildlife as well.
Our farming practices (deforestation, pesticide/herbicide use, insect die offs ...) and diet preferences are driving many species, including birds, to extinction.
We could significantly reduce the damage by restructuring our diets; however, not many people seem to care about that.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.birdlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SOWB2022...
1 in 8 bird species is facing extinction
https://www.salon.com/2020/08/18/the-pesticide-that-caused-b...
The pesticide that caused bee colonies to collapse is killing birds now
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2023/april/almost-half-o...
Almost half of all UK bird species in decline
https://emagazine.com/bird-population-declines/
Bird Populations Declining Fast Across North America
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/2-out-of-3-north-american-...
2 out of 3 North American bird species face extinction
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216573120
Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
This avoids having to convince people to deny themselves their preferred foods, and arguably, reduce their quality of life, to protect natural habitats. It's a better strategy for both humanity and nature.
I’m curious what you think of that paper and what it would change about your suggested solution.
[1] https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf
At civilizational-scales, it's doable.
So is abolishment of animal agriculture subsidies and large scale afforestation projects.
In the end nothing will get done.
As for convincing governments to protect more forests: that be will be vastly easier if abundant energy and a multitude of vertical farms makes horizontal farms less competitive in the market, and results in a situation where protecting forests won't come at the expense of the income/purchasing-power of citizens.
Without subsidies animal ag is deeply unprofitable. Removing them and taxing the negative externalities "properly" would mean the price of such products would be a multiple of what it's now, so it would be out of reach for most of the population.
> that be will be vastly easier if abundant energy
Yes, it would. But we don't have it at the moment, and it will require a lot of fossil fuels and time to get there.
At the same time EROI of fossil fuels is falling down. It's at 5 IIRC, down from more that 100+ at the start of the previous century - meaning that previously for every 1 barrel of oil invested into extraction you'd get 100-150 barrels back, now it's about 5 barrels. Soon it could become unprofitable to extract more oil, as it would cost more energy to get it out of the ground that what would be gained, no matter how much is still in the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_energy_gain#Examples
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
There is no history of consumption being artificially restricted at a global scale. A few socialist countries have managed it, and everyone there wants to escape.
In an era of exponentially expanding abilities, we should be massively increasing clean energy output through technologies like nuclear reactors.
Note that nobody in this conversation has disagreed about the virtues of building more nuclear power. The observation is solely that you’re asking for something that’s substantially harder than anything else humanity has ever done while handwaving everything else away. That just isn’t good argumentation.
>The observation is solely that you’re asking for something that’s substantially harder than anything else humanity has ever done while handwaving everything else away. That just isn’t good argumentation.
I think mass-production of nuclear reactors and vertical farms (to give a couple of examples) is substantially easier and more realistic than coordinating global caps and reductions in consumptions through mandatory limits on private industries and citizens.
No, we're not. We can't increase consumption indefinitely in a finite environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Recent_Warni...
> no history of consumption being artificially restricted at a global scale
There have never been 8 billion people on the planet.
> we should be massively increasing clean energy
Agree, but that alone won't solve it.
We are nowhere near the limits of the finite environnment. Once we reach those limits, growth will naturally slow and stop, with no activism required.
>There have never been 8 billion people on the planet.
With that many people, it's even harder to coordinate a unanimous reduction in meat consumption.
>Agree, but that alone won't solve it.
Why won't an increase clean energy production alone solve it?
Yes, you're true. We're so far behind them we can't see the line anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Humans (read it)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#/media/File:...
> Once we reach those limits, growth will naturally slow and stop
It's already stopping. What comes next is the rapid decline of the carrying capacity of the environment and the collapse of the species dependent on that environment.
> With that many people, it's even harder to coordinate a unanimous reduction in meat consumption
No, see my previous comment. Every country on earth has animal ag subsidies, although animal ag is a leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, atmospheric pollution (15-25%), eutrophication, soil erosion, and overfishing, all things that dangerously degrade our likelihood to survive. It's more bad then people usually realize.
There's already 80% less insects (in last 25 years), and 90% of sharks are missing (meaning the collapse of fishing populations is on the horizon). Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...
