25 ms·

Sir David Attenborough makes stark warning about species extinction

205 points by makerofspoons 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago
About the two rhinos, do we have the technology to keep genetic material from animals that are endangered so we can reintroduce them later? I realize the population would be too much of a monoculture, but maybe it's better than nothing.
- conception 6y ago
  We do and use it! SD zoo just made a horse! https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewalskis-horse-is-born-of-dna-saved-for-40-years https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewal...
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    That's exciting news, thanks!
- DavidAdams 6y ago
  I wonder if CRISPR tech could mitigate some of the dangers of inbreeding.
  - bioinformatics 6y ago
    It won't.
    - lilboiluvr69 6y ago
      Can somebody talk more about this? I'm interested and don't know much about it.
      - ses1984 6y ago
        I am a lay person so please don't just trust what I'm saying, but don't think you need to be an expert in the field to deduce why it won't happen. First of all, there's no money in it. So the technical reasons, whatever they are, don't really matter. Second, I don't think it's that simple to just apply CRISPR to this problem, like CRISPR is some kind of magic bullet. This would be asking way more of CRISPR than previous experiments by orders of magnitude. It would be like asking the Wright brothers when they're going to scale their flying technology to get to Mars.
        bioinformatics 6y ago
        You are in the right track. To actually make CRISPR/CAS-9 work for "reduce inbreeding" issues, we would need to understand how the whole animal genome operates and all possible connections between genes and define what are the recessive genes that might cause some anomaly in the selection coefficient and decrease it. Without this map, how would we are going to be able to use a technique that alters genes and efficiently change nucleotides to avoid recessive traits?
VikingCoder 6y ago
I was arguing with someone on the internet, and biodiversity became the arguing point. They ended up flat-out asking me why anyone should care about biodiversity. It's such an ingrained assumption inside my head that everyone should understand the value of biodiversity that I couldn't even answer. I grew up watching David Attenborough, David Suzuki, and Carl Sagan explaining the natural world. I can't imagine how much poorer my life would be, if I hadn't grown up with that. And I can't begin to imagine how to explain my world-view to someone who clearly didn't grow up with them... Other than to sit them down with all those fantastic series, and hope that they take hold in them. I mean, like, start by watching "Queen of the Trees," and see how inter-connected all of that life is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  Biodiversity is important because biology has been doing chemistry, physics, medicine, and neuroscience far longer than humans have. Many modern technologies exist only through studying nature. There's no need to love the splendor of nature to know that destroying a discovery before we know it exists is shooting ourselves in the foot.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I don't think we understand redundancy as well as we say we do. We have backups and alternatives within cultural and civil systems and we often try to cut them back. Different organisms have come up with different solutions to the same problem, and because of that they can break in different situations. The 'service' they provide will be affected differently by an environmental shortage or excess. If twenty microbes are responsible for recycling organic matter and dust or drought or some chemical affects 10 of them, the others will expand to pick up some of the slack.
    - anigbrowl 6y ago
      Indeed. Often the drive for efficiency is rooted in the desire to extract economic value that seems to be going unclaimed or wasted (in the present) without regard for structural utility (over time).
scott31 6y ago
The ship was named after this guy instead of being named Boaty McBoatface which was voted by public, and he happily accepted it. This should tell you about his ethics.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Making comments where the actual view of the author is made up by the reader is most of the time not a good idea. Do you mean that he is against democracy? That he is not humble and like things named after him? I feel like you meant well with the comment, but it's hard to understand what's positive here, except that the people naming the boat thought of Attenborough.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) had the final say [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Naming_poll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Nam...
  - scott31 6y ago
    Yes, and I did not say he named the ship after himself. Any person with small bit of self respect would have rejected the name, and he had opportunities to do so, but he happily choosed the alternative
    - Nursie 6y ago
      Why?
      - anigbrowl 6y ago
        Don't take the troll bait.
