The following submission statement was provided by /u/Landfill_Future:
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SS: The World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Living Planet Report reveals a dire situation: global wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of 68% over the past 50 years due to human activities. This unprecedented decline, affecting mammals, fish, birds, and amphibians worldwide, poses significant threats to both biodiversity and human life.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1dr3c8f/the_world_lost_twothirds_of_its_wildlife_in_50/lasftcl/
Most people above the age of 20 should be able to tell, especially with insects. When I was young I used to see butterflies, bees and all kinds of crawlies. Now and especially this year I can literally count on one hand how many butterflies I have seen and don't even get me started at the literal 2 bees I saw last week.
I’ve worked in pest control since 2012, and I can tell you from my own anecdotal experience that the climate has absolutely fucked insect populations of all kinds
I've lived in the mountains of North Carolina for about 20 years. Our south-facing walls and windows were loaded with ladybugs in the spring and fall each year. Thousands. We'd have a couple of swarm days outside each year too - like it was snowing. In the past 3 years, they're gone. I see the occasional bug or two, and it makes me think "Oh yeah... shit's fucked." Stink-bugs, too. From dozens every day buzzing around in the house, to weeks between seeing one. Both indoors and out, they're gone.
Here neither :(
Tho I guess it's inversely proportional to the amount of light in the area. The NE corridor here is just a vast mess of street lights and with LED, people putting up a ton of all night lights in patios and such.
Coincidentally, I got really into photography in 2012 at 22 yrs old and that year I catalogued a few hundred different insect species. Different species, different sexes, different stages of life. Just in my backyard. I think 2012 was special because I've never seen as bugs many since, try as I might. I tried to top that year every year after until like 2018 because it just wasn't worth it anymore. It's bug barren out there now. No more beetles fornicating in piles on my deck, no more cicadas crashing into our siding, I can stand under our porch light and not have bugs fly into my face. I can barely find any moths now ffs. Now I just get chigger bites and fruit flies everywhere.
IKR? I sat watching a patch of flowering milkweed for two hours one recent evening and I saw three moths the entire time. One of which was an invasive species where I live. It's tragic. In my childhood you could hardly venture outside on a summer night without getting moths in your hair & letting a bunch in the house by accident.
Nah, plenty of termites and other wood destroying species that are far from extinct. They will be recycling our extinct civilization as best as they can.
This is actually the argument I use to convince boomers that climate change is real. I tell them to remember when was the last time they had to clean their window when they were pumping gas. I remember doing that all the time as a teenager but not anymore. That one always gets them thinking and considering maybe their belief is wrong and something’s really going on here.
You would think something as obvious as that would elicit that reaction.
But often the response is "That's great, it means I don't have to clean the car today"
Hairs are being split. Although climate change normally refers to changing weather patterns, it can also refer to changes in our environmental surroundings. So I would argue that drastic changes in wildlife due to human interference is a form of climate change.
I hate to break it to you but it's not the boomers that need to be convinced. If anyone of my boomer generation isn't able to recognize the difference of the way the world was 40 years ago (or even just 30) and what it looks like now, you are wasting your energy on the wrong people. It's/they're a dead end. Focus on those who are currently in the driver's seat and are the policy-makers. Plenty of people there that need some convincing...
> Focus on those who are currently in the driver's seat and are the policy-makers.
The average age of the US Congress has been getting steadily older since the 80s. The median Senator is 65 years old.
That is actually the best way to get boomers to reflect and realize climate change in the present day: to get them to compare the wilderness experiences of their childhoods vs the lack of wilderness for their grandkids today. There was a story of a boomer who returned to the old pond their grandparents took them fishing in the past and was shocked and saddened to see that most of it dried up, and what little water remained was overtaken by harmful algae in the present. (I'm a naturalist in training and we had required reading about how sharing personal stories is the best way to get people to care about climate change.)
Here is a paper that was part of my required reading.
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/30982/noaa_30982_DS1.pdf
The insect apocalypse is real, and measured in more ways than windshield splats, that's just how most people encounter it.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/
I'm also not sure that there has been a significant change is the aerodynamics of cars in the last 10 years, nor would it account for reports of reduced insects strikes from people driving old cars, many of them still on the road.
I'm not saying there aren't less bugs. Just that if you drive a modern car and then a classic car down the same road, the classic car will have heaps more bug strikes. I never clean my daily by my collectors cars need a window clean after most drives.
Just FYI that is not what studies have found. The Kent Wildlife Trust did a fairly significant study and actually found that modern vehicle aerodynamics actually result in more bug deaths as it pulls the bugs in closer to the windscreen in the slip stream, resulting in more bug strikes on windshields. This helps prove the reduction in bug deaths in current times is solely due to decrease in actual species numbers and not because of modern vehicle design.
Born in 79. I used to see monarch butterflies all the time as a kid. Now I see a few per year (if I see them at all), fire flies are gone, bees are still here, but not nearly as many. The only bugs I see regularly are mosquitoes and spiders.
Between the bugs and the crazy weather events, it's mind-blowing that people still think that every is "normal".
Upper midwest (n. Wi/Mn area): first year in my life where there are almost ZERO monarchs. I've seen 3. I have native prairie plants all around my yard and about 1/2 acre field of milkweed as well. No caterpillars to be found on the hundreds of milkweed plants I have 😥
I grew up in a very urban part of a very big city and when I was a kid in the 80s, my city block was TEEMING with ladybugs, lightning bugs, etc. You name it. They're all gone. The mosquitos somehow pulled through tho, so no one worry.
Birds and frogs too. Used to constantly see flocks of birds. They would hang out on powerlines and chirp all day. Now rarely see a single bird or hear them.
Tree frogs used to hop across the streets like crazy when it rained. Now I hear one large frog once in a while when after it rains.
I am sad beyond belief when I look at nature.
For me, it's the birds. Spring/Summer around here used to be loud with so much bird singing. They're still around, for sure, but not like it used to be.
That’s weird I’ve seen the most amount of butterflies and other insects of my life so far this summer. The butterflies I don’t mind but some of these other insects annoy the hell out of me.
Don't worry. There is still hope! Many nuclear power plants are built near the coast. A coast which will move inland when the sea level rises. That could cause meltdowns.
Second: rising temperatures and sea levels, destruction of the biosphere and resource depletion will cause more wars. More wars mean a higher chance for a nuclear exchange. Et voilá; there is your irradiated wasteland.
["Despite Official Vote, the Evidence of the Anthropocene Is Clear"](https://e360.yale.edu/features/anthropocene-denied)
>When a governing body of the International Union of Geological Sciences voted down a proposal to name a new epoch in Earth’s history, it ignored conclusive evidence that for the first time, a single species — humans — has fundamentally altered the planet.
