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I am reading your post wondering how that could happen. Wildlife disappearing is not the problem is merely as symptom of the problem - too many people.

• RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
  We have much more people on earth than we had 500 years ago. We probably have much less wildlife than before. However, people now on average live longer, healthier lives than before. As humans, we are much, much better off than we were 500 years ago. Wildlife as a whole is probably worse off than it was 500 years ago. Thus, it is not an impossible scenario to have humans thriving, but wildlife in serious danger.
  • collyw 9y ago
    > As humans, we are much, much better off than we were 500 years ago. That's very subjective and depends on what you are measuring. Sure we have less conflict, less people in absolute poverty, but we also have more people in slavery than any time in history.
• ebcode 9y ago
  I don't think it's the number of people that matter, but rather the behavior of those people. It appears that humanity lived in balance (Lotka-Volterra style) with the rest of the inhabitants of the planet until the invention of agriculture, which is still relatively recent. The transitions that led from agriculture to walled cities to city-states to modern nation-states all occurred within the past 10,000 years or so. Whereas the oldest known human fossil is something like a million years old. Divide that 10,000 by the million years our species has been on this planet, you get 1%. So for 99% of humanity's time on the planet we probably behaved a lot like most of the other land mammals. Something happened that led to the changes in our behavior, and we are now facing the consequences of our collective actions for the past thousands of years. It looks like we'll need to change even more before it's too late.