from the real-world-following-the-movies dept.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4
Up to one million plant and animal species face extinction, many within decades, because of human activities, says the most comprehensive report yet on the state of global ecosystems.
Without drastic action to conserve habitats, the rate of species extinction — already tens to hundreds of times higher than the average across the past ten million years — will only increase, says the analysis. The findings come from a United Nations-backed panel called the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
According to the report, agricultural activities have had the largest impact on ecosystems that people depend on for food, clean water and a stable climate. The loss of species and habitats poses as much a danger to life on Earth as climate change does, says a summary of the work, released on 6 May.
The analysis distils findings from nearly 15,000 studies and government reports, integrating information from the natural and social sciences, Indigenous peoples and traditional agricultural communities. It is the first major international appraisal of biodiversity since 2005. Representatives of 132 governments met last week in Paris to finalize and approve the analysis.
Biodiversity should be at the top of the global agenda alongside climate, said Anne Larigauderie, IPBES executive secretary, at a 6 May press conference in Paris, France. "We can no longer say that we did not know," she said.
"We have never had a single unified statement from the world's governments that unambiguously makes clear the crisis we are facing for life on Earth," says Thomas Brooks, chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland, who helped to edit the biodiversity analysis. "That is really the absolutely key novelty that we see here."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday June 12 2019, @03:52PM (39 children)
Nobody wants to address the real issue: population.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @03:57PM (15 children)
Any kind of possible "addressing the real issue: population" is racist, by mode of operation. Which tribe of population do you mean to address?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:03PM (7 children)
Homo sapien.
It is not a racist topic by default, but racists sure will want to use the idea to promote their favored genocide.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:08PM (3 children)
And the Catholic church has been willing to endorse "holy wars" in the past, but can't even stomach the idea of condoms let alone abortion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:56PM
A defensive war is sometimes needed
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:03PM
Not to defend the Catholic Church (which I will not), but their logic is perfectly consistent within the framework of a tribalistic god. Kill the infidels, but force the faithful to make more babies so their tribe can take over the world.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday June 12 2019, @06:11PM
They (and various Red states) actively fight to prevent even Non-Catholics from getting access to birth control:
Nuns, HHS to Clash With States Over Obamacare Birth Control Rule [bloomberglaw.com]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:27PM (2 children)
Yes, that's one of the things that makes this conversation such a landmine that people will try to avoid it.
And on the other side, racists will *also* perceive any solution that appears to disadvantage their own tribe in any way as a racist attack on them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @06:41PM (1 child)
Hence the big hoopla about affirmative action, something which barely impacts white people but has become a hot topic for the reasons you gave. To be fair it is preferential treatment so disliking AA doesn't mean you're racist, but it sure is blown out of proportion these days.
I wonder if anyone has any kind of idea about when it should be repealed. Trying to fix human bias with legislation is one tricky problem.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday June 12 2019, @07:09PM
The ones most disadvantaged by AA are actually "Asians."
And here's yet another case where you can see the cracks in the whole racist edifice, the bankruptcy inherent in all racist thought.
See. we're trying to correct for opportunity based on group statistics rather than individual assessment, and that can never work properly.
In the specific case of 'Asians' the racist theory of the mainstream says that since Asians as a group perform better on a number of scales, they must have an excess of opportunity as a 'race.' So we lower their test scores accordingly, and this is supposed to balance out their supposed good fortune.
There are so many things wrong with this, but one HUGE one is the whole idea that there is some 'Asian race.' That's a racist assumption to begin with, and like every racist assumption it stumbles when expected to process reality. You lump ALL 'Asians' together in one big group and you crunch the numbers and there you go, we know what being Asian is. But we don't, not at all. Our numbers are highly weighted towards wealthy Chinese. So you get this poor Cambodian kid grows up in a slum trying to get into a school or get a job and he's being treated as if he were from a wealthy Chinese family, and by that yardstick he's suddenly not so appealing.
And that's racism, pure and simple. We're not evaluating the person, we're dealing with a classification. A category we invented and imposed on that kid.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:50PM (4 children)
Seriously? "Population" encompasses all people. I'm intentionally child-free and white. I've applied this thinking to myself, not because I'm white, but because there is a certain mass of living tissue the world can support. We can divide that mass into almost totally humans and virtually nothing else besides what we eat, or we can have a diversity of organisms, something which makes life in the most general terms, more likely to survive world-wide calamities (although like the dinosaurs, it may not be humans which carry that torch forward).
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:24PM (2 children)
Being child-free in one of the countries with very minimal population growth, isn't necessarily helping anything. The reason why it's touted as a racist idea is, because essentially all of the fastest growing countries are in Africa. There's a very large correlation between wealth (the lack thereof) and population growth.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13 2019, @02:08PM
Which means the best means against population growth is to make those countries wealthy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday June 14 2019, @08:11AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 12 2019, @09:17PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:17PM (1 child)
>Any kind of possible "addressing the real issue: population" is racist, by mode of operation. Which tribe of population do you mean to address?
Not so.