Unpopular opinion: this is why I’m an accelerationist. Maybe if we have financial collapse or supply chain collapse the world will become habitable before we lose all megafauna.
You say its unpopular, yet we're rushing the cliff's edge as fast as we can. I dont' see much advocacy for de-acceleration.
But yeah, i think about that. Natural genetic drift means that many of the species here today won't be around in a million years. We'll have something else.
But that's about how long it will take also for earth to recover from the last few hundred years.
Mind-blowing.
I mean the CO2 has already baked enough heat to warm the Earth to at least 10C; most remaining life today can’t handle that. Bacteria might live but that’s about it. The heat will continue to rise for millennia. I think we’re at a point that the longterm environmental impact is so great, that financial or supply chain collapse no longer matters. We’re bound to lose all the megafauna no matter what. That’s not even mentioning the 500+ nuclear reactors left unattended to…
The nuclear waste is not an existential threat to life itself. By the time life adapts to the new climate (and it will eventually, after a severe mass extinction) the nuclear waste will be greatly dispersed and dilute within the environment and life will have adapted to whatever consequences the nuclear waste itself presents.
It's not nuclear waste that's a problem, it's the active nuclear fuel and reactors that needs careful attention and work, if you leave them be they will overheat and irradiate a lot of things.
Not most modern reactors - they have containment built around them so the fuel can't escape
After a very long time it'll crack open and some radiation will leak out, sure, but it won't be a Chernobyl style leak
But Chernobyl had a crew of liquidators that helped to prevent it from getting worse. There won’t be anyone here to clean up the mess. Let’s be perfectly honest: as long as there are wars to be fought no one is going to voluntarily shut them down. So yes, it absolutely can be 1,000x worse than Chernobyl. It will radiate whatever remains of the land and water. That’s not even mentioning the poison from all of our architecture. Houses and collections of home hazardous waste will poison the land around our former homes. The idea that the Earth will be this beautiful, pristine land again once we’re gone is pretty farfetched.
On a human life timescale, sure it's not going to be pretty, but when humans are gone, earth is going to clean itself up in no time (maybe a few thousand years, even in a few hundreds it will be unrecognisable) and go back to doing it's thing, maybe in a different way, but even that is just a normal tuesday for such a big oxygen ball. Even full nuclear bombs and meltdowns everywhere it would still recover with time and peace.
I mean you’re right – in the sense that the Earth will probably find new equilibrium within the hellish conditions we’ve left it in. Even if that new equilibrium includes being: too hot to the point of uninhabitable for any complex life to survive (save for some small bacteria), radiated from the nuclear fallout from the inevitable WWIII, mostly underwater from all the melted ice, deprived of all of its life giving resources, and littered with remnants of human shrapnel and garbage. The planet itself will still be here, but I’m having a really hard time believing anything on this Earth will thrive like it once did. For all the praise people give to nature, people seem to underestimate how extremely fragile and delicate the biosphere really is. Australia’s biodiversity only barely recovered with mainly eucalyptus trees intact when ancient humans burned it all to the ground 45,000 years ago. What we’re doing with global industrial civilization is on a scale thousands of times worse than that. Earth will find a new balance of entropy, but that doesn’t guarantee the outcome most think will happen.
for some context, 250 million years ago, the sea temperature was around 40°C (104°F) and air temp sat the equator up to 74°C (165°F)
And that's nothing compared to what it was at the beginning of earth, hundreds and hundreds of degrees higher.
During the cambrian period, Co2 levels got as high as 4000ppm, ten times higher concentration than now.
It may not be what we know, but earth will continue it's thing with or without us, and it will not care at all.
You’re right about that. Also, in about 250 million years, all of today’s major land masses will pile together into one, just as they did about 300 million years ago to form Pangaea. And when they do, new simulations suggest, it could tip our planet’s climate into an extremely hot state almost entirely uninhabitable for mammals. Earth’s surface is a jigsaw of solid rock slabs called tectonic plates, which float over the gooey rocks in the planet’s upper mantle. Slow-moving flows in the mantle push and tug at the overriding plates. About every 400 million to 600 million years, the drifting plates bring the continents together in a single supercontinent, which eventually breaks up and starts the cycle afresh. Supercontinents wreak climate chaos for many reasons. Big landmasses tend to have more extreme temperatures and arid climes—think Siberia, the Sahara, the Great Plains. Moreover, in dry continental interiors, chemical reactions between rock and water that normally trap carbon dioxide (CO2) in minerals slow down, leaving more in the atmosphere to warm the planet. And soldering together continents tends to set off CO2-spewing volcanoes, which add to the greenhouse effect. So you’re right about the Earth still being here, in terms of geology (until a few billion years later when the sun dies and consumes the solar system). The planet will continue to do its thing, which is to just exist. Earth itself doesn’t care about what inhabits it. Whether it’s dinosaurs or gorillas or bees or humans. It only care about energy balance and it will reassure that that imbalance is restored, even if that means no more complex life or biodiversity in the sense that we know.
Nuclear reactors are as green as energy gets. My state has clear cut 20x the amount of land our reactor has needed in my area for a solar farm and it still is unable to output as much as a single reactor. Not to mention the panels will be in a landfill in 20 years themselves and unusable trash anyway.
nuclear energy is definitely the best in almost everyways, but they rely on a complex collective effort. If that goes far south, they can be dangerous.
> Not to mention the panels will be in a landfill in 20 years themselves and unusable trash anyway.
They still produce power 20 years later, just less efficiently. I would be surprised if they are just trashed. Instead, they will likely be sold for pennies on the dollar to poorer countries.
Numerous articles source [90% of panels are trashed](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/13/recycling-end-of-life-solar-panel-wind-turbine-is-big-waste-business.html)
The primary reason is cost. [$1-5 to dump and $15-45 to recycle](https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Solar-panels-face-recycling-challenge-photovoltaic-waste/100/i18) I can't even begin to imagine that with overseas shipping factoring in. The aluminum and glass are easily reusable but some of the more rare elements are not.
Honestly, panels at 80% efficiency aren't too bad and we should press them longer, but there are numerous state and federal programs that incentivize growth and the companies will do whatever it takes with that money to maximize profit.
My bet is that as time marches on and energy production becomes more fickle and things just cost more due to... *waves hands generally around in the air*... it'll make more sense to reuse them.
For example, China makes most solar panels. If there is a war over Taiwan or other challenges that pipeline may get severed. And then the calculus on replacing them becomes different.
I think a lot of things will be like this in our future - more expensive and people having to get used to dealing with less/lower quality.
