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Countries are gathering in an effort to stop a biodiversity collapse

• Proven 5y ago
  [dead]
• valgor 5y ago
  Easiest thing we can do as concerned individuals is to stop eating meat and dairy. Much of the deforestation happening across the world is due to farming animals and growing the incredible amount of food farm animals require.
  • retrac98 5y ago
    It’s the easiest thing we can do but it’s only a small part of the overall problem. We all need to do much more in addition to just not eating animals. Endless production, consumption and growth the way we’re currently doing it is just completely unsustainable.
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    Easiest thing to do is quit your job and get a minimum wage job. For nearly everybody, consumption closely tracks income. Cutting your income is the easiest way to cut consumption.
    • tuatoru 5y ago
      ... And this is where we each find out how important limiting environmental damage is to ourselves. It's only a principle if it hurts you to hold to it. For nearly all of us, this can't compete with having a comfortable, secure life.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/nD3c6 https://archive.is/nD3c6
• caiobegotti 5y ago
  As a brazilian I don't believe for a second that these are actual efforts unless Brazil (holding 1/5 of all planet's biodiversity alone) is held accountable enough to see economical sanctions being enforced by more developed countries. I can't think of other last resorts efforts other than economical ones and Brazil would surely listen to those if they were enforced right.
  • sleepysysadmin 5y ago
    >As a brazilian I don't believe for a second that these are actual efforts unless Brazil (holding 1/5 of all planet's biodiversity alone) is held accountable enough to see economical sanctions being enforced by more developed countries. I can't think of other last resorts efforts other than economical ones and Brazil would surely listen to those if they were enforced right. How do you feel about external countries dictating your government policy? Often this won't go the way you want. Is Mercosur unpopular in Brazil? Eliminating it would be quite costly to the world.
    • mistrial9 5y ago
      "dictating" is a landmine word, and almost certainly causes an arguement
      • sleepysysadmin 5y ago
        >"dictating" is a landmine word, and almost certainly causes an arguement I believe it's a fair statement. If you come in with economic sanctions with policy in mind. You have dictated what that policy is. There's no beating around the bush.
      • esturk 5y ago
        But isn't that what's happening in this entire thread? Everyone here seems to have their "opinion" on how other countries "should" behave. Most of which involving drastic changes in lifestyle like eating and procreation habits. Never once considering what those countries would feel about.
    • 5y ago
• mc32 5y ago
  People keep saying we can feed 10 billion people. We can. But at what cost to the diversity of biological systems? It’s not popular to say but we need to stabilize population growth and stop encroaching on natural habitats and put a brake on consumerism. The developed world has in many parts allowed previously used areas to revert to a natural state. However in high pop growth countries the opposite is happening as both thd developed world and developing world both need as well as demand more resource extraction. We're depleting ocean fisheries, contributing to soil erosion, having water shortages, etc. Stabilize populations to 1960s or whatever, but we need to do the same as we’re doing for pollution set a benchmark and aim for it. Get those people educated, provide them with prophylactics and get them out of a pop explosion curve and get to ZPG like Italy and Japan (US as well if we didn’t import pop growth).
  • skeeter2020 5y ago
    >> Stabilize populations to 1960s or whatever, What exactly does this mean? People were pretty upset with China's one child policy (all the unintended side-effects ignored); this sounds even more nefarious? .
    • mc32 5y ago
      It’s not something we achieve in 20 years. It would be a century long goal via reduced fertility rates that do not include barbaric tools like forced abortions, etc.
      • Scarblac 5y ago
        Yeah, if it takes a century then it will be way too late for biodiversity. The man-made great extinction is right now.
        • mc32 5y ago
          It’s not like we want to be authoritarians and control reproduction directly. We can only incentivize via education, opportunity and availability of contraceptives. India for example offers sterilization for men who want to avoid unintended impregnation of partners. They could even incentivize such a thing.
