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Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds.
Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world's foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.
The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.
"We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff" said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. "If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done."
"This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is," he said. "This is actually now jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not a 'nice to have' – it is our life-support system."
(Score: 2, Disagree) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 01 2018, @01:28AM (2 children)
We've run that experiment for ~70 years now. Result: population tripled, number living in poverty more than tripled, and the ecosystem is on a fast track to never never land.
There were the world wars, there was the cold war, what we are waging right now without even acknowledging it is war on every other species on the planet - all out subjugation, enslavement, harvesting and even worse: strip mining style devastation of any species not homo sapiens. The other side of this war doesn't participate in our economy, they hold no currency, no voting rights, and they have the weakest of representation in our legislative processes: representation via under-funded proxies painted as the eco-nut kooky fringe of society.
When this is over, if there is any kind of accurate history of it recorded, it will be "the big event" before the transformation to the next era. Whether that is the era of birth control (difficult to imagine), rapid expansion space colonization (unlikely), or ecological collapse (current front runner) is up to us.
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(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday November 01 2018, @10:57AM (1 child)
> We've run that experiment for ~70 years now. Result: population tripled, number living in poverty more than tripled, and the ecosystem is on a fast track to never never land.
No we haven't, we have never run such an experiment. In fact we have been doing the opposite, globally, because It is too unpalatable and inhumane to leave it to "the free market". The results you speak of are precisely because we cannot bring ourselves to be so callous and brutal, and instead build out welfare states and provide all kinds of healthcare and aid to support the poorest, with the result that they have population explosions (see Africa for an example).
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it is a good idea to have a "dog-eat-dog" cruel world, indeed if you read my original post I point out why it would not work, even if we agreed to such a inhumane society.
> Whether that is the era of birth control (difficult to imagine), rapid expansion space colonization (unlikely), or ecological collapse (current front runner) is up to us.
I doubt any of those three will happen (ecological collapse most likely of the three though). I think we would have a societal and economic collapse before any of those three kick off (we are already reaching unsustainable debt levels, and we still haven't left the 2008 crisis, it is just being dragged along by money printing, but even that is coming to an end). There is a good chance it may occur with a war (great to have a foreign "enemy" to distract the locals about their situation, and have someone else to blame). When people cannot afford to feed themselves or their kids, we will see a slowdown in population growth.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 01 2018, @12:15PM
By all accounts, the sixth mass extinction event has already happened, the only question is how deep it's going to go before it bottoms out.
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