Within my lifetime (b. 1970) some local (I'm UK - SW England) species have declined by horrendous amounts.
The second link I provide hs some harrowing statistics: eg - Tree sparrow -95 per cent. That was from 1970 to 1999. I recall recently (Countryfile - BBC programme that covers agri, countryside and enviro. issues) that Turtle Doves are now (2023) 90% down. They were ~70% down in 1999. I remember seeing and hearing turtle doves on farmland back in the day (late 70s - early 90s). One of my grandads retired to a small holding in S Devon with a mere 30 acres to worry about.
"Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals."[0]
Studies show that outdoor cats kill billions of birds annually. Anecdotally, posting anti cat studies on social media leads to real world threats and cat loving relatives unfriending me.
In the ACT here in Australia, all cats born after 1 July 2022 must be registered and kept indoors (or in a cage when outside). There are also 17 suburbs where cats of any age must be contained at all times.
If you elect green governments, progress can be made.
Felixer, the grooming trap, works to control feral cats
A feral cat management device that uses lasers and sensors to specifically target cats has been shown to be effective
The automated device sprays a measured dose of poison onto the fur of cats when they pass within 4m, which the cats then ingest when they lick themselves during grooming. The trial showed the device was highly specific at targeting cats.
A camera based Artificial Intelligence (AI) system working in tandem with the four Lidars now offers an enhanced target detection capability that is being implemented in our new batch of V3.2
I grew up on a farm and we had barn cats we kept to keep mice put of the hay and animal feed. All spayed and neutered of course. However, now and then unfixed strays would show up, like the setup, and stay.
It's crazy how fast cats can multiply. By the time we figured out there was stray in the barn, they would either be knocked up when they get there or get knocked up by the hordes of traveling Tom cats. We would give away what cats we could and got the rest fixed.
Some of the Tom cats would be violent as well. Not just cat fighting, straight up killing our cats. They definitely got put down when we saw them.
This is in the country, I could imagine the problem is much worse closer to big population centers with more food and fresh escapees.
By the way, you can get cats fixed for free at certain places. Just keep in mind they dock one of the ears so they can keep tabs on the cats. Can't share a link right now I'm on break.
I love cats by the way. Still trying to save up for a place of my own so I can own two. Unfortunately the housing market has been crazy and I probably missed my chance.
It also suggests that up to >20 billion mammals are killed by those cats each year. Quick Google search says that there are fewer than 60 million domestic pet cats in the US, and about the same number of feral cats. So on average domestic cats kill up to >150 mammals a day? And since not all of them are allowed outdoors, those supposed killer outdoor cats would practically kill an animal every few seconds. Looking at the lower estimates the numbers still look crazy. Even if we round up all the estimates for our number of cats to 200 million total and use the lowest values for the estimates, it implies that the average kill count for a domestic cat (including indoor cats) is 6.5 birds and 31.5 mammals(!) a day! And the estimate range is pretty large, so the average is much higher! Umm...
Sorry but I don't believe this at all. I've seen this paper posted several times around the Internet and it contradicts my experience completely.
Finally, the paper does mention that the majority of those estimated deaths are attributed to unowned (i.e. feral) cats. I thought I should point that out since you're obviously implying that cat owners letting their pets roam outside are causing this.
> It also suggests that up to >20 billion mammals are killed by those cats each year. Quick Google search says that there are fewer than 60 million domestic pet cats in the US, and about the same number of feral cats. So on average domestic cats kill up to >150 mammals a day?
Sorry, but I'm a bit confused by your maths.
20 billion mammals / 60 million cats = 333.33 animals per cat per year, or around 0.91 animals per day. That seems entirely reasonable. How do you get >150/day?
You're right, I got the scale wrong, my bad. I'll blame the late hour ;)
It's still too high for pet cats (>1 mammal killed a week supposedly based on the average estimate and the same overestimation of 200 million cats, indoor included) but might make more sense if you consider that ferals have a disproportionate impact. I know people want an easy solution that absolves them from blame but it certainly doesn't seem to justify regurgitating this paper ad nauseam and demonizing people letting their pets outside. Overall I doubt that cats move the needle outside of urban areas with high feral cat populations that area already poor habitats for birds.
> It's still obviously too high for pet cats (>1 mammal killed a week supposedly based on the average estimate and the same overestimation of 200 million cats, indoor included) but might make more sense if you consider that ferals have a disproportionate impact.
