22 ms·

Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

391 points by acdanger 6y ago

Hokusai 6y ago
> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials," This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition. The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to replace the problematic industries. The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big investors to do the right thing.
- mc32 6y ago
  “... The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc...” Just as often as big operations contributing to this, it’s the mom or pop or children doing this in a subsistence manner. A contributing factor is encroachment due to local population growth.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Indeed. Madagascar is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe because every family has many children and each of those children eventually needs to slash-and-burn rainforest in order to plant enough rice to sustain themselves. Also a lot of tree-felling to make charcoal, because for whatever reason Malagasy villagers cannot afford e.g. kerosene to cook with. The result is the steady eradication of all those cool lemurs and other rainforest wildlife, but the perpetrators of this destruction are not millionaire industrial fatcats like people often imagine, they are dirt-poor subsistence farmers.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      And without significant investment by those with resources, asking them to preserve the environment is a direct ask for them to go hungry or cold for the sake of the environment. This is an ask that 99.99% or more of the human population will absolutely ignore.
      - zo1 6y ago
        Or how about we invade Madagascar, ship all these poor folk to NYC, and declare the entire region a wildlife reserve?
        runarberg 6y ago
        Not cool. This kind of imperialist mindset has historically been at the head of some of the most awful actions in human history. Including forced relocations, imposed poverty, sustained resource theft, sustained vandalism and theft of local artifacts, slave labor, and even genocide. If the rich world really cared about the wildlife in Madagascar we would fund green local infrastructure projects so that the local population could enjoy a sustainable lifestyle on their own.
      - Aaronstotle 6y ago
        I guess a solution would be give them supplies so they aren't forced to destroy their own backyard in order to survive.
- laurent92 6y ago
  We are addicted to high population density, making babies and helping get everyone to what we consider is the minimum level of consumption, which is exactly 2x higher than the Earth can provide sustainably. At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.
  - rcpt 6y ago
    There's nothing wrong with population density. We'd do better to have people living in dense city centers instead of sprawled out into every corner of the wilderness.
    - airstrike 6y ago
      COVID-19 begs to differ
      - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
        North Dakota has more than 10x the per-capita COVID-19 infection rate of New York City right now, despite having only about 0.03% of the population density.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        eanzenberg 6y ago
        That’s because covid ran through NYC in April leading to massive per capita loss of life.
        airstrike 6y ago
        You're comparing two cities that got hit by COVID-19 in totally different time periods. No other place in the US had a spike like NYC
      - hyper_reality 6y ago
- Aunche 6y ago
  It's not just about the capital owners. The actual people chopping down rainforests for palm oil plantations are formerly impoverished farmers. You can stop corporations from buying from them, but you're hurting these poorer communities the most.
  - Hokusai 6y ago
    > you're hurting these poorer communities the most. My point is that redistributing wealth in a better way, we would get less opposition to upgrade our production means and people like that poor farmers and others will get a bigger piece of the cake in a more healthy environment and conserving their culture and land. I agree with you, thou. The current mindset is that the super-rich are super-rich and their wealth cannot be touched. So, we are left with limited options on how to manage with the scraps. If we think out of the box and realize that we can redistribute wealth better, there will be still very rich people but also farmers would get a more fair price for their contribution.
    - Avicebron 6y ago
      This is key. It's this cultural blind spot where we gloss over the fact that these people are impoverished and so desperate that they would destroy the home around them, partly because we allow a tiny fraction of humanity to amass absurd wealth. Then we double down by making it socially acceptable for them to leverage that wealth into making it untouchable and ever-growing. If we just took this situation as strictly unacceptable, then we are working with a much larger range of options. The idea that big reward == all that innovation needed is pretty sick. It assumes all it takes is innovation to solve literal planet scale problems.
      - nickff 6y ago
        Well, innovation in agriculture has actually reduced the amount of land used for farming in more developed countries while increasing production.
        6y ago
- julienb_sea 6y ago
  The problem is much more complex than people being "addicted to easy money". Wealthy nations have buffer to take on unnecessary expense in addressing their basic needs, like food and shelter. This is dramatically less true in non-wealthy nations. Creating ecological mandates can have actual human impact on food availability and on human standard of living. Not the marginal improvements experienced in developed nations, but life or death quality of life changes to the worlds poorest.
- Passthepeas 6y ago
  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is-grass-fed-beef-really-better-for-the-planet-heres-the-science https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is... Pastured farming is actually capable of being carbon negative
- runarberg 6y ago
  Very much indeed. It frustrates me to no end to look back 20 years in the past and see that Al Gore ran on an anti global warming platform in the 2000 presidential election, and lost to an oil baron. While in the 2020 presidential election the democratic candidate hardly mentions the climate disaster while the western parts of the country is literally on fire. Over the years we have tried to solve the climate disaster with some (but very limited) success. Methods including carbon tax, international agreements and green infrastructure. However these efforts have always stopped short of being implemented on a necessary scale (international agreements especially). It is a hard problem only because modern politicians are unwilling to implement any of the necessary policy to tackle it (even though most voters generally want it; green infrastructure especially).
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    >> the western parts of the country is literally on fire. Currently under investigation as arson.
  - feralimal 6y ago
    Yes but none of the imminent dangers he warned about came to pass did they? We're still waiting. So, perhaps the right choice was made. 20 years later, you should watch that film again and see the manipulative fear mongering that is in play. And let's not forget that Al is heavily invested in 'green' tech.
    - tpnCC 6y ago
      If U may tell, which specific imminent 'dangers' did not come to pass?
      - feralimal 6y ago
        I'd have to watch the film again (no thanks!) to provide more detail, but it was a tirade of fear. Eg: No snow on Kilimanjaro? but: https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilimanjaro-glaciers-in-years/ https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilim... 20-foot rise in sea levels caused by melting ice caps? shutting down of the ocean conveyor? Hurricanes are getting stronger? Pacific Islands drowning?
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  But also the owners of the means to produce soybean and grain are happy that they can cut out the middleman and sell their product direct to consumers rather than as animal feed. They will end up with more wealth.
AlexandrB 6y ago
I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we stopped destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are already living in small, isolated pockets surrounded by roads, farms, and industry. Meanwhile, plants and smaller animals face intense competition from invasive species - often brought in by accident thanks to the constant flow of goods around the globe. We're probably headed for a pretty homogeneous global ecology - where "economically significant" or highly adaptable plants and animals thrive, while the others are relegated to zoos, national parks, or extinction.
- samatman 6y ago