More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene defaunation through the diversity of population trends
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974
> Why won't an increase clean energy production alone solve it?
The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...
UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
+ thousands of similar studies
Your analysis underestimates the adaptability and technological capabilities of human civilization. We can continue to expand even as the natural ecosystem is destroyed.
So a better way to protect natural environments, than pushing for reductions and caps on consumption, is to provide an alternative path for development that protects the environment while allowing even more economic growth.
And that's supposed to be a good thing?
> We can continue to expand even as the natural ecosystem is destroyed
No, without the ecosystem we're done. Not much of it remains.
> is to provide an alternative path for development that protects the environment while allowing even more economic growth
Not enough time before last pieces are gone.
What's about the economic growth that you find so valuable? Don't you see that money are just stupid tokens in a very stupid game? That the economy is rigged? That healthy environment is much more valuable than ... what? Tons of plastic everywhere and elevator music in a supermarket? Do you have children? How do you explain to them that we don't have forests and wild animals anymore because you've loved burgers and big cars too much? But honey look how rich I got. You'd really rather have blade runner than star trek future?
You win. This I cannot comprehend. Over and out.
It negates the appeal you could make to people that their standard of living will decline unless they accept steep cuts now. If people's consumption can grow in the face of ecological disaster, then there's nothing to suggest it won't continue to grow as the natural environment continued to be paved over.
>>Not enough time before last pieces are gone.
I think it will take less time than convincing all the major economies to institute caps on meat eating.
I'm not saying that the environment should not be protected. I'm arguing that the most effective path for doing that is to go full bore toward expanding the production of clean energy, especially from the source that seem the most capable of fully replacing baseline fossil fuel based power plants, which is nuclear reactors.
It should not be a choice between consumption and the environment. I consider both to be good things, all other things being equal, and I would like to see both maximized. High levels of production/consumption means more enjoyable lives with more opportunity, and lower poverty.
I'm vegan ... my quality of life isn't lower because of it.
When people switch, they realize they've been taking something that wasn't theirs in the first place.
> it will take less time than convincing all the major economies to institute caps on meat eating
We'll see.
> High levels of production/consumption means more enjoyable lives
70% of people in US are on antidepressants.
High consumption != more enjoyable lives
> High levels of production
Production is not just and only energy.
High levels of production = more destruction (mining), more pollution (almost always), more exploitation
> more opportunity, and lower poverty
Degrowth, basic income, free housing & healthcare. Problem solved.
If you're making a reference to the life of the farm animal: that's an entirely different argument.
Right now we're debating whether natural habitats can be protected while current consumption patterns are maintained and ramped up.
>High consumption != more enjoyable lives
1. High consumption means less death. Per capita production/consumption is strongly correlated with life expectancy.
2. People consistently choose high consumption when given a choice, so even if you want to use a definitin of happiness that is not aligned with the way of life people choose, the fact remains that high consumption is the preferred way of life, as expressed by people's choices.
>High levels of production = more destruction (mining), more pollution (almost always), more exploitation
There is asteroid mining and recycling as alternatives to mining the Earth's crust. The damage of mining can also be reduced with precision techniques and through rehabilitation of old mines.
Another possibility is to compensate for the damage done by a mine by artificially enhancing other habitats to make them more vital, e.g. use some of the revenue generated by a mine to create an artificial lake to create more wetlands, to make up for the environmental damage done by the mine.
>Degrowth, basic income, free housing & healthcare. Problem solved.
The world doesn't produce enough to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing.
We need far more production for that. And you can see that for yourself by just looking at the global per capita GDP and seeing that it's ~$18,000, and then looking up to see what goods/services that level of income can afford each person.
And innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity of human civilization.
Raising productivity is a moral imperative. The degrowth ideological narrative is utterly baseless in its economic rationale.
That's not an argument, that's just a remark.
> Right now we're debating whether natural habitats can be protected while current consumption patterns are maintained and ramped up
Not with animal agriculture in the world we have (population growth, developing regions, overshoot, existing levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss etc.).