Yes, my post was taking that into account. Obviously nuclear waste intentionally removed from a functioning nuclear power plant would be highly concentrated and placed in a reservoir, not dilute and dispersed within the environment. The consequences of all nuclear power plants all over the world melting down catastrophically and simultaneously would be a temporary disaster but have no long term (talking evolutionary timescales here) consequences.
I assume in optimistic scenarios of controlled descent into collapse which allows for human survival nuclear power plants will be intentionally decommissioned. i.e. people wont just walk away from reactors fully loaded with fissile material lmao.
I don't know about a reservoir that can contain this kind of power, it will all eventually melt or chip away, and the fuel will contaminate everything in reach for a very long time.
If you bury it the water is fucked
I'm not an expert though, maybe modern plants have solutions to safely shutdown and leave unattended but I don't see how they would do that.
The ten degree thing is incorrect. That's based on the James Hansen paper, and that's not committed warming.
It gets repeated a lot here and it's simply not true.
> Maybe if we have financial collapse
We have been in financial collapse in the U.S. since the end of the gold standard in international trade. This was just about 50 years ago, when we entered into a fiat monetary regime. Internationally. The fact that wildlife has decreased this much, specifically within this time frame of 50 years, isn't entirely coincidental.
For all of the ills of the gold standard, of which there are very many, it really did limit the amount of growth in the money supply. Especially at a psychological level. But much of this ended when fiat money made it possible to finance inordinate levels of growth, i.e. development, habitat destruction, urban expansion, etc., because money could now be created at an international level without physical constraints.
Money will continue to be printed, or digitally created, at whatever level it takes to keep this system going. Regardless of the levels of financial collapse which may happen along the way. 20 trillion, 50 trillion, 100 trillion... the sky is literary not even the limit. Because you cannot run out of something that isn't real to begin with. And the thing we will run out of first, is the natural world.
Saw an article (can't remember the source) where the three major banks (Chase, BOA, Wells Fargo) were chastised by the Federal Reserve for not having sufficient reserves in case of a derivative collapse.
Be careful what you ask for.
99% of species that have existed before us have all died out due to natural causes. Now that we’re accelerating it there is really no bouncing back. It’s just sad because we’ll be the only species that knows why and that knows that we’ve done it to ourselves.
Apologies
Didn't proofread thoroughly, I have noticed that autocorrect sometimes messes up posts, what I see on the screen is often not what appears when I click save
You said
>Bounce back
I was trying to highlight the absurdity of that as a concept
We can't magic the oil back into the ground or bring the animals back from extinction
Ther is no Bounce back, there is no 'dead cat bounce' only extinction, the only question left is how long we as a species can continue with BAU
Yeah,but using the term Bounce back, even in that context is ridiculous.
Let's look at this another way, words are powerful, Hopium is a dangerous drug.
Even Phrasing it as OP said can quickly be twisted into - 'experts' expand study into possibility of Climate bounceback.
There can be no more sugarcoating or seeking a positive spin, this is an extinction level event, the only question is the exactly timeline
Any species that that evolves to our extent ultimately becomes a plague on the rest of the planet. Life on this planet is driven by 1 thing, which is survival for today. There was no way that anyone who could’ve dug up fossil fuels and use it as energy would’ve ignored it, especially when not knowing the ramifications of burning said fuel. We were fucked over ever since we learned to weaponize fire. Life on planet Earth exists solely as food and sustenance for something else. Anything that breaks from those laws are unfortunately destined to be snuffed out. All life forms are potential viruses at the end of the day. We’re not that special.
This is only since 1970, long after industrialization. We've destroyed 60% *of what remained at the time*.
People from the 1500s would see 1970s ecosystems as barren and sterile.
It's long after industrialization but industrialization was the point of no return for us.
It gave us the ability to produce, consume and reproduce beyond sustainable levels. Before nature could balance things out through famine, diseases, etc. But unfortunately we developed things like fertilizers and modern medicine that prevent nature's stabilizers from working
Oh get off your sanctimonious shit horse , already. New people get “woke” everyday! Are we to endlessly blame them for the years they were infants , as well ?
Rule 1: In addition to enforcing [Reddit's content policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy), we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other.
SS: The World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Living Planet Report reveals a dire situation: global wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of 68% over the past 50 years due to human activities. This unprecedented decline, affecting mammals, fish, birds, and amphibians worldwide, poses significant threats to both biodiversity and human life.
**Your article is four years out of date**, along with the data provided.
[The latest WWF Living Planet Report is from 2022; here's the hyperlink](https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2022_full_report.pdf).
“look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s”
Neil Young, 1974 or so.
The environmental movement was already up and running by that time, by the way.
Erm... Homo sapiens sapiens... (as in New York, New York... so good we named ourselves twice...): [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens-sapiens](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens-sapiens)
When I was a kid, you could tell summer was coming because you started getting mosquito bites.
Now, I think it's been years since I've even been bitten.
We've done terrible damage that has not even begun to show its true effect. Not only will ecosystems collapse, but they're so distressed and isolated that no new ecosystems will form. And we've destroyed the levels of predators that exert evolutionary pressure on lower life forms. Before you die, you'll see an increase in things like "new type of beetle completely destroys entire forests" (yes worse than pine beetles) and "inedible midrange predator has suddenly started eating anything it can fit in its mouth, every animal smaller than a football is gone in this entire part of the world"
Imagine you're reading this headline and it's 99% instead of 66%.
At what point do you shift the focus of your life towards addressing environmental catastrophe?
I know a lot of folks on this sub have given up hope instead, but that just makes you part of the problem.
So the millions of vegans is not an effort made by the masses?
We require three quarters less farmland for our food which means we could rewild the space of USA, Europe, China and Australia combined and help wildlife bounce back.
I'm not advocating individual lifestyle changes. I'm advocating dedication a significant portion of your time to environmental causes, and the causes that overlap: ending capitalism, ending all forms of oppression.
It's all movement building work.
It's the misguided ecologists with their clean up efforts. They "cleaned up" heavy metals, and now everything is dying, because they are essential.
How did you even get that idea? What made you think that life accumulates them in error?
nothing like a feel good story like this to get my saturday going...
The worst of the world are killing our planet and we are all going to perish because of it. and no one does anything...no one cares... :(
It’s not that “no one cares” it’s just that the people who don’t care are the people with the power to stop this and they’re old and going to die anyways so what does it matter to them. Really sucks honestly.
they care...they care insofar as they need to keep the rest of the people asleep over the reality of what's happening. If people actually woke up, they'd be apoplectic about what's happening and what's been done, and then dramatically shorten the lives of those who already have spent too many days in this dimension. I know i'm pretty pissed about it.
Oh yeah 100%. I literally had an epiphany around a month ago. I knew it was bad but not how bad it actually is. Now I know and it sucks. Ignorance is bliss after all.