I don't know why it's obvious to you that >1 mammal/week is too high for pet cats. I've seen cats bring rodent "gifts" every 2-3 days, and I'm reasonably sure that those were not all their kills.
You said it yourself - domestic vs unowned. People aren’t counting unowned cats en masse, and domestication is the root cause of those feral cats. Also, their range is lower bound 3* your numbers, so there’s no need to cherry pick the highest end of all ranges here.
Whether they’re right or not, it’s plausible and probable that cats are a problem. Biggest problem? Who knows
With 60m cats and a mid range 15b animals killed, that’s 250 deaths per cat a year, less than one a day. According to the study. Idk where you’re getting your numbers from dude but it’s not TFA. You’re blowing things out of proportion by several orders of magnitude.
Is it plausible that they’re a problem by killing some number of animals?
And the sad thing is if they are like our cats they don’t even eat it. Just random genes for killing in their genome that they don’t even use or need anymore. The cats won’t even eat much other food that isn’t their dry kibble and certainly not an animal they just killed.
It's surprising to see so many comments here jumping to the conclusion that the article is pointing the finger at carbon emissions. It's not. The article doesn't credit any single cause with the drop. Nor does it spin any solutions.
It does note a correlation, and from that a possible cause. And there, the link between observation and putative cause is not supported:
> The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows
I would say climate change has, so far, been the least relevant force for extinctions. Land development and over hunting have been the historical killers. As well as cats and other introduced species. Climate change is a red herring: we can fix these problems, but only if people recognise them.
Besides the habit loss for the grassland birds, which lost over 50% of their population, I wonder how much of this is due to pesticides killing off their primary food source. If you get rid of pesticides, you need more farmland to produce food to feed everyone to account for the loss to pests, which destroys more habitat...
Very few bird species have gone extinct this century though, and many that were on the utter brink have rebounded (California condor, whooping crane, and kakapo to name a few). Conservation works.
How so? humans dominate. Our livestock outweighs all wild animals. And humans will outweigh all wild animals very soon if not already. HALF of the entire earths habitable land is used for agriculture. Humans dominate earth.
Does nature even exist anymore? Even remote areas often have roads or hiking paths carved through, or huts to sleep in. Or worse, they are dumping sites of plastic.
The concept of nature as someone 2000 years ago might have imagined it is consigned to history. There's just spaces between towns.
This is not even close to true. Most of the world is still wilderness, and always will be. I'd love to drop you in the middle of Siberia, northern Canada, or the Amazon and watch you try to find a road or hut :)
Hell, I could drop you in a huge wilderness region in my state (Arizona) where you might walk a dozen miles before you encounter a "trail" (loosly defined).
Honestly, I don't know how you could end up with a take like that unless you're a European who hasn't travelled much.
Imagine the headlines when humans try to immigrate to other inhabited planets:
“They’re bringing pollution, they’re bringing Extinction, and some of the I assume might actually enhance the ecosystems they inhabit.”
It’s not such a hard skill. When we see a complex ecosystem is our first instinct to make it better or to exploit and degrade it? Do we even have a metric for what making it better actually means?
Do we even have a way to debate it? Because the whole debate oscillates between destroy(“jobs”) and the minimum (“we need it to survive.”) nobody has the heart actually suggest it might be worth sacrificing anything for just to make it better.
We need more than a utilitarian reason, we should feel pleasure in making nature better the same way we feel pleasure at seeing a well designed race cad like a Ferrari.
> We need more than a utilitarian reason, we should feel pleasure in making nature better the same way we feel pleasure at seeing a well designed race cad like a Ferrari.
There are definitely people that fit this descriptor! Poets, artists, laypeople that are well-attuned. But those are also likely to be the folks already doing relatively less damage compared to the rest of their societal cohort.
Reminds me the paragraph in Jurassic park about the normal distribution of some dinosaur sizes, that was suspicious because it was a perfectly normal curve explaining not normally distributed events
What this man found is not logical in deeper aspects that the journalist shows. Either the paper has more substance that can be pushed in this resume and we are discussing a cartoon of the real work, or something is very wrong here. Statistically wrong. Ecosystems don't work like that.
From my couch position and before blindly accepting the bold proposition than a third of the places with nature in North America had vanished; I would test first a few hypothesis that:
A) Either a good chunk of the data collectors has vanished
(Those people are retired or dead now, or changed jobs in the last anti-science years or the project suffered from too much volunteering dependence), or...