    - dang 6y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We've already had to ask you this. We're trying for something a bit different than internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Restoration of habitat and setting aside half of earth for the rest of the species would be an easier solution than cloning or Crispr Human beings procreating responsibly is a major factor in continuing our species to perpetuity. It should not be for religious, economic, political or social reasons. Species extinction occurs because human beings are outbreeding every other species on earth exploiting all the planet’s resources and keeping it for themselves. This is detrimental to our own survival as we are super apex predators. When an apex predator gets hungry, nothing else can survive. And we are always hungry and we keep adding hungry mouths. If we pick quality over quantity, we will have a healthy stock and sufficient earth resources when the eventual depopulation event occurs. Depopulation is a mathematical certainty. We can either control population with responsible procreation and resource conservation or we can burn all existing and non renewable resources and perish in a spectacularly tragic and violent way. The only way to prevent species extinction is to conserve habitat for the species. Since everything is below us, we have to step aside and make space. Without habitat, we will perish as a species. Being the apex predator, it’s like sitting on the top most branch of a tree and sawing off all the branches. Because apex predators consume everything. Increase in population is like inviting everyone to come and sit on top of the tree too. Hunters and fishermen know this. That’s why most conservation groups seek hunters and fishermen and NRA support. They donate because they realize the importance of preservation of habitat. How do we go about this? By removing population pressure from economic activities like work and employment and GDP. This can be easily achieved by automation. Growing high calories, nutritionally dense food to feed the population and investing in local food security by utilizing modern tech like hydroponics and vertical farming on marginal land. Figuring out the environmental cost of replacement rate of human births and helping people gain resources to justify having children rather be a continual drain by incentivizing large families. When resources disappear, civil unrest and war begins. We have always seen this. Famine and drought have always preceded every major war. From tribes to the latest Syrian incursion. Even way back, primitive tribes will go to war with the the neighbours when there is a famine or drought or food runs low. The men who die remove themselves from the food chain. Women and children are spared and were always spoils of war. The resources are combined for greater survivability of species..not a tribe. The latest upheavals we see and the protests and revolutions in recent memory have always been due to less resources to distribute amongst a larger population. Densely populated regions revolt when resources are stretched thin. We incarcerated criminals when they show a tendency to appropriate community resources without contributing to the common pot thereby reducing their ability to be multiplying and replicating vectors of DNA. We did not allow the sick and the weak to continue sharing the commons. If we look at the bigger picture unemotionally, what we pride ourselves with..the genteel fair kind and sociological progress Is what has allowed this resource restriction. We can’t let go of that progress. The only way out is automation. And removing economic incentives for procreation. And resource allocation and distribution equally by removing speculation over resources that contribute to human survival.
mikelyons 6y ago
The wildfire smoke has brought that future that we'd feared and daydreamed (daymared?) about; where we can actually see the posibility and impetus for living in self-contained bubbles of breathable atmosphere and livable temperatures. Now is the time that we are finally transitioning to electric vehicles and hopefully toward sustainable policies and economies, but has the collective level of consciousness risen to empower us to meet these challenges?
- solutron 6y ago
  Electric vehicles are just one piece of the solution. We stop the output of new CO2 emissions for private and commercial transportation. Then we gotta do agriculture. Then we gotta decentralize the power grid. Then we gotta further decentralize agriculture again. Then we gotta better manage tens of millions of acres of hardly traversable terrain that's been fuel loading for a century. The list goes on and on. We've lost decades of progress by side-tracking ourselves with complete bs narratives being pumped out of monied interest groups that prefer things stay they way they are. I hate to be a pessimist but we might be right and truly fucked at this point.
  - animal_spirits 6y ago
    We have to follow the same refactoring strategies we use for programming to refactor the way the world works
    - solutron 6y ago
      Exactly. And nothing's off the table.
LostTrackHowM 6y ago
I've been watching Sir David Attenborough since I was a kid, and I am now middle aged. And I've known about species extinction since I was a little kid. They've happened and keep happening. Little to nothing seems to have done to prevent them during my lifetime. I feel powerless and have no idea what to do about it. I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling. And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.
- TYPE_FASTER 6y ago