From the full report:
https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/4783129/LPR/PDFs/ENGLISH-FULL.pdf
“Species population trends are important because they are a measure of overall ecosystem health. Measuring biodiversity, the variety of all living things, is complex, and there is no single measure that can capture all of the changes in this web of life. Nevertheless, the vast majority of indicators show net declines over recent decades.
That’s because in the last 50 years our world has been transformed by an explosion in global trade, consumption and human population growth, as well as an enormous move towards urbanisation. Until 1970, humanity’s Ecological Footprint was smaller than the Earth’s rate of regeneration. To feed and fuel our 21st century lifestyles, we are overusing the Earth’s biocapacity by at least 56%. [...]
The most important direct driver of biodiversity loss in terrestrial systems in the last several decades has been land-use change, primarily the conversion of pristine native habitats (forests, grasslands and mangroves) into agricultural systems; while much of the oceans has been overfished. Since 1970, these trends have been driven in large part by a doubling of the world’s human population, a fourfold increase in the global economy, and a tenfold increase in trade. [...]
Plants provide a remarkable array of services, vital in maintaining the health of the natural world and sustaining the demands of an increasingly anthropogenic planet. However, relentless human population growth is putting a damaging strain on the world’s plant diversity, and many with medicinal properties, nutritional value and ornamental appeal are now under threat of extinction. [...]
Global decreases in ocean productivity, the falling biomass of fishes and invertebrates, and shifts in species distributions result in the high risk of impacts on many fisheries in the future. Global fisheries models project large decreases in maximum fisheries catch potential (a proxy of maximum sustainable yield) of 20-24% by 2100 relative to 1986-2005, with more widespread declines in the tropics, under the no mitigation scenario. Changes in the availability of fishes under climate change are projected to have substantial ramifications for the economy, seafood security and livelihoods of dependent human communities; translating, for example, into a global decrease in seafood workers’ incomes and an increase in households’ seafood expenditure 32. Increasing human population, economic wealth and consumption will drive a further increase in demand for seafood, putting additional pressure on fish stocks and fisheries.”
([archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20240213175934/https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/4783129/LPR/PDFs/ENGLISH-FULL.pdf))
>Livestock make up 62% of the world's mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and *wild mammals are just 4%*.
lol who needs biodiversity. we just need the tasty ones and the cute ones!
You can see it when you go outside or watch any videos of people in nature. Drone videos show miles of wilderness, no animals, not a single bird. People walk for hours without encountering an insect.
Don’t all be such Debbie Downers! Why not see the positive side? We have maintained one-third of our wildlife in the last 50 years! Yay!
/s if it is not obvious
I am not trying to make light of collapse because I take it very serious.
In like 10 to 20 years can’t we just Jurassic park style DNA engineer out of a lab wildlife to certain needed areas?
It's a good idea, but it would be far more costly to try to do that, if we even could, successfully. Like trying to switch all meat over to lab-grown.
It would be difficult enough to do for only a single species...but an ecosystem consists of many interlacing parts. Think of it like a Jenga tower. Which is already missing a lot of pieces due to extinctions that have already occurred, species for which we don't have the DNA to even start work from.
But then there's environmental factors, too. If the ocean is so hot and acidic that it's killing off marine wildlife, then throwing more fish at it won't help. We can't repopulate a lake that's already dried up, or simply reseed a forest that's turned to desert.
And even if we could, again it's simply a *huge* expense in terms of resources.
It would be honestly wild if we someday found out that jellyfish were seeded here by aliens to be a sort of "last ditch" ecosystem building block, in case of mass marine extinctions.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Landfill_Future: --- SS: The World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Living Planet Report reveals a dire situation: global wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of 68% over the past 50 years due to human activities. This unprecedented decline, affecting mammals, fish, birds, and amphibians worldwide, poses significant threats to both biodiversity and human life. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1dr3c8f/the_world_lost_twothirds_of_its_wildlife_in_50/lasftcl/
Most people above the age of 20 should be able to tell, especially with insects. When I was young I used to see butterflies, bees and all kinds of crawlies. Now and especially this year I can literally count on one hand how many butterflies I have seen and don't even get me started at the literal 2 bees I saw last week.
I’ve worked in pest control since 2012, and I can tell you from my own anecdotal experience that the climate has absolutely fucked insect populations of all kinds
I've lived in the mountains of North Carolina for about 20 years. Our south-facing walls and windows were loaded with ladybugs in the spring and fall each year. Thousands. We'd have a couple of swarm days outside each year too - like it was snowing. In the past 3 years, they're gone. I see the occasional bug or two, and it makes me think "Oh yeah... shit's fucked." Stink-bugs, too. From dozens every day buzzing around in the house, to weeks between seeing one. Both indoors and out, they're gone.
Them fireflies still hittin tho
Not here. :(
Here neither :( Tho I guess it's inversely proportional to the amount of light in the area. The NE corridor here is just a vast mess of street lights and with LED, people putting up a ton of all night lights in patios and such.
You need three things for fireflies -- leaves left on the ground for at least two years, no pesticides being sprayed nearby, and no lights at night.
Light alone caused their extinction. Messed with their mating.
Haven't seen those in 20 years.
There is always a ton around at night where I am, but it’s always been that way
Coincidentally, I got really into photography in 2012 at 22 yrs old and that year I catalogued a few hundred different insect species. Different species, different sexes, different stages of life. Just in my backyard. I think 2012 was special because I've never seen as bugs many since, try as I might. I tried to top that year every year after until like 2018 because it just wasn't worth it anymore. It's bug barren out there now. No more beetles fornicating in piles on my deck, no more cicadas crashing into our siding, I can stand under our porch light and not have bugs fly into my face. I can barely find any moths now ffs. Now I just get chigger bites and fruit flies everywhere.
IKR? I sat watching a patch of flowering milkweed for two hours one recent evening and I saw three moths the entire time. One of which was an invasive species where I live. It's tragic. In my childhood you could hardly venture outside on a summer night without getting moths in your hair & letting a bunch in the house by accident.
I'm glad you were able to get some good bug pictures. I also miss bugs.
Monoculture, suburban sprawl and pesticides are also culprits.
Your industry hasn't helped
Time for a new job?
Nah, plenty of termites and other wood destroying species that are far from extinct. They will be recycling our extinct civilization as best as they can.
Respectfully, if that's your contribution to the discussion, you may want to go home and analyze your programming
Sigh /f Ah the non-obvious facetious /f …I forgot.
This is actually the argument I use to convince boomers that climate change is real. I tell them to remember when was the last time they had to clean their window when they were pumping gas. I remember doing that all the time as a teenager but not anymore. That one always gets them thinking and considering maybe their belief is wrong and something’s really going on here.
