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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: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 31 2018, @05:10PM (2 children)
The world can sustain this population of humans, just not how we're currently doing it.
The nineteenth century approach to capitalism and resource exploitation that we're still following will collapse. We have to design our material production to be a closed loop. That means near total recycling. Landfills should not be a thing anymore. Everything should be separated and recycled. Organic matter can be run through methane digesters to decompose them and generate gas that can be used for electricity production, heating, or cooking, and then the exhausted slurry can be plugged back in as fertilizer. Plastics should be fully recycled. Metals, ceramics, and all the rest can and ought to be recycled. That would greatly reduce our immediate impact on the environment.
Energy, too, has been a major culprit for habitat destruction. Even without having solved fusion power, we have renewable means of energy production that can power manufacturing and transportation. It can slow or stop the dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, and keep us going until we can figure out fusion or some other means of producing energy.
As far as the matter available to humanity to shape and provide the requirements of civilization, we've barely scratched the surface. Literally. There is so much of the Earth's crust and we have used so little of it. We'll have to figure out new, economical ways to get it, but with robots and AI on the horizon I don't think it will remain unfeasible.
Then there are the ways we live. The patterns of our cities and how we use the environment. Many thinkers have been working on that for a long time. Arcologies are one idea, there are many others.
If we can shift how we do all that, nature will move back in quickly to fill the vacuum. Regard how nature reclaimed the area around Chernobyl. Species that had been thought extinct in Europe have rebounded, despite the radiation. We also have seen evidence that when new niches open up, speciation can accelerate to fill them if no prior species remain to exploit them.
In the end, life is incredibly tenacious. Humans can fail to adapt to new conditions and go extinct, but life will recover as it has recovered from previous mass extinctions. Too bad for humans, but quite encouraging if you think about the bigger picture of life in general.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 31 2018, @07:07PM
You my friend have un-wittingly hit on the solution!
We need more nuclear accidents!
That is the only thing that will keep humans out of an area and let it go back to nature.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:53AM
All these "awesome green" recycling and clean energy technologies are still struggling due to economic disadvantage, and that disadvantage will remain as long as the "dirty old men's" technologies are allowed to strip mine the land and spew toxic waste (including CO2) into the atmosphere and waters without paying for the damage that is done.
"Carbon credits" sounds like namby pamby BS, until you look at the cost of relocating Miami Beach and hundreds of other large coastal cities like it.
If you live in the US and you like strawberries, chances are you are getting cheap strawberries that are skimping out on the true cost of their production. See, during drought years farms in places like Plant City, FL, pump massive amounts of ground water up to grow the strawberry crops, this ground water consumption dramatically increases the frequency of new sinkholes in the surrounding region. Roads, houses, businesses, billions of dollars of damage is done to structures and the property value of similar not-yet affected structures in the region. Insurance is tricky, and the upshot of it all is: strawberry production is a major contributor to this "act of god" but they are not bearing the cost. Same thing is true of CO2 producers the world over, but the damage is slower in coming and ultimately much more expensive than sinkholes.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/