> high consumption is the preferred way of life, as expressed by people's choices
I don't think people have much choice to live how they'd like. Their choices are being forced by the system. Many would choose something else if it was possible.
> The world doesn't produce enough to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing
> per capita GDP and seeing that it's ~$18,000
If we're discussing UBI and degrowth, we must consider abolishing money as we know it now for various reasons.
Firstly, economics is not what most people think it is; it's a pseudoscience with imprecise models that often ignore negative externalities, such as environmental impacts, GDP is a meaningless metric, and the entire financial system is rigged.
Why is it rigged? A significant portion of the money in the economy is credit/debt, created by banks when someone takes out a loan. There is a premium on this money that must be paid, usually a few percent every year, and this leads to exponential growth. However, exponential growth is unsustainable in a finite environment like ours. While space and other planets might be options in the future, currently, this planet is all we have.
Around 40-70% of people are employed in bullshit jobs. These jobs are unnecessary or even harmful, consuming resources for commuting and job-related needs. People are forced to pretend they contribute just to secure a place to live and food in their fridge.
> to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing
Yet (almost) nobody dies of hunger (in our countries, anyway, nor should they) and (almost) everyone has a roof over his head, when the day ends. It's all a matter of distribution. We already produce enough food for 10B people, and e.g. US has enough free flats for every homeless person (and then some).
The problem is distribution, nothing else. Money doesn't work well in this regard.
> innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity
Scientists would still work even with UBI. Doctors would too, as well as teachers and artists. They are all motivated by factors other than money. And they would be compensated too.
Currently, only 2% of people are employed in agriculture (and provide food for the 98%). However, even if we needed 6% for a more sustainable plant-based agricultural food production, under UBI, we could find individuals who would be happy to move from meaningless jobs to work in nature. People are not doing this now because they need to sustain themselves, and the current system doesn't allow for it. Money is not an accurate measure of value; we learned this when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and we realized that some sectors are more valuable than their compensation suggests.
Other sectors would also require people to work, and there would be different incentives, such as societal appreciation, travel credits, or the opportunity to switch from an apartment to a house with a bigger garden. We would find suitable motivations for individuals to contribute to these sectors.
> Raising productivity is a moral imperative
Degrowth is a moral imperative. Wait. You've been talking about production/consumption earlier, now about productivity. Those are not the same things.
https:&#...
Not this very instant of course, but nothing on that scale—including your plan of capping/reducing meat consumption—can be done in an instant.
A transition to mass-nuclear-power and vertical farms would dramatically reduce the damage human civilization does to natural habitats while enabling massively more consumption.
>I don't think people have much choice to live how they'd like.
People having a choice between more consumption and less consumption is ubiquitous, and people almost always choose the former, because it almost always confers a higher standard of living.
This idea that you have that a higher standard of living is possible with less consumption shows your ideas are removed from reality.
>If we're discussing UBI and degrowth, we must consider abolishing money as we know it now for various reasons.
I was using money as a yardstick for the value of economic resources consumed by each individual. If we eliminated money and moved to the Communism that it is now apparent you support, the economy would collapse, and we'd see mass-impoverishment.
Money enables far more sophisticated economic coordination than would otherwise be possible. It is one of the important innovations in human history:
https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
>Firstly, economics is not what most people think it is; it's a pseudoscience with imprecise models that often ignore negative externalities, such as environmental impacts, GDP is a meaningless metric, and the entire financial system is rigged.
Conspiracy theories like this form the basis of any fringe movement.
>Why is it rigged? A significant portion of the money in the economy is credit/debt, created by banks when someone takes out a loan.
This is a misguided trope. Money is created by issuing credit against real world assets, like houses. This enables larger-scale economic coordination as people with surplus resources are able to invest those resources in enterprises in need of resources that raise future productivity.
>Around 40-70% of people are employed in bullshit jobs. These jobs are unnecessary or even harmful, consuming resources for commuting and job-related needs.
These are speculative theories, and on the basis of this speculation, you're making massive leaps of logic about how the world works.
