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Equally terrible is the same comparison about bugs, but it's easier to make people flip because it happened in our lifetime (recent and so fast!): When I was y

Equally terrible is the same comparison about bugs, but it's easier to make people flip because it happened in our lifetime (recent and so fast!): When I was young, I was driving a small bike. Having mosquitoes or flies clouds was a common occurrence on the road and the best motivator to wear a helmet for a youngster not bothered by security. Nowadays, I'm still driving a bike, although a bigger one. But I encounter a bug cloud maybe once a year. Our garden is also quite silent, and I have to go to the country side to hear the bugs again. Given the massive role of fishes and bugs in our ecosystem, this is more than alarming. We already have a hard time making people aware of one single issue, such as global warming. But the reality of the scale of our fuck up is so beyond that, as we have a bleak role in: - global warming - killing most animals, including fished and bugs - then selectively breading the remaining life to serve our interest only, annihilating biodiversity and its balance - destruction of huge biomes by either exploiting it or polluting it - consuming resources at a rate that make even the most abundant of them seem scarce - polluting air and water to such a scale it's becoming a health issue Scientists are alarmed by one topic, saying we should do something before it's too late. However, take all those topics together and the big picture seems an impossible battle to win, which ironically we fight against ourself, that is leading us to the worst possible ending

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Awareness is relative. What you see in your formative years sets what's normal. Everything is relative to that. Older photos of abundance or massive piles of horseshoe crabs to be ground for fertiliser[0] are a strange alien world. People in their 20s are used to a lack of wildlife and consider it normal simply as that is what they grew up seeing, along with acres of monoculture in the "countryside". The almost insolvable problem we have is everyone 60 or younger grew up with throwaway consumerism as "normal". My parents generation didn't. They had a fraction of my generation's environmental impact without any efforts to environmentalism. Simply they expected to buy something once then repair it if need be and replace when broken beyond repair. Not when something a little better gets released. For all the huge increase in general awareness of the environment, when in the 80s the environment was something of the fringe, we're destroying it at an ever increasing rate. I'm not optimistic. [0] https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertilizer/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertil...
- sametmax 8y ago
  That's a good point, and maybe a solution lies in it. When I read other comments about birds obscuring the sky, fishes you could caught by hand, etc. It seemed unreal, almost magical. A fairy tale on some Westeros-like world. If we can use this narrative to astonish people, and make them get perspective on what should be, it can be a powerful message. "Eat less meat", "recycle", "use less the car/plane" are not really sexy. They are constraints. "Look how amazing things used to be before we did this", however, is much more inspirational.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    My normal at 18 saw summer trips that included stops to wipe the wildlife off the windscreen or visor. I can't remember the last time I did that - sure there's a few bugs, after a hundred miles or more. I think it needs a multi-pronged approach. Inspiration is a great start, but it's fairly weak against a marketing machine spending billions inventing more nonexistent problems and needs. We need to rediscover collective action, activism of the get off facebook and into the street to make someone's life difficult variety, regulation as a good thing (food safety laws, clean air acts, child labour laws etc), and stop pretending the market has the solution to everything. That's a slightly challenging wishlist especially if we don't want to give up all the lifestyle in the process. :)
onetimemanytime 8y ago
">>But I encounter a bug cloud maybe once a year. Our garden is also quite silent" Where most people live, virtually everything is covered with concrete and whatever is left green is routinely sprayed with lots of chemicals.
swebs 8y ago
Don't forget "solving world hunger" which means causing a human population boom, exasperating the above problems.
- sametmax 8y ago
  We never really had a technological problem about world hunger. It was political. Social. But humanity has been able to produce food for everybody for centuries. It just happens we don't share it and we waste it. I think energy, peace and hygiene are a better factor in baby booming. They contribute to a better food distribution as well.
  - TheBeardKing 8y ago
    Efficiently transporting food or growing it where people need it is certainly a technological/logistical problem.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Right. I meant food production technologies. But even then, people don't need that much food to be healthy. A regular human being can live happy with one meal a day. We are just used to more. The population was also much lower in the past. The problem is more about: - war - people not helping each others - a small group of people keeping a lot of it for themself (royalty, rich cast, etc) And of course now we face a novel problem: the fact our population is getting huge and want to eat meat 2 times a day.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  I'm not sure about that; higher birth rates are associated with poverty, not wealth. Also, I feel that these appeals often suggest that we should be OK with letting some unspecified Other die for the cause of environmentalism when we would clearly not accept this for ourselves.
  - swebs 8y ago
    >I'm not sure about that; higher birth rates are associated with poverty, not wealth. Who said anything about wealth? That sounds like a red herring to me. In any ecosystem, with any living organism, a population will increase until it reaches the limit of its food supply. >Also, I feel that these appeals often suggest that we should be OK with letting some unspecified Other die for the cause of environmentalism when we would clearly not accept this for ourselves. And I feel like your appeals are more interested in virtue signaling than actually having a meaningful discussion. Say you have an island that has enough resources to feed 100 people. 30 settlers move there. In a few years, the population grows to 105. There isn't enough food. People die off and the population is down to 95. There's enough food to go around, so the next generation the population grows to 105 again. This process fluctuates indefinitely. Then someone takes a boat out and discovers a nearby island. This has enough resources to feed another 100 people. There's enough food to go around, until the population reaches 205 people. Now there's not enough food again and people are starving. Repeat indefinitely until we run out of islands. There is no solution to "solving hunger" that doesn't involve controlling birth rates. Anything else is just pushing the problem back. Nobody has to die. Simply making contraceptives as ubiquitous in third world countries as they are in developed countries would probably solve most of the problem.
Fnoord 8y ago
> Having mosquitoes or flies clouds was a common occurrence on the road and the best motivator to wear a helmet for a youngster not bothered by security. Debatable. In The Netherlands, except for professional cyclers people who drive bicycles generally don't wear helmets. If they'd do, they'd look like profs and then cars keep less distance, which is an increased danger. A cap and glasses works fine for me with regards to sun and getting things in my eyes (sand is still annoying at times), just don't drive with your mouth open.
saghm 8y ago
This is really interesting; growing up I definitely remembered seeing more bugs than I do now, but I kind of assumed that this was just because I've been living in cities rather than suburbs since college, so I'm exposed to a lot more asphalt and sidewalks than grass and dirt. Now I'm curious if there used to be more bugs in cities before I moved to them.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Awareness is relative. What you see in your formative years sets what's normal. Everything is relative to that. Older photos of abundance or massive piles of horseshoe crabs to be ground for fertiliser[0] are a strange alien world. People in their 20s are used to a lack of wildlife and consider it normal simply as that is what they grew up seeing, along with acres of monoculture in the "countryside". The almost insolvable problem we have is everyone 60 or younger grew up with throwaway consumerism as "normal". My parents generation didn't. They had a fraction of my generation's environmental impact without any efforts to environmentalism. Simply they expected to buy something once then repair it if need be and replace when broken beyond repair. Not when something a little better gets released. For all the huge increase in general awareness of the environment, when in the 80s the environment was something of the fringe, we're destroying it at an ever increasing rate. I'm not optimistic. [0] https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertilizer/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertil...

