So that’s cheery news. Just so happens that I am reading this book now:
So, the last branch of modern humans, ie us, shot to the top of the food chain so fast that the ecosystems we have spread into have suffered quite a bit. Harari states that sharks and lions took quite some time to earn their spots on the top shelf, allowing their ecosystems to adjust and set in some checks and balances.
Homo Sapiens, the last of the modern homos, have come out of nowhere and in the last 12,000 years grabbed the global top spot. In doing so, ecosystems have reacted adversely to say the least.
So, I planted a flower in a hollow log. S’all good.
I never got this obsession with preserving everything. Species go extinct and new ones take their place that’s the story of life itself. We wouldn’t have been here if that meteor didn’t wipe out dinosaurs and most other things with it.
Having said that, it seems that we are getting close to the point of no return where the changes will spiral out of control and affect the survival of our own species. Corral bleaching is particularly scary IMO.
Hopefully it may turn around, but I fear that , as you say , we are relying on the Planet as much as Humans. Some things are in our control , some are not.
We could save a lot of them if we did a better job allocating resources. There are a lot of species that we can save easily and for not that much money if we just allocated resources to saving them. Instead we pour a lot of time and resources in keeping cute animals like pandas on life support. Pandas will in all probability never been able to sustain any real population without human intervention. It’s like this for a lot of animals.
I went to the sichuan panda sanctuary, yes cute. But you can see why they’re so close to extinction. I’ve never seen a more useless and helpless animal in my life. If you didn’t watch them, they would basically hurt themselves falling from trees and stuff. You have to watch every aspect of their lives closely, they literally try to do anything to not survive. If you wanted to say evolution is not true, use the pandas. IDK how they even survived this long.
But the argument for keeping them is “cuteness” does seem to hold some value as well.
The reality is that Nature is cruel . We intervene where there is sympathy and effort, but thousands of species are becoming extinct every year . Some are caused by Human ignorance and greed , but most are unavoidable and sometimes just a natural evolution .
I’d like to see a Clean New Deal, where we go out of our individual and collective ways to revamp and improve the environment a la Nature 2.0 via big s Science and technology.
I’m not discounting everything you said; however, it only took a few thousand homosapiens…us just thousands of years ago, to completely f8ck up Australia.
How many of us would you think should be here, on the entirety of the Earth so as NOT to cause massive environmental and species degradation? That’s a whole lot of abortions and vasectomies. As for tourists…meh. Tourists aren’t eating all the foliage and killing all the edible meat sources into extinction.
Tourists ‘meh’ isn’t an answer, you can do better. Tourism is actually undergoing a massive boom worldwide and cities and islands are starting to limit numbers of visitors . Low cost airlines booming, loads of development, of course CO2 emissions go up.
I’ve read some good books about Australia history that talk about that , but humans have lived in Africa too for millions of years and we weren’t so destructive .
Glad to see you got my point that there’s a fair amount people can do now if they want to reduce their individual or family impact without waiting for tech saviours to magically appear.
Eating less meat is a big one from all that I have read. So many other low hanging fruit, personally I’d start with fish and ocean management as the priority. What we are doing to the oceans is criminal.
So how’s the biodiversity situation now? With folks meeting in Montreal to discuss this matter at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 15), Ian Bremmer gives his sobering take on what has happened over the past fifty years.
The problem here is that the people doing the talking know less than nothing about the topic at hand. So the “solutions” they come up with will be the usual combination of self-serving initiatives, handwringing and finger-pointing, and of course the spending of large amounts of other people’s money on boondoggles.
In short, not talking would at least result in no negative change.
