[bsmitty5000]

This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline. I wonder if there's a similar decline in other animals that rely on insects, eg bats. Although, interestingly, the article does mention neonicotinoids as a direct reason for the decline in population.

It's hard to imagine humans taking the corrective solution here. My gut says we either continue on this road and completely destroy the natural world a la Trantor in Foundation, just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs, or we die out and the planet recovers on its own.

[technothrasher]

> or we die out and the planet recovers on its own.

That makes it sound like there's some kind of natural 'ideal state' for the planet to recover to. Without us, the planet would just go on changing, without anything to judge the current environment at any point as good or bad to any particular standard.

Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

[ff317]

+1 - I think the kind of marketing and messaging that makes environmentalism all about saving "the planet" and "the animals" and "the natural environment" really doesn't serve us well. A better strategic approach would be to highlight (with the right crafty messaging) that a very tiny statistical slice of earth's historical states and potential future states are any good at supporting large human populations comfortably like we do today, and our goal is preserving this state in our own self-interest. It's not environmentalism at all, it's human self-interest.

[anigbrowl]

Your approach will fail for the same reason than an ethical environmental appeal does.

Enough humans who feel and fear their impending mortality are selfish and vindictive enough to obstruct change because they want to conserve whatever material comforts they have now and do not care about what happens to other people after they're dead. I would go so far as to say that some of them take a perverse pleasure in the idea of everyone else being worse off, going by the number of facially specious arguments and overtly sadistic rhetoric deployed by many self-styled 'skeptics'.

[corey_moncure]

>say that some of them take a perverse pleasure in the idea of everyone else being worse off, going by the number of facially specious arguments and overtly sadistic rhetoric deployed by many self-styled 'skeptics'.

We don't even have to look at arguments and rhetoric. Simply go outside and observe. You can immediately see people driving conspicuously huge vehicles, and some of them have modified their vehicles to increase dangerous and undesirable emissions (noise emissions, combustion emissions e.g. coal rolling) for no other purpose but than to antagonize the people around them and intentionally degrade the natural environment.

Nearly every street you drive down in residential America is lined from one end to the other with lawns that have chemicals pumped in to increase growth unnaturally, and simultaneously chemicals pumped in to control undesired weeds and insects. None of this serves any practical purpose at all.

Look carefully at the ground and you'll find it's full of fragments of the discarded plastic and metal containers of quick junk food and the so-called "energy drinks". Not only is it bad enough we have to produce these items to satisfy a temporary need at the cost of creating permanent* garbage, we have to go and toss them by the side of the road just to illustrate how utterly callous and thoughtless we are.

Hopeless. Sometimes it feels very hopeless.

[NeedMoreTea]

Hopeless? Aye.

I think part of the problem is we have become so hugely separated from the natural world. Nature and the environment isn't part of many people's lives, at all.

Go outside and look might reveal a few artificially manicured bits of monoculture grass, endless asphalt, concrete, poles, boxes and wires. Meat, milk, fruit, veg comes in plastic packs, and quite often ready cooked and prepared.

One of the things that stuck with me most reading The Uninhabitable Earth - the most strident and urgent call to action on climate and environment I ever came across, was in his preamble. [paraphrasing badly from memory here] He talks of being perfectly chilled at achieving growth by imposing a cost to nature, he's just not a "nature guy", and wouldn't dream of going near it for a holiday. It's OK to crow about being top of the food chain. Something about not caring about the cow so long as he can get the hamburger, not seeing an issue being a good city dweller, with completely separating ourselves from nature, from paving the planet in concrete and getting everything in packets. Sure, he goes on to say how he misunderstood, but FFS.

OK, now I start to appreciate the scale of the problem.

Hopeless? Feels that way, doesn't it?

[blunte]

> I think part of the problem is we have become so hugely separated from the natural world. Nature and the environment isn't part of many people's lives, at all.

The "disconnectedness" of people seems to be a big part of the issue. This applies to many cases where we might say that things are done wrong, but people don't seem to care.