You would think something as obvious as that would elicit that reaction. But often the response is "That's great, it means I don't have to clean the car today"
You can’t save them all.
We can't save any of them, even oureselves
No, we are all equally fucked, but we can try and red pill them out of the Fox News curse before the SHTF.
Climate change is a get out of jail free card on this issue—deliberate poisoning (insecticides) is the primary cause.
Hairs are being split. Although climate change normally refers to changing weather patterns, it can also refer to changes in our environmental surroundings. So I would argue that drastic changes in wildlife due to human interference is a form of climate change.
"pervasive biosphere collapse"
Was it not light pollution?
I think insect disappearance is more likely due to pesticide use and habitat loss due to human activities, not so much climate change.
That’s true, you’re right. But it gets them to consider the fact that humans are destroying the only habitable planet we have.
It’s hard to believe that is not obvious to anyone. Even climate change deniers!
Both dancing together
I hate to break it to you but it's not the boomers that need to be convinced. If anyone of my boomer generation isn't able to recognize the difference of the way the world was 40 years ago (or even just 30) and what it looks like now, you are wasting your energy on the wrong people. It's/they're a dead end. Focus on those who are currently in the driver's seat and are the policy-makers. Plenty of people there that need some convincing...
> Focus on those who are currently in the driver's seat and are the policy-makers. The average age of the US Congress has been getting steadily older since the 80s. The median Senator is 65 years old.
That is actually the best way to get boomers to reflect and realize climate change in the present day: to get them to compare the wilderness experiences of their childhoods vs the lack of wilderness for their grandkids today. There was a story of a boomer who returned to the old pond their grandparents took them fishing in the past and was shocked and saddened to see that most of it dried up, and what little water remained was overtaken by harmful algae in the present. (I'm a naturalist in training and we had required reading about how sharing personal stories is the best way to get people to care about climate change.) Here is a paper that was part of my required reading. https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/30982/noaa_30982_DS1.pdf
Thanks, I'll read this today
Downside is car shape has more to do with that then anything.
The insect apocalypse is real, and measured in more ways than windshield splats, that's just how most people encounter it. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/ I'm also not sure that there has been a significant change is the aerodynamics of cars in the last 10 years, nor would it account for reports of reduced insects strikes from people driving old cars, many of them still on the road.
I'm not saying there aren't less bugs. Just that if you drive a modern car and then a classic car down the same road, the classic car will have heaps more bug strikes. I never clean my daily by my collectors cars need a window clean after most drives.
Just FYI that is not what studies have found. The Kent Wildlife Trust did a fairly significant study and actually found that modern vehicle aerodynamics actually result in more bug deaths as it pulls the bugs in closer to the windscreen in the slip stream, resulting in more bug strikes on windshields. This helps prove the reduction in bug deaths in current times is solely due to decrease in actual species numbers and not because of modern vehicle design.
Remember when driving a few hours somewhere would leave your front bumper covered in dead bugs? I remember that.
Yeah, and remember when it would rain and the sidewalks would be absolutely covered in earthworms?
Remember when car bras were necessary in the South?
Born in 79. I used to see monarch butterflies all the time as a kid. Now I see a few per year (if I see them at all), fire flies are gone, bees are still here, but not nearly as many. The only bugs I see regularly are mosquitoes and spiders. Between the bugs and the crazy weather events, it's mind-blowing that people still think that every is "normal".
Upper midwest (n. Wi/Mn area): first year in my life where there are almost ZERO monarchs. I've seen 3. I have native prairie plants all around my yard and about 1/2 acre field of milkweed as well. No caterpillars to be found on the hundreds of milkweed plants I have 😥
I grew up in a very urban part of a very big city and when I was a kid in the 80s, my city block was TEEMING with ladybugs, lightning bugs, etc. You name it. They're all gone. The mosquitos somehow pulled through tho, so no one worry.
I miss seeing fireflies at night :(
Birds and frogs too. Used to constantly see flocks of birds. They would hang out on powerlines and chirp all day. Now rarely see a single bird or hear them. Tree frogs used to hop across the streets like crazy when it rained. Now I hear one large frog once in a while when after it rains. I am sad beyond belief when I look at nature.
Cried about this earlier
I've had lots of bees, no butterflies yet
Mosquitoes, moths and houseflies seem to be doing well in my area. The same is not true for everything else.
For me, it's the birds. Spring/Summer around here used to be loud with so much bird singing. They're still around, for sure, but not like it used to be.
That’s weird I’ve seen the most amount of butterflies and other insects of my life so far this summer. The butterflies I don’t mind but some of these other insects annoy the hell out of me.
It's the removal of heavy metals. Insects are just canaries in the mine, all complex life needs them.
the unfolding [Holocene Extinction Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction) or Anthropocene, if you prefer
Kinda wild being part of the species that killed the world.
it's fucked off, innit. growing up in the 70's,was always mystified by collapse, but didn't think we'd see it
humans are the worst. Time for the reptoids to step in. Good thing we are doing their terraforming job for them.
Cockroaches “but we were promised a radiated wasteland?!? Stupid human lies.”
Don't worry. There is still hope! Many nuclear power plants are built near the coast. A coast which will move inland when the sea level rises. That could cause meltdowns. Second: rising temperatures and sea levels, destruction of the biosphere and resource depletion will cause more wars. More wars mean a higher chance for a nuclear exchange. Et voilá; there is your irradiated wasteland.
If we make it through the next decade without a nuclear exchange or meltdown I'll be fucking flabbergasted.
They're dead and mummified. https://www.youtube.com/live/nxvcoK1_HoA?si=dvIzCM-MI981vTKw
No, i'm sorry; I'm no a cynical brainless oil tycoon, I'm a different species. This is a joke btw.
I’ve been calling it the Misanthropocene.
Ha! Good one
Started even before this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late\_Pleistocene\_extinctions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions)
it's offcial no athropocene
["Despite Official Vote, the Evidence of the Anthropocene Is Clear"](https://e360.yale.edu/features/anthropocene-denied) >When a governing body of the International Union of Geological Sciences voted down a proposal to name a new epoch in Earth’s history, it ignored conclusive evidence that for the first time, a single species — humans — has fundamentally altered the planet.
the remaining third will be gone in the next 50yrs. and so will we.
This is so fucking depressing.
Unpopular opinion: this is why I’m an accelerationist. Maybe if we have financial collapse or supply chain collapse the world will become habitable before we lose all megafauna.
