8 ms·

Oh jesus christ, "green roofs"? "Bee bricks" ?? This is ridiculous turd-polishing. The problem isn't that we haven't made our buildings more freaky, it's that w

Oh jesus christ, "green roofs"? "Bee bricks" ?? This is ridiculous turd-polishing. The problem isn't that we haven't made our buildings more freaky, it's that we've destroyed natural ecosystems. So restore the natural ecosystems. Have less buildings. Leave more undeveloped land. Reintroduce predators. Remove invasive species. Allow nature to take over (it will). And news flash: hedgehogs and bees are only being saved because humans think they're cute. What we actually need more of are creepy crawly insects, weeds, grasslands, bushes, forests, wetlands. You know, that "undeveloped" land that was here before we bulldozed it all and installed strip-malls on top.

betwixthewires 5y ago
If you read the article it tells you that only 1% of the earth's habitable land has human development on it. There's plenty of space for nature to thrive, and it does. The big problem for me is externalities that affect that untouched world. Industrial and agricultural runoff, different pesticides and things like that.
- shreyshnaccount 5y ago
  sure, but some of the largest and most important ecosystems which contribute a lot to the overall stability of the earth are being completely obliterated. I remember reading that the Amazon is now a net carbon dioxide producer due to over-utilisation of natural resources. surely that can't be good, right?
- jbay808 5y ago
  That's true, but area is not the only important metric. It only takes a thin sliver of highway cutting through a forest to segment an habitat, break migration paths, and strongly affect ecosystems. The article is mainly about green roofs, but wildlife bridges would perhaps be an even more important example of "building for wildlife". https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-overpasses-underpasses-make-animals-people-safer https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-...
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Driving along the freeways through northern Ontario (400) and northern British Columbia (1 through Banff), I was amazed to see how many wildlife bridges there actually are. The ones in BC are plainly visible because they go over the road, but the ones in Ontario mostly go under the road in the form of large tunnels with fence funnels on either end, and most people would probably never notice them if they weren't paying attention. I even saw a few under the highway in the prairies in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. I think those were mostly for moving livestock across the highway though.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    --This-- is the point. Animals need corridors to move between populations Green roofs would improve the temperature of our homes making to spend less in energy. We should build more, just by our own interest. They are nicer to see than just a roof also.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  1% is used for habitation and other city based stuff. 50% of habitable land is used for agriculture. uninhabitable land includes tundra, desert, exposed rock, mountains etc. That's ~29% of all land. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
rkique 5y ago
I agree with your sentiment but oftentimes small interventions are the only kind possible. And I wouldn't say that something like a pollinator strip is ineffective -- bees and other pollinators are losing habitat, pollinator strips restore them. It may only be one dimension of wildlife but it's a critical one.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
City spaces are deserts of concrete, steel, glass and asphalt. With the exceptions of a few parks and gardens within. Why not reintroduce at least parts of the destroyed ecosystems back into these artificial deserts?
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  It is also probably not really a healthy habitat for humans either.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Depends. On the particular habitat and human(s) ;-) Ones sensoric deprivation is another ones stress.
officehero 5y ago
Urban residential areas with houses with few people are the worst imo. They require a huge amount of infrastructure like paved roads. It might be ok to live like that if you have young kids. If you don't, while living like that, you are an environmental burden period. Also, please don't think that driving electric and feeding some birds and eating green etc can redeem living like that
- majormajor 5y ago
  In terms of land usage, I find it hard to believe that the type of house someone has won't be dominated by the supply chains that feed them and equip them with clothing and tools. How much do you think a yuppie city-dweller's medium-density apartment and train usage offsets the rest of their consumption?
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Why would the supply chains that feed and equip them dominate? Food, clothes, and tools all benefit from high per unit efficiency and this reflects real efficiency in less expensive inputs. Even if you mean the transit the huge barges have very good kg per mile (even if filthy bunker oil is the current norm). For a simple example of this sort of scale efficiency just take a vat of molten steel for one - a larger vat has more volume with less surface area. For a contrasting illustration of an extreme in the other direction, many thimble sized steel vats would be extremely inefficient as they cool off quicker and either need more of them or give it far more time to cool off. Housing is linked to transit needs as an inevitable knock on effect. The lack of scale is what makes individual cars less efficient than loaded buses. I would be perfectly willing to consider hard numbers - there are all sorts of counterintuitive truths.
    - hansvm 5y ago
      Farming takes up a lot of land. Even the most land-efficient diets in this analysis [0,1] required 0.3+ acres per person -- a larger land area than most suburban houses sit on, even when including the marginal cost of the extra road they require. [0] (clickbaitish summary) https://ensia.com/notable/which-diet-makes-best-use-of-farmland-you-might-be-surprised/ https://ensia.com/notable/which-diet-makes-best-use-of-farml... [1] (original) https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/journal.elementa.000116/112904/Carrying-capacity-of-U-S-agricultural-land-Ten https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/jou...