For example, treatment of animals or other humans: When a person is given an opportunity to get close to, or get to know an animal or another person, their care for that animal (and animals in general) often increases - likewise for care for other humans, particularly ones of very different backgrounds.

So it is with nature as well. Give someone an opportunity to go feel the proven benefits of time in nature, and then show them a video of their "favorite" nature spot being clear cut, and they will have a negative reaction.

[solotronics]

I lean more towards ignorance than malice. The average Earth person (out of all 11 billion) probably doesn't have as solid of a scientific or historical background to form an educated opinion on what affect we are having on the ecosystem in the long term.

[chosenbreed37]

It is certainly a factor. The other thing is that even for people that now it is very difficult to change consumer behavior. E.g. I came across a family of three on the underground train in London. One of them lamented the fact that she wouldn't be able to part in a climate change protest march the following day. The reason being that they were flying to Germany the next day. Oh...and they came from Texas ;-)

[WillPostForFood]

Population is ~7.7 billion

[solotronics]

See! I don't even know how many people are on Earth :]

[socialist_coder]

I don't disagree, but I also think it is important to note that what you are describing is baked into our entire economic system.

Economic actors all acting rationally in their own best interest, which automatically filters out any long term multi-generational outlook.

Capitalism is the root cause here.

[UnFleshedOne]

That's a good point. Would be nice if vindictive people had to make an actual effort, instead of their position being the default path of least resistance.

[IntricateJake]

>Economic actors all acting rationally in their own best interest

>Capitalism is the root cause here.

That is not how capitalism works, it works by providing value to the greater whole of people, that's how it obtains money. If a business isn't doing something we like, we don't purchase products, services, advice, etc. or at least that's how it should work. The bigger problem is why do we value the wrong things? or why are we unable to develop better solutions?

I agree there are things we can improve about the environment (for example plastic in oceans, etc.) but saying capitalism is the root cause is foolish and unsubstantiated.

[TeMPOraL]

> That is not how capitalism works, it works by providing value to the greater whole of people, that's how it obtains money. If a business isn't doing something we like, we don't purchase products, services, advice, etc. or at least that's how it should work.

The entire large industry called "marketing" exists explicitly to subvert this process. Why make something people need, or like, when you can make them like it or feel like they need it through persistent psychological manipulation in form of advertising? Hell, why make them like it at all if you can make it addicting instead? They'll hate every minute of their lives but still come back to your product.

Then there are countless ways of making money by providing value to someone, while providing lots of negative value to other people - also known as externalizing costs.

Point being, capitalism is good at making money, period. That this implies providing value to society is not true in general; in fact, it turns out it isn't the most efficient way of making money in many cases. And capitalism is really good at making money efficiently.

[socialist_coder]

> The bigger problem is why do we value the wrong things? or why are we unable to develop better solutions?

Because capitalism is based on exchange value, not use value. The exchange value of keeping CO2 out of the air is $0. The exchange value of keeping bees and birds alive is $0. Neither of those things have any exchange value, but they have a massive amount of use value. There is a huge disconnect there. Explore marxism / socialism to learn more about this stuff.

[andrey_utkin]

Following one's desires is baked into our biology, and economic system is just the consequence. Kittens don't know about capitalism but they follow their desires.

Capitalism is just a mental framework which helps to satisfy one's desires in a big way without the need to kill people.

Full socialism, while very interesting to many here, especially when it comes to the final happy picture, unfortunately involves killing lots and lots of people, as history shows us.

[TeMPOraL]

There are different ways of looking at the "capitalism is the root cause here".

One is, "therefore let's get rid of capitalism and replace it with socialism/anarchy/whatever", which is generally a bad idea (and history proves that). Another is, "therefore let's focus on capitalism when looking for particular issues to fix, find those issues and fix them, without breaking the whole thing". Aka. not throwing out baby with the bathwater. I'm not sure if GP had the second thing in mind, but this would be the approach I think is best.