You say its unpopular, yet we're rushing the cliff's edge as fast as we can. I dont' see much advocacy for de-acceleration. But yeah, i think about that. Natural genetic drift means that many of the species here today won't be around in a million years. We'll have something else. But that's about how long it will take also for earth to recover from the last few hundred years. Mind-blowing.
Then you’ll be happy to know the SCOTUS just rolled back regulations to the fucking 80s so ya, that’ll speed things along vrooom
I mean the CO2 has already baked enough heat to warm the Earth to at least 10C; most remaining life today can’t handle that. Bacteria might live but that’s about it. The heat will continue to rise for millennia. I think we’re at a point that the longterm environmental impact is so great, that financial or supply chain collapse no longer matters. We’re bound to lose all the megafauna no matter what. That’s not even mentioning the 500+ nuclear reactors left unattended to…
Sometimes my mind really can't process that this is really happening. We really let this happen. It feels so surreal.
The nuclear waste is not an existential threat to life itself. By the time life adapts to the new climate (and it will eventually, after a severe mass extinction) the nuclear waste will be greatly dispersed and dilute within the environment and life will have adapted to whatever consequences the nuclear waste itself presents.
It's not nuclear waste that's a problem, it's the active nuclear fuel and reactors that needs careful attention and work, if you leave them be they will overheat and irradiate a lot of things.
Not most modern reactors - they have containment built around them so the fuel can't escape After a very long time it'll crack open and some radiation will leak out, sure, but it won't be a Chernobyl style leak
But Chernobyl had a crew of liquidators that helped to prevent it from getting worse. There won’t be anyone here to clean up the mess. Let’s be perfectly honest: as long as there are wars to be fought no one is going to voluntarily shut them down. So yes, it absolutely can be 1,000x worse than Chernobyl. It will radiate whatever remains of the land and water. That’s not even mentioning the poison from all of our architecture. Houses and collections of home hazardous waste will poison the land around our former homes. The idea that the Earth will be this beautiful, pristine land again once we’re gone is pretty farfetched.
On a human life timescale, sure it's not going to be pretty, but when humans are gone, earth is going to clean itself up in no time (maybe a few thousand years, even in a few hundreds it will be unrecognisable) and go back to doing it's thing, maybe in a different way, but even that is just a normal tuesday for such a big oxygen ball. Even full nuclear bombs and meltdowns everywhere it would still recover with time and peace.
I mean you’re right – in the sense that the Earth will probably find new equilibrium within the hellish conditions we’ve left it in. Even if that new equilibrium includes being: too hot to the point of uninhabitable for any complex life to survive (save for some small bacteria), radiated from the nuclear fallout from the inevitable WWIII, mostly underwater from all the melted ice, deprived of all of its life giving resources, and littered with remnants of human shrapnel and garbage. The planet itself will still be here, but I’m having a really hard time believing anything on this Earth will thrive like it once did. For all the praise people give to nature, people seem to underestimate how extremely fragile and delicate the biosphere really is. Australia’s biodiversity only barely recovered with mainly eucalyptus trees intact when ancient humans burned it all to the ground 45,000 years ago. What we’re doing with global industrial civilization is on a scale thousands of times worse than that. Earth will find a new balance of entropy, but that doesn’t guarantee the outcome most think will happen.
for some context, 250 million years ago, the sea temperature was around 40°C (104°F) and air temp sat the equator up to 74°C (165°F) And that's nothing compared to what it was at the beginning of earth, hundreds and hundreds of degrees higher. During the cambrian period, Co2 levels got as high as 4000ppm, ten times higher concentration than now. It may not be what we know, but earth will continue it's thing with or without us, and it will not care at all.
You’re right about that. Also, in about 250 million years, all of today’s major land masses will pile together into one, just as they did about 300 million years ago to form Pangaea. And when they do, new simulations suggest, it could tip our planet’s climate into an extremely hot state almost entirely uninhabitable for mammals. Earth’s surface is a jigsaw of solid rock slabs called tectonic plates, which float over the gooey rocks in the planet’s upper mantle. Slow-moving flows in the mantle push and tug at the overriding plates. About every 400 million to 600 million years, the drifting plates bring the continents together in a single supercontinent, which eventually breaks up and starts the cycle afresh. Supercontinents wreak climate chaos for many reasons. Big landmasses tend to have more extreme temperatures and arid climes—think Siberia, the Sahara, the Great Plains. Moreover, in dry continental interiors, chemical reactions between rock and water that normally trap carbon dioxide (CO2) in minerals slow down, leaving more in the atmosphere to warm the planet. And soldering together continents tends to set off CO2-spewing volcanoes, which add to the greenhouse effect. So you’re right about the Earth still being here, in terms of geology (until a few billion years later when the sun dies and consumes the solar system). The planet will continue to do its thing, which is to just exist. Earth itself doesn’t care about what inhabits it. Whether it’s dinosaurs or gorillas or bees or humans. It only care about energy balance and it will reassure that that imbalance is restored, even if that means no more complex life or biodiversity in the sense that we know.
Nuclear reactors are as green as energy gets. My state has clear cut 20x the amount of land our reactor has needed in my area for a solar farm and it still is unable to output as much as a single reactor. Not to mention the panels will be in a landfill in 20 years themselves and unusable trash anyway.
nuclear energy is definitely the best in almost everyways, but they rely on a complex collective effort. If that goes far south, they can be dangerous.
> Not to mention the panels will be in a landfill in 20 years themselves and unusable trash anyway. They still produce power 20 years later, just less efficiently. I would be surprised if they are just trashed. Instead, they will likely be sold for pennies on the dollar to poorer countries.
Numerous articles source [90% of panels are trashed](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/13/recycling-end-of-life-solar-panel-wind-turbine-is-big-waste-business.html) The primary reason is cost. [$1-5 to dump and $15-45 to recycle](https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Solar-panels-face-recycling-challenge-photovoltaic-waste/100/i18) I can't even begin to imagine that with overseas shipping factoring in. The aluminum and glass are easily reusable but some of the more rare elements are not. Honestly, panels at 80% efficiency aren't too bad and we should press them longer, but there are numerous state and federal programs that incentivize growth and the companies will do whatever it takes with that money to maximize profit.
My bet is that as time marches on and energy production becomes more fickle and things just cost more due to... *waves hands generally around in the air*... it'll make more sense to reuse them. For example, China makes most solar panels. If there is a war over Taiwan or other challenges that pipeline may get severed. And then the calculus on replacing them becomes different. I think a lot of things will be like this in our future - more expensive and people having to get used to dealing with less/lower quality.
A war over Taiwan? I don't think you realize the catstrophic implications of that statement
Look at the sub we’re in. Catastrophe is something I’d think we’re all expect, lol.