  > I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling. I think if we all do more to make a little difference, we'll make a big difference as a group. I've been making a focused effort to buy food produced locally. Details on how this helps here: https://www.terrapass.com/eat-your-way-to-a-smaller-carbon-footprint https://www.terrapass.com/eat-your-way-to-a-smaller-carbon-f.... Lettuce from across the country costs the same, and isn't as fresh. We moved for a better quality of life, and part of that was reducing our commute. We were able to cut the commute back from 3hrs a day to about 30min a day per adult, if that. There's a calculator here that can help you figure out the carbon savings: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/household-carbon-footprint-calculator https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/household-carbon-footprint-... When our water heater failed, I did some research and realized the state where we were living at the time would pay for a replacement tankless combined water heater and furnace. That saved us about $4k from the cost of the system, plus it is super efficient so our heating and cooking costs dropped, plus we had endless hot water for showers. I realized one day it's like working on legacy software: if you look at it as a whole, it looks like a completely intractable problem. But if you start making incremental changes, over time you can change and have an impact.
  - leafboi 6y ago
    The hard truth is that all the changes you made have little impact. The worst case scenario for species and the environment is pretty much on track to play out. But we don't like the truth do we? I see myself getting voted down for this.
shekharshan 6y ago
The conservationists shared a portion of the revenue from the park with the adjacent villages. This helped create a symbiotic relationship between the gorillas and villages. Not saying that this solution will work with poachers but there is probably a combination of approaches needed to preserve the biodiversity. One national park in India has given legal protection to park rangers if they were to kill to poachers and that has had a dramatic impact on the population of single horned rhinos. In 2015 park rangers shot dead more poachers than poachers killing rhinos for Chinese medicine.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ArkVark 6y ago
We'll struggle to address this until we get the global population under control, particularly in the 3rd world where regard for the Environment is much lower than in the West. At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
- vharuck 6y ago
  >as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth. Those people won't cease to exist. They'll just stay in poorer nations. In fact, wouldn't accepting them into a wealthy nation reduce the average number of children they have? And if these nations can drastically reduce the impact of their citizens, all the more reason to start recruiting migrants.
  - ArkVark 6y ago
    The reduced number of potential children is offset by the significantly higher net increase in emissions from moving from a poor country to a rich country, and participating in a more CO2-intensive economy. Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens. With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.
abeppu 6y ago
It totally makes sense for someone to try to capture the public attention about the impacts of climate change and habitat destruction on species most of don't get to see on the other side of the planet. Those impacts are important, and worth discussing. But would you expect it would convince anyone to change their lifestyle or behavior, given the other evidence that people seem to just accept as the new normal? The west coast of the US is burning. And when California isn't burning, Australia is. Chunks of Florida already regularly experience "nuisance flooding" related to sea level rise, and it's frankly confusing to me that people are still building stuff in Miami. Rising temperatures have meant that the ranges of some infectious diseases have expanded in rich countries (e.g. Lyme disease in parts of Canada, Zika and Dengue in parts of the US). But most Americans, Canadians, Australians and others haven't substantially reorganized their lives to stop emissions. If direct impacts on the lives of people living in rich and powerful countries doesn't cause people in those places to change their behavior, why would you expect them to be moved or motivated by threats to pangolins or rhinos?
- runarberg 6y ago
  I live near Seattle and I’m astounded to see people going about their normal lives while the air they are breathing is literally toxic. It makes me wonder how much people actually know or care about the problem as they are willing to sacrifice their lungs in order to ignore it. This also further solidifies my belief that asking people to change their lifestyles in ineffective in tackling the climate disaster. Given the choice people will carry out their normal businesses (even as the world is burning around them). What we really need is actual policy that combats this. We need the state to build the infrastructure and enact restrictions on polluting behavior so people aren’t given the choice of carrying out our polluting destructive business.
  - c22 6y ago
    What's the alternative? Should everyone on the west coast have dropped what they were doing and fled over the mountains? Are we supposed to be helping to put out the fires? Or are you just astounded that we haven't all retreated to the personal hyperbaric chambers we've all pre-constructed in our respective bomb shelters? What have you been doing?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amai 6y ago
This video narrated by Sir David Attenborough should be watched by everyone on our planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Puv0Pss33M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Puv0Pss33M