• deleted 5y ago
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• goohle 5y ago
  First, we need to save genetics of as many wild animals, birds, insects, trees, etc. as we can, including their variations, to be able to revert damage to the ecosystem in the future. Second, we need to make artificial breeders, to help nature to regenerate. Third, we need to make a continuous web of wild nature, to allow migrations, because isolated ecosystem will die with time no matter what, e.g. because of climate change alone.
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    >Second, we need to make artificial breeders, to help nature to regenerate. Nature always thrive better when we just them Her do her thing. Leave Nature alone!
  • carapace 5y ago
    In re: making a continuous web of wild nature see E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth Project: https://www.half-earthproject.org https://www.half-earthproject.org > Half-Earth is a call to protect half the land and sea in order to manage sufficient habitat to reverse the species extinction crisis and ensure the long-term health of our planet. They have a big "virtual summit coming up on the 22nd: Half-Earth Day 2021 https://www.half-earthproject.org/hed2021/ https://www.half-earthproject.org/hed2021/
• xenocyon 5y ago
  I'm paying close attention to the direction that (my native) India takes w.r.t. GM food crops, which have so far been illegal. Background: India went from colonialism-induced massive serial famines to self-sufficiency and then some, while entirely eschewing GM foods. (NB: this doesn't mean there is no malnutrition in India, where inequalities are rife, but it means that the country as a whole is able to produce more than needed. The causes of hunger are non-intuitive; for e.g. the dumping of cheap foods is more likely to cause hunger than solve it, as hunger stems from poverty which stems from economic disablement - which is caused by dumping cheap foods.) Now, the Green Revolution did result in a loss of biodiversity (among other problems) but without creating the kind of monocultures you see in the US. For example, there are still numerous varieties of rice in India, especially locally variated. Despite this, the Indian government has been increasingly warming over recent years to introducing GM foods (which is largely a solution in search of a problem, in the Indian context). The threat from GM foods is almost always misunderstood. It is not about the individual health effects of eating GM foods; it is about the largescale replacement of a system where farmers own their biodiverse seed, with a top down monocultural approach that essentially makes farmers franchisees of a massive corporate behemoth and eliminates biodiversity, putting all eggs in one basket.
  • ch4s3 5y ago
    > it is about the largescale replacement of a system where farmers own their biodiverse seed with a top down monocultural approach that essentially makes farmers franchisees of a massive corporate behemoth and eliminates biodiversity, putting all eggs in one basket. No one is out there forcing people to switch to GM crops when those seeds become available. Now the business model of large agriculture in the US isn't necessarily the one you would want to import, but GM crops could happily coexist in a country's agricultural mix along side traditional crops. You could probably even tweak some of your traditional seeds domestically to be more pest/drought resistant, give those seeds out, and call it a win. It could be a really useful tech if people deployed it responsibly.
    • Retric 5y ago
      Market forces heavily push GM crops when you let them enter the market without labeling laws.
• FerretFred 5y ago
  "What’s next .. The working draft .. Create a plan" Yes, but the real problem is that the people in power have actually just realised that there is a problem, and they can't buy it off. The "plan" right now is to extend the needed extreme measures to 10 or 20 years time when the current generation of clued-up kids will be in power: I hate to think what they'll have to work with though.
  • jaggederest 5y ago
    Yeah my first thought was "the plan better involve a time machine and intervention about 200 years ago" - it's a little late to be closing the barn door now.
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    > the real problem The real problem is that the response is to create the plan. Politicians know that we don't want to change our lifestyles at all, but we also want to feel virtuous. They're doing what we want.
• TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  We need to convert society to a stability and sustainability model over a growth and efficiency model. The cracks are showing. We spent the accumulated natural resources and charged the rest on credit to the future of the Earth.
  • andrekandre 5y ago
    > to a stability and sustainability model over a growth and efficiency mode this doesn't seem compatible with our entire global economic system... it goes against all the incentives of investment and return w/compounding growth.
    • TrispusAttucks 5y ago
      You're reading between the lines correctly.
