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>"The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed," wrote Josef Settele, a German biologist and co-chair of the re

>"The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed," wrote Josef Settele, a German biologist and co-chair of the report. "This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world." "Nobody Knows Why".

bobthepanda 6y ago
I mean, that's a very vague generalization; "Nobody Knows Why" is about the fact that we don't know the direct causal link. It's not pollution (other mussel species in the same ecosystem are doing perfectly fine) and it may be disease but no one has conclusively determined that.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Humans. Humans are the direct causal link. There isn't going to be some single silver bullet explaining everything further than that, it is an ecosystem collapse. Humans impact everything in small ways, these in turn impact everything else in its network. Sometimes positively but more usually negatively via various strains. It's not always pollution, sometimes it's disease, sometimes it's habitat sometimes it's climate, sometimes food chain, sometimes it's noise pollution, sometimes it's even more complicated than that for example you might knock out a predator but then create more disease or remove an ecological pressure that kept a species behaviour in line with its environment.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Sure, but unless your solution is "wipe out humanity" this is so broad as to be useless for solving the specific problem, or really any problem. Unless we're supposed to just throw hands up in the air and rot away fatalistically. Some human-caused issues are fixable. As a rough example that is somewhat similar to a mussel die-off in a river, Washington was able to bring local salmon numbers back up on a river by fixing culverts blocking stream flow and blowing up dams.
dang 6y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments, and especially not shallow dismissals, to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bobthepanda 6y ago

I mean, that's a very vague generalization; "Nobody Knows Why" is about the fact that we don't know the direct causal link. It's not pollution (other mussel species in the same ecosystem are doing perfectly fine) and it may be disease but no one has conclusively determined that.

waheoo 6y ago
Humans. Humans are the direct causal link. There isn't going to be some single silver bullet explaining everything further than that, it is an ecosystem collapse. Humans impact everything in small ways, these in turn impact everything else in its network. Sometimes positively but more usually negatively via various strains. It's not always pollution, sometimes it's disease, sometimes it's habitat sometimes it's climate, sometimes food chain, sometimes it's noise pollution, sometimes it's even more complicated than that for example you might knock out a predator but then create more disease or remove an ecological pressure that kept a species behaviour in line with its environment.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Sure, but unless your solution is "wipe out humanity" this is so broad as to be useless for solving the specific problem, or really any problem. Unless we're supposed to just throw hands up in the air and rot away fatalistically. Some human-caused issues are fixable. As a rough example that is somewhat similar to a mussel die-off in a river, Washington was able to bring local salmon numbers back up on a river by fixing culverts blocking stream flow and blowing up dams.

dang 6y ago

Please don't post unsubstantive comments, and especially not shallow dismissals, to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html