205 points by makerofspoons 6y ago

About the two rhinos, do we have the technology to keep genetic material from animals that are endangered so we can reintroduce them later? I realize the population would be too much of a monoculture, but maybe it's better than nothing.

conception 6y ago
We do and use it! SD zoo just made a horse! https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewalskis-horse-is-born-of-dna-saved-for-40-years https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewal...
- StavrosK 6y ago
  That's exciting news, thanks!
DavidAdams 6y ago
I wonder if CRISPR tech could mitigate some of the dangers of inbreeding.
- bioinformatics 6y ago
  It won't.
  - lilboiluvr69 6y ago
    Can somebody talk more about this? I'm interested and don't know much about it.
    - ses1984 6y ago
      I am a lay person so please don't just trust what I'm saying, but don't think you need to be an expert in the field to deduce why it won't happen. First of all, there's no money in it. So the technical reasons, whatever they are, don't really matter. Second, I don't think it's that simple to just apply CRISPR to this problem, like CRISPR is some kind of magic bullet. This would be asking way more of CRISPR than previous experiments by orders of magnitude. It would be like asking the Wright brothers when they're going to scale their flying technology to get to Mars.
      - bioinformatics 6y ago
        You are in the right track. To actually make CRISPR/CAS-9 work for "reduce inbreeding" issues, we would need to understand how the whole animal genome operates and all possible connections between genes and define what are the recessive genes that might cause some anomaly in the selection coefficient and decrease it. Without this map, how would we are going to be able to use a technique that alters genes and efficiently change nucleotides to avoid recessive traits?

VikingCoder 6y ago

I was arguing with someone on the internet, and biodiversity became the arguing point. They ended up flat-out asking me why anyone should care about biodiversity. It's such an ingrained assumption inside my head that everyone should understand the value of biodiversity that I couldn't even answer. I grew up watching David Attenborough, David Suzuki, and Carl Sagan explaining the natural world. I can't imagine how much poorer my life would be, if I hadn't grown up with that. And I can't begin to imagine how to explain my world-view to someone who clearly didn't grow up with them... Other than to sit them down with all those fantastic series, and hope that they take hold in them. I mean, like, start by watching "Queen of the Trees," and see how inter-connected all of that life is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM

TeaDrunk 6y ago
Biodiversity is important because biology has been doing chemistry, physics, medicine, and neuroscience far longer than humans have. Many modern technologies exist only through studying nature. There's no need to love the splendor of nature to know that destroying a discovery before we know it exists is shooting ourselves in the foot.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I don't think we understand redundancy as well as we say we do. We have backups and alternatives within cultural and civil systems and we often try to cut them back. Different organisms have come up with different solutions to the same problem, and because of that they can break in different situations. The 'service' they provide will be affected differently by an environmental shortage or excess. If twenty microbes are responsible for recycling organic matter and dust or drought or some chemical affects 10 of them, the others will expand to pick up some of the slack.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    Indeed. Often the drive for efficiency is rooted in the desire to extract economic value that seems to be going unclaimed or wasted (in the present) without regard for structural utility (over time).

scott31 6y ago

The ship was named after this guy instead of being named Boaty McBoatface which was voted by public, and he happily accepted it. This should tell you about his ethics.

