5 ms·

Wild animals are spiraling to extinction. Can a bunch of bureaucrats save them?

93 points by rntn 2y ago

slackfan 2y ago
[flagged]
- xoxxala 2y ago
  "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
  - slackfan 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - lukan 2y ago
    Except, it doesn't in reality. "In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine" (from that link)
    - slackfan 2y ago
      Non-reproducible.
GrantMoyer 2y ago
Note that the human caused Holocene Extinction[1], among the 7 largest mass extinctions in the entire history of multi-celular life on Earth, is ongoing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- pfdietz 2y ago
  > among the 7 largest mass extinctions in the entire history of multi-celular life on Earth I strongly dispute this. Mass extinctions in the fossil record are typically measured at the family level, yes? Most of the then-extant species wouldn't even have been recorded. If we were in the equivalent of one of the major mass extinctions it would be a "put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye" situation. We wouldn't be worried about the survival of uncommon animals. We'd be worried if rats were going extinct.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    "That can't be true, because if it were that would be really bad" doesn't seem like a good way to reason about things like this IMO
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      You misunderstand. It can't be true because if it were, the current situation would be vastly worse than it actually is. Ancient mass extinctions were almost unimaginably terrible. It's not that the current situation is ok.
      - _yb2s 2y ago
        The current human caused ecological catastrophe is obviously slower than, e.g. a meteor impact or supervolcano blocking out the sun caused global ecological catastrophe, but that doesn't mean the ultimate effects won't be just as bad, even if we're not fully experiencing them yet.
        2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
abeppu 2y ago
> One important piece of context to keep in mind is that although the US helped negotiate the Convention on Biological Diversity — the treaty under which COP16 takes place — it’s not a formal member of the agreement. In fact, the US is the only country, other than the Vatican, that’s not party to the Convention. ... and I'm guessing the US doesn't want to sign on because in general we're skeptical of treaties that oblige us to do anything? And a big rich country not participating probably contributes to that funding gap? Blaming the bureaucrats for this not being effective seems misguided. Bureaucrats only have the powers that we give them. It's not gonna work because rich and powerful stakeholders don't think it's valuable.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  I don't know why you've got downvotes. If it's because your claim is false, I'd hope to see some evidence about why. If it's because your claim is uncomfortable... well I guess that's just another reflection the problem you're pointing out.
- adamc 2y ago
  In the US, I would bet the proximate cause is difficulty getting Republican party support.
mistrial9 2y ago
Eco-activists in California have seriously engaged this for the last thirty years. Environmentalist burnout and despair are not even newsworthy somehow. Literally, dominant media is about how to invest in oil or "energy transition" every week, while smaller scale environmentalist media regularly fail due to lack of resources. About 20 years ago, wealthy environmentalist groups (poster-child Sierra Club and others) suffered infighting and lost public prominence. A very small number of very large environmentalist groups continue to engage in serious and long-term work to their credit (World Wildlife Fund and others)
- slt2021 2y ago
  if environmentalists were serious about saving environment, they would have supported Nuclear Energy & Dense housing. Instead we have: hectares and hectares of land dedicated to wind&solar with all wildlife habitat destroyed, and gas plants still continuing to burn fuel. hectares of land dedicated to suburban sprawl hectares of land dedicated to new highways that connect sprawl to downtown cities to be truly efficient, cities must reduce the footprint and leave more areas to wildlife and nature preservation sites: dense low footprint housing dense low footprint commercial RE safe, clean, cheap mass public transit that connects the two safe, clean nuclear energy that powers it all
  - forinti 2y ago
    I live in a state that went from three years of drought to a record 100-year flood. Most people are not going to worry about animals going extinct or about biodiversity in the abstract, but I think people would take the environment seriously if they realized dying of hunger might be a possibility.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    thank you for directly proving how difficult this topic is! lots of "environmentalists" support Nuclear Power, and lots of others are deeply against it due to toxicity, ignoring efficiency and playing into capital allocation. Others want to find the right answers, and that is difficult. Secondly, dense housing was exactly what plenty of people tried to build, while aggressive real estate developers found an easier profit by subdividing farm land and making suburbs. Since covid-19, not only has dense cities fallen drastically, but the ordinary small business that enables dense cities, ceased to function. This "I told you to do this" comment is exactly the pressure and noise that pushes ordinary people out, since they cannot respond and are negatively reinforced socially with semi-hostile criticism.
TesterVetter 2y ago
[dead]
ks2048 2y ago
The word “bureaucrats” is funny. Why is it in the title? It seems to be used only when people want to cast a negative light on people employed by governments. This is about potential treaties to preserve nature. Of course it will be government officials and scientists employed or funded by governments. The article also mentions public and private scientists. Theres really not much to the article - there’s an upcoming UN summit on biodiversity. The subtitle just seemed strange to me.
- hawski 2y ago
  I read this with a tongue in cheek tone.
kubb 2y ago
Free market capitalism will save the animals.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Give them Bitcoin.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- JBiserkov 2y ago
  Does Betteridge's law apply to all headlines?
fracus 2y ago
I just want to say that, without having read the article yet, on the surface, that title is absolutely hilarious.
hendler 2y ago
I care a lot about the environment, and worked in climate tech for 7 years. I also am very hopeful for AI's contributions. When we say that AI will help save the environment, I can see short term gains in things like nuclear energy expansion and improvement, better educational opportunities, robotic labor and other efficiency automations, etc. On ecosystems and biodiversity, I don't see a clear path. AI can improve our understanding, but a systems collapse requires very complex bio-chemical systems that are all interdependent. Maybe we all live in bubbles of AI controlled environments post Holocene, but we rely on larger earth systems that will be difficult to rebuild post collapse. Does anyone else worry that AI will not be rapid or sufficiently impactful to deal with ecosystem collapse?
- knowitnone 2y ago
  Do you think AI will propose new ideas or regurgitate our ideas that we don't implement? And even if AI proposes new ideas, will we implement them if we don't even implement our own ideas?
  - hendler 2y ago
    Your answer is part of why I am concerned. Maybe new incentives or leverage can be created. Giving AI the power to create new social dynamics seems both too dangerous and necessary.
spicyusername 2y ago
The last summit, known as COP15, was arguably much more important. During the event, held in 2022, nearly all countries of the world agreed on a groundbreaking new deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. I know this is a big deal and I should feel happy that something is being done, but I always hate how the date in these kinds of agreements is always just far away enough for people to handwave not doing anything this year or next year or the year after that.
metalman 2y ago
no
metalman 2y ago
my answer is "no" all beuaucracies are in the business of divying up nature for exploitation in one way or another and with an expanding population getting more per human per day,the beureaucrats, not wanting less themselves will happily create another layer of government that then can get churning up some more policy that the failure to impliment can be layed on the alter or budgetary realities
hcfman 2y ago
It doesn’t have to be just funded by governments. Corporations and individuals are also welcome to and encouraged to provide funding as well. For example, Arm computing are now quite active in funding biodiversity activities, see on wildlabs.net I’d like to take the opportunity here to appeal to folks with the cash to see if they can find a funding cause that appeals to them and improve their karma :-)