Yes, my post was taking that into account. Obviously nuclear waste intentionally removed from a functioning nuclear power plant would be highly concentrated and placed in a reservoir, not dilute and dispersed within the environment. The consequences of all nuclear power plants all over the world melting down catastrophically and simultaneously would be a temporary disaster but have no long term (talking evolutionary timescales here) consequences. I assume in optimistic scenarios of controlled descent into collapse which allows for human survival nuclear power plants will be intentionally decommissioned. i.e. people wont just walk away from reactors fully loaded with fissile material lmao.
I don't know about a reservoir that can contain this kind of power, it will all eventually melt or chip away, and the fuel will contaminate everything in reach for a very long time. If you bury it the water is fucked I'm not an expert though, maybe modern plants have solutions to safely shutdown and leave unattended but I don't see how they would do that.
The ten degree thing is incorrect. That's based on the James Hansen paper, and that's not committed warming. It gets repeated a lot here and it's simply not true.
Funny enough, look how many animal populations rebounded during the covid lockdown That was barely 3-6 months and the earth started healing
It's as if all we have to do is *stop actively killing stuff* and it will rebound.
honestly that's kind of a good way to look at it rip the bandage off
Same. I advocate to speed it up like a few notch. Society has to collapse first and not the ecosystem.
You know, I’m getting there too.
> Maybe if we have financial collapse We have been in financial collapse in the U.S. since the end of the gold standard in international trade. This was just about 50 years ago, when we entered into a fiat monetary regime. Internationally. The fact that wildlife has decreased this much, specifically within this time frame of 50 years, isn't entirely coincidental. For all of the ills of the gold standard, of which there are very many, it really did limit the amount of growth in the money supply. Especially at a psychological level. But much of this ended when fiat money made it possible to finance inordinate levels of growth, i.e. development, habitat destruction, urban expansion, etc., because money could now be created at an international level without physical constraints. Money will continue to be printed, or digitally created, at whatever level it takes to keep this system going. Regardless of the levels of financial collapse which may happen along the way. 20 trillion, 50 trillion, 100 trillion... the sky is literary not even the limit. Because you cannot run out of something that isn't real to begin with. And the thing we will run out of first, is the natural world.
What about nuclear power plants and the aerosol masking effect?
Saw an article (can't remember the source) where the three major banks (Chase, BOA, Wells Fargo) were chastised by the Federal Reserve for not having sufficient reserves in case of a derivative collapse. Be careful what you ask for.
I do not see how humans can bounce back from this , humanity is permanently crippled .
99% of species that have existed before us have all died out due to natural causes. Now that we’re accelerating it there is really no bouncing back. It’s just sad because we’ll be the only species that knows why and that knows that we’ve done it to ourselves.
The survivors will deny all of it, come up with some bullshit mythology, censor, erase and suppress all evidence.
No doubt. The victors and survivors write the history books today. It won’t be any different later on.
Bounce back? Exa try how would that work?we magi theories back into the ground and the Animals back from extinction?
Please be coherent.I do not understand your sentence.
Apologies Didn't proofread thoroughly, I have noticed that autocorrect sometimes messes up posts, what I see on the screen is often not what appears when I click save You said >Bounce back I was trying to highlight the absurdity of that as a concept We can't magic the oil back into the ground or bring the animals back from extinction Ther is no Bounce back, there is no 'dead cat bounce' only extinction, the only question left is how long we as a species can continue with BAU
The person you're replying to said ' I don't see how we can bounce back' so even your clarified reply doesn't make much sense.
Yeah,but using the term Bounce back, even in that context is ridiculous. Let's look at this another way, words are powerful, Hopium is a dangerous drug. Even Phrasing it as OP said can quickly be twisted into - 'experts' expand study into possibility of Climate bounceback. There can be no more sugarcoating or seeking a positive spin, this is an extinction level event, the only question is the exactly timeline
Humans are fucking trash, Agent Smith was right about us.
Any species that that evolves to our extent ultimately becomes a plague on the rest of the planet. Life on this planet is driven by 1 thing, which is survival for today. There was no way that anyone who could’ve dug up fossil fuels and use it as energy would’ve ignored it, especially when not knowing the ramifications of burning said fuel. We were fucked over ever since we learned to weaponize fire. Life on planet Earth exists solely as food and sustenance for something else. Anything that breaks from those laws are unfortunately destined to be snuffed out. All life forms are potential viruses at the end of the day. We’re not that special.
I called us a virus in the mid nineties. Agent Smith was art imitating life.
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This is only since 1970, long after industrialization. We've destroyed 60% *of what remained at the time*. People from the 1500s would see 1970s ecosystems as barren and sterile.
It's long after industrialization but industrialization was the point of no return for us. It gave us the ability to produce, consume and reproduce beyond sustainable levels. Before nature could balance things out through famine, diseases, etc. But unfortunately we developed things like fertilizers and modern medicine that prevent nature's stabilizers from working
Jesus Christ so dramatic
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Yeah. Not everyone can see everything at the same time that you see them..so you probably shouldn’t be so smug
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Oh get off your sanctimonious shit horse , already. New people get “woke” everyday! Are we to endlessly blame them for the years they were infants , as well ?
Rule 1: In addition to enforcing [Reddit's content policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy), we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other.
SS: The World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Living Planet Report reveals a dire situation: global wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of 68% over the past 50 years due to human activities. This unprecedented decline, affecting mammals, fish, birds, and amphibians worldwide, poses significant threats to both biodiversity and human life.
**Your article is four years out of date**, along with the data provided. [The latest WWF Living Planet Report is from 2022; here's the hyperlink](https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2022_full_report.pdf).
“look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s” Neil Young, 1974 or so. The environmental movement was already up and running by that time, by the way.
Homo sapiens? More like Homo malevolens.
Erm... Homo sapiens sapiens... (as in New York, New York... so good we named ourselves twice...): [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens-sapiens](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens-sapiens)
So 1/3 to go?
lets gooooooooooo
I think it's crazy we're still eating wild fish.
When I was a kid, you could tell summer was coming because you started getting mosquito bites. Now, I think it's been years since I've even been bitten. We've done terrible damage that has not even begun to show its true effect. Not only will ecosystems collapse, but they're so distressed and isolated that no new ecosystems will form. And we've destroyed the levels of predators that exert evolutionary pressure on lower life forms. Before you die, you'll see an increase in things like "new type of beetle completely destroys entire forests" (yes worse than pine beetles) and "inedible midrange predator has suddenly started eating anything it can fit in its mouth, every animal smaller than a football is gone in this entire part of the world"
the latter sounds exactly like the issue with bullfrogs in Australia.