[marbletiles]

There has been quite a lot of killing arising from capitalist enterprises, some of which have employed their own armies.

One can also have desires which are more complex than mere impulse. The behaviour of soldiers willingly putting themselves in extreme harm’s way is one such.

[Kaiyou]

It's hardly the fault of capitalism that lots of people do not believe in human responsibility for climate change. I wouldn't advise to force people into complying with your vision.

[socialist_coder]

The point here is that it does't matter if they believe or not. Capitalism does not let them stay true to their beliefs.

Businesses that act in a sustainable way will not be as competitive as businesses that don't. So, it's very hard to be sustainable in a capitalism system that doesn't "price in" the externalities of the natural world that we've been taking for granted.

You can use the same example for globalization and offshoring of jobs. If I'm a business owner who manufactures cheap things, it doesn't matter how much I care about keeping my factory in the US or Europe because other factories will go to where the labor is cheapest and out compete me. So, I'm forced to do it too just to compete.

[JulianMorrison]

Which is why it must be torn down.

[mrmonkeyman]

Which gives rise to the question of whether saving the human species is actually worth the trouble. It might be, it might not be. I'm not convinced it needs to be saved at all costs.

[fuzz4lyfe]

>Enough humans who feel and fear their impending mortality are selfish and vindictive enough to obstruct change because they want to conserve whatever material comforts they have now and do not care about what happens to other people after they're dead.

Sent from my iPhone

[JulianMorrison]

Oh hey I have to survive in society, this means I can't have opinions about how utterly fucked up that society is, because if I wanted to do that, I should starve myself and die to avoid hypocrisy in the eyes of random internet strangers.

[fuzz4lyfe]

You are society. Society is a large number of individuals just like you all pointing at each other and proclaiming everyone else is the problem. Do not ask others to do things you yourself are not doing. You care about climate change? Show me, don't tell me.

[IntricateJake]

Couldn't have said it better

[Angostura]

I strongly disagree. I don't believe in an natural ideal state, however I can distinguish between a planet with a large number of species living in a biologically diverse set of ecosystems; an a biologically impoverished planet with fewer species and biomes.

I think it is fair to say that complexity and variety is a objectively good thing and that humanity's action causing a mass extinction event is objectively bad.

That's not to say that mass extinctions or biome change will occur without us.

[Kaiyou]

I disagree and prefer a world with fewer species. Insects and birds going away is something I'm really happy about. For example, I hate mosquitoes and the noise birds make. Also not fond of birds defecating wherever.

[inimino]

Fortunately[1], those annoying birds and insects are going away[2] like never before!

  [1] for you
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollinator_decline

Are humans starving to death also something you'd be really happy about? Because if insects and birds go away, who is going to pollinate all that shit you plant and expect to be able to eat? Also not fond of your cities and farms pouring your waste into the oceans wherever.

[Kaiyou]

As long as its humans in other countries, I don't really care either way. I have confidence in my country to figure something out.

[inimino]

Fortunately, most people aren't like you.

[inimino]

Is this satire?

[Kaiyou]

No, but you thinking it would be shows your biases/filterbubble.

[inimino]

And you expecting it to be read straight shows yours.

[Ma8ee]

> Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

I disagree. I think nature has a value in itself, in all its complexity and beauty.

I think few people would argue that if the Louvre was destroyed it wouldn't be considered a loss for the world and for humankind, or that we don't still lament the loss of the library in Alexandria.

Of course, nothing of this matters from the perspective of the heath death of the universe. But that is a cynism that I consider juvenile.

[aeternum]

It's also unlikely that all humans would die out even from severe climate change given our current technology.

You could say that saving the environment is just saving the current set of humans, or our modern way of life. It definitely sounds much less noble when put that way though.

[outworlder]

> It's also unlikely that all humans would die out even from severe climate change given our current technology.