There is something called replacement rate fertility which means basically every couple should have no more than 2 children. You don’t need to force anyone to do this. All you need to do is educate the populace as a whole and peer pressure takes over.
https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/how-being-called-third-by-stilson-both-good-bad-74861 [enotes.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday June 12 2019, @09:17PM
We see it happening in every country that embraces things like education, especially sex-education, and access to birth control and family planning.
Unfortunately, there are powerful forces in our country and abroad that are actively opposed to those things. Even though they reduce abortions, which they are also opposed to.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:25PM (4 children)
So we Thanos the planet then?
(Score: 1, Troll) by slinches on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:57PM (3 children)
We seem to already be doing it voluntarily. Just look at the birthrate trends. We are well below replacement rate in the US and rapidly trending lower.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:35PM (2 children)
Thanos went for more of a sudden drop, not a reduction in growth.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by slinches on Wednesday June 12 2019, @11:09PM (1 child)
What we are doing is rather sudden from the perspective of geological timescales.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Thursday June 13 2019, @05:03PM
And the universe dies a heat death on a bigger timescale. So what.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:19PM (4 children)
Poverty is the main cause of over-population. Hang the banker scum and outlaw usury. Anyone caught doing it, cut their balls off. Don't care if they are jew or not.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:42PM (3 children)
not the op but
soylentnews.org: where the truth is flamebait!
(Score: 5, Touché) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:31PM (2 children)
It would have been okay until you just had to include that blaming it on the Jews at the end.
Try writing a long, in-depth, insightful analysis of anything, then in the last paragraph call all your readers niggers and see how well that works out for you either.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13 2019, @06:43PM (1 child)
they said "they don't care if they are jew or not", you triggered fuckhead.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 13 2019, @06:50PM
It's not going to occur to the average person to put in that disclaimer in the first place. Because it's completely unnecessary and just draws attention to the distinction for no reason.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:45PM
there are not too many humans. just piss poor management.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday June 12 2019, @06:05PM (4 children)
Bullshit! Quite a few of us are fighting for cheap accessible birth control and support organizations like Planned Parenthood.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday June 12 2019, @07:36PM
Pointing out that fewer babies can help reduce population: such trolling!
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday June 13 2019, @01:07PM (2 children)
The vast majority of people who use birth control do so to merely limit their fecundity rather than choose to not procreate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13 2019, @02:15PM (1 child)
In other words, to have less children. Which is exactly the point of birth control. Or do you think the goal has to be extinction of the human species?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday June 14 2019, @05:27AM
We're nowhere close to having a problem with too few births. We can address that if we ever get there.
(Score: 2) by TheFool on Wednesday June 12 2019, @07:26PM (3 children)
And, this comment thread shows exactly why. Any discussion about this particular issue naturally derails itself almost immediately.
I suspect it's because there isn't any real acceptable solution. We innately know there can't be one, and people want to avoid talking about it. There's plenty of horrific answers, but you won't get "most" to go along with those without some clever maneuvering like "such and such a group isn't human, so technically it's not murder". And those are all just temporary fixes, anyway, unless you make the group broader.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:27PM
A fairly large portion of western society classifies unborn children that way. Though lately, that trend seems to be correcting itself somewhat.
Although, there is a good answer. Help provide everyone with a good basic education, access to higher education along with cheap and effective contraceptives. Essentially all of the developed countries who have these things have much lower birth rates than those without. It also generally improves everyone's lives and gives people an effective choice if/when they become a parent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday June 12 2019, @11:57PM (1 child)
You don't have to go around killing people. Just incentivize not procreating and in 100 years or so, the problem self-corrects. We actually do the reverse and give tax breaks to those who procreate so we are incentivizing destructive behavior. Step one -- stop that. That would help a little, but where we'd see big gains I suspect, is if we give tax breaks to those who don't have kids.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/children-carbon-footprint-climate-change-damage-having-kids-research-a7837961.html [independent.co.uk]
Then there is the stick approach (still not killing): institute a carbon tax that takes into account those precious sprogs.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Thursday June 13 2019, @01:46PM
Where there are tax incentives to promote having children, the birth rate is generally below replacement levels already. Removing those incentives and adding aggressive new taxes on procreating would essentially be a voluntary extinction of our culture.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13 2019, @12:38PM
In fact the actual problem is consumption. Yes, increasing population will increase the lower limit of consumption but that is really not the problem. If all humans consumed on average what an Indian currently consumes on average, there would be no ecological problems at all. The earth can easily satisfy the needs of every man but nothing can satisfy all the wants. There is no limit to human greed.
Please do decrease population too but first and foremost decrease consumption.
If you or your relatives and friends have children, think of them. If you're religious, do take better care of the earth for your deity. If you're rational, you should also consume at most moderately. Happiness and consumption are very weakly linked after certain crude base needs are met.
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Saturday June 22 2019, @01:13AM (1 child)
Sorry that I'm late to this particular party.
True, for a very long time many neo-Malthusians did argue that over-population was the cause of environmental degradation.
However, more recent decades saw a pretty big change in the direction of the debate. To say this now is an out-of-date echo from the past.