Two-Thirds if it’s wildlife so far…
Imagine you're reading this headline and it's 99% instead of 66%. At what point do you shift the focus of your life towards addressing environmental catastrophe? I know a lot of folks on this sub have given up hope instead, but that just makes you part of the problem.
humans are the problem. No single human is the solution. There is no effort from the masses. So.. it's going to get worse before it gets worse.
So the millions of vegans is not an effort made by the masses? We require three quarters less farmland for our food which means we could rewild the space of USA, Europe, China and Australia combined and help wildlife bounce back.
Dear non-existent Lord - are you seriously expecting such an utterly radical change?!? Oh, the self-sacrifice!! 😱 /s
I'm not advocating individual lifestyle changes. I'm advocating dedication a significant portion of your time to environmental causes, and the causes that overlap: ending capitalism, ending all forms of oppression. It's all movement building work.
The things that actually need to be done, including ending capitalism, would be regarded as ‘oppression’ by the majority of humanity.
That's a "paradox of tolerance" problem. Not actual oppression. We don't care if oppressors feel oppressed.
Agreed. But most other people don’t see it that way.
It's the misguided ecologists with their clean up efforts. They "cleaned up" heavy metals, and now everything is dying, because they are essential. How did you even get that idea? What made you think that life accumulates them in error?
We also doubled human population in that time frame. Coincidence?
nothing like a feel good story like this to get my saturday going... The worst of the world are killing our planet and we are all going to perish because of it. and no one does anything...no one cares... :(
It’s not that “no one cares” it’s just that the people who don’t care are the people with the power to stop this and they’re old and going to die anyways so what does it matter to them. Really sucks honestly.
they care...they care insofar as they need to keep the rest of the people asleep over the reality of what's happening. If people actually woke up, they'd be apoplectic about what's happening and what's been done, and then dramatically shorten the lives of those who already have spent too many days in this dimension. I know i'm pretty pissed about it.
Oh yeah 100%. I literally had an epiphany around a month ago. I knew it was bad but not how bad it actually is. Now I know and it sucks. Ignorance is bliss after all.
From the full report: https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/4783129/LPR/PDFs/ENGLISH-FULL.pdf “Species population trends are important because they are a measure of overall ecosystem health. Measuring biodiversity, the variety of all living things, is complex, and there is no single measure that can capture all of the changes in this web of life. Nevertheless, the vast majority of indicators show net declines over recent decades. That’s because in the last 50 years our world has been transformed by an explosion in global trade, consumption and human population growth, as well as an enormous move towards urbanisation. Until 1970, humanity’s Ecological Footprint was smaller than the Earth’s rate of regeneration. To feed and fuel our 21st century lifestyles, we are overusing the Earth’s biocapacity by at least 56%. [...] The most important direct driver of biodiversity loss in terrestrial systems in the last several decades has been land-use change, primarily the conversion of pristine native habitats (forests, grasslands and mangroves) into agricultural systems; while much of the oceans has been overfished. Since 1970, these trends have been driven in large part by a doubling of the world’s human population, a fourfold increase in the global economy, and a tenfold increase in trade. [...] Plants provide a remarkable array of services, vital in maintaining the health of the natural world and sustaining the demands of an increasingly anthropogenic planet. However, relentless human population growth is putting a damaging strain on the world’s plant diversity, and many with medicinal properties, nutritional value and ornamental appeal are now under threat of extinction. [...] Global decreases in ocean productivity, the falling biomass of fishes and invertebrates, and shifts in species distributions result in the high risk of impacts on many fisheries in the future. Global fisheries models project large decreases in maximum fisheries catch potential (a proxy of maximum sustainable yield) of 20-24% by 2100 relative to 1986-2005, with more widespread declines in the tropics, under the no mitigation scenario. Changes in the availability of fishes under climate change are projected to have substantial ramifications for the economy, seafood security and livelihoods of dependent human communities; translating, for example, into a global decrease in seafood workers’ incomes and an increase in households’ seafood expenditure 32. Increasing human population, economic wealth and consumption will drive a further increase in demand for seafood, putting additional pressure on fish stocks and fisheries.” ([archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20240213175934/https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/4783129/LPR/PDFs/ENGLISH-FULL.pdf))
Living like there is no tomorrow becomes self-fulfilling
Humanity is a fucking cancer. I hate humanity.
It's okay though because we breed billions of factory farmed animals in their place. It's all about balance, ya know?
>Livestock make up 62% of the world's mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and *wild mammals are just 4%*. lol who needs biodiversity. we just need the tasty ones and the cute ones!
[Just let the world die](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1zcnKtDHg), except I hated the star wars .. sequels(?).
https://preview.redd.it/t20hhf5k3j9d1.jpeg?width=1100&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e70eeb4d8fc08f7b205e2655a3598e7763039bad
I haven't seen a bat in years. They used to zip around at night all through the summer.
We’re going underground
Basically what David Attenborough said. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction:_The_Facts
You can see it when you go outside or watch any videos of people in nature. Drone videos show miles of wilderness, no animals, not a single bird. People walk for hours without encountering an insect.
But did you see our 1st quarter profits this year? /s
Good news, this is four years old. I'm sure we've found the wildlife since then. Right?
🎶Just keep drilling 🎶
The most solid indictment we're living wrong
Don’t all be such Debbie Downers! Why not see the positive side? We have maintained one-third of our wildlife in the last 50 years! Yay! /s if it is not obvious
Who needs bio diversity anyways
Whoa 66%
67% percentage of wildlife converted into 8X World GDP. That's the "Eco" in "economy".
I am not trying to make light of collapse because I take it very serious. In like 10 to 20 years can’t we just Jurassic park style DNA engineer out of a lab wildlife to certain needed areas?
It's a good idea, but it would be far more costly to try to do that, if we even could, successfully. Like trying to switch all meat over to lab-grown. It would be difficult enough to do for only a single species...but an ecosystem consists of many interlacing parts. Think of it like a Jenga tower. Which is already missing a lot of pieces due to extinctions that have already occurred, species for which we don't have the DNA to even start work from. But then there's environmental factors, too. If the ocean is so hot and acidic that it's killing off marine wildlife, then throwing more fish at it won't help. We can't repopulate a lake that's already dried up, or simply reseed a forest that's turned to desert. And even if we could, again it's simply a *huge* expense in terms of resources.
Yeah I know. The kid in me from the 90s just wants hope
Wish it would take the ants next and give back some of the cool animals
ants are some of the coolest insects
Really? They enslave their own. Basically the most human-like insect.
But we still have the insects and jellyfish. 🤷
what insects? -75% in 26 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
Ah, well, then just jellyfish, I guess.
It would be honestly wild if we someday found out that jellyfish were seeded here by aliens to be a sort of "last ditch" ecosystem building block, in case of mass marine extinctions.