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
The issue really isn't the amount of buildings we have, buildings and most city infrastructure only makes up 1% of all the land. The issue is agriculture which takes up 50% of all habitable land. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use We have a really strong bias towards what we see around us, and for an overwhelming amount of us we see the cities, we see buildings, we see roads.
- wazoox 5y ago
  We can go further: the issue is industrial, mechanical, chemical laden agriculture. Agroforestry or simply traditional agriculture with lots of hedges, trees, small plots, etc maintained living ecosystems for millenia in our countryside.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    How much lower the crop yields are without all this chemistry? Hunger has mostly left humankind (any famines are first of all political troubles, not lack of food), but this was made possible by improving yields several fold. It's hardly possible without pretty heavy augmentation like fertilizers and pest control.
    - moooo99 5y ago
      Hunger has left the developed world, but is still an issue in poor countries. Our society is so incredibly wasteful with food, there are massive amounts of perfectly edible food send to trash every year. This leads me to believe that even with a massive reduction in the use of fertilizers and pest control exactly nothing would change in the developed world in terms of food supply. However, to enable that we'd probably have to get away from monocultural agriculture which is not only an issue for agriculture, but for instects and other wildlife as well.
  - space_fountain 5y ago
    True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside from trying to do something about the number of alive humans, the only shot at reducing agriculture's destructive influence is going more technological not less and I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. Compare the livestock vs all other mammal biomass from the first chart in this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture
exabrial 5y ago
Yep. Wait until you see how much more water and land and ecosystems are destroyed by hipsters insisting that "organic is healthier" and "gmos aren't safe"
- sonicggg 5y ago
  I think you misunderstand the criticism of GMO. They are usually designed to be more resistant to some pretty hardcore pesticides, like RoundUp from Monsanto. That becomes agricultural run-off, and pollutes the nearby ecosystem.
snarf21 5y ago
I agree with you but humans are selfish and destructive. It is always down-voted but the only true solution is less humans. Of course, we could change but history has shown we have no desire to do so and worse, are accelerating our greediness. The thing is that the earth has started to change based on our over-consumption. One way or the other, there will be a lot less humans on this planet in some hundreds of years from now.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Have you noticed that the whole purpose of life as a phenomenon is self-sustaining and proliferation? Forcing lower numbers of humans is not unheard of; usually this is considered cruel. Mass killings aside, take a look at policies enforced by India and China in 1970-80s. Choosing not to have kids is myopic: if your genes make you more conscious and thus caring about the planet as a whole, removing them from the gene pool lowers the chances that next generations would share these traits of yours. The best medicine found so far is exactly what the ultra-green do not like: urbanization, education, higher standards of living, minimal numbers of people doing the traditional countryside agriculture. This puts reproduction rates safely below the replacement rate all over the world, no matter what culture and religion.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    i would say the purpose of life is only proliferation, it's the environment that provides the negative feed back for "self-sustaining". For example, deer with no predators will proliferate until they starve to death and numbers go down to what can be sustained by their environment. If the environment can't sustain any then the population count goes to 0 to match.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Maybe the ultra-greens are against urbanization and I think there is merit to that. But the other topics don't really fit. You can put every living human on Sicily and still have space. The problem is that 99% would have died of thirst after a few days. I think today is earth overshoot day, so we used resources the earth could recoup within a year. That problem isn't solved with everyone moving into cities, it is externalities and our resource consumption. Maybe cities are a few percent more efficient, but it doesn't really matter that much. Cities are also relatively unhealthy in most cases. Living expectation are countered by the proximity of medical professionals perhaps. edit: It is indeed today: https://www.overshootday.org/ https://www.overshootday.org/
darth_avocado 5y ago
True. We don't need roofs with gardens all the time. But urban planning needs to account for more green space. Of course we need to fix and leave more wild habitat to stay wild, but we also need to create more spaces for the wildlife to roam free. For example my city is packed on one side being the coastline and the other being a massive freeway. We have a lot of green space but not enough places for the wildlife to cross. We need to allow for that. An interconnected "freeway" and "city" system for wildlife made up of ecological reserves and green highways.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I live in a somewhat newly developed area. There really aren't that many bugs around, mostly tiny moths, ants, and the usual cosmopolitan pests like roaches and carpet beetles. I took a vacation at a 50+ year old home near a river and my goodness, there was just so much LIFE all over. Species of insect I had never seen before, along with land mammals scurrying about. It is absolutely amazing how sterile living in a city / exurb is compared to someplace only mildly affected by human habitation. And it's not like I was living in a concrete jungle either, there are lawns and green spaces but they are just so much more hollow than I ever imagined.