  That's the direction things are heading. It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples from as many critically endangered species as possible. Unextinction is a difficult problem, but without the necessary material, it's impossible. Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like those, it's right in the name. And it's no substitute for building wildlife corridors, managing park lands better, extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it doesn't draw resources away from those things either.
  - sethherr 6y ago
    ... wait, how is what you’re suggesting different from zoos?
    - samatman 6y ago
      In a zoo, we take an animal out of the wild, and keep it alive. Ideally breeding them as well. In my suggestion, we tranquilize an animal, take a blood sample, and extract marrow from the hip. We then perform a full genome sequence on the blood, and freeze the marrow down, with compounds which vitrify the cells such that they can be revived at any point in the future. We should do both. But the latter has advantages: the animal stays in the wild, it scales better, and the only ongoing input is a bit of energy to keep the cells cold. We don't have the technology to print a whole genome from a file, but I expect we will. Stem cell cloning is well understood, and will only get better. Doing this to as many individuals as possible will preserve genetic diversity. It's insurance, basically.
xnx 6y ago
I wish we spent more time talking about "habitat destruction" instead of "climate change", while understanding that climate change is the largest form of habitat destruction.
- philips 6y ago
  Why do you feel discussing habitat destruction would be helpful?
  - pvaldes 6y ago
    There is an huge difference between saving giant panda in zoos and saving the forests where giant panda lives (and all the other species of birds, flowers and mammals including pandas with it. De-extinction would be to save just one screw from a perfectly tuned and complex machine that produces more than pandas. No-extinction is better than de-extinction and also much more cheap.
  - xnx 6y ago
    "change" feels neutral. "destruction" is always bad. There's also a lot of habitat destruction (e.g. ocean acidification) that might not fit the normal concept of "climate change". "Habitat destruction" can include things like deforestation, which would be bad even if it didn't affect climate. "Habitat destruction" might also serve as a reminder that we're destroying our own habitat as well, not just that of other plants and animals.
- coolspot 6y ago
  Too complicated for the masses. Climate change is something everyone can observe more or less. Dead bees, elephants, wolves - not so much.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  The net effects of climate change (and of course the magnitude) are big question marks in my book. But you bring up the exact thing I think every time I hear the more extreme climate change claims. We have some very real and relevant issues right now that are huge, existential even, and not based on theoretical models and we don't seem to be discussing or doing anything at all about these. Groundwater depletion. Topsoil depletion. Loss of habitat and biodiversity. Microplasics. Desertification.
vharuck 6y ago
>New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food. I'm pessimistic with this claim. From my experience, if a productive process like agriculture becomes more efficient, we scale up output. The resources being used up, in this case land, won't be reduced. For an analogy, consider how adding more lanes to a busy highway ultimately means more people drive and congestion is just as bad. What we need is more government protection of habitats. But it's hard for a government to directly and explicitly oppose economic opportunities.
- monktastic1 6y ago
  Sounds like Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand."
  - xg15 6y ago
    Thanks for the pointer and definition. "Increasing demand" seems pretty funny when we have whole industries dedicated to artificially generating demand (e.g. marketing and advertising) and when the ultimate quality metric for a country is it's GDP - so both business as well as government will do whatever it can to keep demand from going down. Sometimes I feel we're sitting in the bus from Speed (that will explode if it goes under 50 Mph) and just realized we're headed towards a roadblock. So now we're paradoxically trying to come to a full stop and not go below 50mph at the same time and wonder why it's not working.
- nickff 6y ago
  As a matter of fact, the more industrialized nations have increased productivity and production, while decreasing the amount of land devoted to agriculture (returning a great deal of it to 'nature').
philips 6y ago
I find it notable how indirect the author is about the “Why” in this story: > New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food. > The British TV presenter and naturalist Sir David Attenborough said the Anthropocene, the geological age during which human activity has come to the fore, could be the moment we achieve a balance with the natural world and become stewards of our planet.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  Many people consider anthropogenic extinction immoral and the ongoing human-caused mass extinction event to be an urgent moral crisis. But let's suppose you were going to take a cynical argument along the lines of "these species are going extinct due to their poor adaptations to a changing environment, it's just evolution," or let's just say you think moral objections are irrational. Then from this (ignorant and needlessly cruel) perspective, - the destruction of the Amazon is likely to have profound climatological/geochemical impacts, including increased C02 in the atmosphere - widespread defaunation of predators could very well lead to increased pests or disease-carrying animals - loss of insect life could be catastrophic to industrial agriculture - overharvested fishing and agricultural resources means diminshing returns (and possibly famine) for future generations More generally, the destruction we've wrought upon the world in the last 150 years is scientifically uncharted territory, and it's deeply naïve to assume that 150 years of strong economic growth can be extrapolated to suppose that destroying the planet will work out for humans in the long term.
  - dariosalvi78 6y ago
    which, from the Darwinian perspective, will cause either our extinction, or an adaptation, but only after many have died. It's probably all avoidable, but I don't see the human kind, in its current form and way of societal organisation being able to get out of this.
okcwarrior 6y ago
Ok, this is a crazy comment, but I have been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 a lot and almost every piece of land has something, somewhere built on it. Farm, suburb, etc It's depressing but maybe it helps me understand that we are using too much of earth. Do we really need endless farms?
- mythrwy 6y ago
  If we are going to have endless people we need endless farms probably. It would be cool if we could keep the population of the globe like 1/10 what it is now but I don't know of a humane and rights respecting way to achieve that. Or maybe if we reduce our standard of living it would help but how low can we go? And people aren't going to go for that either. It's a tough problem.
- coolspot 6y ago
  We got a lot of people to feed. The only right way to stop/reverse climate change is to control population growth. Others ways, like reducing each individual’s carbon footprint or clean energy just gives us excuse to breed more and overwhelm the planet, but later.
  - Falling3 6y ago
    Completely disagree. Tje richest 10% of the world is responsible for 50% of CO2 output. I don't know about other metrics, but that I'm sure that pattern isn't just limiter to carbon footprint. We don't have a population problem. We have a problem with Greer and resource use that slashing ourr population - even drastically - will not in any way solve.
    - samatman 6y ago
      The richest 10% of the world also come from regions with stable-to-negative population growth. Those regions are our only hope for moving to a sustainable technological platform while maintaining a high quality of life; we're talking about the people who buy solar panels, windmills, and electric cars, who at least can build nuclear plants, if they get over their political reservations. The poorest 50% of the world would absolutely love to emit more CO2, and will do so just as fast as they can acquire the resources. I don't think any steps to limit population growth really need to be taken, however, other than two things which are good in and of themselves: women's education, and improving access to birth control. But concerns about Earth's carrying capacity need to be taken seriously. Malthus is wrong right up until he isn't, and we should strive to avoid hitting that limit.
philips 6y ago