Up to a point, you could artificially sustain small populations (climate-controlled greenhouses and habitation). But there's a limit. We are not able to recreate the whole biosphere yet.

[TeMPOraL]

Which is all the reason to remember that, whatever we do, we absolutely cannot break our civilization's ability to maintain existing level of technology and improve on it. If we do break it, we're done. The Gulf Stream shutting down would be tough, but survivable. Global economy shutting down would be game over for humanity, preceded by unprecedented amounts of suffering.

> You could say that saving the environment is just saving the current set of humans, or our modern way of life. It definitely sounds much less noble when put that way though.

If you compare "our modern way of life" and the promises ahead to past millennia of humanity, it actually does sound very noble. I wouldn't wish medieval or ancestral life on my worst enemy.

[commandlinefan]

> Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves

I wonder, though... we know, for example, that bees pollinate plants, and that we need plants to be pollinated for our survival. But if the bees die out, we can figure out another technical way to pollinate plants - it might be a pain to carry out, and we might be kicking ourselves for not saving the bees before it got to that point, but it can be done. If it comes down to a matter of survival, humans a a species will figure out a way to get what needs to be done, done. You might say that saving the birds and the insects now is the "simpler" route than replacing them, but it's starting to look like you'd be wrong, and we're not going to have any choice but figure out how to keep the human race going without them.

[jacobolus]

> If it comes down to a matter of survival, humans as a species will figure out a way to get what needs to be done, done.

Don’t count on it. Human civilization depends heavily on trust and cooperation, and a large number of complex systems functioning which nobody completely understands and most people barely notice. The whole endeavor is quite fragile.

Once basic systems start breaking down, people start starving and dying, and societies start to collapse, it can get real bad in a hurry.

There have been plenty of past examples of large-scale societies collapsing into ruin, with the survivors fleeing or dying out.

[richardknop]

In case of major disaster such as meteorite hitting a metropolitan area, just in time logistics systems mean most major cities such as New York or London have enough food to survive for 2-3 days. If something happens that disrupts the supply chain 10 of millions of people will be starving in couple days. Imagine if something serious happened. In a week there would be anarchy and total collapse of law and order.

[TeMPOraL]

Which is why the most important constraint in dealing with climate change is ensuring that scenario never happens.

[Bjartr]

Note that he said species and you said civilization. Civilization could crumble, worldwide populations of humans could crater to under a million, and the species could survive for another hundred thousand years.

You're both correct, you're just talking past each other.

[atombender]

Nature is a non-linear system, and once things start to collapse, many things will collapse at the same time. We can deal with many challenges, but not at the same time.

Given enough time, perhaps we would be able to work around the disappearance of bees, for example. But that assumes the structure of society can survive that long. Climate change can cause agricultural collapse (due to droughts, floods, blights, etc.), which will lead to food shortage leading to revolts and famine. How many bee pollination researchers will be able to work through that crisis? Governments tend not to survive so well through disasters on the scales we are talking about.

[UnFleshedOne]

Better hope billionaires succeed in trying to all emigrate to a space station or something in time. Really. It is so much easier to restart civilization from a pocket of technology.

[nearbuy]

I really don't like the destruction of our environment, and we should protect it, but the idea that humans depend on bees (and even more so for wild bees) for survival is a complete myth.

> The most essential staple food crops on the planet, like corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and sorghum, need no insect help at all; they are wind pollinated or self pollinating. Other staple food crops, like bananas and plantains, are sterile and propagated from cuttings, requiring no pollination of any form, ever. Further, foods such as root vegetables and salad crops will produce a useful food crop without pollination, though they may not set seed; and hybrids do not even require insect pollination to produce seeds for the next generation, because hybrid production is always human pollinated. Many of the most desirable and common non-hybrid crops, like heirloom tomatoes, are self pollinated, which is what makes their cultivars stable. [1]

There's a second misconception that the number of domestic bees is declining. This also isn't true. I think people are confused because of the increase in Colony Collapse Disorder. The actual number of domestic bees has increased over the past decade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated...