capableweb 6y ago
Making comments where the actual view of the author is made up by the reader is most of the time not a good idea. Do you mean that he is against democracy? That he is not humble and like things named after him? I feel like you meant well with the comment, but it's hard to understand what's positive here, except that the people naming the boat thought of Attenborough.
KineticLensman 6y ago
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) had the final say [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Naming_poll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Nam...
- scott31 6y ago
  Yes, and I did not say he named the ship after himself. Any person with small bit of self respect would have rejected the name, and he had opportunities to do so, but he happily choosed the alternative
  - Nursie 6y ago
    Why?
    - anigbrowl 6y ago
      Don't take the troll bait.
  - dang 6y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We've already had to ask you this. We're trying for something a bit different than internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Restoration of habitat and setting aside half of earth for the rest of the species would be an easier solution than cloning or Crispr Human beings procreating responsibly is a major factor in continuing our species to perpetuity. It should not be for religious, economic, political or social reasons. Species extinction occurs because human beings are outbreeding every other species on earth exploiting all the planet’s resources and keeping it for themselves. This is detrimental to our own survival as we are super apex predators. When an apex predator gets hungry, nothing else can survive. And we are always hungry and we keep adding hungry mouths. If we pick quality over quantity, we will have a healthy stock and sufficient earth resources when the eventual depopulation event occurs. Depopulation is a mathematical certainty. We can either control population with responsible procreation and resource conservation or we can burn all existing and non renewable resources and perish in a spectacularly tragic and violent way. The only way to prevent species extinction is to conserve habitat for the species. Since everything is below us, we have to step aside and make space. Without habitat, we will perish as a species. Being the apex predator, it’s like sitting on the top most branch of a tree and sawing off all the branches. Because apex predators consume everything. Increase in population is like inviting everyone to come and sit on top of the tree too. Hunters and fishermen know this. That’s why most conservation groups seek hunters and fishermen and NRA support. They donate because they realize the importance of preservation of habitat. How do we go about this? By removing population pressure from economic activities like work and employment and GDP. This can be easily achieved by automation. Growing high calories, nutritionally dense food to feed the population and investing in local food security by utilizing modern tech like hydroponics and vertical farming on marginal land. Figuring out the environmental cost of replacement rate of human births and helping people gain resources to justify having children rather be a continual drain by incentivizing large families. When resources disappear, civil unrest and war begins. We have always seen this. Famine and drought have always preceded every major war. From tribes to the latest Syrian incursion. Even way back, primitive tribes will go to war with the the neighbours when there is a famine or drought or food runs low. The men who die remove themselves from the food chain. Women and children are spared and were always spoils of war. The resources are combined for greater survivability of species..not a tribe. The latest upheavals we see and the protests and revolutions in recent memory have always been due to less resources to distribute amongst a larger population. Densely populated regions revolt when resources are stretched thin. We incarcerated criminals when they show a tendency to appropriate community resources without contributing to the common pot thereby reducing their ability to be multiplying and replicating vectors of DNA. We did not allow the sick and the weak to continue sharing the commons. If we look at the bigger picture unemotionally, what we pride ourselves with..the genteel fair kind and sociological progress Is what has allowed this resource restriction. We can’t let go of that progress. The only way out is automation. And removing economic incentives for procreation. And resource allocation and distribution equally by removing speculation over resources that contribute to human survival.

mikelyons 6y ago

The wildfire smoke has brought that future that we'd feared and daydreamed (daymared?) about; where we can actually see the posibility and impetus for living in self-contained bubbles of breathable atmosphere and livable temperatures. Now is the time that we are finally transitioning to electric vehicles and hopefully toward sustainable policies and economies, but has the collective level of consciousness risen to empower us to meet these challenges?

solutron 6y ago
Electric vehicles are just one piece of the solution. We stop the output of new CO2 emissions for private and commercial transportation. Then we gotta do agriculture. Then we gotta decentralize the power grid. Then we gotta further decentralize agriculture again. Then we gotta better manage tens of millions of acres of hardly traversable terrain that's been fuel loading for a century. The list goes on and on. We've lost decades of progress by side-tracking ourselves with complete bs narratives being pumped out of monied interest groups that prefer things stay they way they are. I hate to be a pessimist but we might be right and truly fucked at this point.
- animal_spirits 6y ago
  We have to follow the same refactoring strategies we use for programming to refactor the way the world works
  - solutron 6y ago
    Exactly. And nothing's off the table.

LostTrackHowM 6y ago

I've been watching Sir David Attenborough since I was a kid, and I am now middle aged. And I've known about species extinction since I was a little kid. They've happened and keep happening. Little to nothing seems to have done to prevent them during my lifetime. I feel powerless and have no idea what to do about it. I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling. And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.