B) The data has been poisoned for several reasons, including
--1. Several Covid years in a row with everybody closed at home. (Who were out watching birds in 2020, 2021 or 2022?. I hope this is addressed in the article. If not, this factor needs to be addressed and fixed)
--2. The data has been greased for publication
--3. The data has been pre-beautified for following some agenda
--4. use volunteers, receive a polished Turdus... volunteers stop caring after a while when the novelty is worn out
or...
C) The computer has mangled a part of the data in the process
Yes, this is called habitat loss. And the current obsession with climate change is to some extent reducing the extent to which humans are paying attention to habitat loss. Caring about the environment is not primarily about climate change and avoiding human suffering and economic damage: caring for the environment is primarily about preserving the remaining natural habitat that the other organisms with which we share the planet depend on for their survival. One should care about climate change because it threatens habitat preservation.
Why do we assume that the biosphere should remain largely unchanged? That it should or even could strikes me as extreme vanity. It never has. Long before humans, long before fossil fuels, etc. species came and went. Climate changed continuously. I’ve been watching this for most of my nearly 70 years, the population bomb, the coming ice age, global warming, the Club of Rome, and on and on. None of it ever happened. Follow the money and see who is profiting.
I don’t think this paper supports your premise (“climate change is not a problem, but rate of change is”)
They are essentially determining the relative temperature rates of change in different environments. They give no indication how fast this velocity is relative to the past, or any predictions as to how it affects anything tangible. For all we know the velocity is less extreme than average (I’m not saying this is likely - just that we can’t tell from their data or analysis).
I would call this a “water is wet” paper - the basic conclusion is “different environments respond to climate change at different rates” which is intuitive and doesn’t need research. I admit that I could be missing some novelty but based on reading a lot of other “water is wet” climate papers, I doubt it.
I don't understand your criticism, you're looking for things that don't need to be there.
The authors of the paper propose a model to measure how much the positions of individual climate environments are changing per year. That seems like a great measure to determine the impact on animal and plant species - they describe that only 8% of environments stay at similar levels for at least 100 years, meaning that all other animals and plants will have to drastically adapt their lives to new environments.
You're looking for comparisons with earlier changes in climate, but the paper is just about proposing a model to determine change in position of environments. Why should such a paper also compare with historical data?
I disagree, you can’t tell how useful their model is for assessing impact on animal and plant species because they do not have any animal or plant data in their model. Maybe animals and plants can move faster than we thought so the current velocity doesn’t dictate local extinctions? Maybe temperature velocity is a bad measure of climate change rate with respect to ecosystems?
My criticism is that the paper takes half of the problem, and uses some ambiguous criteria (eg 100 years) so their model is effectively useless on its own.
It’s like writing a paper that describes how long your piece of string is; unless your measurement method is novel it’s useless for anyone else wanting to measure their own string.
> I disagree, you can’t tell how useful their model is for assessing impact on animal and plant species because they do not have any animal or plant data in their model. Maybe animals and plants can move faster than we thought so the current velocity doesn’t dictate local extinctions? Maybe temperature velocity is a bad measure of climate change rate with respect to ecosystems?
Are they making any judgement on this? I can't see it. I just see a proposed model for the change of position of environments. They're not saying "and this will lead all animal species to die out" or "we must act now", they just say "this is how the environments change positions". So why are you looking for more?
> My criticism is that the paper takes half of the problem, and uses some ambiguous criteria (eg 100 years) so their model is effectively useless on its own.
What use are you looking for? They proposed a useful model that other papers can build upon. That is how science works. Why must they look at this problem from every angle you want for the paper to be useful?
> It’s like writing a paper that describes how long your piece of string is; unless your measurement method is novel it’s useless for anyone else wanting to measure their own string.
No, it's more like a paper that describes a model to determine the length of a piece of string by showing it for a specific example. You find it useless because you say "hey, you guys didn't look at my string!".
I admit I’m probably being a bit too picky, but I honestly don’t think this is how science works, I think this paper is a good example of the problem of low quality papers clogging up academic publishing due to perverse incentives.