[yifanl]

We haven't come close to solving the environment, whatever that means. If we had that solution on any scale, then almost by tautology, climate change wouldn't be a problem.

[frutiger]

Incidental, but almost all plants pollinate by wind, not by insects (and even fewer by bees): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemophily

[PeterStuer]

Given our extremely limited basic understanding of the interlinked systems that constitute this planet's ecosystem, any attempts at large scale geoengineering are as likely to be beneficial as a brainsurgeon going at it with a baseball bat.

[gerbilly]

> That makes it sound like there's some kind of natural 'ideal state' for the planet to recover to.

If you want to know what the natural state for an area is, ask a native person from a population that has un uninterrupted culture, that is if you can find one.

A native person I know often describes a discorded ecosystem by saying: "The land is sick."

To equivocate and to claim all states are equally natural, is to deliberately miss the point.

A healthy ecosystem—and most of us haven't ever seen one—is obviously healthy when you see it.

It's a tautology to say that everything is natural. You could argue that plutonium and dioxin are natural, but without considering the concentration and distribution, it's meaningless semantics.

[UnFleshedOne]

Chinese are "native people from a population that has un-uninterrupted culture". Not too great at preserving environment (reportedly improving lately I think).

Idea of a "noble savage" is a myth that is about as racist as it's opposite.

[healsjnr1]

This is a long way from my expertise but I think that what you are referring to ('Chinese') is actually a large group of varying cultural and ethnic people that has seen a huge amount of change over millennia. I think this is significantly different to what the parent was referring to.

[gerbilly]

Don't sling epithets.

My using the word 'native' was a proxy for a type of culture: a close to the land hunter gatherer lifestyle. You know one that would necessarily make them keen observers of their natural environment.

I could have said aboriginal, but maybe you'll take offence to that too?

[UnFleshedOne]

Ah, sorry, I didn't mean you are racist. Just the idea of noble savage. I should have been more careful with the wording.

Re: hunter-gatherer lifestyle, my understanding that people leading that are merely unlucky (or lucky) ones who didn't domesticate enough plants and animals to settle down and go through a population explosion. They certainly have a lot of knowledge about local ecosystems because they depend on that knowledge for survival.

But, a few successful domestications, some introduced species, few hundred years of nice weather and they will multiply and turn into the same kind of locusts the rest of humanity is. I think Maya or Aztec went through that. Hell, this was happening back when cyanobacteria was repeatedly wiping out life on earth before something figured out how to use oxygen. It is a general property of life -- consume and reproduce.

We might eventually grow out of it (I see a lot of promise in regenerative agriculture for example), but chances are not certain.

[phyzome]

Traditional Knowledge is a real thing, separate from the "noble savage" stereotype.

[krapp]

>Chinese are "native people from a population that has un-uninterrupted culture".

Didn't they interrupt their culture with extreme prejudice like fifty-odd years ago?

[TeMPOraL]

Such a native person can compare what they see to what they lived in the past, or at best to what the cultural memory can still vividly recall. Which is at best few hundred years.

[dmix]

Without advanced systems of agriculture where I was dependent on thing likes mass herds of Buffalo migrating through my local regions I'd see it as sick too.

[amatecha]

I would never use the phrase "ideal state", but rather "natural state". Though, even that is not quite accurate as humans are naturally-occurring too, but the things we do (and do to the planet) are not quite so "natural".

While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than they probably would have if we weren't here), and they are powerless to prevent that. I think this is what people are intuitively feeling a sense of when they say things like "or we die out and the planet recovers on its own".

[refurb]

A beaver dams a river, flooding the shores and killing off the ecosystem. That’s natural.

A group of humans do it and it’s unnatural?

[okcando]

Yes.

It's just what the word means. It's fun as a philosophical exercise to consider humans as natural and so too their interventions but at the end of the day, "natural" is a word that in most cases means not caused or created by humans. It's relative to us.