- burlesona 5y ago
  I had the opposite experience, moving into an older neighborhood deep inside the city, but in an area where there hasn't been much construction for the last 50 years. The number of birds, small animals, and bugs are astounding - and this is a relatively densely populated location. AFAICT there are two main factors: 1. A nearby stream which is part of a protected greenbelt -- never more than 100m wide or so, but miles long. 2. The fact that the area has not been torn up for construction in a generation, so the plants have had time to overgrow everything. I assume the wildlife largely follows the plants. Of course there aren't any larger animals who need room to roam, because they couldn't survive crossing all the streets. Cars are one of the biggest barriers to wildlife and humans coexisting nicely - or to humans and humans coexisting nicely.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    If there is truly 0 maintenance, 15 foot tall shrubbery and impassible bushing can exist in as little as 10-15 years.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Sorry but I have to disagree with the whole tone of this. I see it this way, the thought hat we have "destroyed a natural ecosystem" is incorrect. Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. Those changes, have changed the ecosystem around them. What Gedge and others in the article are saying, is that it is in human's best interest to support a diversity of habitats that can co-exist with their own. The benefits are three fold, they keep biodiversity higher (balancing other processes in the environment), they can provide benefits for the humans for "free", and they lower the negative impact of humans on the flora that used the space before humans started changing it for their own use. An example close to home. I live in a typical California 2 story single family home. Because California homes are typically "next" to each other, the walls on the side of my house are blank since there isn't much point of a window that looks at your neighbors wall or worse inside their house at close range. I built a "bat house" which is really just a couple of plywood sheets separated by 1x2s to attach to the eastern wall. Voila, bats come to live at my house. And those same bats are eating pests such as mosquitos which carry West Nile virus in my area. If we could get all the houses on my street to do the same, the city would likely never catch another mosquito on our street. So what is the "cost" of that? The bat house takes no electricity, its materials are pretty simple. The bats show up for "free" and take care of themselves. There is a guano disposal "problem" but I just dump it into my compost pile and it adds a crap ton of nitrogen to the soil. So the net of it is that is saves me money on fertilizer, it saves me money on pest control, and it costs nearly zero to maintain. How is that not a "win" here?
- clumsysmurf 5y ago
  > Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to. If Timothy Morton is correct, humans have already destroyed the earth but we don't know it yet because it is a hyperobject.
antisthenes 5y ago
Agreed on everything. Leave nature to its own devices to recuperate. It does that surprisingly well if there is a bit of water, sun and soil.
danans 5y ago
> And news flash: hedgehogs and bees are only being saved because humans think they're cute. Hedgehogs maybe, but I think in the case of bees humans like fruit and honey.
burlesona 5y ago
It's amazing how strong the resistance is to sprawling less. Not to developing less, but just to using more compact forms so that some land can be preserved in its natural state. Example: https://dgunderblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/when-is-it-okay-to-fail/ https://dgunderblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/when-is-it-okay...
cabalamat 5y ago
> Have less buildings. I agree. Let's start by demolishing the building you live in, the building you work in, and the buildings you buy food in. What, you didn't mean those buildings? Well guess what, no-one wants the buildings they use demolished, so this idea is a total non-starter.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yurishimo 5y ago
  I think I agree with you but to play devil's advocate, we're now seeing a huge percentage of jobs around the world could be done at home with minimal upgrades to infrastructure. That in and of itself is evidence that some/more businesses could run virtually. That saves office space that could be returned to nature.
macawfish 5y ago
You're perpetuating a dichotomy here, the same dichotomy that produces parasitic industrialization. Humans are a part of nature, and we are fully capable of living in symbiosis with other creatures and ecosystems. Please keep your mind open!
- curtainsforus 5y ago
  Of course, in the long run our goal should be to destroy the ecosphere. But yes, we need to survive till we get there.
Datagenerator 5y ago
Remove the daily generation of inflationary money from the global economy and stop abusing our mother earth with this flawed idea of the forever expanding GDP. Return to moderate living and actually have time to enjoy what nature has to offer without highly industrial vehicles, boats and all kinds of wasteful things which require large industrial complexes and infrastructure. The world needs more wondering and less greed driven market leaders. The profit of a few is destroying the earth and reducing the quality of life - who really wants to slave labor every day without gaining the ability to have long periods just to travel, explore and admire the beautiful landscapes earth has to offer? If we only would reduce and not increase our list of must haves - we might actually start living instead of just existing to pay taxes and pay the ever increasing monthly bills. The rat race to our extinction has to stop. Everywhere where people stop fiddling with nature, recovery starts showing. Stop building dams, stop mega structures, stop generating the need to use industrial scale weekend flights -throwing massive amounts of extra heat in our airspace - for what? To briefly escape the labor intensive life as designed by our rulers. Did you have a choice not to need inflationary money systems? Money which banks -effortlessly- create every night in databases as mere numbers which keep on abusing you and the earth that we are trying to kill as fast as possible?