Now, rather than overpopulation, most people who work in this area focus on distribution of consumption/production of wastes. Think about this. The average North American or European has a fantastically large environmental footprint. The average footprint of those living on other continents? Much, much smaller.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/concern-overpopulation-red-herring-consumption-problem-sustainability [theguardian.com]
Why yes, you are correct! The combined impact of those non-North American lives, all told, is quite large! I heard you thinking it even before you reached to write a comment.
The ecological footprint literature suggests that Europeans and North Americans must decrease the environmental impacts of our luxurious lifestyles, so that the many living in abject poverty can enjoy a higher standard of living. And, as indicated above, all those in Asia and elsewhere who want to duplicate what they see in Hollywood movies will be disappointed. The earth can never sustain such an onslaught.
Some time has passed since the original post date. Too bad that nobody will ever read my comment.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Sunday July 07 2019, @02:41PM
I did, and I thought it was pretty good. My own take on it is that the world would benefit from a bit of both. A reduced human population combined with a greater respect for our impact on nature would both greatly raise the standard of living and improve the planet as a habitat for other organisms as well.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:12PM (2 children)
> Biodiversity should be at the top of the global agenda alongside climate
Climate change has some pretty obvious downsides; a warming climate may be associated with increases in extreme weather events and human migration. This has a big societal impact which governments should seek to avert.
I didn't see in TFA a list of downsides from reduced biodiversity in terms of _human_ impact. In fact, I would argue that quite the opposite is true; reduced biodiversity is associated with improved agricultural practices and more stable society. So reduction in biodiversity is absolutely not such a significant problem as climate change. One might argue that the opposite is true, and reduced biodiversity is a symptom of improved standard of living.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:17PM
Reduced biodiversity in agriculture was a necessary condition for the Irish Potato Famine. Modern agricultural practices may already have ways of reducing the risk of these types of disasters, but I’m not aware of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13 2019, @12:43PM
Sounds like we have found another Mars colonist volunteer. Please do report back how you feel about biodiversity after 10 years on the alien planet, if you still are alive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:17PM
They're always racin' that goddamn Lincoln!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday June 12 2019, @04:31PM (4 children)
In the book “Sapeins”, Yuval Noah Harrari posits that this has been going on since the first Homo Sapiens migrated out of East Africa. He also cites evidence that Sapiens may have also driven other human species, such as Neanderthals, to extinction. Australian megafauna were wiped out around the same time that HS arrived about 45,000 years ago. This will not be an easy trend to halt.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:13PM (3 children)
It was old even then.
Every species alters its environment in some way. Humans were altering our environment long before we left Africa, long before Sapiens evolved even. Forget Neanderthalis, even Habilis and Erectus would have a huge effect in some places. Pigs, horses, cattle, even before human domestication large mammals in the wild cause changes as well. Even tiny insects and worms and the like can do the same.
"This will not be an easy trend to halt."
I think the whole idea that it *can* be halted is wrongheaded. If humans disappeared tomorrow that would not produce this mythical stable state where the climate is just right and stays that way, year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium. That's just a fairy tale.
Our best bet may be to just try and avoid the most catastrophic effects, and to anticipate and ameliorate what we can't avoid.
As a species we're notoriously bad at managing public goods though, and that's what this amounts to. Clean air and clean water and a lack of catastrophic climate disasters is something everyone has a rational interest in preserving.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Informative) by fustakrakich on Wednesday June 12 2019, @06:53PM (2 children)
Every species alters its environment in some way.
Yep, Here you see beavers clear-cutting a forest and causing widespread flooding. [telegraph.co.uk]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday June 13 2019, @12:13AM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday June 13 2019, @09:33AM
Who thinks that? Nobody here AFAICT and I don't think that was the point of TFA either.
Its a matter of scale. How many species are going extinct globally due to the activity of beavers (I'd suggest roughly none) versus humans. If beaver numbers exceeded the human population, more bad things would start happening but I seriously doubt it would approach the kind of damage human technology and profiteering can generate. We do have a very special talent for royally fucking everything up.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @05:16PM
Meanwhile, jews are driving humans to extinction by destroying natural diversity, encouraging others to mix until there is nothing pure left anymore except the jew rats.
Humans are not responsible when species are being destroyed, as they are not the primary cause. Khazar rats are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:56PM
maybe the bigger the animal the bigger the space it needs to survive?
i blame it (loss of universally unique species) maybe on poor land managment or more specific: land zoning.
there maybe should be more "non profit" zoning, like:
this flood zone for that river. nevermind the coal or othe deposits. nothing goes here. leave it alone.
this zone is a "natural mess" aka a forrest. see above, again nothing goes here. again, nevermind any deposits. also it has a corridor to the next "mess".
this zone is "the city". there is at least 20 km of agriculture before the next city. jup, that means setting a limit on city size.
stuff like this and it would work.
unfortunatly most all of the land has been zoned for ownership already. people probably got demon-gratically elected because of the desire for certain "zones" ... that are profitable ... but not for "big" or very narrow ecosystem animals and plants etc. which dont vote and just die out.
people get elected to power "too quickly" and too often and zoneing planes change too fast for speed of nature so all that is left is vulgar zone planning...
oh ... and i think dams are good ... sorry ... srsly.