That's without assessing the goodness or badness of it. Any interventions we pursue to correct climate change and restore biomes will be every bit as unnatural as the ones that caused those things but they can also be good.

[chousuke]

I think it has more to do with responsibility. Humans are capable of understanding the harm caused by our choices and that brings responsibility.

[NeoBasilisk]

It's a question of scale. There aren't 7 billion beavers. If there were only 300 million humans, we wouldn't be having these issues.

[frutiger]

What do you think of cyanobacteria and the poisonous oxygen they emitted hundreds of millions of years ago?

[Jweb_Guru]

They were hugely disruptive and set off a massive extinction event... not to moralize the actions of cyanobacteria (who obviously act without agency), but the only reason we think what they did was fine is that we breathe oxygen!

[amatecha]

Beaver dams don't kill off the ecosystem. Tons of other life forms make use of the newly-flooded area. I've personally watched herons perch upon the dam to catch the fish that are now swimming through the now-deeper waterway, for example.

[refurb]

Same thing when humans build dams, right? We're creating new ecosystems.

[amatecha]

Is that a rhetorical question? There's quite some difference between a 200m tall concrete dam that holds 1m+ cubic decameters of water[0][1], and a bunch of twigs and logs jumbled in a creek that might be 2 meters high on average and actually house life like beavers, frogs, birds etc.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Bullards_Bar_Dam

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reserv...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_dam#Benefits

[__jal]

Get back to me when beavers are causing the extinction of thousands of other species and arguing about how to warn their descendants about radioactive waste.

[Scarblac]

The problem is that beavers didn't suddenly start doing that, the ecosystems they live in co-evolved around the existence of beavers.

On time scales relevant to evolution, human civilization is happening in an instant and nothing can adapt as fast.

The result is a gigantic loss of biodiversity.

[yqx]

The point that's missing from this discussion is that beavers have been building dams for an eternity because it's part of their natural behaviour. The ecosystem has had ample time to adapt to it. An ecosystem is a delicate balance between systems that results from these systems co-evolving in the same environment for millions of years. The systems (plants animals seasonal change, climate) are all highly fine tuned to each other. Yes, this balance is sometimes abruptly disturbed under "natural" circumstances, but this is rare. What humans are doing in the last couple hundreds of years involves much more sudden changes to which eco systems have no time to adapt. It's the suddenness of the changes what's unnatural about it. Whether you call it natural or not is besides the point though. The point is that human dam building is a phenomenon very different from beaver dam building because, besides scale and impact, it did not gradually co-evolve with an eco system, but is an abrupt and disruptive change.

[akvadrako]

Actually beaver dams can be terrible for the ecosystem if you measure them the same way as human dams. They certainly can cause lots of death and flooding.

[baddox]

I think if beavers were intelligent and capable enough to have other ways of surviving, and could talk to each other about it, I think it would be pretty reasonable for them to discuss possible ways to reduce and/or isolate their impact on the environment.

[mdavidn]

I loathe to point out that birds which never existed cannot suffer more than birds that do exist.

Perhaps a better measure would be genetic diversity? A more diverse gene pool is more likely to survive the unexpected.

[rdiddly]

In my ponderings on this, I tend to think of a "post-human state." If the influence of homo sapiens on a place or ecosystem were to decrease dramatically, and insofar as any place or ecosystem would tend toward anything resembling equilibrium rather than constant/continued change, most of them will probably stabilize around a discernibly post-human state, rather than the pre-human one that prevailed throughout most of our history until the industrial era. It's just the lowest-energy and most likely outcome. So like, all the kudzu, rats and other wacky species we've introduced here and there, would have a go. Though they might not all make it. Pretty much impossible to predict, because it's a chaotic system, but also because the effects of the heat we've introduced have only started to play out.