Next time you advocate a reduction in meat eating, you should disclose the fact that your advocacy is premised on conspiracy theories and radical social plans, like economics being a pseudoscience used to legitimize exploitation, and eliminating money and substituting it with central economic planning bureaus being the best way forward, respectively.
People deserve to know that the basis of the changes you advocate are fringe theories utterly rejected by mainstream Economics.
>Yet (almost) nobody dies of hunger (in our countries, anyway, nor should they) and (almost) everyone has a roof over his head, when the day ends. It's all a matter of distribution.
People die from the daily grind associated with privation, in the form of non-existent or sub-standard housing, processed low-nutrition food, or the long-commutes and physically punishing jobs needed to avoid that privation.
>The problem is distribution, nothing else.
A portion of goods produced will always be lost to waste. Your solution of nationalizing all production in the name of better distribution would still have sources of waste, and it would destroy the complex interconnected web of private arrangements that incentivize and sust...
Our civilization is an extemely complex system.
I appreciate it as much as you do, but its negative externalities endanger both our continued existence and the health of our environment.
The system's rules also harbor numerous inefficiencies and injustices.
You might not agree, but I believe we should address as many of these issues as we can, and do so urgently.
You might feel that minor adjustments to the system are sufficient or that technological progress will eventually provide solutions.
I'm genuinely concerned that such an approach isn't feasible. From my perspective, we need to overhaul the system's rules and reboot it.
Anything less is superficial and inadequate. It might postpone the inevitable decline, but eventually, it will crumble, much like Rome or a Jenga tower.
If you can move beyond the beliefs like the "current system is an immutable physical reality and best possible version" and "anything other than capitalism equals communism," and start to consider even a fraction of the challenges we face — delving deeper and aiming for the system's ideal state (while being wary of local optima) — you'll realize that transformative changes are crucial.
I studied economics in college long time ago and now view much of it as a safeguard, an upholder of status quo, as overly simplistic, even naive. I've lived in both socialism and capitalism, and each of those systems has its own, serious problems. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I'm convinced that addressing the systemic issues is the key to resolving our problems.
I wish I had the time to write a more concise or refined comment. I'm sorry, but unfortunately, I don't. Thank you for the discussion.
Report: https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022
As growing climate change impacts are experienced across the globe, the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall is unambiguous. Yet the Emissions Gap Report (EGR) 2022: The Closing Window – Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies finds that the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.
Those (if you want the latter at a survivable level, without some kind of coercion for the able to work with UBI removing the normal financial coercion of capitalist economy) are mutually incompatible.
If you want a viable strong safety net, especially with UBI, you can’t have degrowth.
You mean vertical farms like this one (or soon two)?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-2...
> We could raise consumption while expanding the area of protected wetlands
There are many more problems with animal ag, not just the area.
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot. Agriculture is a key culprit in 5 out of 7 of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
Most of those are area-related. If we didn't need to cover so much of the planet with crops grown to be feedstock for farm animals, those problems would vanish.
We don't need to cover ...
We could switch to plant based diets and free upto 80% of all agriculture lands, some 35% of habitable earth, the area a size of Africa, and reforest/rewild that.
That's probably the only feasible option we have at this moment to stop us from environmental collapse.
Your solution is technological in nature. While theoretically possible, it doesn't meet the timescale and amount required.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectare. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6
Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation. Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.
Soil erosion -> agriculture
Pollution -> farm runoff, eutrophication, pesticides/herbicides, greenhouse gases ...
Climate change -> CO2 + methane + N20 -> 15-26% from agriculture
Overfishing -> Empty seas in 2040's -> veganism
Deforestation & biodiversity loss -> mainly driven by agriculture -> 80% of agriculture is animal ag (pastures) -> veganism
Mass-production is something human civilization has proven adept at, and mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that.
This could easily be solved by removing animal ag subsidies and with taxing of negative externalities.
That's one law, the market (= higher prices) will take care of the rest.
> people in the developing world are consuming more meat as their incomes rise
I'm aware :) However, that made sense when there were 1 B of humans, not when our needs overshoot the environmental capacity of our environment. If everyone ate like we westerners do (and they will want to, when we still do) then we'd need something like 4-5 earths to sustain everyone.
> mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that
Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
Abolishment of animal ag subsidies is a piece of paper and few signatures.
Considering how strong people's preference for meat are, you could raise prices and inevitably demand will start growing again when incomes rise sufficiently.
>>Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
The resources needed to build those out will be more than made up for by the resources saved from switching to an abundant non-CO2/pollutant emitting energy system.
We could just stop massively subsidizing things like corn and meat.
The easiest way is to just freeze them and let inflation remove them; nobody will intentionally start farming corn if the subsidy remained at the original dollar amount.
How so??
To prevent that, the government tries to convince farmers NOT to grow whatever crop they think there will be too much of, and pays them to fallow fields.
It's memed as "paid not to farm" but it's much more complicated than that, and it's not a guaranteed money-maker (seen by the absolute demise of the small farm over the last 50 years).
Why would we do that instead of buy the soybeans at market rates and then send them to countries as aid?
The latter is done for some products in various ways but that's a more fine-grained solution (which destroys poor countries agriculture entirely, which is another horror story).
Government Cheese™ literally comes from the government buying up milk and having to do SOMETHING with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese
Literal Rodents of unusual size and very ill tempered
Although I'm not sure what OP refers to, other than them being a top predator.
I mean, wolves and foxes can wreak havoc on farm animals, but at least they don't turn your land into a swamp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ic7FyZV0M0
A healthy ecosystem provides enough shelter to the preys for sustaining both preys and predator. It does not modify the ecosystem in the way than a beaver does. Not even close.
I do, however, understand why it makes sense to keep some animals out of ones home.
For example, it is very hard to build these days, without environmental assessments. The days are long gone, at least where I am, where you can build waterfront property and clear the shoreline of reeds and such.
Which is fine!
But my point is, a beaver colony turns a river into a marsh, kills grassland, endless trees both due to flooding and feeding, prevents water from flowing downstream, stops fish from spawning, utterly changing the landscape.
If left unchallenged, they would do as goats do, destroy.
People get upset if we remove one ecosystem for another, yet that's just what beavers do.
All animals, including humans, are destructive. Some more than others.
Life, other than humans, has shaped the environment more than we ever have. We didn't used to have o2 in the air before, and its addition caused mass extinction at the time!
(note: I like living, and like my fellow humans, so want to stop large scale climate change... but I think we all need a bigger view sometimes)
Do not equate goats and beavers, their impact is not the same.
Goat (and cattle) herds overgraze vegetation and kill the soil microbime by it, prevent afforestation and exacerbate soil erosion and desertification.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316721412_Blame_it_...
https://epar.evans.uw.edu/research/environmental-implication...
Beavers create wetlands - highly effective carbon sinks.
By slowing down the flow of water, they reduce the risk of floods during heavy rains and ensure a steady water supply during drier periods.
Diverse wetland habitats increase biodiversity, of both plant and animal species. During heavy rainfall, the dams can slow down and retain water, preventing downstream flooding.
In times of drought, the dams help maintain water levels in streams and wetlands, providing a more stable water supply for plants and wildlife.
Beaver ponds and wetlands can have a cooling effect on the surrounding landscape. The presence of water bodies can moderate local temperatures, reducing the risk of extreme heat events in the area.
Beaver activity promotes soil health by increasing organic matter in wetland areas. The accumulation of organic material can improve soil fertility and water retention, benefiting vegetation and enhancing the overall health of the ecosystem.
In areas where ecosystems have been degraded by human activities like deforestation or mining, beavers can play a role in restoring wetlands and improving the ecological conditions of the region.
> we all need a bigger view sometimes
Certainly.
I wouldn't be so sure of that, if you look at the total impact over an average human's lifespan so including what it takes for food, all the stuff people buy, cars, travel, ... (and not just the land occupied for a house which I think is what you mean)
But my point is, a beaver colony turns a river into a marsh, kills grassland, endless trees both due to flooding and feeding, prevents water from flowing downstream, stops fish from spawning, utterly changing the landscape.