How are people on Hacker News changing their behavior around food and energy consumption? And besides individual action what community action have you taken? Personally I have found myself on a similar path to Peter Kalmus[1]. Before having kids I did what I could: didn’t own a car, commuted by bike, composted, minimized fashion/tech consumption, etc. On the other hand my career required significant plane travel for a time. Now with kids I feel extremely motivated to take further action to reduce energy consumption and interact directly with nature: through gardening, removing all plane travel, installing rooftop solar, etc. On the collective action front I become increasingly frustrated that something as obvious and “market based” as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (HR 7173)[2] isn’t already law. Something like that feels like the bare minimum solution to putting the US on the right track. [1]: https://peterkalmus.net/books/read-by-chapter-being-the-change/ https://peterkalmus.net/books/read-by-chapter-being-the-chan... [2]: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbo...
- 11235813213455 6y ago
  Same here, I'm on a bike for everything, I eat organic (literally, I forage a lot of fruit when going for a ride, currently there are many figs). So my consumption and my environmental impact is certainly super low. I pick up plastic trash every now and then, it's hard to counter all that continuous litter volume Next step is to spread this philosophy, but it's not easy or even possible to change other people lifestyles. It's sad because, it's definitely healthy to live that way Just talked with someone today, near a fig tree, he said they should cut that tree next to the road because it was dangerous, I replied to him, the fig tree is more important than the road and car traffic with a smile, and a bit of sadness inside because I know what will happen
  - nverno 6y ago
    This brings back memories of living in Portland. It would be amazing if cities were designed with this type of foraging as a priority :D
  - runarberg 6y ago
holoduke 6y ago
To me (at least in the area I live in) the easiest and quickest win is to plant trees massively. There is so much space available. But somehow people/governments wants to have grass vegetation as a filler between roads, inside parks etc.
- wozer 6y ago
  Or just stop mowing these areas. Shrubs and then trees will grow there all by themselves.
  - droopyEyelids 6y ago
    The thing is, unmanaged natural life is generally not compatible with human flourishing. Let the land go feral and soon you're looking at an unfathomable amount of ticks fed on unchecked deer who breed faster than anything can handle and infect each other with prions because the alternative is reintroducing wolves to the environment. And even the plant life is dangerous as unpruned, splintery trees drop branches in every windstorm, the brush periodically catches on fire, thorny or irritating plants proliferate and roots infiltrate and destroy nearby structures. It can take millennia to develop a stable, beautiful, all-natural environment, and there are sort of 'minimum size requirements' in the range of hundreds to thousands of miles.
LostTrackHowM 6y ago
The same headline would be equally true from the moment we left Africa and entered other continents, to today.
aaron695 6y ago
Lucky we have the doomsday cult to keep telling us the world is warming and will wipe out the animals in 100 year so let's not concern us with local problems. In reality it has and always will be local. And the solution has and will be for a few more decades use fossil fuels to help. (The doomsday cult sunk nuclear) This applies to both the environment and if you have empathy, other humans.
- cleandreams 6y ago
  A member of the 'doomsday cult' here. From the West Coast, I see global warming out my window in the form of unprecedented wildfire, in part caused by warming and related drying out of the landscape. Denial doesn't fix this problem.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    > In part caused by warming and related drying out of the landscape. Nope. Maybe a small part than makes it happen at best 10% more often. But insignificant. You and those around you are worth well more than 10% than your parents. You could have managed it locally at a state level, through education, prevention, preparation, treatment, mitigation, harm minimisation and repair but you didn't. It's on you. You chose big screen TV's and pretending recycling matters instead.
annoyingnoob 6y ago
Mosquitos are having no issues, to the detriment of everyone.
lopmotr 6y ago
Here's some good news for fish https://reefresilience.org/wp-content/uploads/graph02.jpg https://reefresilience.org/wp-content/uploads/graph02.jpg It shows rate of fishing has plateaued or declined but importantly, "effort" continues to climb so I imagine cost should provide a natural limit.
sul_tasto 6y ago
Seems like this is never the type of issue discussed at Davos.
giantg2 6y ago
Surprise, surprise. What did we think would happen with increasing quality of life (increased consumption) and increasing population (further increase in consumption).
roenxi 6y ago
I live in a city. We've exterminated every animal except cats and dogs, which we've modified with a multi-millennium breeding program to suit our desires. Pretty much every surface is covered in concrete, all the plants are curated by humans. As far as the eye can see is a totally artificial biosphere. This is where pretty much all the humans live. Most of the people who get worried about wildlife decline live here too. I get why there are some people who care, but I don't get why they expect the median human to care or why it becomes an important political issue. People are voting with their feet - exterminating the competition is an outcome of human civilisation.
- sanjay_316 6y ago
  There’s room outside the cities. Even cities require farms at the very least, which — while not wilderness — are not concreted over. Wilderness is good for mental health, clean air, and having options in the case of a collapse of our artificial ecologies of food crops.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    There isn't anything especially natural happening on a farm either, they are artificial environments to the same extent as a city. There isn't going to be anything there that isn't being managed by humans. And if our artificial crops collapse we're doomed. Nature can't support the population levels we've reached.
- rexpop 6y ago
  > exterminating the competition Nature is not our competition, it is the substrate in which we live. To exterminate it is to exterminate ourselves. A simple example is how ocean flora, outside our concrete biomes, produce the oxygen we breathe.
coinward 6y ago
Jeff Bezos will restore the planet and move all industry to space. All hail Amazon
seanwilson 6y ago
50% of habitable land on earth is taken up by agriculture, 77% of which is used for meat & diary (including the crops grown for livestock to eat), which contributes only 18% to the global calorie supply because of the inefficiency of animal products: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets I wonder how much of an impact it would have to return the land used by meat & diary to nature (40 million km^2 out of the 104 million km^2 of habitable land, minus some for more crops for humans). Wild animals would have more of chance, they'd be more forests to capture more carbon, and industrial animal farming wouldn't be polluting the planet with carbon, methane and waste products that are contributing to climate change. I don't know a practical solution to the above, but people are in denial about how much damage animal farming is doing globally and the insane scale of it (about 70 billion animals are used for food each year). The general attitudes of "well, people are never going to reduce their use of animal products to help so..." and "lab based meat will save us at some point in the future and then I'll probably switch if they're indistinguible from real meat" is depressing. We're running out of time.
- chongli 6y ago
  I think these figures are pretty misleading. First of all, they only look at calories, not protein. If you wanted to replace all the meat and dairy with equivalent protein substitutes you’d be looking at huge amounts of land for growing soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts. Replace all the milk with almond milk and you’re still dealing with huge water and land use for a product that has inferior protein and nutrients. Second of all, you can raise livestock like cattle, sheep, and goats on extremely rough terrain. Good luck growing soybeans on a bunch of jagged cliffs. Those areas may be highly inefficient in terms of land area per gram of protein, but it’s not going to be productive farmland otherwise.
  - latch 6y ago
    Saying that someone's figures are misleading because the alternative is "huge" isn't a compelling argument. What's the amount? How much does it depend on the crop? What about rice and lentils? Why almond milk? Why not another alternative? Why do we need milk at current quantities at all?
cleandreams 6y ago
I believe this study but it contrasts oddly with my own experience. I have lived for many of my 60+ years in the American West. Species which have made a comeback: wild turkeys, cougar, eagles, rocky mountain sheep, even wolves in some areas. Is this because American patterns of interaction with wildlife are different than elsewhere? Genuinely curious here.