betwixthewires 5y ago

If you read the article it tells you that only 1% of the earth's habitable land has human development on it. There's plenty of space for nature to thrive, and it does. The big problem for me is externalities that affect that untouched world. Industrial and agricultural runoff, different pesticides and things like that.

shreyshnaccount 5y ago
sure, but some of the largest and most important ecosystems which contribute a lot to the overall stability of the earth are being completely obliterated. I remember reading that the Amazon is now a net carbon dioxide producer due to over-utilisation of natural resources. surely that can't be good, right?
jbay808 5y ago
That's true, but area is not the only important metric. It only takes a thin sliver of highway cutting through a forest to segment an habitat, break migration paths, and strongly affect ecosystems. The article is mainly about green roofs, but wildlife bridges would perhaps be an even more important example of "building for wildlife". https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-overpasses-underpasses-make-animals-people-safer https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-...
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Driving along the freeways through northern Ontario (400) and northern British Columbia (1 through Banff), I was amazed to see how many wildlife bridges there actually are. The ones in BC are plainly visible because they go over the road, but the ones in Ontario mostly go under the road in the form of large tunnels with fence funnels on either end, and most people would probably never notice them if they weren't paying attention. I even saw a few under the highway in the prairies in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. I think those were mostly for moving livestock across the highway though.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  --This-- is the point. Animals need corridors to move between populations Green roofs would improve the temperature of our homes making to spend less in energy. We should build more, just by our own interest. They are nicer to see than just a roof also.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
1% is used for habitation and other city based stuff. 50% of habitable land is used for agriculture. uninhabitable land includes tundra, desert, exposed rock, mountains etc. That's ~29% of all land. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

rkique 5y ago

I agree with your sentiment but oftentimes small interventions are the only kind possible. And I wouldn't say that something like a pollinator strip is ineffective -- bees and other pollinators are losing habitat, pollinator strips restore them. It may only be one dimension of wildlife but it's a critical one.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