This makes it sound as if this is somehow unnatural, and you're doing that by only highlighting what you consider as the negatives. It's not like these marches are dead, on the contrary. They are just a different type of ecosystem and it's not because it doesn't have trees or grassland (and I'm saying that as a huge grassland lover because in my area there's really not a lot of original grasslands left and most of its inhabitatnts are in serious decline) that it doesn't have its own, rich biodiversity of plants and insects and birds etc which thrive (or even can only survive) in such landscape. Beavers have existed for longer than the current form of humans and have their spot on earth, as do goats in their natural surrounding (not the same as a mass herd held for human food!), even though they might be perceived as doing damage on some scale.
but I think we all need a bigger view sometimes
Exactly, and then you see that beavers have always been there and just because humanity grew they started to be 'in the way' of humans and are getting a bad reputation. Whereas the bigger view would be that beavers just do as they do, but then humans start complaining because the result isn't useful or inhabitable. Which is understandable, but doesn't mean the rhetoric of 'beavers are bad, mkay' is super logical.
No, merely that other species are capable of devastation as well.
The time of biblical reasoning is over, we tend to view the world through that historical optic. We are not separate from nature, as the bible states, we are part of nature, everything we do is natural, as well.
I find it amusing, that some of your arguments are directly counter to environmentalists arguments against hydro electric. Before "green concrete" was discussed, these arguments revolved around damaged ecosystems, blocking fish spawning, and turning forest into lake, and marsh.
All things that beavers do.
This was supposedly bad, because some species would be replaced by others, but apparently it's good, if beavers do so? Some beaver colonies change the environment so much, their impact can be seen from space.
Note that at no point did I say beavers are bad, but here's an example. Where I live, in rural Quebec, there is a mountain range. It hosts 100s of species found no where else.
Some of those species are at risk, as they occupy a small area, from beaver activity.
Beavers are not bad or good, but they are destructive by their very nature. And that means, the result may be bad.
there are other parts of the US where they are basically extinct. we have literally decimated the beaver population in the US and Canada and are just starting to understand what that means. so some of those places are moving them back in to good effect. those areas have turned into basically deserts. there are no roads are farming near them because the beavers are no longer replenishing the aquifers and those guys left long ago. the fish are long gone because the rivers run dry every year now. once they put them back the fish return the banks start to grow with new growth and the rivers do not run dry every year. the best things that beavers do is what is called water linger. letting the water soak in and help the surrounding area.
in other areas like where you are from they are considered a nuisance because you have enough of them to fill the area up which is your point.
the downside to these sorts of conversations is everyone wants to do 'that one ting' but to properly fix these sorts of things is not planting some trees or dropping a beaver in. you have to have an ecosystem around them that supports that sort of thing. all the way up from the rocks, dirt, microbes, moss, bugs, small animals (birds and rodents), grasses, trees, and larger animals like beavers or foxes or bears. pluck one of those things out and the whole system hurts as there becomes an imbalance and stuff will die out or like you point out overrun the rest of the area. if your area is overrun with something there is probably some sort of imbalance.
The linked article shows a case where those seem to be good things.
Saying you don't like it when people say that an animal destroyed something is also an expression of an aesthetic preference.
Except they aren't literally rodents. They are mustelids.
Not particularly destructive or constructive, apart of its common environmental services as predator.
I’m not familiar with the area but wouldn’t this impact local ecosystem? In my opinion more of anything is bad
-- The Battle Cry of 2023
Surely humans know how to design/divert waterways better than a beaver.
A man-made dam is good for the global environment when it offsets coal burning. A man-made dam is terrible for the local ecosystem when it completely obliterates the local ecosystem by putting it underwater. It also has much more surface area for evaporation than rivers leading to water loss. They also promote extreme anerobic bacteria compared to rivers causing dramatic increase in greenhouse gas production in the water. Dams also prevent rivers from delivering silt, nutrients, and other things that help Ocean ecosystems including reducing the oceans ability to sink carbon. They also can contribute to earthquakes. Finally, once they fall into disrepair, they become a huge dangerous hazard and most countries do not want to pay to maintain and decommission.
So is a dam good or bad? It becomes a question of the net benefit. For the chemotherapy, we say that there is a net positive benefit. For man-made dams, there is a current debate and I won't say what I think.
