4 ms·

Coming out of an ecology program? And observing the Chernobyl data? None of that is remotely as damaging to the natural environment as continued human habitat

by mapt 11y ago

Coming out of an ecology program? And observing the Chernobyl data? None of that is remotely as damaging to the natural environment as continued human habitation of the area that has been evacuated. Cry not for the fishes and birds, for they are better off with slight genetic damage than they are with us. The threshold at which people become uncomfortable about radiation is several orders of magnitude lower than the threshold at which it causes population decline in wild populations, and people cause declines and extirpations in wild populations all the time.

morsch 11y ago
So a rational ecology program should advocate irradiating wide swathes of land? Of course the people displaced from the area didn't disappear, they're affecting wildlife somewhere else. Seems like mostly zero sum in that specific regard.
- theoh 11y ago
  There's a major question in ecology of how we feel about our "anthropocentric" civilization. For many environmentally conscious thinkers it seems like a world without humans would be preferable.
  - mapt 11y ago
    A world without humans would be necessary to fulfill their goals of the environment being unmolested by humans. We cannot live in perfect harmony. That's not a thing. At best, we can establish areas that look roughly like they used to look before humans, but this is no less deliberate design than the styrofoam rocks at the zoo, it's just on a different scale. Many such areas are, in fact, better seen as zoos, because of their small size or limited variety. Most of the productive arable land is predictably already being used for something by somebody. Personally, I'm a humanist. The worst things environmental devastation can do to us are disrupt some of our services, like agricultural collapses; After that environmentalism is mostly a romantic or novelty-based aesthetic, albeit an attractive one. Pit it against human lives and human profit, and groups of humans will nearly always make the same decision. EDIT: Worth tacking on, for some perspective: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
    - hemptemp 11y ago
      As much as i abhor commenting online do bear with me. You say that "We cannot live in perfect harmony". That's not a thing", however what is this in comparison to. Surely this would be comparative to the rest of the eco-system. Animals make changes, they create habitats and dam rivers, however as it is more rudimentary (sticks and holes in earth) we dont consider it a change to the enviroment. Creating our homes in a more ecological and recycleable way would be in perfect harmony. The arguement is whether we should go further and drastically change the enviroment, do we have the right as the dominant species on the planet to abuse its resources for ourselves (as seen in the attached xkcd whose figures roughly show the populations of mammals who we have artifically inflated to such proportions for our dietray wants). So if we changed our architechture and agriculture then yes we could live in perfect sync and harmony, it's just that we wont.
      - jahewson 11y ago
        There is no such thing as "harmony" in nature. Species come and go, some destroy their own habit, others drive their competitors to extinction. We do need to be careful about how we use natural resources and that we don't change our environment in a way that is detrimental to us. But understand that change is the status quo for nature, that's especially easy to miss when it happens on timescales longer than a human life, but happen it does.
- mapt 11y ago
  "Should" is a word I'm uncomfortable with. Define your goals, and I can provide an answer. If you want to re-establish the wild ecology of ~4000 years ago? You need to get the people out. Modern human habitation & agriculture claims a right to every last square meter of land, and even the supposedly reserved natural areas are often cut & planted as if they were pseudo- lumber factories. If this is your goal, irradiating wide swathes of land is a good start; There are few simpler or more reliable mechanisms to force sustained evacuation and shunning of an area for the centuries or millennia necessary to re-establish, for example, old-growth forest. Some legal regime might buy you a few decades, but don't kid yourself about the longevity and commitment of a particular political system. The changes in species composition associated with the climate, then with megafauna, and later with the Columbian exchange & globalization, are going to pose some durable problems if you want it to look exactly the same, but you can form a complex ecology with most of the same niches filled with at least similar creatures.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Irradiation works, but it would be a bit silly to advocate it. If you're going to force people to move, you might as well just pass a law reserving the area as a park and prohibiting people from living there. Of course, people who want to live there will oppose you, but they'll oppose your irradiation plan too. Irradiation works here because it was accidental. Nobody accidentally passes a law to reserve a bunch of inhabited land as a park.
adamsea 11y ago
That's like arguing it's OK to beat someone up since they're going to die anyway, and dying obviously is way worse than getting beat up.
- technolem 11y ago
  No, it's like saying its okay to beat someone up if it stops them from dying.
random_upvoter 11y ago
It's a rather dubious claim that "fishes and birds are better off" in the deserted areas around the reactor. The studies mentioned by Greenpeace talk about morphological defects, heritable mutations, decreased fertility and decreasing numbers. Animals have a level of consciousness too. At some level they're going to be aware of being unwell. Are you going to point to mutated fir trees and DNA-damaged butterflies and say they're better off now because they no longer have to suffer the presence of human beings?
- mapt 11y ago
  Humans will evacuate an area on the basis of enough radiological threat that one in a hundred gets an additional tumor sometime in middle age, or perhaps if one in ten neonates in the same area are born with some visible deformation. Wild animals need a threat thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of times higher to actually threaten their ability to sustain themselves. All they need to keep the population up is replacement-level fertility on average, and most animals are physically capable of many, many times that level. In this higher dose scenario lifespan is reduced so much that it starts to impinge on their reproductive capabilities, which are usually food/habitat limited by human influence (or previously to humans, by predators and disease as well). Humans made a tradeoff towards k-selection: in order to support these huge skulls & brains, we made childbearing an epic process that takes a decade, and made childbirth quite dangerous. For something like heavily r-selected fish, two parents might produce ten thousand eggs, and only two of them need to survive to breed to sustain the population. Remove all the other things that kill this example fish, and each generation is five thousand times the size of the previous generation. Most mammals are somewhere between fish and humans. Free up the habitat and let them reproduce ad libitum, and over all but the worst-hit areas, wild animal populations will grow rapidly because the radiation is less of a population stressor than the people, their cars, their pavement, their agriculture, and their fishing nets were. This was not an expected result. The efficacy of Chernobyl as a wildlife preserve was kind of a wake-up call for ecologists about how deep into the anthropocene epoch we actually are.