• carapace 5y ago
  > “When you have two concurrent existential crises, you don’t get to pick only one to focus on — you must address both no matter how challenging,” said Brian O’Donnell Climate change and biodiversity loss are aspects of one problem: we don't see the world. Ours is fundamentally a psychological or spiritual crisis. Civilization as we know it is a kind of hypnotic trance. The real world is fantastically beautiful. Nature supplies all our needs though a self-regulating autonomic system made of self-improving four-billion-year-old nanotechnology that's driven by a zero-maintenance fusion reactor so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from 150 gigameters away. "All the world's problems can be solved in a garden" - Geoff Lawton Food, medicine, clothing, structural materials all grow naturally. It's also very fun and fulfilling to live in harmony with nature. So the question is, what's preventing us from seeing that and changing our ways? Why doesn't e.g. Gabe Brown's neighbor adopt his methods? (Gabe Brown is a farmer in North Dakota who practices regenerative agriculture. He make more money, increases soil fertility and biodiversity, does less work, and his farm is more resilient than conventional farms, so why don't more people pick up on this faster? "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A ) We have all the technology we need already, so that's not the limiting factor. It seems to me to be, as I said above, a perceptual/psychological problem.
  • da39a3ee 5y ago
    I don’t know what you’re trying to say but whatever it is, try saying it more clearly and succinctly, or desist. No it is not a perceptual/psychological problem: the problem is that humans are destroying natural habitat.
    • carapace 5y ago
      That was pretty clear and succinct in my opinion. > the problem is that humans are destroying natural habitat. Right, but why?
      • spacemark 5y ago
        Despite the rude response from the previous commenter, I agree with the general response. It seems like you're suggesting we all revert to subsistence living by growing our own food on little family farms or something. Fact is people actually like civilization. Modern civilization has led to an unprecedented quality of life for a larger portion of the human population than ever before in recorded history. People are hard pressed to give that up. Put another way, humans prefer to reduce their current misery than ensure all the future's climate issues are solved. Stepping away from modern civilization and our systems would result in unimaginable suffering.
• da39a3ee 5y ago
  This is the huge problem with the focus on climate change: a generation of “environmentalists” is growing up who don’t understand the importance and fragility of natural ecosystems and their organisms. Our primary objective is not to keep our planet within certain temperature ranges. Our primary objective is to not irreversibly destroy the natural world. We must succeed; failure is unacceptable. People are addressing climate change with afforestation projects using non-native trees and all sorts of other stuff that doesn’t help save natural ecosystems. If the subset of people who think they “care about the environment” spends the next couple of decades supporting projects like that, and taking their eyes off the crisis of habitat destruction, then a terrible tragedy will result the shame of which humanity will never escape and which will make the world inherited by our children a pathetic memory of what it should have been, for ever.
• demosito666 5y ago
  The problem with biodiversity loss is that people don't care about it en masse. We just don't give a shit about nature collectively and biodiversity has complex relationship with profit to humans, because we can largely compensate loss of wildlife with more fertilizers and more sophisticated agriculture and farming. Which makes it even harder politically to act on it. Now of course global ecosystem degradation will hit the poor in developing countries very hard. But it's not like anybody who can take meaningful action cares about them either. And as opposed to climate change, the rich are isolated of the effects, so they have no incentive to push here either.
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    >the rich are isolated of the effects How? The bees and birds will migrate to rich countries? Corals will pop up in front of premium resorts so the fish can reproduce in their nets? Pandemics only travel in business class?
• pphysch 5y ago
  Current headline: "The Most Important Global Meeting You’ve Never Heard of Is Now" Gee, why is that? It only takes "paper of record" NYT 11 paragraphs to first mention what the meeting is and its mighty inconvenient host country--and the fact that the US is the only major country not party to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Politics over life.
• mountainboy 5y ago
  These countries should start by reading the book "The Invisible Rainbow: A history of electricity and life".
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    Why?