- mac01021 6y ago
  The article obviously and necessarily omits thousands of pages worth of detail, but I'm pretty sure that if you dug into the scientific findings a disproportionate amount of the decline in vertibrate biodiversity has been in places like Peru, Brazil, Congo, Malaysia -- all the places with jungles and tropical rainforests, which contain a disproportionate amount of the world's terrestrial biodiversity in the first place and which are near-universally under dire threat of being logged into oblivion, cleared for palm plantations, etc. The USA is not doing fantastic when it comes to conservation, but much of the world is doing far worse.
etxm 6y ago
I can’t even begin to think of how we actually fix this with a world clutching so desperately to fossil fuels and large amounts of people considering climate change a hoax.
sizzle 6y ago
What are the consequences to humans if wildlife declines past the point of no return? I know bees are absolutely necessary for pollination, but what will the absence of wildlife do to our species?
aporetics 6y ago
Fascinating to see how these comment threads debate the relative facility of different diets, and even armchair evolutionary biology... while conveniently avoiding the critical topic: the choices we continue to make are defacing the planet, destabilizing ecologies, and exterminating other species at a scale that is hard to imagine. We’re all ok with this? So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions (much less to resolve to change your habits)? Not to put too fine a point on it, but for all of you who ate a burger for dinner tonight, were you thinking about the devastation you’re a part of? (And of course the list of destructive-yet-normalized ways of living is long; try picking one relevant to you).
- nicbou 6y ago
  Because it's a coordination problem. You can make lifestyle changes to reduce the waste and emissions you produce, but half of the people in your building can't be arsed to separate their trash. That's in Germany, where people seemingly care about the environment. Go to southern Europe and you'll see roads lined with trash. Go to Turkey and you'll undo all of your work in a week or two. It feels pointless.
- tomhoward 6y ago
  The answer is similar to the one for those who retort to the suggestion that taxation should be higher with: "if you love paying tax so much why don't you just send a big cheque to the government?". In both cases, it is that an individual's actions don't move the needle. Even a low-to-mid double-digit percentage of the population's actions don't move the needle that much. So, to address your accusatory question: no, thinking people are not OK with the destructions of ecosystems, the decline in animal populations or the extinction of many species. And if it were the case that through my own avoidance of consuming meat for the rest of my life I could significantly abate these problems, I'd happily make that choice. But thinking people also know it's not remotely as simple as the question implies. I could avoid meat for the rest of my life, and it would make zero difference to these problems. Even worse, everyone in the world could avoid eating meat, but that would still leave (indeed possibly exacerbate) the issue of land and resource use for the production of plant-based foods. And it would also have no bearing on the issue of animal poaching for medicinal or ornamental uses, of which I'm pretty sure just about nobody on this website is an advocate or customer. None of this is to say it's a lost cause, that there's nothing that can or should be done to improve things. Plenty is being done, and plenty more should be done. To the extent that heathy ecosystems are necessary for human survival, self-interest will ensure that more efforts go into that, and social/political pressure will continue to see benevolent efforts being undertaken. But for solutions to be truly effective, they have to be co-ordinated across society, and that is the great challenge we face. I often observe that people who choose to avoid meat for environmental reasons and finger-wag at others for not following suit are avoiding confronting the deeper realities and challenges involved with solving these problems.
acd 6y ago
System engineer here. The economic system current is wrong, it does not reward keeping ecological systems in a good state! We need to fix the economic system so that preserving wild life and nature is rewarded. Well functioning eco systems is very valuable to us as humans yet we do not preserve them as we should. Wildlife is valuable Clean air is valuable Oceans clean of plastic and full of fish is valuable Not warming earth is valuable How do we make a fix to the economic system that such values are kept for future generations?
- qnt 6y ago
  I think "the economic system is wrong" is a bit of a stretch, but despite objectively working pretty well there are a few glaring problems (some of which potentially lead to society imploding if left unchecked... but aside from that, pretty good!) As far as I'm aware, I think the most glaring problems (tragedy of the commons, dealing with negative externalities) are very well known & have relatively well understood policy solutions (e.g. Pigovian tax). When there is wide enough social buy-in that these policy solutions can be implemented without expending/risking too much political capital, the "problem" ends up resolved. A good example might be smoking in Australia. Very highly taxed, forced grotesque health warning images plastered all over the cigarette packets, etc. The comparison travelling through Italy vs Australia with respect to number of smokers is pretty amazing. The population understands & accepts the negative externalities of smoking well enough to accept the forced hand of policymakers intervening in their lives, and won't vote anybody out because of it. So to me, the more appropriate question is, how do we incentivise enough social buy-in that people will accept the personal disadvantages of e.g. a carbon tax, and still lend their support (vote) to the party who choses to implement it? Didn't work well for France last time they tried to hike taxes on fuel.
  - xg15 6y ago
    Climate change and environmental collapse are somewhat larger dimensions than smoking though, both in impact as well as required policy changes. The tobacco industry has never had a particular good reputation, so getting social buy-in is not that hard. It has no more utility than the alcohol industry, so getting rid of it has not a lot of knock-on effects. Even then, demanding a few scary pictures was a slap on the wrist, compared to outright banning them. (Not sure about Australia, but other notions actually work with local bans in a gradually increasing number of locations) I think fighting climate change and environmental collapse are harder problems because the responsible industries are deeply intertwined into our economic systems and lifestyles. They are also providing a significant amount of political power. We'll have to actively work to find alternative ways of doing things in many areas before we're able to scale back here.
tarsinge 6y ago
The key quote is that 94% of the drop is in Latin America and the Caribbeans. For example in France forests are increasing since more than 100 years [0]. So discussing diet is interesting but eating les meat in the developed world will do nothing for the obvious big problem: Amazon deforestation. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122699/forest-area-surface-france/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122699/forest-area-surf...
- regisg 6y ago
  Brazilian soybeans massively imported into France for animal feed.
- akiselev 6y ago
  The amount of land covered by forest says nothing about biodiversity and general wildlife. Replanting forests doesn't bring back all of the species who disappeared along with their habitat. Brazil is the world's biggest beef exporter, including to the EU, and the majority of deforested land goes to grazing, not agriculture.
  - tresCommatoso 6y ago
    Its one cow covid away from beeing out of buisness.. meat seems like a very fragile investment
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  France destroyed basically all of their forest in the last few centuries. It's a funny claim. It's like a homeless man saying his wealth increased by 100% in one day. There's a real problem with conservation in the West where we lecture developing countries about the environmental destruction we ourselves did long ago for pure monetary gain. It's hard to have a proper conversation about it and find solutions when there's a real hypocrisy that is quite blatant to one party and not the other. I see this with the EU and palm oil in SEA, what exactly does Europe want them to do? If they can't sell palm they'll still farm something else (probably far less efficient too, palm oil per kg needs 4x less space than European canola). It's not an easy issue in the first place and borders/nationalism/trade protection makes it even harder.
effnorwood 6y ago
It isn’t