sametmax 8y ago
That's a good point, and maybe a solution lies in it. When I read other comments about birds obscuring the sky, fishes you could caught by hand, etc. It seemed unreal, almost magical. A fairy tale on some Westeros-like world. If we can use this narrative to astonish people, and make them get perspective on what should be, it can be a powerful message. "Eat less meat", "recycle", "use less the car/plane" are not really sexy. They are constraints. "Look how amazing things used to be before we did this", however, is much more inspirational.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  My normal at 18 saw summer trips that included stops to wipe the wildlife off the windscreen or visor. I can't remember the last time I did that - sure there's a few bugs, after a hundred miles or more. I think it needs a multi-pronged approach. Inspiration is a great start, but it's fairly weak against a marketing machine spending billions inventing more nonexistent problems and needs. We need to rediscover collective action, activism of the get off facebook and into the street to make someone's life difficult variety, regulation as a good thing (food safety laws, clean air acts, child labour laws etc), and stop pretending the market has the solution to everything. That's a slightly challenging wishlist especially if we don't want to give up all the lifestyle in the process. :)

onetimemanytime 8y ago

">>But I encounter a bug cloud maybe once a year. Our garden is also quite silent" Where most people live, virtually everything is covered with concrete and whatever is left green is routinely sprayed with lots of chemicals.

swebs 8y ago

Don't forget "solving world hunger" which means causing a human population boom, exasperating the above problems.

sametmax 8y ago
We never really had a technological problem about world hunger. It was political. Social. But humanity has been able to produce food for everybody for centuries. It just happens we don't share it and we waste it. I think energy, peace and hygiene are a better factor in baby booming. They contribute to a better food distribution as well.
- TheBeardKing 8y ago
  Efficiently transporting food or growing it where people need it is certainly a technological/logistical problem.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Right. I meant food production technologies. But even then, people don't need that much food to be healthy. A regular human being can live happy with one meal a day. We are just used to more. The population was also much lower in the past. The problem is more about: - war - people not helping each others - a small group of people keeping a lot of it for themself (royalty, rich cast, etc) And of course now we face a novel problem: the fact our population is getting huge and want to eat meat 2 times a day.
emodendroket 8y ago
I'm not sure about that; higher birth rates are associated with poverty, not wealth. Also, I feel that these appeals often suggest that we should be OK with letting some unspecified Other die for the cause of environmentalism when we would clearly not accept this for ourselves.
- swebs 8y ago
  >I'm not sure about that; higher birth rates are associated with poverty, not wealth. Who said anything about wealth? That sounds like a red herring to me. In any ecosystem, with any living organism, a population will increase until it reaches the limit of its food supply. >Also, I feel that these appeals often suggest that we should be OK with letting some unspecified Other die for the cause of environmentalism when we would clearly not accept this for ourselves. And I feel like your appeals are more interested in virtue signaling than actually having a meaningful discussion. Say you have an island that has enough resources to feed 100 people. 30 settlers move there. In a few years, the population grows to 105. There isn't enough food. People die off and the population is down to 95. There's enough food to go around, so the next generation the population grows to 105 again. This process fluctuates indefinitely. Then someone takes a boat out and discovers a nearby island. This has enough resources to feed another 100 people. There's enough food to go around, until the population reaches 205 people. Now there's not enough food again and people are starving. Repeat indefinitely until we run out of islands. There is no solution to "solving hunger" that doesn't involve controlling birth rates. Anything else is just pushing the problem back. Nobody has to die. Simply making contraceptives as ubiquitous in third world countries as they are in developed countries would probably solve most of the problem.

Fnoord 8y ago

> Having mosquitoes or flies clouds was a common occurrence on the road and the best motivator to wear a helmet for a youngster not bothered by security. Debatable. In The Netherlands, except for professional cyclers people who drive bicycles generally don't wear helmets. If they'd do, they'd look like profs and then cars keep less distance, which is an increased danger. A cap and glasses works fine for me with regards to sun and getting things in my eyes (sand is still annoying at times), just don't drive with your mouth open.

saghm 8y ago

This is really interesting; growing up I definitely remembered seeing more bugs than I do now, but I kind of assumed that this was just because I've been living in cities rather than suburbs since college, so I'm exposed to a lot more asphalt and sidewalks than grass and dirt. Now I'm curious if there used to be more bugs in cities before I moved to them.