I had a quick look through the first half dozen citations on the paper, and it is a lot of stuff like this: “The effects of modern climate change are occurring more quickly in grasslands relative to many other ecosystems (Loarie et al. 2009;” This quote doesn’t really use any of the data/methods of the original paper, it just uses the paper to support the fairly obvious idea that climate change has variable effects that differ by environment.
Another: “ On the other hand, the climate is shifting rapidly (Loarie et al. 2009)” again nothing is the paper is used, and they claim the paper says change is rapid, but to determine what is “rapid” we would need to compare our velocity to a value we think is “not rabid”. This would provide us with some testable hypothesis (eg “2% of regions move velocity faster than the fastest moving population in the region”).
I don’t think my analogy was very good - I’m not critical because they didn’t look at my string, I’m critical because i don’t think their paper can truly help other teams measure their bits of string (or my piece).
I agree their method might be useful, but it seems pretty obvious and I don’t understand why they wouldn’t apply it to a scientific theory themselves. Currently they have a model looking for a theory to test, but without any indication that their model is useful for any particular hypothesis.
So many climate papers are just models with no link to any tangible hypothesis/predictions. This means they are unfalsifiable and so unscientific in Popper’s epistemology. I would even argue they are unscientific in terms of Lakatos’ Research Programmes because they are likely to be used to support auxiliary climate hypothesis in degenerating programs (since if they were part of a progressive program they would have explicit theory/predictions).
> I had a quick look through the first half dozen citations on the paper, and it is a lot of stuff like this: “The effects of modern climate change are occurring more quickly in grasslands relative to many other ecosystems (Loarie et al. 2009;” This quote doesn’t really use any of the data/methods of the original paper, it just uses the paper to support the fairly obvious idea that climate change has variable effects that differ by environment.
I don't see a reference to Loarie et al. 2009, and I can't find that quote in the article.
> Another: “ On the other hand, the climate is shifting rapidly (Loarie et al. 2009)” again nothing is the paper is used, and they claim the paper says change is rapid, but to determine what is “rapid” we would need to compare our velocity to a value we think is “not rabid”. This would provide us with some testable hypothesis (eg “2% of regions move velocity faster than the fastest moving population in the region”).
I was referring to citations of the paper (theoretically if these researchers are citing the paper, then they should be using the ideas, model or data from the paper).
It has 2172!! citations! And in many(most?) cases these citations are pointless. It’s essentially used to pad out other ‘water is wet’ papers and/or hack researchers indexes.
If it were a scientific article, the citations would reference it to use/improve/critique their hypothesis/model/data. I’m sure there’s a couple of these among the 2172 citations, but good luck finding the seed among the chaff!
I think this stuff annoys me because of the huge opportunity cost. Climate change is such a big problem with so many critical questions unanswered, yet tomes of research get funded that tell us nothing about how to solve the problem. And worse: we get such volumes of drivel that serious researchers have to wade through heaps of nonsense to find quality papers.
I decided to have a deeper look at this during my lunchbreak. I found a bit of a smoking gun: they claim that "probability distribution function of our temperature-based velocities are consistent with those described previously when uncertainty is accounted for (Supplementary Table 2)" If you look at Supplementary Table 2, it looks like their estimates are in line with existing studies (Malcolm 2002).
If you actually look at the source of this comparison table (Table 2 Malcolm 2002), you will find that their estimates do not align well. E.g. for 0-315m/year they estimate 37.6/90/15 % for mean/lower/upper. The equivalent measure in Malcolm 2002 is 71.1 but has uncertainty of only +/-1.23%! So their model is "consistent" with existing models because 71.15 is within their range of 15-90%. Figure S23 looks even worse.
So essentially they have proposed a model which doesn't really match existing literature and can't really be easily compared or used by others. They explain the differences away with assumptions but don't explain why their assumptions are better/worse. They might have produced a worse model but we don't have any data to tell!
But maybe I'm completely wrong and this paper is super-useful to those in this field. I'd still have to see at least 1 paper actually use their model to be convinced.
Darwin talked about bird deaths around him during the winter. By his estimation, he thought ~3/4 birds would die of starvation every year. A massive amount. He commented that a plague of 1/10 people would be a near apocalypse, yet many fauna experience this year after year.
So, with a fecundity like that, it is a big deal that ~1/3 birds aren't returning relative to baseline. Something big really is happening to do devastation like that. I don't know the modeling and the second order partial differential equations to really say something (read the article, obviously), but I can say that reductions like this are big deals.