City spaces are deserts of concrete, steel, glass and asphalt. With the exceptions of a few parks and gardens within. Why not reintroduce at least parts of the destroyed ecosystems back into these artificial deserts?

raxxorrax 5y ago
It is also probably not really a healthy habitat for humans either.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Depends. On the particular habitat and human(s) ;-) Ones sensoric deprivation is another ones stress.

officehero 5y ago

Urban residential areas with houses with few people are the worst imo. They require a huge amount of infrastructure like paved roads. It might be ok to live like that if you have young kids. If you don't, while living like that, you are an environmental burden period. Also, please don't think that driving electric and feeding some birds and eating green etc can redeem living like that

majormajor 5y ago
In terms of land usage, I find it hard to believe that the type of house someone has won't be dominated by the supply chains that feed them and equip them with clothing and tools. How much do you think a yuppie city-dweller's medium-density apartment and train usage offsets the rest of their consumption?
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Why would the supply chains that feed and equip them dominate? Food, clothes, and tools all benefit from high per unit efficiency and this reflects real efficiency in less expensive inputs. Even if you mean the transit the huge barges have very good kg per mile (even if filthy bunker oil is the current norm). For a simple example of this sort of scale efficiency just take a vat of molten steel for one - a larger vat has more volume with less surface area. For a contrasting illustration of an extreme in the other direction, many thimble sized steel vats would be extremely inefficient as they cool off quicker and either need more of them or give it far more time to cool off. Housing is linked to transit needs as an inevitable knock on effect. The lack of scale is what makes individual cars less efficient than loaded buses. I would be perfectly willing to consider hard numbers - there are all sorts of counterintuitive truths.
  - hansvm 5y ago
    Farming takes up a lot of land. Even the most land-efficient diets in this analysis [0,1] required 0.3+ acres per person -- a larger land area than most suburban houses sit on, even when including the marginal cost of the extra road they require. [0] (clickbaitish summary) https://ensia.com/notable/which-diet-makes-best-use-of-farmland-you-might-be-surprised/ https://ensia.com/notable/which-diet-makes-best-use-of-farml... [1] (original) https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/journal.elementa.000116/112904/Carrying-capacity-of-U-S-agricultural-land-Ten https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/jou...

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

The issue really isn't the amount of buildings we have, buildings and most city infrastructure only makes up 1% of all the land. The issue is agriculture which takes up 50% of all habitable land. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use We have a really strong bias towards what we see around us, and for an overwhelming amount of us we see the cities, we see buildings, we see roads.

wazoox 5y ago
We can go further: the issue is industrial, mechanical, chemical laden agriculture. Agroforestry or simply traditional agriculture with lots of hedges, trees, small plots, etc maintained living ecosystems for millenia in our countryside.
- nine_k 5y ago
  How much lower the crop yields are without all this chemistry? Hunger has mostly left humankind (any famines are first of all political troubles, not lack of food), but this was made possible by improving yields several fold. It's hardly possible without pretty heavy augmentation like fertilizers and pest control.
  - moooo99 5y ago
    Hunger has left the developed world, but is still an issue in poor countries. Our society is so incredibly wasteful with food, there are massive amounts of perfectly edible food send to trash every year. This leads me to believe that even with a massive reduction in the use of fertilizers and pest control exactly nothing would change in the developed world in terms of food supply. However, to enable that we'd probably have to get away from monocultural agriculture which is not only an issue for agriculture, but for instects and other wildlife as well.
- space_fountain 5y ago
  True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside from trying to do something about the number of alive humans, the only shot at reducing agriculture's destructive influence is going more technological not less and I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. Compare the livestock vs all other mammal biomass from the first chart in this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture

exabrial 5y ago

Yep. Wait until you see how much more water and land and ecosystems are destroyed by hipsters insisting that "organic is healthier" and "gmos aren't safe"

sonicggg 5y ago
I think you misunderstand the criticism of GMO. They are usually designed to be more resistant to some pretty hardcore pesticides, like RoundUp from Monsanto. That becomes agricultural run-off, and pollutes the nearby ecosystem.