[tgarv]

I was actually wondering recently if there has ever been a huge spike in, say, a new species of algae or something, that caused a large change in the atmosphere. I know that what we're doing as a species isn't "natural", and we know better and could avoid it if we really wanted to, but it still had me thinking about what kinds of things the planet has gone through before that would have been alarming at the time if someone had been around to monitor it.

[AprilArcus]

The Azolla Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event) was a cyclical bloom of duckweed-like ferns in the Arctic Ocean about 49 million years ago which drew down atmospheric CO2 by an order of magnitude, from 3500 ppm (responsible for the warm, verdant climate you think about when you imagine the Mesozoic era) to 650 ppm (responsible for the cold, cyclical glaciations you think about when you imagine the modern world), and in which vicinity it has remained ever since.

[saagarjha]

(FWIW, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels pre-Industrial Revolution were about 280 ppm, and today are just over 400 ppm.)

[Donald]

Species are created on geologic timescales. Human activity is, in comparison, instantaneously destroying biological diversity. Evolution simply doesn't have enough time to adapt species to the sort of exponential changes we're seeing in their environments.

[frutiger]

Evolution is like gravity. It doesn’t have to adapt to anything on any timescale that is important to our anthropological ideas of “change” or “environment”.

[Scarblac]

The Great Oxidation Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event) was exactly that. Oxygen-producing organisms caused the extinction of almost all life, over two billion years ago.

[scoutt]

> 'ideal state'

There may not be an ideal state, but maybe parent is talking about reverting the damage we are producing.

> Without us, the planet would just go on changing

That's true, but at the same time it is not a valid excuse to keep making damage. Someone could argue that killing you today is OK since you'll eventually die.

> Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

You can also word it as 'destroying the environment is killing ourselves', that is more or less the same we hear every day.

[lostconfused]

"Ideal state" is inserted by your own bias. There are plenty of changes made by humans to the planetary system and some of them will be undone once humans are not around to maintain those changes.

[Kiro]

So what? What's the higher purpose?

[jjuhl]

Purpose? Ultimately there is none, of course. But short term there's the prolonged existence of our species.

[RangerScience]

It's not so much that I completely agree with your sentiment, than that I think this is an incredible way to phrase the issue. Likely more effective, and I think I'll try switching to it.

[apocalypstyx]

Saving ourselves for a little while. At the end of the end, no one outruns entropy.

[SolaceQuantum]

"I wonder if there's a similar decline in other animals that rely on insects, eg bats"

Bats have had a massive population dip in several areas in the americas, up to and including to the point where places bats hibernate to have been forbidden in an effort to stop the spread of a fungus ('White Nose Syndrome') that causes the bat to wake during hibernation, speeding its metabolism and causing it to starve itself. Several species have gone from common to endangered/critically endangered because of this. There's ongoing research as to how bats became more vulnerable to this existant disease- is it higher temps? Toxins?

[masklinn]

> Trantor in Foundation, just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs

Trantor required continuous supply from 20 agricultural worlds to survive. Pretty much all necessities of life for trantorian were externally sourced, with the possible exception of water.

Once that shut down after the 260 sack and the Imperial Family leaving for Neotrantor, population crashed from 40G to 100M.

[StanislavPetrov]

>This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline.

If you cast a wider net you'll see that this mass extinction goes beyond birds and insects to all living creatures including plant life. Year after year we destroy more and more of the forests and other natural places while saturating the earth with more and more of our garbage and synthetic trash and plastic that will never decay but will serve to poison the ecosystem we all depend on to survive. The vast majority of public concern is focused on, "global warming" which is only a tiny part of the damage we are doing. Anyone who even attempts to raise the issue of our massive overpopulation, which causes and exacerbates all of our environmental issues (as well as many of our social ones) is instantly castigated and derided as a lunatic or a Malthusian, while we add another billion people to our already shattered ecosystem.

I pity the kids!

[djsumdog]

Pesticides are necessary for current crop productions .. crops that go to growing fuel (ethanol), food starch and other things we have mass use of, but that are not going to be sustainable.