Would you out a lot of stock in those estimates when we know we’ve historically really struggled to keep an eye on bird populations until more recent times when we actually understand migratory patterns and have actual tracking tech?
In other words, do we have any modern evidence of these bird exterminations or is this even worse?
climate change is always framed in terms of how many coastal people it will affect when sea levels rise a few meters. the canadian wildfires going on now. the only thing i hear about it in the media is how bad the air quality will be in this or that city, or how many oil/gas/logging jobs will be lost. the amount wildlife that is being displaced or burned alive? fuck it! did you hear that 10k humans had to be evacuated!
rarely does anyone talk about the rapid collapse of entire ecosystems and disappearance of millions of species in short order. coral bleaching gets a passing mention, cause us scuba divers notice how shitty the scenery is becoming. pollution is a problem for individuals to solve; "just recycle!", the plastic/oil lobby shouts at us.
we don't deserve this planet. but it will recover a few million years after we're gone. the industrial revolution was both the best and the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. we don't have a chance in hell of living even 5% as long as the dinosaurs did; not here, not on mars.
The article mentions habitat destruction and agriculture as the driving issue, not climate change.
> The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.
pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change are not all different things.
i guess you can blame all the above on a single root cause, though: human over-population. we just don't have plagues and famines like we used to; we're really good at killing everything that we don't like.
i see my neighbors dousing their lawn with weed killer and pesticides every season, followed by grass nutrients! then burn 2gal of gasoline to mow that lawn every week. nothing better than an insect-less, uniform green lawn!
Don’t forget that if you don’t saturate your lawn with poison, coat it with industrial fertilizer, water it from depleted aquifers and burn that gasoline to cut it, you run the risk of getting fined or being foreclosed upon.
> you run the risk of getting fined or being foreclosed upon
yes! i was fined because my dandelions crossed the magical 8" threshold for a week a few seasons ago. i happily paid it of course. you see, i had saved up the $20 by then with all the money i didnt spend on weed killer and fertilizer.
i'm just the worst person in my HOA.
the irony, of course, is that immediately behind my 0.2 acre property is a massive wetland with "grass" that's 10-15ft tall.
But why is over-consumption even possible? It's the plentiful cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels that we figured out how to tap into. Once that is gone I am hopeful the next civilization cycle will be more temperate.
More likely once the current civilization’s cheap source of energy is gone, the next civilization will revert to the pre-industrial source of cheap energy: slavery.
Any half baked ecologist knows that monoculture farming is the single most damaging thing to the ecosystem that humans have developed. Let’s destroy MASSIVE amounts of land to farm, and the displaced animals will now go to areas they don’t belong, ruin that land, displace those animals, etc.
I heard once in one of my classes that every 1 acre of farmland disrupts 24 acres of adjacent land, not just the surrounding acres but the ones surrounding that!
Meanwhile, global warming is terrible but the world being even 5 degrees hotter doesn’t kill most stuff, but 10b acres of farming can destroy entire continents
I'd say it is the root cause, since habitat destruction and pollution have been proportional to population size. If the human pop. hadn't grown geometrically throughout recent history, there almost certainly wouldn't have been the global decimation of wildlife/habitat we have today.
To support such a large population, half of the earth's habitable land is currently being used for agriculture - that's a shitload of habitat destruction - that's not even accounting for all the rest of the space people use for homes, etc.
> half of the earth's habitable land is currently being used for agriculture
This is a fact (to some margin of error). It's indisputable that humans require land to produce food through agriculture, and that amount of required land increases with population size. I'm curious what analysis could possibly show human population growth doesn't result in more wildlife habitat destruction.
Since we stopped being hunter-gatherers, we've required agriculture to support large sedentary populations. Land use by humans/wildlife is generally a zero-sum game.
First of all, left-wing politics is the one advocating for less kids.
Elon Musk is like “there’s no problem, guys, keep on having more kids!” and he himself did.
Right wingers are pro life, and many religious ones advocate not even using condoms.
Left wingers are the reason women now have so much education and careers that they postpone having children til their 30s.
Anyway, the amount of resources and garbage is proportional to how many humans are on the planet. I don’t see what Elon Musk is so worried about “population collapse”. For an otherwise smart guy, he seems to be very mistaken about this core issue. Maybe he thinks we can escape to Mars and start over LOL
Yes, this article is a rare example of an article that cares about habitat loss; we have mostly thrown the baby out with the bathwater with the last decade's reframing of conservation as climate change avoidance.
