This is one of the reasons I think we'll soon be talking about more than 'just' climate change, as the problem is much bigger still: we are committing planet-wide ecocide.
Also maybe more focus on root causes will follow: that we are still promoting unbridled consumerism, and that inequality created an upper class that is trying to maintain the status quo. More focus on the latter is already happening.
We're in a position with a lot of power, but this is obscured from us. When we trace the strings which run from ecocide to ourselves, it is easy to see what changes we need to make.
While this is true, and I agree, this insight has been obvious for at least the last 40 years. Seeing the change is unfortunately very different than bringing the change. I am afraid most people need the emergency at their own doorstep before they are truly willing to act and make sacrifices to their way of living.
Have you stopped buying the myriad "cleaning" products which pollute your home and create pollution in the process of being produced?
Have you stopped buying disposable clothing and plastic trinkets?
If you are still buying these things, you are complicit in this ecocide. And now you know it, too.
Once you stop yourself, you can tell others, too.
Without making changes in your own actions, there's little you can ask of anyone else.
This is a change that will come one individual convincing another individual, one at a time, to stop contributing to the problem.
No one else will do it for us: politicians don't give a fuck, corporations don't give a fuck, regulators don't give a fuck, military doesn't give a fuck, even "scientists" are mostly in the same camp of not giving a fuck, for the most part.
We are the only ones who give a fuck, because it's our close relatives, and soon, us, who are being exterminated.
And we are feeding and building our own extermination machine.
If they stopped single-use plastics, that would be a world first. Microbeads were recently banned; this is obviously orders of magnitude more effective than boycotting microbead-containing hygiene products would ever have been.
By all means, reduce your personal consumption of harmful products. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's a substitute for activism and political action.
We are facing a tragedy of the commons, and individual action does not solve that. This holds true for overfishing, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, you name it. The change we need is pigovian taxes, which factor negative externalities into the price of the activity causing it, instead of letting them be amortised by society. Consumer-shaming is not how we solve a tragedy of the commons.
If half the world stops burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the other half will enjoy cheaper oil and double their emissions the next day. Tax pollutants.
Exactly! We need to stop acting like people will wake-up one day and change all of their habits. You want to change behaviors? Make it so expensive to engage in those behaviors that they're no longer economically viable.
Okay, this might be a bit meandering stream of consciousness...
Feeling bad because entire species go extinct due to our own behavior is an uniquely human experience. It's not something that exists outside of our own human awareness in the broader world.
When the last butterfly goes, it's not aware that it was the last of it's kind. It's not even aware of the complexities that caused it and it's kind to vanish. It simply dies. End of story.
Now, that butterfly is a part of the Universe. This big thing that just "is", where basic laws of entropy and quantum physics just run their course, unattended, until trillions upon trillions of years from now, all that is left are subatomic particles randomly appearing and disappearing as the last black hole finally evaporates.
There's a paradox at the heart of our human condition. Our awareness has brought us to the apex of the food chain. We are seemingly in control of how we shape the conditions for our own survival. But that sense of rational control is just the veneer on top of behavior, feelings, urges and instincts that we share with other species.
We can imagine how we can reach for the stars, go to other planets and build great machines to do it. We have created morals, ethics, science, religion, nations, lore and legends to put ourselves at the center of things. But there's a dissonance we can never hope to overcome at the heart of our experience: We are not really in control. And that word "control" is just a mental construct that helps us make sense of the world around us.
Whatever you and I, living people, do or do not do, small or big, has an impact. No more, no less. We can't avoid not throwing stones in the pond and causing ripples. Trying to preserve Earth as it exists today, either through technology or through profound policy changes is just as futile is holding your breathe. Our mere existence predicates change, willing or not.
The idea that humanity shouldn't exist is just as futile. Remember, the Universe just "is". It does not care about our existence. And that butterfly doesn't care whether humanity is around or not. The only ones who agonize over the morality of existence are... humans. That's the price we pay for having evolved an acute sense of awareness of the past, present, future and the world around us.
Even though we are in this extinction event, life will still be around long after we are gone. Bacteria sprung into existence even long before Earth's atmosphere contained 21% of oxygen. If we could travel back in time, Earth would be a very alien place to us. And it will be a very alien place once again eons down the line. Maybe it will be just fungi and algae, maybe it will be dense forests of plants and animal life that are nothing like what we know today.
There are more galaxies then there are grains of sands of all beaches on Earth. Even if Earth becomes a barren rock, probability has it that the Universe might be teeming with life. Just at this point, right here, right now, in this corner of the Universe, humans are the only ones agonizing over that question: Are we really alone in our bubble of awareness? Or are there other species who feel and experience what we feel experience? And the vastness of things will never allow us to solve that question, unless by random chance.
None of that is by any means an excuse to sit back and just take the ride. The very paradox that is our human awareness forces us to make decisions that will have an impact, that will cause suffering at one point or another. Either by giving up on consumerism, or by grieving over the loss of biodiversity.