391 points by acdanger 6y ago

> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials," This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition. The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to replace the problematic industries. The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big investors to do the right thing.

mc32 6y ago
“... The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc...” Just as often as big operations contributing to this, it’s the mom or pop or children doing this in a subsistence manner. A contributing factor is encroachment due to local population growth.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Indeed. Madagascar is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe because every family has many children and each of those children eventually needs to slash-and-burn rainforest in order to plant enough rice to sustain themselves. Also a lot of tree-felling to make charcoal, because for whatever reason Malagasy villagers cannot afford e.g. kerosene to cook with. The result is the steady eradication of all those cool lemurs and other rainforest wildlife, but the perpetrators of this destruction are not millionaire industrial fatcats like people often imagine, they are dirt-poor subsistence farmers.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    And without significant investment by those with resources, asking them to preserve the environment is a direct ask for them to go hungry or cold for the sake of the environment. This is an ask that 99.99% or more of the human population will absolutely ignore.
    - zo1 6y ago
      Or how about we invade Madagascar, ship all these poor folk to NYC, and declare the entire region a wildlife reserve?
      - runarberg 6y ago
        Not cool. This kind of imperialist mindset has historically been at the head of some of the most awful actions in human history. Including forced relocations, imposed poverty, sustained resource theft, sustained vandalism and theft of local artifacts, slave labor, and even genocide. If the rich world really cared about the wildlife in Madagascar we would fund green local infrastructure projects so that the local population could enjoy a sustainable lifestyle on their own.
    - Aaronstotle 6y ago
      I guess a solution would be give them supplies so they aren't forced to destroy their own backyard in order to survive.
laurent92 6y ago
We are addicted to high population density, making babies and helping get everyone to what we consider is the minimum level of consumption, which is exactly 2x higher than the Earth can provide sustainably. At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.
- rcpt 6y ago
  There's nothing wrong with population density. We'd do better to have people living in dense city centers instead of sprawled out into every corner of the wilderness.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    COVID-19 begs to differ
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      North Dakota has more than 10x the per-capita COVID-19 infection rate of New York City right now, despite having only about 0.03% of the population density.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - eanzenberg 6y ago
        That’s because covid ran through NYC in April leading to massive per capita loss of life.
      - airstrike 6y ago
        You're comparing two cities that got hit by COVID-19 in totally different time periods. No other place in the US had a spike like NYC
    - hyper_reality 6y ago
Aunche 6y ago
It's not just about the capital owners. The actual people chopping down rainforests for palm oil plantations are formerly impoverished farmers. You can stop corporations from buying from them, but you're hurting these poorer communities the most.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > you're hurting these poorer communities the most. My point is that redistributing wealth in a better way, we would get less opposition to upgrade our production means and people like that poor farmers and others will get a bigger piece of the cake in a more healthy environment and conserving their culture and land. I agree with you, thou. The current mindset is that the super-rich are super-rich and their wealth cannot be touched. So, we are left with limited options on how to manage with the scraps. If we think out of the box and realize that we can redistribute wealth better, there will be still very rich people but also farmers would get a more fair price for their contribution.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    This is key. It's this cultural blind spot where we gloss over the fact that these people are impoverished and so desperate that they would destroy the home around them, partly because we allow a tiny fraction of humanity to amass absurd wealth. Then we double down by making it socially acceptable for them to leverage that wealth into making it untouchable and ever-growing. If we just took this situation as strictly unacceptable, then we are working with a much larger range of options. The idea that big reward == all that innovation needed is pretty sick. It assumes all it takes is innovation to solve literal planet scale problems.
    - nickff 6y ago
      Well, innovation in agriculture has actually reduced the amount of land used for farming in more developed countries while increasing production.
      - 6y ago
julienb_sea 6y ago
The problem is much more complex than people being "addicted to easy money". Wealthy nations have buffer to take on unnecessary expense in addressing their basic needs, like food and shelter. This is dramatically less true in non-wealthy nations. Creating ecological mandates can have actual human impact on food availability and on human standard of living. Not the marginal improvements experienced in developed nations, but life or death quality of life changes to the worlds poorest.
Passthepeas 6y ago
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is-grass-fed-beef-really-better-for-the-planet-heres-the-science https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is... Pastured farming is actually capable of being carbon negative
runarberg 6y ago
Very much indeed. It frustrates me to no end to look back 20 years in the past and see that Al Gore ran on an anti global warming platform in the 2000 presidential election, and lost to an oil baron. While in the 2020 presidential election the democratic candidate hardly mentions the climate disaster while the western parts of the country is literally on fire. Over the years we have tried to solve the climate disaster with some (but very limited) success. Methods including carbon tax, international agreements and green infrastructure. However these efforts have always stopped short of being implemented on a necessary scale (international agreements especially). It is a hard problem only because modern politicians are unwilling to implement any of the necessary policy to tackle it (even though most voters generally want it; green infrastructure especially).
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  >> the western parts of the country is literally on fire. Currently under investigation as arson.
- feralimal 6y ago
  Yes but none of the imminent dangers he warned about came to pass did they? We're still waiting. So, perhaps the right choice was made. 20 years later, you should watch that film again and see the manipulative fear mongering that is in play. And let's not forget that Al is heavily invested in 'green' tech.
  - tpnCC 6y ago
    If U may tell, which specific imminent 'dangers' did not come to pass?
    - feralimal 6y ago
      I'd have to watch the film again (no thanks!) to provide more detail, but it was a tirade of fear. Eg: No snow on Kilimanjaro? but: https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilimanjaro-glaciers-in-years/ https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilim... 20-foot rise in sea levels caused by melting ice caps? shutting down of the ocean conveyor? Hurricanes are getting stronger? Pacific Islands drowning?
partyboat1586 6y ago
But also the owners of the means to produce soybean and grain are happy that they can cut out the middleman and sell their product direct to consumers rather than as animal feed. They will end up with more wealth.