Who are we kidding...It'll recover within a century or so without humans. Millions of years for birds to re-evolve, but general recovery happens pretty quickly!!
We're getting bombarded with messages from the fossil fuel industry like "recycle," "ban nuclear," "ban straws," "ban plastic bags" that distract from the industry's real impact. If we want to solve the problem, we have to focus on the core issue: burning fossil fuels.
We're at a potentially species-ending crossroads - and we're moving towards saving ourselves. But it'll take actual focus on the problem to solve it instead of looking for perfect solutions to everything.
The coral reefs are another huge problem. Most fish species spend some time of their life in one, and a staggering amount have been destroyed. Last year I volunteered for a few hours at a coral nursery, they said 90% of coral has been destroyed[1] since the 70s. I'm not sure if they meant just barrier reefs,just around Florida, or everywhere, but in any case it's already a disaster.
[1] I tried to Google to verify that number and found a bunch of different numbers with different qualifiers.
10% of the US population does not have food security. 25% lives paycheck to paycheck. The simple truth is people don’t have room in their lives to worry about abstract problems that don’t impact them when their basic needs are not met.
Just look to the advance of the desert. People cut down vegetation to burn for cooking, and hasten desertification. But what choice do they have? They need to eat.
Environmentalists are increasingly starting to view poverty reduction and fostering economic opportunity as a critical first step in wildlife protection.
Pollution is a problem for everyone. We need government regulations and every single person changing their lifestyle but guess what, it won't happen. We had peak awareness in the 80s and 90s, I remember in school time was dedicated to ecology and the environment. Now half the US is actively working against environmentalism.
You're blaming the media for not talking about species going extint but about flooding. If people don't change even with the threat of human life being lost then there's no way they care if multiple species of birds goes extinct.
We've created a culture where being selfish is acceptable. Where polluting by modifying your vehicle is cool. Where caring about the environment makes you part of a conspiracy and who do you blame? The media for not talking about it more.
> If people don't change even with the threat of human life being lost then there's no way they care if multiple species of birds goes extinct.
people won't change. they are addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability. which is also great for corporate profits.
as a species, humans plan and invest very little beyond our own lifetimes. but we're just animals after all. all the talk about becoming an interplanetary (mars) species for our own survival has to be the most absurd statement that can be made to dismiss the very real problems we should solve here first. but billionaires need an excuse to play Tony Stark.
it's not cool or profitable to do the boring work of unfucking ourselves.
> people won't change. they are addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability. which is also great for corporate profits.
But we can change our behavior by showing ourselves less ads. And that would solve a lot of other problems too.
The reason you block ads is selfish, the environment savings (I'd like to see data on that) are incidental.
Not every change we need to make will benefit people. More often they will require more work, more resources, or less enjoyment at rhe individual level (recycling, not driving certain types of vehicle).
>The idea that Norway holds some sort of moral high ground with respect to fossil fuels is offensive
They at the very LEAST deserve the moral high ground of largely distributing the economic benefits of those fossil fuels to their citizens rather than to a dozen billionaires while their nation's infrastructure becomes dilapidated
> Look at nordic countries. Norway has a seed vault and has 80% of new cars are electric.
80% of 0.001% is a rounding error. scale matters. just because a first-world country of 5M can do something does not make this attainable for the other 99.999% of the human population.
> Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed
imo, nuclear (not fusion, mind you) + electric, is the only realistic way out of the energy mess.
I think we have some moral standing to blame prostitutes for STDs. Peddling oil despite its externalities because people are addicted adds to the overall world market, driving down price, in turn hampering renewables.
> all the talk about becoming an interplanetary (mars) species for our own survival has to be the most absurd statement that can be made to dismiss the very real problems...but billionaires need an excuse to play Tony Stark.
This is a thinly veiled dig at Elon musk. It's so weird that you think what he's doing is the problem, with his efforts bringing about electric cars earlier than what would have happened.
He might be a loud mouth jerk, but surely he's not symbolic of the real problem here?
the guy dropped how much coin on a social media platform that could have gone to the very environmental causes that he claims to want to advance?
what do you think $44 billion in climate/epa lobbying would look like?
teslas still have to be manufactured. he probably would've had a greater climate impact if he purchased everyone on earth the same model bicycle that can be repaired/reused indefinitely.
we should be trying to remove cars, reduce production, and replace it with public transit, etc. but that's neither cool nor profitable; electric cars are both of those things.
electric energy storage, on the other hand, is useful. so making batteries cheap is a good thing, and tesla definitely helped that a lot.
