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posted by mrpg on Wednesday October 31 2018, @02:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-fed-up-with-humans dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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."


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:24AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:24AM (#756295)

    Chemical companies who produced fun things like DDT.

    They never stopped producing "fun things." They have gotten better at spin control.

    Throw in a bit of global climate change, poaching for ivory and trophies and such

    That's like comparing apples and strange quarks. Sure, poachers are a problem what needs fixin, preferably Capt. Malcom Reynolds style, but... if you're looking at the big picture, the advertising agencies, media (TV/movies) and urban planners who drove popular demand for automobiles and McMansions in the suburbs have done many orders of magnitude more damage to the ecosystem than all the poachers of the last 4 centuries combined.

    We have to address whether it's "people" who killed off all these species, or particular industries.

    No, assignment of blame is neither required, nor terribly productive. What we need to do is reverse the trends driving us towards oblivion, whether that involves villification and public beheadings of those who profited from the institutions of the past or not really isn't important at all.

    Agriculture, Chemicals, Lumber, Coal, Oil, Steel, Nuclear, Computers, Communications, and dozens of other industries contributed to the ecological destruction of the past two centuries - they can also help to stem the tide and get us out of the mess that they helped to create. EVERYTHING needs to scale back and make clean, healthy, liveable space for the ecosystems that are rapidly collapsing, but nothing in particular needs to be banned or returned to Amish levels of development.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 01 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday November 01 2018, @05:20PM (#756522)

    No, assignment of blame is neither required, nor terribly productive.

    The point of assigning blame is to rebut any charges of "It's so *unfair* that you're making so-and-so pay to address this problem." Nope: You did this, you made a bunch of cash off of it, you need to pay to fix it.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 01 2018, @08:16PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday November 01 2018, @08:16PM (#756594)

      you need to pay to fix it.

      Economically speaking, whether you print money from the treasury or pry it from the deep coffers of the rich hoarders of cash, there's not a whole lot of difference to the world economy's reaction to the change. Penalizing Darren W. Woods $50M just means that he has $50M less free cash on hand to direct the people of the world to do other things, you might call it poetic justice but in terms of actually getting things done, I'd rather move the projects forward on spec rather than waiting for the results of a witch hunt to produce some numbers in a spreadsheet saying that the projects are funded.

      It is much more important to do the things that need doing (which, in this case, mostly involves making sure that things aren't being done...) rather than have a list of those deemed responsible for the sad state of current affairs.

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