93 points by rntn 2y ago

slackfan 2y ago

[flagged]

xoxxala 2y ago
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- slackfan 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    [flagged]
- lukan 2y ago
  Except, it doesn't in reality. "In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine" (from that link)
  - slackfan 2y ago
    Non-reproducible.

GrantMoyer 2y ago

Note that the human caused Holocene Extinction[1], among the 7 largest mass extinctions in the entire history of multi-celular life on Earth, is ongoing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

pfdietz 2y ago
> among the 7 largest mass extinctions in the entire history of multi-celular life on Earth I strongly dispute this. Mass extinctions in the fossil record are typically measured at the family level, yes? Most of the then-extant species wouldn't even have been recorded. If we were in the equivalent of one of the major mass extinctions it would be a "put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye" situation. We wouldn't be worried about the survival of uncommon animals. We'd be worried if rats were going extinct.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  "That can't be true, because if it were that would be really bad" doesn't seem like a good way to reason about things like this IMO
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    You misunderstand. It can't be true because if it were, the current situation would be vastly worse than it actually is. Ancient mass extinctions were almost unimaginably terrible. It's not that the current situation is ok.
    - _yb2s 2y ago
      The current human caused ecological catastrophe is obviously slower than, e.g. a meteor impact or supervolcano blocking out the sun caused global ecological catastrophe, but that doesn't mean the ultimate effects won't be just as bad, even if we're not fully experiencing them yet.
      - 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

abeppu 2y ago

> One important piece of context to keep in mind is that although the US helped negotiate the Convention on Biological Diversity — the treaty under which COP16 takes place — it’s not a formal member of the agreement. In fact, the US is the only country, other than the Vatican, that’s not party to the Convention. ... and I'm guessing the US doesn't want to sign on because in general we're skeptical of treaties that oblige us to do anything? And a big rich country not participating probably contributes to that funding gap? Blaming the bureaucrats for this not being effective seems misguided. Bureaucrats only have the powers that we give them. It's not gonna work because rich and powerful stakeholders don't think it's valuable.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I don't know why you've got downvotes. If it's because your claim is false, I'd hope to see some evidence about why. If it's because your claim is uncomfortable... well I guess that's just another reflection the problem you're pointing out.
adamc 2y ago
In the US, I would bet the proximate cause is difficulty getting Republican party support.