My point was not that Elon is a saint, or the best thing for the planet. Instead that there are so many individuals and companies that are much more deserving of your ire. But you're distracted by Elon's antics that you're ignoring much more legitimate threats to the environment.
It is your own biases making you misinterpret my words. I did not say Elon singly handedly achieved anything. But it's undeniable that he did put in effort with Tesla, and that helped bring electric cars to market, helping to start the transition away from ICE.
I don't think Elon is a saint, there's plenty not to like. But I think that you're so angered by him (probably drinking an alternative brand coolaid) that you're willing to discount any positive contribution, action, or utterance from Elon. Usually people aren't all good or all bad, as much as we'd like the world to be that simple.
That's precisely why every private launch company before SpaceX succeeded! After all, they had even larger government subsidies and even more engineers! /s
Elon Musk proposed the hyper loop specifically to decrease investment in actual rail. He had no plans to build it. He has no interest in improving transportation or making it greener (which rail would certainly be). He only wants to enrich himself.
> We had peak awareness in the 80s and 90s, I remember in school time was dedicated to ecology and the environment.
You can go back to the 70's.
There was a fascinating amount of experimentation in education when I grew up in the 70's. I went to two rather interesting "experimental" schools — one public, one private. But regardless, there was a Zeitgeist in the 70's both of danger (over-population, pollution) but also of optimism — that we could change course as a society if we wanted.
As an anecdote, I remember a fascinating visitor when I was in elementary school. A man showed up in our class with a fascinating machine that was described as a "computer"! (This was perhaps 1973 or so — it may well have been an analog computer.) The thing was upright and perhaps the size of a Pachinko machine. He explained that you could set some dials to represent perhaps human growth, energy use ... something like that. I mean, I was quite young so I think a lot of it flew over my head — perhaps his audience was generally an older age. In any event it was supposed to calculate ... something ... maybe how many years before we ran our of food or fissile fuel or space on the planet....
Afterword: Sadly, speaking of Zeitgeist, it seems something happened around the close of President Carter's term and when Reagan's presidency began. The Metric System they had taught us in elementary school was out the window. Ha ha, even national markers in the U.S. that had added Metric to the Imperial(?) units would dropped the metric units....
> Opposition to DDT was focused by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. It talked about environmental impacts that correlated with the widespread use of DDT in agriculture in the United States, and it questioned the logic of broadcasting potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment with little prior investigation of their environmental and health effects. The book cited claims that DDT and other pesticides caused cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. Although Carson never directly called for an outright ban on the use of DDT, its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT's agricultural use in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#History
By the way, you can get Silent Spring for free on https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20151002 – and it is still very much worth reading; eloquent and poetic while still being factual, informative and balanced. The producers of DDT and other poisons started a smear-campaign after the publication, but it only lead to a Streisand-effect. See also this little clip from her single TV interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nriVjC0H8I
We don’t deserve this planet, but also we don’t owe this world a thing.
Fact is, humanity’s fate was sealed the moment we decided to stop living like savage animals and become civilized.
As simple creatures, humans could live indefinitely until the world ends or a major extinction event, but surviving as a civilization for millions of years is definitely going to take the sacrifice of a couple planets along the way, at the rate we’re growing. No way around that. When we’re done with Earth, we will have to use the resources of several more planets, and we will continue this until we reach some stable equilibrium or simply die out entirely.
That’s assuming we don’t start implementing some rigorous eugenics and population control, but that does not seem popular, though personally I think it’s a better solution than having an unquenchable thirst for natural resources.
i will say that saving (preserving) the planet for your children is still a form of "saving" it. english's lack of nuance here is unfortunate, but also makes for some hilarious puns :D
As a new birder, I learned that birder before my time have much more fun than I do, many rare birds that we seek to see nowadays are easy spotter back then. It is the reverse experience in regard to other aspect of our life compared to time before us.
Take heart, there are positives. Now that people are paying more attention, all kinds of species are being found in places no-one knew they could be found before.