AlexandrB 6y ago

I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we stopped destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are already living in small, isolated pockets surrounded by roads, farms, and industry. Meanwhile, plants and smaller animals face intense competition from invasive species - often brought in by accident thanks to the constant flow of goods around the globe. We're probably headed for a pretty homogeneous global ecology - where "economically significant" or highly adaptable plants and animals thrive, while the others are relegated to zoos, national parks, or extinction.

samatman 6y ago
That's the direction things are heading. It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples from as many critically endangered species as possible. Unextinction is a difficult problem, but without the necessary material, it's impossible. Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like those, it's right in the name. And it's no substitute for building wildlife corridors, managing park lands better, extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it doesn't draw resources away from those things either.
- sethherr 6y ago
  ... wait, how is what you’re suggesting different from zoos?
  - samatman 6y ago
    In a zoo, we take an animal out of the wild, and keep it alive. Ideally breeding them as well. In my suggestion, we tranquilize an animal, take a blood sample, and extract marrow from the hip. We then perform a full genome sequence on the blood, and freeze the marrow down, with compounds which vitrify the cells such that they can be revived at any point in the future. We should do both. But the latter has advantages: the animal stays in the wild, it scales better, and the only ongoing input is a bit of energy to keep the cells cold. We don't have the technology to print a whole genome from a file, but I expect we will. Stem cell cloning is well understood, and will only get better. Doing this to as many individuals as possible will preserve genetic diversity. It's insurance, basically.

xnx 6y ago

I wish we spent more time talking about "habitat destruction" instead of "climate change", while understanding that climate change is the largest form of habitat destruction.

philips 6y ago
Why do you feel discussing habitat destruction would be helpful?
- pvaldes 6y ago
  There is an huge difference between saving giant panda in zoos and saving the forests where giant panda lives (and all the other species of birds, flowers and mammals including pandas with it. De-extinction would be to save just one screw from a perfectly tuned and complex machine that produces more than pandas. No-extinction is better than de-extinction and also much more cheap.
- xnx 6y ago
  "change" feels neutral. "destruction" is always bad. There's also a lot of habitat destruction (e.g. ocean acidification) that might not fit the normal concept of "climate change". "Habitat destruction" can include things like deforestation, which would be bad even if it didn't affect climate. "Habitat destruction" might also serve as a reminder that we're destroying our own habitat as well, not just that of other plants and animals.
coolspot 6y ago
Too complicated for the masses. Climate change is something everyone can observe more or less. Dead bees, elephants, wolves - not so much.
mythrwy 6y ago
The net effects of climate change (and of course the magnitude) are big question marks in my book. But you bring up the exact thing I think every time I hear the more extreme climate change claims. We have some very real and relevant issues right now that are huge, existential even, and not based on theoretical models and we don't seem to be discussing or doing anything at all about these. Groundwater depletion. Topsoil depletion. Loss of habitat and biodiversity. Microplasics. Desertification.

vharuck 6y ago

>New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food. I'm pessimistic with this claim. From my experience, if a productive process like agriculture becomes more efficient, we scale up output. The resources being used up, in this case land, won't be reduced. For an analogy, consider how adding more lanes to a busy highway ultimately means more people drive and congestion is just as bad. What we need is more government protection of habitats. But it's hard for a government to directly and explicitly oppose economic opportunities.

monktastic1 6y ago
Sounds like Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand."
- xg15 6y ago
  Thanks for the pointer and definition. "Increasing demand" seems pretty funny when we have whole industries dedicated to artificially generating demand (e.g. marketing and advertising) and when the ultimate quality metric for a country is it's GDP - so both business as well as government will do whatever it can to keep demand from going down. Sometimes I feel we're sitting in the bus from Speed (that will explode if it goes under 50 Mph) and just realized we're headed towards a roadblock. So now we're paradoxically trying to come to a full stop and not go below 50mph at the same time and wonder why it's not working.
nickff 6y ago
As a matter of fact, the more industrialized nations have increased productivity and production, while decreasing the amount of land devoted to agriculture (returning a great deal of it to 'nature').

philips 6y ago

I find it notable how indirect the author is about the “Why” in this story: > New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food. > The British TV presenter and naturalist Sir David Attenborough said the Anthropocene, the geological age during which human activity has come to the fore, could be the moment we achieve a balance with the natural world and become stewards of our planet.

ojnabieoot 6y ago
Many people consider anthropogenic extinction immoral and the ongoing human-caused mass extinction event to be an urgent moral crisis. But let's suppose you were going to take a cynical argument along the lines of "these species are going extinct due to their poor adaptations to a changing environment, it's just evolution," or let's just say you think moral objections are irrational. Then from this (ignorant and needlessly cruel) perspective, - the destruction of the Amazon is likely to have profound climatological/geochemical impacts, including increased C02 in the atmosphere - widespread defaunation of predators could very well lead to increased pests or disease-carrying animals - loss of insect life could be catastrophic to industrial agriculture - overharvested fishing and agricultural resources means diminshing returns (and possibly famine) for future generations More generally, the destruction we've wrought upon the world in the last 150 years is scientifically uncharted territory, and it's deeply naïve to assume that 150 years of strong economic growth can be extrapolated to suppose that destroying the planet will work out for humans in the long term.
- dariosalvi78 6y ago
  which, from the Darwinian perspective, will cause either our extinction, or an adaptation, but only after many have died. It's probably all avoidable, but I don't see the human kind, in its current form and way of societal organisation being able to get out of this.

okcwarrior 6y ago

Ok, this is a crazy comment, but I have been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 a lot and almost every piece of land has something, somewhere built on it. Farm, suburb, etc It's depressing but maybe it helps me understand that we are using too much of earth. Do we really need endless farms?

mythrwy 6y ago
If we are going to have endless people we need endless farms probably. It would be cool if we could keep the population of the globe like 1/10 what it is now but I don't know of a humane and rights respecting way to achieve that. Or maybe if we reduce our standard of living it would help but how low can we go? And people aren't going to go for that either. It's a tough problem.
coolspot 6y ago
We got a lot of people to feed. The only right way to stop/reverse climate change is to control population growth. Others ways, like reducing each individual’s carbon footprint or clean energy just gives us excuse to breed more and overwhelm the planet, but later.
- Falling3 6y ago
  Completely disagree. Tje richest 10% of the world is responsible for 50% of CO2 output. I don't know about other metrics, but that I'm sure that pattern isn't just limiter to carbon footprint. We don't have a population problem. We have a problem with Greer and resource use that slashing ourr population - even drastically - will not in any way solve.
  - samatman 6y ago
    The richest 10% of the world also come from regions with stable-to-negative population growth. Those regions are our only hope for moving to a sustainable technological platform while maintaining a high quality of life; we're talking about the people who buy solar panels, windmills, and electric cars, who at least can build nuclear plants, if they get over their political reservations. The poorest 50% of the world would absolutely love to emit more CO2, and will do so just as fast as they can acquire the resources. I don't think any steps to limit population growth really need to be taken, however, other than two things which are good in and of themselves: women's education, and improving access to birth control. But concerns about Earth's carrying capacity need to be taken seriously. Malthus is wrong right up until he isn't, and we should strive to avoid hitting that limit.

philips 6y ago

How are people on Hacker News changing their behavior around food and energy consumption? And besides individual action what community action have you taken? Personally I have found myself on a similar path to Peter Kalmus[1]. Before having kids I did what I could: didn’t own a car, commuted by bike, composted, minimized fashion/tech consumption, etc. On the other hand my career required significant plane travel for a time. Now with kids I feel extremely motivated to take further action to reduce energy consumption and interact directly with nature: through gardening, removing all plane travel, installing rooftop solar, etc. On the collective action front I become increasingly frustrated that something as obvious and “market based” as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (HR 7173)[2] isn’t already law. Something like that feels like the bare minimum solution to putting the US on the right track. [1]: https://peterkalmus.net/books/read-by-chapter-being-the-change/ https://peterkalmus.net/books/read-by-chapter-being-the-chan... [2]: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbo...