snarf21 5y ago

I agree with you but humans are selfish and destructive. It is always down-voted but the only true solution is less humans. Of course, we could change but history has shown we have no desire to do so and worse, are accelerating our greediness. The thing is that the earth has started to change based on our over-consumption. One way or the other, there will be a lot less humans on this planet in some hundreds of years from now.

nine_k 5y ago
Have you noticed that the whole purpose of life as a phenomenon is self-sustaining and proliferation? Forcing lower numbers of humans is not unheard of; usually this is considered cruel. Mass killings aside, take a look at policies enforced by India and China in 1970-80s. Choosing not to have kids is myopic: if your genes make you more conscious and thus caring about the planet as a whole, removing them from the gene pool lowers the chances that next generations would share these traits of yours. The best medicine found so far is exactly what the ultra-green do not like: urbanization, education, higher standards of living, minimal numbers of people doing the traditional countryside agriculture. This puts reproduction rates safely below the replacement rate all over the world, no matter what culture and religion.
- chasd00 5y ago
  i would say the purpose of life is only proliferation, it's the environment that provides the negative feed back for "self-sustaining". For example, deer with no predators will proliferate until they starve to death and numbers go down to what can be sustained by their environment. If the environment can't sustain any then the population count goes to 0 to match.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Maybe the ultra-greens are against urbanization and I think there is merit to that. But the other topics don't really fit. You can put every living human on Sicily and still have space. The problem is that 99% would have died of thirst after a few days. I think today is earth overshoot day, so we used resources the earth could recoup within a year. That problem isn't solved with everyone moving into cities, it is externalities and our resource consumption. Maybe cities are a few percent more efficient, but it doesn't really matter that much. Cities are also relatively unhealthy in most cases. Living expectation are countered by the proximity of medical professionals perhaps. edit: It is indeed today: https://www.overshootday.org/ https://www.overshootday.org/

darth_avocado 5y ago

True. We don't need roofs with gardens all the time. But urban planning needs to account for more green space. Of course we need to fix and leave more wild habitat to stay wild, but we also need to create more spaces for the wildlife to roam free. For example my city is packed on one side being the coastline and the other being a massive freeway. We have a lot of green space but not enough places for the wildlife to cross. We need to allow for that. An interconnected "freeway" and "city" system for wildlife made up of ecological reserves and green highways.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I live in a somewhat newly developed area. There really aren't that many bugs around, mostly tiny moths, ants, and the usual cosmopolitan pests like roaches and carpet beetles. I took a vacation at a 50+ year old home near a river and my goodness, there was just so much LIFE all over. Species of insect I had never seen before, along with land mammals scurrying about. It is absolutely amazing how sterile living in a city / exurb is compared to someplace only mildly affected by human habitation. And it's not like I was living in a concrete jungle either, there are lawns and green spaces but they are just so much more hollow than I ever imagined.

burlesona 5y ago
I had the opposite experience, moving into an older neighborhood deep inside the city, but in an area where there hasn't been much construction for the last 50 years. The number of birds, small animals, and bugs are astounding - and this is a relatively densely populated location. AFAICT there are two main factors: 1. A nearby stream which is part of a protected greenbelt -- never more than 100m wide or so, but miles long. 2. The fact that the area has not been torn up for construction in a generation, so the plants have had time to overgrow everything. I assume the wildlife largely follows the plants. Of course there aren't any larger animals who need room to roam, because they couldn't survive crossing all the streets. Cars are one of the biggest barriers to wildlife and humans coexisting nicely - or to humans and humans coexisting nicely.
- rhacker 5y ago
  If there is truly 0 maintenance, 15 foot tall shrubbery and impassible bushing can exist in as little as 10-15 years.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Sorry but I have to disagree with the whole tone of this. I see it this way, the thought hat we have "destroyed a natural ecosystem" is incorrect. Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. Those changes, have changed the ecosystem around them. What Gedge and others in the article are saying, is that it is in human's best interest to support a diversity of habitats that can co-exist with their own. The benefits are three fold, they keep biodiversity higher (balancing other processes in the environment), they can provide benefits for the humans for "free", and they lower the negative impact of humans on the flora that used the space before humans started changing it for their own use. An example close to home. I live in a typical California 2 story single family home. Because California homes are typically "next" to each other, the walls on the side of my house are blank since there isn't much point of a window that looks at your neighbors wall or worse inside their house at close range. I built a "bat house" which is really just a couple of plywood sheets separated by 1x2s to attach to the eastern wall. Voila, bats come to live at my house. And those same bats are eating pests such as mosquitos which carry West Nile virus in my area. If we could get all the houses on my street to do the same, the city would likely never catch another mosquito on our street. So what is the "cost" of that? The bat house takes no electricity, its materials are pretty simple. The bats show up for "free" and take care of themselves. There is a guano disposal "problem" but I just dump it into my compost pile and it adds a crap ton of nitrogen to the soil. So the net of it is that is saves me money on fertilizer, it saves me money on pest control, and it costs nearly zero to maintain. How is that not a "win" here?