mistrial9 2y ago

Eco-activists in California have seriously engaged this for the last thirty years. Environmentalist burnout and despair are not even newsworthy somehow. Literally, dominant media is about how to invest in oil or "energy transition" every week, while smaller scale environmentalist media regularly fail due to lack of resources. About 20 years ago, wealthy environmentalist groups (poster-child Sierra Club and others) suffered infighting and lost public prominence. A very small number of very large environmentalist groups continue to engage in serious and long-term work to their credit (World Wildlife Fund and others)

slt2021 2y ago
if environmentalists were serious about saving environment, they would have supported Nuclear Energy & Dense housing. Instead we have: hectares and hectares of land dedicated to wind&solar with all wildlife habitat destroyed, and gas plants still continuing to burn fuel. hectares of land dedicated to suburban sprawl hectares of land dedicated to new highways that connect sprawl to downtown cities to be truly efficient, cities must reduce the footprint and leave more areas to wildlife and nature preservation sites: dense low footprint housing dense low footprint commercial RE safe, clean, cheap mass public transit that connects the two safe, clean nuclear energy that powers it all
- forinti 2y ago
  I live in a state that went from three years of drought to a record 100-year flood. Most people are not going to worry about animals going extinct or about biodiversity in the abstract, but I think people would take the environment seriously if they realized dying of hunger might be a possibility.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  thank you for directly proving how difficult this topic is! lots of "environmentalists" support Nuclear Power, and lots of others are deeply against it due to toxicity, ignoring efficiency and playing into capital allocation. Others want to find the right answers, and that is difficult. Secondly, dense housing was exactly what plenty of people tried to build, while aggressive real estate developers found an easier profit by subdividing farm land and making suburbs. Since covid-19, not only has dense cities fallen drastically, but the ordinary small business that enables dense cities, ceased to function. This "I told you to do this" comment is exactly the pressure and noise that pushes ordinary people out, since they cannot respond and are negatively reinforced socially with semi-hostile criticism.

TesterVetter 2y ago

[dead]

ks2048 2y ago

The word “bureaucrats” is funny. Why is it in the title? It seems to be used only when people want to cast a negative light on people employed by governments. This is about potential treaties to preserve nature. Of course it will be government officials and scientists employed or funded by governments. The article also mentions public and private scientists. Theres really not much to the article - there’s an upcoming UN summit on biodiversity. The subtitle just seemed strange to me.

hawski 2y ago
I read this with a tongue in cheek tone.

kubb 2y ago

Free market capitalism will save the animals.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
Give them Bitcoin.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

JBiserkov 2y ago
Does Betteridge's law apply to all headlines?

fracus 2y ago

I just want to say that, without having read the article yet, on the surface, that title is absolutely hilarious.

hendler 2y ago

I care a lot about the environment, and worked in climate tech for 7 years. I also am very hopeful for AI's contributions. When we say that AI will help save the environment, I can see short term gains in things like nuclear energy expansion and improvement, better educational opportunities, robotic labor and other efficiency automations, etc. On ecosystems and biodiversity, I don't see a clear path. AI can improve our understanding, but a systems collapse requires very complex bio-chemical systems that are all interdependent. Maybe we all live in bubbles of AI controlled environments post Holocene, but we rely on larger earth systems that will be difficult to rebuild post collapse. Does anyone else worry that AI will not be rapid or sufficiently impactful to deal with ecosystem collapse?

knowitnone 2y ago
Do you think AI will propose new ideas or regurgitate our ideas that we don't implement? And even if AI proposes new ideas, will we implement them if we don't even implement our own ideas?
- hendler 2y ago
  Your answer is part of why I am concerned. Maybe new incentives or leverage can be created. Giving AI the power to create new social dynamics seems both too dangerous and necessary.

spicyusername 2y ago

The last summit, known as COP15, was arguably much more important. During the event, held in 2022, nearly all countries of the world agreed on a groundbreaking new deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. I know this is a big deal and I should feel happy that something is being done, but I always hate how the date in these kinds of agreements is always just far away enough for people to handwave not doing anything this year or next year or the year after that.

metalman 2y ago

my answer is "no" all beuaucracies are in the business of divying up nature for exploitation in one way or another and with an expanding population getting more per human per day,the beureaucrats, not wanting less themselves will happily create another layer of government that then can get churning up some more policy that the failure to impliment can be layed on the alter or budgetary realities

hcfman 2y ago

It doesn’t have to be just funded by governments. Corporations and individuals are also welcome to and encouraged to provide funding as well. For example, Arm computing are now quite active in funding biodiversity activities, see on wildlabs.net I’d like to take the opportunity here to appeal to folks with the cash to see if they can find a funding cause that appeals to them and improve their karma :-)