11235813213455 6y ago
Same here, I'm on a bike for everything, I eat organic (literally, I forage a lot of fruit when going for a ride, currently there are many figs). So my consumption and my environmental impact is certainly super low. I pick up plastic trash every now and then, it's hard to counter all that continuous litter volume Next step is to spread this philosophy, but it's not easy or even possible to change other people lifestyles. It's sad because, it's definitely healthy to live that way Just talked with someone today, near a fig tree, he said they should cut that tree next to the road because it was dangerous, I replied to him, the fig tree is more important than the road and car traffic with a smile, and a bit of sadness inside because I know what will happen
- nverno 6y ago
  This brings back memories of living in Portland. It would be amazing if cities were designed with this type of foraging as a priority :D
- runarberg 6y ago

holoduke 6y ago

To me (at least in the area I live in) the easiest and quickest win is to plant trees massively. There is so much space available. But somehow people/governments wants to have grass vegetation as a filler between roads, inside parks etc.

wozer 6y ago
Or just stop mowing these areas. Shrubs and then trees will grow there all by themselves.
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  The thing is, unmanaged natural life is generally not compatible with human flourishing. Let the land go feral and soon you're looking at an unfathomable amount of ticks fed on unchecked deer who breed faster than anything can handle and infect each other with prions because the alternative is reintroducing wolves to the environment. And even the plant life is dangerous as unpruned, splintery trees drop branches in every windstorm, the brush periodically catches on fire, thorny or irritating plants proliferate and roots infiltrate and destroy nearby structures. It can take millennia to develop a stable, beautiful, all-natural environment, and there are sort of 'minimum size requirements' in the range of hundreds to thousands of miles.

LostTrackHowM 6y ago

The same headline would be equally true from the moment we left Africa and entered other continents, to today.

aaron695 6y ago

Lucky we have the doomsday cult to keep telling us the world is warming and will wipe out the animals in 100 year so let's not concern us with local problems. In reality it has and always will be local. And the solution has and will be for a few more decades use fossil fuels to help. (The doomsday cult sunk nuclear) This applies to both the environment and if you have empathy, other humans.

cleandreams 6y ago
A member of the 'doomsday cult' here. From the West Coast, I see global warming out my window in the form of unprecedented wildfire, in part caused by warming and related drying out of the landscape. Denial doesn't fix this problem.
- aaron695 6y ago
  > In part caused by warming and related drying out of the landscape. Nope. Maybe a small part than makes it happen at best 10% more often. But insignificant. You and those around you are worth well more than 10% than your parents. You could have managed it locally at a state level, through education, prevention, preparation, treatment, mitigation, harm minimisation and repair but you didn't. It's on you. You chose big screen TV's and pretending recycling matters instead.

annoyingnoob 6y ago

Mosquitos are having no issues, to the detriment of everyone.

lopmotr 6y ago

Here's some good news for fish https://reefresilience.org/wp-content/uploads/graph02.jpg https://reefresilience.org/wp-content/uploads/graph02.jpg It shows rate of fishing has plateaued or declined but importantly, "effort" continues to climb so I imagine cost should provide a natural limit.

sul_tasto 6y ago

Seems like this is never the type of issue discussed at Davos.

giantg2 6y ago

Surprise, surprise. What did we think would happen with increasing quality of life (increased consumption) and increasing population (further increase in consumption).

roenxi 6y ago

I live in a city. We've exterminated every animal except cats and dogs, which we've modified with a multi-millennium breeding program to suit our desires. Pretty much every surface is covered in concrete, all the plants are curated by humans. As far as the eye can see is a totally artificial biosphere. This is where pretty much all the humans live. Most of the people who get worried about wildlife decline live here too. I get why there are some people who care, but I don't get why they expect the median human to care or why it becomes an important political issue. People are voting with their feet - exterminating the competition is an outcome of human civilisation.

sanjay_316 6y ago
There’s room outside the cities. Even cities require farms at the very least, which — while not wilderness — are not concreted over. Wilderness is good for mental health, clean air, and having options in the case of a collapse of our artificial ecologies of food crops.
- roenxi 6y ago
  There isn't anything especially natural happening on a farm either, they are artificial environments to the same extent as a city. There isn't going to be anything there that isn't being managed by humans. And if our artificial crops collapse we're doomed. Nature can't support the population levels we've reached.
rexpop 6y ago
> exterminating the competition Nature is not our competition, it is the substrate in which we live. To exterminate it is to exterminate ourselves. A simple example is how ocean flora, outside our concrete biomes, produce the oxygen we breathe.

coinward 6y ago

Jeff Bezos will restore the planet and move all industry to space. All hail Amazon

seanwilson 6y ago

50% of habitable land on earth is taken up by agriculture, 77% of which is used for meat & diary (including the crops grown for livestock to eat), which contributes only 18% to the global calorie supply because of the inefficiency of animal products: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets I wonder how much of an impact it would have to return the land used by meat & diary to nature (40 million km^2 out of the 104 million km^2 of habitable land, minus some for more crops for humans). Wild animals would have more of chance, they'd be more forests to capture more carbon, and industrial animal farming wouldn't be polluting the planet with carbon, methane and waste products that are contributing to climate change. I don't know a practical solution to the above, but people are in denial about how much damage animal farming is doing globally and the insane scale of it (about 70 billion animals are used for food each year). The general attitudes of "well, people are never going to reduce their use of animal products to help so..." and "lab based meat will save us at some point in the future and then I'll probably switch if they're indistinguible from real meat" is depressing. We're running out of time.

chongli 6y ago
I think these figures are pretty misleading. First of all, they only look at calories, not protein. If you wanted to replace all the meat and dairy with equivalent protein substitutes you’d be looking at huge amounts of land for growing soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts. Replace all the milk with almond milk and you’re still dealing with huge water and land use for a product that has inferior protein and nutrients. Second of all, you can raise livestock like cattle, sheep, and goats on extremely rough terrain. Good luck growing soybeans on a bunch of jagged cliffs. Those areas may be highly inefficient in terms of land area per gram of protein, but it’s not going to be productive farmland otherwise.
- latch 6y ago
  Saying that someone's figures are misleading because the alternative is "huge" isn't a compelling argument. What's the amount? How much does it depend on the crop? What about rice and lentils? Why almond milk? Why not another alternative? Why do we need milk at current quantities at all?

cleandreams 6y ago

I believe this study but it contrasts oddly with my own experience. I have lived for many of my 60+ years in the American West. Species which have made a comeback: wild turkeys, cougar, eagles, rocky mountain sheep, even wolves in some areas. Is this because American patterns of interaction with wildlife are different than elsewhere? Genuinely curious here.