clumsysmurf 5y ago
> Just as incorrect as when a beaver dams a river and creates a flooded meadow. The beaver, and people, are doing what they do, changing the ecosystem to create a habitat in which they can thrive. I don't think this analogy holds, there is a difference between beaver and people: the beaver has evolved and performs services in an ecosystem, and that system has evolved around the beaver within some suitable geological timeframe. Humans are destroying the environment far faster than anything can evolve to. If Timothy Morton is correct, humans have already destroyed the earth but we don't know it yet because it is a hyperobject.

antisthenes 5y ago

Agreed on everything. Leave nature to its own devices to recuperate. It does that surprisingly well if there is a bit of water, sun and soil.

danans 5y ago

> And news flash: hedgehogs and bees are only being saved because humans think they're cute. Hedgehogs maybe, but I think in the case of bees humans like fruit and honey.

burlesona 5y ago

It's amazing how strong the resistance is to sprawling less. Not to developing less, but just to using more compact forms so that some land can be preserved in its natural state. Example: https://dgunderblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/when-is-it-okay-to-fail/ https://dgunderblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/when-is-it-okay...

cabalamat 5y ago

> Have less buildings. I agree. Let's start by demolishing the building you live in, the building you work in, and the buildings you buy food in. What, you didn't mean those buildings? Well guess what, no-one wants the buildings they use demolished, so this idea is a total non-starter.

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yurishimo 5y ago
I think I agree with you but to play devil's advocate, we're now seeing a huge percentage of jobs around the world could be done at home with minimal upgrades to infrastructure. That in and of itself is evidence that some/more businesses could run virtually. That saves office space that could be returned to nature.

macawfish 5y ago

You're perpetuating a dichotomy here, the same dichotomy that produces parasitic industrialization. Humans are a part of nature, and we are fully capable of living in symbiosis with other creatures and ecosystems. Please keep your mind open!

curtainsforus 5y ago
Of course, in the long run our goal should be to destroy the ecosphere. But yes, we need to survive till we get there.

Datagenerator 5y ago

Remove the daily generation of inflationary money from the global economy and stop abusing our mother earth with this flawed idea of the forever expanding GDP. Return to moderate living and actually have time to enjoy what nature has to offer without highly industrial vehicles, boats and all kinds of wasteful things which require large industrial complexes and infrastructure. The world needs more wondering and less greed driven market leaders. The profit of a few is destroying the earth and reducing the quality of life - who really wants to slave labor every day without gaining the ability to have long periods just to travel, explore and admire the beautiful landscapes earth has to offer? If we only would reduce and not increase our list of must haves - we might actually start living instead of just existing to pay taxes and pay the ever increasing monthly bills. The rat race to our extinction has to stop. Everywhere where people stop fiddling with nature, recovery starts showing. Stop building dams, stop mega structures, stop generating the need to use industrial scale weekend flights -throwing massive amounts of extra heat in our airspace - for what? To briefly escape the labor intensive life as designed by our rulers. Did you have a choice not to need inflationary money systems? Money which banks -effortlessly- create every night in databases as mere numbers which keep on abusing you and the earth that we are trying to kill as fast as possible?