But when we do feel that creeping sense of depression over what we are losing, it's good to remind ourselves that the stories we tell ourselves - including climate change and mass extinctions - hide a far larger, incomprehensible reality in which mental constructs don't carry any particular larger Meaning our morality.
We only control so much after all, it's entirely up to us to define how far we are willing to go to find out to what extent, and what we, humans, are willing to accept as a consequence. Accepting that nothing will ever stay the same anyhow, not even life, humanity, culture or civilization as we know it today on this planet, can help us to find a measure of some comfort and re-frame that journey a bit.
That's... entirely not what my point was. Hence why I wrote:
> None of that is by any means an excuse to sit back and just take the ride.
At this point, there's inaction exactly because we don't want to acknowledge our own impermanence. The phrase "living like there's no tomorrow" means exactly that: denial.
Why do we hug fossil fuels so tight? We can't we imagine anything else but growth and consumerism? Why the "Do we have to go back to living in caves?" argument?
Where does that come from? It's because of the sheer terror of our own very individual impermanence, our own destruction into nothingness at the end of life.
That same drive for survival regardless of the costs, which has spawned us and our unique sense of awareness, is now turning against us. It causes us to seize up and cling onto ideas and behaviors that do us more harm then good.
Only when we're willing to accept that we're all just temporary travelers on that great current of Time, we'll be able to punch through deep rooted beliefs and tropes that are holding us back.
Is that deep thought? Sure it is. Everything else, such as debating the accuracy of predictive climate models, is more or less the minutiae.
At the end of the day, science only carries meaning to humans. Those Western Monarch Butterflies won't care about the statistics anyhow. They just live and die. Unaware whether it was a asteroid or fossil fuel use that carried them to their end. End of story.
That's not surprising at all. The cartels control Mexico. They stop at nothing for profit. They regularly murder presidental candidates they don't like so they don't get elected. The government is beyond corrupt.
> "For years, illegal loggers tied to Mexico’s criminal underworld have clashed with conservationists who tried and eventually succeeded to ban logging from the butterfly sanctuaries in the state of Michoacan."
I'm part of a group that is developing RNAi-based pesticides [1]. One of the biggest advantages of such a technology (even relative to organic pesticides like Bt toxin) is the ability to target pests in a highly specific manner and avoid non-target organisms such as monarch butterflies and honey bees. There are likely many factors influencing insect population declines, but hopefully this and similar technologies as part of an integrated pest management strategy will offer a lot of benefit.
Stopping say thrips or aphids eating a horticultural crop somehow removes a species, which then usually has a chain effect? Can you show me some scientific literature where this is typically the case?
Personally I don't research these 'chain effects' in depth as it's well outside my area of expertise. There are however many research groups and government agencies looking at ecological impacts of crop protection measures. Some of their presentations are in the link I provided. As scientists, we collaborate on these kinds of things.
when it comes to aphids, their predators like ladybugs would be affected. aphids are not a problem they are a symptom of a problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGlqnkE1Id0
> habitat loss, the use of pesticides, disease and the changing climate have all likely contributed to the decline of western monarchs
We can dance around proximal causes all we want, but all environmental roads lead to overpopulation.
Most people associate acting on population with China forcing abortions or tearing down homes, or racist eugenics policies or forced sterilizations.
That's why when I talk about overpopulation, I talk about success cases like Thailand. Or how Mexico's soap operas helped lower that nation's birth rate. These cases brought prosperity, stability, and abundance.
When they say we need more people to create more minds to solve bigger problems, I point out the geniuses have already been born and they said the population was too high. Besides, what was the world population that produced Beethoven and Shakespeare. Einstein was born to a population below 2 billion. Buddha and Jesus lived below 1 billion.
The greatest technologies to solve our environmental problems aren't solar powered planes, thorium, and rocket ships. It's IUD, vasectomies, and other tools of family planning, along with educating everyone about it.
population is an obsessive topic with lots of underlying psychological baggage, so much so as it is almost pointless to start listing. 100,000 caves dwellers versus 12,000 cave dwellers in some proportionally larger area (e.g. New Mexico) would have how much "impact" ? One Chernobyl for 120,000 people versus 1,000,000 people over a proportionate area (Ukraine) has how much effect? etc..
Large topics often bring out more the personal obsessions of the commentors.. therefore, take the time to specifically refute this comment point-of-view...
> That's why when I talk about overpopulation, I talk about success cases like Thailand. Or how Mexico's soap operas helped lower that nation's birth rate. These cases brought prosperity, stability, and abundance.
Can you elaborate on these and/or provide links?
At first thought it seems absurd that telenovelas could significantly impact the birthrate.
IUDs and vasectomies encourage the kind of life that uses created things instead of receives them. Which, counterintuitively, will increase the rate of consumption, not reduce it. Family planning is good when it plans to receive, not when it plans to demand.