by mapt 11y ago

morsch 11y ago

So a rational ecology program should advocate irradiating wide swathes of land? Of course the people displaced from the area didn't disappear, they're affecting wildlife somewhere else. Seems like mostly zero sum in that specific regard.

theoh 11y ago
There's a major question in ecology of how we feel about our "anthropocentric" civilization. For many environmentally conscious thinkers it seems like a world without humans would be preferable.
- mapt 11y ago
  A world without humans would be necessary to fulfill their goals of the environment being unmolested by humans. We cannot live in perfect harmony. That's not a thing. At best, we can establish areas that look roughly like they used to look before humans, but this is no less deliberate design than the styrofoam rocks at the zoo, it's just on a different scale. Many such areas are, in fact, better seen as zoos, because of their small size or limited variety. Most of the productive arable land is predictably already being used for something by somebody. Personally, I'm a humanist. The worst things environmental devastation can do to us are disrupt some of our services, like agricultural collapses; After that environmentalism is mostly a romantic or novelty-based aesthetic, albeit an attractive one. Pit it against human lives and human profit, and groups of humans will nearly always make the same decision. EDIT: Worth tacking on, for some perspective: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
  - hemptemp 11y ago
    As much as i abhor commenting online do bear with me. You say that "We cannot live in perfect harmony". That's not a thing", however what is this in comparison to. Surely this would be comparative to the rest of the eco-system. Animals make changes, they create habitats and dam rivers, however as it is more rudimentary (sticks and holes in earth) we dont consider it a change to the enviroment. Creating our homes in a more ecological and recycleable way would be in perfect harmony. The arguement is whether we should go further and drastically change the enviroment, do we have the right as the dominant species on the planet to abuse its resources for ourselves (as seen in the attached xkcd whose figures roughly show the populations of mammals who we have artifically inflated to such proportions for our dietray wants). So if we changed our architechture and agriculture then yes we could live in perfect sync and harmony, it's just that we wont.
    - jahewson 11y ago
      There is no such thing as "harmony" in nature. Species come and go, some destroy their own habit, others drive their competitors to extinction. We do need to be careful about how we use natural resources and that we don't change our environment in a way that is detrimental to us. But understand that change is the status quo for nature, that's especially easy to miss when it happens on timescales longer than a human life, but happen it does.
mapt 11y ago
"Should" is a word I'm uncomfortable with. Define your goals, and I can provide an answer. If you want to re-establish the wild ecology of ~4000 years ago? You need to get the people out. Modern human habitation & agriculture claims a right to every last square meter of land, and even the supposedly reserved natural areas are often cut & planted as if they were pseudo- lumber factories. If this is your goal, irradiating wide swathes of land is a good start; There are few simpler or more reliable mechanisms to force sustained evacuation and shunning of an area for the centuries or millennia necessary to re-establish, for example, old-growth forest. Some legal regime might buy you a few decades, but don't kid yourself about the longevity and commitment of a particular political system. The changes in species composition associated with the climate, then with megafauna, and later with the Columbian exchange & globalization, are going to pose some durable problems if you want it to look exactly the same, but you can form a complex ecology with most of the same niches filled with at least similar creatures.
mikeash 11y ago
Irradiation works, but it would be a bit silly to advocate it. If you're going to force people to move, you might as well just pass a law reserving the area as a park and prohibiting people from living there. Of course, people who want to live there will oppose you, but they'll oppose your irradiation plan too. Irradiation works here because it was accidental. Nobody accidentally passes a law to reserve a bunch of inhabited land as a park.

adamsea 11y ago

That's like arguing it's OK to beat someone up since they're going to die anyway, and dying obviously is way worse than getting beat up.

technolem 11y ago
No, it's like saying its okay to beat someone up if it stops them from dying.

random_upvoter 11y ago

It's a rather dubious claim that "fishes and birds are better off" in the deserted areas around the reactor. The studies mentioned by Greenpeace talk about morphological defects, heritable mutations, decreased fertility and decreasing numbers. Animals have a level of consciousness too. At some level they're going to be aware of being unwell. Are you going to point to mutated fir trees and DNA-damaged butterflies and say they're better off now because they no longer have to suffer the presence of human beings?

mapt 11y ago
Humans will evacuate an area on the basis of enough radiological threat that one in a hundred gets an additional tumor sometime in middle age, or perhaps if one in ten neonates in the same area are born with some visible deformation. Wild animals need a threat thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of times higher to actually threaten their ability to sustain themselves. All they need to keep the population up is replacement-level fertility on average, and most animals are physically capable of many, many times that level. In this higher dose scenario lifespan is reduced so much that it starts to impinge on their reproductive capabilities, which are usually food/habitat limited by human influence (or previously to humans, by predators and disease as well). Humans made a tradeoff towards k-selection: in order to support these huge skulls & brains, we made childbearing an epic process that takes a decade, and made childbirth quite dangerous. For something like heavily r-selected fish, two parents might produce ten thousand eggs, and only two of them need to survive to breed to sustain the population. Remove all the other things that kill this example fish, and each generation is five thousand times the size of the previous generation. Most mammals are somewhere between fish and humans. Free up the habitat and let them reproduce ad libitum, and over all but the worst-hit areas, wild animal populations will grow rapidly because the radiation is less of a population stressor than the people, their cars, their pavement, their agriculture, and their fishing nets were. This was not an expected result. The efficacy of Chernobyl as a wildlife preserve was kind of a wake-up call for ecologists about how deep into the anthropocene epoch we actually are.