Bee populations are suffering greatly and we needs those bees to grow a lot of our food. It doesn't help that bees are shipped in to places like the Almond farms in California, putting them in a lot of stress and hurting their colonies. Even though worker bees only live 2 ~ 4 weeks, the stress of transport does affect these pollinators.

It would make sense the decline in insect populations affecting birds for sure. Pesticides aren't limited to areas around farms and most likely find their way far out into the environment.

So if pesticides are the problem the question is, how do deal with the agricultural industry that depends on them? Is it possible to get our population to stop consuming as much crop based product and prevent more of the pesticides from entering the environment? Or is there a way to limit their effects?

[ehnto]

> a la Trantor in Foundation, just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs

If I am not mistaken, Trantor relied on an external supply chain from other planets in the empire in order to survive. It struck me as enormously brittle at the time and indeed in the books.

[notadoc]

Loss of insects, likely combined with the huge increase in domestic cat populations.

> continue on this road and completely destroy the natural world

I'd generally agree with that dystopian line of thinking.

[ptah]

> the article does mention neonicotinoids as a direct reason for the decline in population

current administration is firmly behind even further decline: https://newfoodeconomy.org/neonicotinoid-ban-reversal-center...

[burtonator]

If you'd like to help with this issue you can replace the plans in your yard with native plants.

Most of the insects in your area CAN NOT eat the plants in your yard.

That's one of the reasons they're planted - they look better and last longer.

However, if insects can't eat them then there are less birds.

HOAs will often fight you over this so you might need to educate them.

[masklinn]

Outdoor cats (both domestic and feral) don't help either.

[siempreb]

Indeed, insect population decline was the first cause that came to mind, and then I read:

> In addition to habitat loss, pesticides may have taken a toll.

Which is also the main cause for insect population decline. I just cannot believe why governments still allow the use of pesticides, it is so damn wrong just for economic purpose.

[raxxorrax]

> or we die out and the planet recovers on its own.

I think all these scenarios are unrealistic. If at all, and that is still a big if, only the vast majority would die.

So hooray, I guess.

[ngvrnd]

"... just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs, ... "

Plug for "Girl's Last Tour" anime/manga.

[Kaiyou]

> the planet recovers on its own.

Like all those other planets without us, like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus,...

[bognition]

As far as we know those planets are devoid of life. Whereas the earth has been teaming with life for billions of years. During that time the earth has gone through thousands of extinction events with 6 mass extinctions (when upwards of 90% of all life went extinct).

Our success (humans/mammals) is the result of one of those extinctions. So yeah, life has a strong foot hold on earth and it will continue to do so long after we're gone.

[Kaiyou]

Wouldn't you then be inclined to agree that planets being devoid of life is the natural state?

[dec0dedab0de]

...we die out and the planet recovers on its own.

I like to think that the point of humanity is to destroy as many genetic lines as possible, before going extinct ourselves. A trial by fire that weeds out all but the most resilient. Eventually evolving into new, even better intelligence.

[pretendscholar]

Evolution in the sense of natural selection is an incredibly brutal, dumb, and silly subtractive process. I urge my fellow hn commenters not to mistake this for some higher purpose or value. Its an easy mistake to make but the selection pressures that would leave some survivors of the Holocene implies no higher, better intelligence. Often it involves greedy local optimization. Roaches and rats for example are well suited to survive and although clever and resourceful they aren't exactly what might be thought of something that might lead to uberintelligence or something better than our evolutionary path.

[dec0dedab0de]

That's why I prefaced it with "I like to think" to indicate a sense of wistfulness

[pretendscholar]

Ah, one can hope.

[hnick]

Well, there are different types of resilient. Many domesticated animals and livestock will outlive their wild counterparts because they're useful to us - but the day we go, I'm not so sure how well they will do!

[pastor_elm]

It's pretty clear humans are fine with getting any given species down to populations as low as dozens so long as they don't completely go extinct.