The point is to allow those who wish to no longer have children the means to achieve it other than "abstaining" which doesn't work. Specifically for those living at or near poverty levels. The consumption of a new human adds a larger increase in consumption on the world than two existing humans who choose not to have any children.
If you can, visit the Monarch Grove at Natural Bridges State Beach in Santa Cruz. Even though the numbers are down significantly, it is still visibly better than last year, and it's wonderful to stand amidst the Eucalyptus trees and see the butterflies swarming.
Standing in the midst of the butterflies at Natural Bridges some time in the early 90s is truly one of the wonders of my life.
That day, there were easily more than 29k just in that one grove. By staying still long enough, I was covered in butterflies as they flittered about looking for a place to be.
I remember first visiting Santa Cruz in the 90s and being disappointed to be early for what was still expected to be a magnificent season.
Earlier this winter I was splitting an old log pile and disturbed three hibernating monarchs. I felt like a real jerk for waking them up. I hope they survived, and learned to be more careful disturbing the more obvious hibernation sites in the garden.
I wish my connection with nature had come earlier in life.
While the "plant milkweed" is nice advice, I seem to remember that you have to plant a very specific species of milkweed. If you plant the wrong milkweed, you wind up killing the butterflies because they don't have enough energy for their migration.
Not an expert, but some digging in on this indicates there is one species folks advice against (topical milkweed); otherwise the advice is a species native to your region.
I used to mock organic food and it's proponents, there's absolutely no nutritional benefits, but watching the sixth major extinction[0] on Earth unfold, caused by us, it's hard to justify the widespread use of pesticides.
We have a responsibility as the sentient beings here to protect all these things, they nourish us, they keep ecosystems and everything we need to survive in balance, small they may be, yet hold so much importance to the only known living planet in the galaxy. Life is really simple to nurture and hopefully we don't fuck it up.
While this matches everything that I know, and I have no reason to doubt the information on that page, i would love to have a concise summary like that with more citations than a single paper from 1992.
I trust the sourcing of my food as far as I can trust the vendor. We have a CSA (community supported agriculture) share with a local farm; despite them not having organic certification (pretty typical for CSAs in my experience—they'd rather build trust directly than via a third party), I know their produce to be much more sustainable than anything I could buy at a grocery store.
IMHO, there are quite a few reasons small "organic" (certified or not) farms like our CSA are more sustainable:
- Small scale focuses more on adapting crops to the land rather than adapting land to the crops (using fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, etc.)
- Crop rotation allows the land to produce more yield in the same space without chemical augmentation
- Reduced emissions from transportation (the farm is about 10 miles away)
- Fresher means better taste, so we eat more vegetables—and therefore less meat; and we also throw away less food (especially since our CSA uses a points system that allows us to choose veggies we're more likely to eat)
- Reduced packaging use
- No treatments required to preserve freshness (I know someone who has a severe intolerance for corn who has to be extremely careful with fresh vegetables, as they're often sprayed with a corn-based preservative)
- More genetic variety, since freight-tolerance isn't nearly as important
Oh of course, though would say insects are far more prepared evolutionary-wise to deal with those products rather than Monsantos new monthly bioweapon straight out of the lab.
organic food won't help with extinction. if we switched to organic food we would have to plow down the remaining rain forest to feed the same number of people we do now
Or we could reduce our meat consumption. Americans eat nearly 100kg of meat per person per year. Twice as much as the Chinese and still nearly 50% more than Europeans. Not to mention the average Indian who eats less than 4kg per year.
A push towards cured meats could help with this... my meat consumption last week was a 4oz pack of prosciutto. Way more tasty than a hunk of beef, and if I continue at that rate for a year I'd consume less than 6kg overall. And it's not like I'd get sick of prosciutto, there are all sorts of cured meats with interesting and unique flavor profiles to choose from.
I'd like to see a citation for that. That may be true if we don't use any GMO crops, but GMO doesn't necessarily have to be incompatible with organic practices for fertilizer, pesticides, etc. IANAF, but my understanding is that organic practices are often more labor intensive rather than more land intensive.
Reduced yields per acre due to not using fertilizer, pesticides etc. are the main reason for the increased land usage for the same amount of food produced.
Whether it could be balanced out by a huge reduction in growing corn for HFS, feed and ethanol is a whole 'nother topic.
Organic farming doesn't mean not using any fertilizer or pesticides—it just means using certain types that are considered safer. For instance, natural fertilizers (such as compost) are used instead of petroleum-based products. Same for pesticides and herbicides.
Citation? While it may not be literally true (e.g. better irrigation of dry land may be just as productive?), it does seem to be in the right direction. The following article is based on a big meta-analysis of agricultural systems, and shows organic fruits and vegetables require significantly more land for the same yield: https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for...
[1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/wwf-report-reve...