mac01021 6y ago
The article obviously and necessarily omits thousands of pages worth of detail, but I'm pretty sure that if you dug into the scientific findings a disproportionate amount of the decline in vertibrate biodiversity has been in places like Peru, Brazil, Congo, Malaysia -- all the places with jungles and tropical rainforests, which contain a disproportionate amount of the world's terrestrial biodiversity in the first place and which are near-universally under dire threat of being logged into oblivion, cleared for palm plantations, etc. The USA is not doing fantastic when it comes to conservation, but much of the world is doing far worse.

etxm 6y ago

I can’t even begin to think of how we actually fix this with a world clutching so desperately to fossil fuels and large amounts of people considering climate change a hoax.

sizzle 6y ago

What are the consequences to humans if wildlife declines past the point of no return? I know bees are absolutely necessary for pollination, but what will the absence of wildlife do to our species?

aporetics 6y ago

Fascinating to see how these comment threads debate the relative facility of different diets, and even armchair evolutionary biology... while conveniently avoiding the critical topic: the choices we continue to make are defacing the planet, destabilizing ecologies, and exterminating other species at a scale that is hard to imagine. We’re all ok with this? So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions (much less to resolve to change your habits)? Not to put too fine a point on it, but for all of you who ate a burger for dinner tonight, were you thinking about the devastation you’re a part of? (And of course the list of destructive-yet-normalized ways of living is long; try picking one relevant to you).

nicbou 6y ago
Because it's a coordination problem. You can make lifestyle changes to reduce the waste and emissions you produce, but half of the people in your building can't be arsed to separate their trash. That's in Germany, where people seemingly care about the environment. Go to southern Europe and you'll see roads lined with trash. Go to Turkey and you'll undo all of your work in a week or two. It feels pointless.
tomhoward 6y ago
The answer is similar to the one for those who retort to the suggestion that taxation should be higher with: "if you love paying tax so much why don't you just send a big cheque to the government?". In both cases, it is that an individual's actions don't move the needle. Even a low-to-mid double-digit percentage of the population's actions don't move the needle that much. So, to address your accusatory question: no, thinking people are not OK with the destructions of ecosystems, the decline in animal populations or the extinction of many species. And if it were the case that through my own avoidance of consuming meat for the rest of my life I could significantly abate these problems, I'd happily make that choice. But thinking people also know it's not remotely as simple as the question implies. I could avoid meat for the rest of my life, and it would make zero difference to these problems. Even worse, everyone in the world could avoid eating meat, but that would still leave (indeed possibly exacerbate) the issue of land and resource use for the production of plant-based foods. And it would also have no bearing on the issue of animal poaching for medicinal or ornamental uses, of which I'm pretty sure just about nobody on this website is an advocate or customer. None of this is to say it's a lost cause, that there's nothing that can or should be done to improve things. Plenty is being done, and plenty more should be done. To the extent that heathy ecosystems are necessary for human survival, self-interest will ensure that more efforts go into that, and social/political pressure will continue to see benevolent efforts being undertaken. But for solutions to be truly effective, they have to be co-ordinated across society, and that is the great challenge we face. I often observe that people who choose to avoid meat for environmental reasons and finger-wag at others for not following suit are avoiding confronting the deeper realities and challenges involved with solving these problems.

acd 6y ago

System engineer here. The economic system current is wrong, it does not reward keeping ecological systems in a good state! We need to fix the economic system so that preserving wild life and nature is rewarded. Well functioning eco systems is very valuable to us as humans yet we do not preserve them as we should. Wildlife is valuable Clean air is valuable Oceans clean of plastic and full of fish is valuable Not warming earth is valuable How do we make a fix to the economic system that such values are kept for future generations?

qnt 6y ago
I think "the economic system is wrong" is a bit of a stretch, but despite objectively working pretty well there are a few glaring problems (some of which potentially lead to society imploding if left unchecked... but aside from that, pretty good!) As far as I'm aware, I think the most glaring problems (tragedy of the commons, dealing with negative externalities) are very well known & have relatively well understood policy solutions (e.g. Pigovian tax). When there is wide enough social buy-in that these policy solutions can be implemented without expending/risking too much political capital, the "problem" ends up resolved. A good example might be smoking in Australia. Very highly taxed, forced grotesque health warning images plastered all over the cigarette packets, etc. The comparison travelling through Italy vs Australia with respect to number of smokers is pretty amazing. The population understands & accepts the negative externalities of smoking well enough to accept the forced hand of policymakers intervening in their lives, and won't vote anybody out because of it. So to me, the more appropriate question is, how do we incentivise enough social buy-in that people will accept the personal disadvantages of e.g. a carbon tax, and still lend their support (vote) to the party who choses to implement it? Didn't work well for France last time they tried to hike taxes on fuel.
- xg15 6y ago
  Climate change and environmental collapse are somewhat larger dimensions than smoking though, both in impact as well as required policy changes. The tobacco industry has never had a particular good reputation, so getting social buy-in is not that hard. It has no more utility than the alcohol industry, so getting rid of it has not a lot of knock-on effects. Even then, demanding a few scary pictures was a slap on the wrist, compared to outright banning them. (Not sure about Australia, but other notions actually work with local bans in a gradually increasing number of locations) I think fighting climate change and environmental collapse are harder problems because the responsible industries are deeply intertwined into our economic systems and lifestyles. They are also providing a significant amount of political power. We'll have to actively work to find alternative ways of doing things in many areas before we're able to scale back here.

tarsinge 6y ago

The key quote is that 94% of the drop is in Latin America and the Caribbeans. For example in France forests are increasing since more than 100 years [0]. So discussing diet is interesting but eating les meat in the developed world will do nothing for the obvious big problem: Amazon deforestation. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122699/forest-area-surface-france/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122699/forest-area-surf...

regisg 6y ago
Brazilian soybeans massively imported into France for animal feed.
akiselev 6y ago
The amount of land covered by forest says nothing about biodiversity and general wildlife. Replanting forests doesn't bring back all of the species who disappeared along with their habitat. Brazil is the world's biggest beef exporter, including to the EU, and the majority of deforested land goes to grazing, not agriculture.
- tresCommatoso 6y ago
  Its one cow covid away from beeing out of buisness.. meat seems like a very fragile investment
DarthGhandi 6y ago
France destroyed basically all of their forest in the last few centuries. It's a funny claim. It's like a homeless man saying his wealth increased by 100% in one day. There's a real problem with conservation in the West where we lecture developing countries about the environmental destruction we ourselves did long ago for pure monetary gain. It's hard to have a proper conversation about it and find solutions when there's a real hypocrisy that is quite blatant to one party and not the other. I see this with the EU and palm oil in SEA, what exactly does Europe want them to do? If they can't sell palm they'll still farm something else (probably far less efficient too, palm oil per kg needs 4x less space than European canola). It's not an easy issue in the first place and borders/nationalism/trade protection makes it even harder.

effnorwood 6y ago

It isn’t