And finally Beaver dams are often considered good because they are not large-scale. They don't flood a whole region, they just slowly turn a small area into a wetland. They slow down fast-moving streams, reduce erosion, provide buffers against storm surges and help control flooding. Beavers can be a keystone species and a healthy beaver population has a dramatically positive effect on the local ecosystem.
Human dams are also an obstacle to migration and cause habitat fragmentation.
A pond behind a small dam will swell up and hold water when it rains, slowly releasing the water downstream over time. Thousands of such dams add up, leading to a major rainstorm's water taking a longer time to fully dissipate into the rivers downstream. The same total water (almost) will go through the river, but with a lower peak load, and over a longer time.
The rivers are less likely to burst their banks. Homes, towns, cities are saved massive damage.
And as this article shows, the areas behind the dams stay wet much longer, reducing drought and fire risks.
All we have to do is, when possible, let the beavers build their dams.
It's an issue for rural roads that get eroded and washed out.
There’s going to be some give and take here. If you want the benefit from a natural solution (beavers), you’ll have to work around whatever that solution is.
Biologists can tell you what kinds of locations are good beaver spots - so we shouldn't just build a road too close without some planning. We also shouldn't remove beaver dams so that we can build human structures- the dam will be back soon enough.
And when you do need to build near one, there are lots of techniques to strengthen structures to avoid erosion. My favorite: plant trees. Willows will grow like mad near a pond and their root system will strengthen a bank very well.
On top of that, forested land is more conducive to rainfall. By allowing these areas to flourish, you not only slow and retain water but increase catchment overall as well. The chance of forest dying in drought decreases, and your chance of rainfall increases (slightly, yet meaningfully when balances are so delicate).
Beavers also produce habitat which benefits many other native species. More water is generally more life in North America.
/s
What is this rule based on?
It looks lovely from above, and in a remote location of Idaho there's no one to care, but I'm sure it's absolutely teaming with mosquitoes, a kind of perfect habitat. And a perfect habitat for all sorts of other creatures and plants who bother no one.
It's not just because of beaver trapping that this waterform has been so systematically eliminated; people go to great lengths to remove backwaters just because of mosquitoes. If we made mosquitoes extinct – not just the disease-carrying mosquitoes, but any that bite humans – I think we'd see attitudes change surprisingly quickly, a sudden peace in an ecological war has lasted millenia.
Fact is, removing insect biomass using neonicotinide insecticides has had major negative impacts on North American biodiversity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4284392/
I had to reread it 3 times to work out what you meant.
teem, verb (gerund or present participle: teeming) be full of or swarming with. "every garden is teeming with wildlife"
team, verb (gerund or present participle: teaming) come together as a team to achieve a common goal. "he teamed up with the band to produce the disc"
I then closed the site. Too bad one can't downvote posts.
The amount of grass and trees in the west used to be decent, but the grass was grazed almost to extinction and the trees stripped from nearly everywhere except mountain passes by the pioneers and early settlers. There used to be large meadows and forests around in the valleys and mountain summits, but now they are barren wastelands. For a specific example, look up the history of Mountain Meadows. It has a major stain in history from the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but think about the landscape and climate. At the time it was a lush meadow with plentiful water, grass, and trees. Now it's a barren wasteland because of overgrazing and stripping.
This activity is a sunk cost, but was also necessary to settle here (given the tech and understanding at the time), and I don't begrudge them doing what they needed to survive. Life was hard. But, we should be seriously trying to restore things to the way they were for thousands of years. Anyone who has tried to grow stuff out here understands the cycle. When trees are present, grasses and other plants fluorish underneath them. You can have a lightly forested field with grasses and other things, but when you cut the trees down it becomes a barren wasteland where even new trees can't grow because they can't get deep enough roots to survive the summer. It took nature thousands, millions of years to slowly spread the trees and grasses around because moving one tree closer to barren land takes almost a generation. Cutting them down devastates that overnight.
It would benefit everyone in many ways to restore things to the way nature had them before we got here. Doing so would make a much more beautiful place for not only our children and granchildren, but us.