TYPE_FASTER 6y ago
> I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling. I think if we all do more to make a little difference, we'll make a big difference as a group. I've been making a focused effort to buy food produced locally. Details on how this helps here: https://www.terrapass.com/eat-your-way-to-a-smaller-carbon-footprint https://www.terrapass.com/eat-your-way-to-a-smaller-carbon-f.... Lettuce from across the country costs the same, and isn't as fresh. We moved for a better quality of life, and part of that was reducing our commute. We were able to cut the commute back from 3hrs a day to about 30min a day per adult, if that. There's a calculator here that can help you figure out the carbon savings: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/household-carbon-footprint-calculator https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/household-carbon-footprint-... When our water heater failed, I did some research and realized the state where we were living at the time would pay for a replacement tankless combined water heater and furnace. That saved us about $4k from the cost of the system, plus it is super efficient so our heating and cooking costs dropped, plus we had endless hot water for showers. I realized one day it's like working on legacy software: if you look at it as a whole, it looks like a completely intractable problem. But if you start making incremental changes, over time you can change and have an impact.
- leafboi 6y ago
  The hard truth is that all the changes you made have little impact. The worst case scenario for species and the environment is pretty much on track to play out. But we don't like the truth do we? I see myself getting voted down for this.

shekharshan 6y ago

The conservationists shared a portion of the revenue from the park with the adjacent villages. This helped create a symbiotic relationship between the gorillas and villages. Not saying that this solution will work with poachers but there is probably a combination of approaches needed to preserve the biodiversity. One national park in India has given legal protection to park rangers if they were to kill to poachers and that has had a dramatic impact on the population of single horned rhinos. In 2015 park rangers shot dead more poachers than poachers killing rhinos for Chinese medicine.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ArkVark 6y ago

We'll struggle to address this until we get the global population under control, particularly in the 3rd world where regard for the Environment is much lower than in the West. At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.

vharuck 6y ago
>as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth. Those people won't cease to exist. They'll just stay in poorer nations. In fact, wouldn't accepting them into a wealthy nation reduce the average number of children they have? And if these nations can drastically reduce the impact of their citizens, all the more reason to start recruiting migrants.
- ArkVark 6y ago
  The reduced number of potential children is offset by the significantly higher net increase in emissions from moving from a poor country to a rich country, and participating in a more CO2-intensive economy. Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens. With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.

abeppu 6y ago

It totally makes sense for someone to try to capture the public attention about the impacts of climate change and habitat destruction on species most of don't get to see on the other side of the planet. Those impacts are important, and worth discussing. But would you expect it would convince anyone to change their lifestyle or behavior, given the other evidence that people seem to just accept as the new normal? The west coast of the US is burning. And when California isn't burning, Australia is. Chunks of Florida already regularly experience "nuisance flooding" related to sea level rise, and it's frankly confusing to me that people are still building stuff in Miami. Rising temperatures have meant that the ranges of some infectious diseases have expanded in rich countries (e.g. Lyme disease in parts of Canada, Zika and Dengue in parts of the US). But most Americans, Canadians, Australians and others haven't substantially reorganized their lives to stop emissions. If direct impacts on the lives of people living in rich and powerful countries doesn't cause people in those places to change their behavior, why would you expect them to be moved or motivated by threats to pangolins or rhinos?

runarberg 6y ago
I live near Seattle and I’m astounded to see people going about their normal lives while the air they are breathing is literally toxic. It makes me wonder how much people actually know or care about the problem as they are willing to sacrifice their lungs in order to ignore it. This also further solidifies my belief that asking people to change their lifestyles in ineffective in tackling the climate disaster. Given the choice people will carry out their normal businesses (even as the world is burning around them). What we really need is actual policy that combats this. We need the state to build the infrastructure and enact restrictions on polluting behavior so people aren’t given the choice of carrying out our polluting destructive business.
- c22 6y ago
  What's the alternative? Should everyone on the west coast have dropped what they were doing and fled over the mountains? Are we supposed to be helping to put out the fires? Or are you just astounded that we haven't all retreated to the personal hyperbaric chambers we've all pre-constructed in our respective bomb shelters? What have you been doing?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

amai 6y ago

This video narrated by Sir David Attenborough should be watched by everyone on our planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Puv0Pss33M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Puv0Pss33M