You have to rally the community to strongly discourage those folks who feed breeding feral cats. Also the notion of allowing pet cats to roam is an ecological catastrophe. They are wanton hunters, beyond any need for food. They especially love to kill birds. I'm a cat lover, but am very aware the a vicious killers. Fun-fact, a dog will usually wait for you to die before they eat you, the cat will not wait.
Does anyone else see headlines like this and instantly interpolate birds with people?
We still heavily rely on the biosphere for our well being and survival and with the advancements of AI and Robotics designed to super-charge corporations ability to rape and pillage faster and harder than ever before, I just can't imagine a situation where we don't see headlines about humans disappearing either. I mean who knows, it might get to the stage where robots have their own economy and really decimate the fuck out of the biosphere .
Fist it's the little guys, insects, frogs, krill, then bigger birds, bears other mammals, and then us.
99% of people think we're just going to get out of this magically coz we're people, but we won't unless we sort ourselves out real quick.
Regardless of any of this, if we were truly the intelligent, amazing species we like to jack off over ourselves for, then we should be able to sustain our lives quite well without being so destructive.
But the science of bird study was advancing, and a close-knit group of scientists was experimenting with using radar imagery, satellite photos, and citizen science to add precision to the dozens of conventional bird counts done for groups of species.
Curious how this determines the total bird population today vs the last 50 years without a whole lot of speculation and estimation based on ___________.
Is the author assuming that when a wooded area is cleared to make a pasture, the birds just vanish? Is the author assuming there are no tree lines or hedgerows surrounding pastures? Is there an assumption that fields don't have an abundance of seeds? What exactly is citizen science? This kinda sounds like a problem formulated to generate more study/grants.
This isn’t news to anyone who is a birdwatcher. Talk to anyone who has been watching for several years and they will all say the same; that they see less birds than they used to. Quantification is good, but its advocacy, rewilding, and conservation that matter now.
The number of birds I recall hanging out on telephone lines as a kid was amazing... 40+ years later and I find it's now a rare sight. I think of the decline often.
Seriously, the number of birds I've seen in my yard and neighborhood is way higher than in years past. I don't know what the explanation is. Maybe the local population has had a boom, or other food sources have disappeared and they have chosen my corner of suburbia. My first assumption was that they were rebounding after a few years of avian flu.
Some species of birds that do well in suburban habitats are doing well. House sparrows, house finches both have populations that have grown. The building of the suburb caused a loss of whatever habitat was there, and the species that live in those undisturbed habitats aren't the same species that live in suburban yards. Some more adaptable birds are doing well now, but those that are more sensitive in their ecological needs rather than generalists are seeing continuing population losses.
Not sure where you are, but I'm in central NJ and just last week I mentioned to a friend that I felt there were more birds than usual. Obviously, anecdotal, but it was a mild winter here.
That said, I also feel like there are less squirrels. But they had peaked during Covid due to - I believe - less road kill.
What makes you think that the verb "to feel" is exclusively limited to emotion? Among the definitions you'll find in a dictionary, it also encompasses experiencing a sensation, whether by touch or intuition.
Same, I've literally had a half dozen juvenile sparrows sitting on my bedroom windowsills for the past several days chirping up a storm while their parents fly back and forth feeding them bugs. Plus countless robins, sparrows, sandpipers, and starlings all over the neighborhood.
Yes, those birds are basically human commensals -- thriving in urban environments. (Not sandpipers though! I wonder what you meant there?) But being serious -- are you familiar with some of the species that you only see if you go to genuine natural habitat? They are beautiful things, it is very rewarding to see them in their natural habitat, and if humans do not preserve natural habitat they will be lost forever.
>Not sandpipers though! I wonder what you meant there?
We've got a few blocks of open fields right next to our house and there are several families of sandpipers (or some other sort of curlew I guess?) that nest in the grass.
We actually have a huge wild migratory bird refuge about 10 miles away, so we've seen all sorts of bird life.
The shorebird that frequents parking lot islands more than actual ones? It's probably them, unless you're close to the ocean or the great lakes. I saw some rare piping plovers though the other year on Lake Erie.
I used to have a love/hate relationship with killdeer, but while on the trip to see the plovers, I saw a killdeer mom and her babies do the most adorable thing. The mom would let out a little "peep" while forging and expect her babies to peep back one at a time. Gave me a new respect for a bird I used to think of as a suburban parking lot nuisance.
It was like a bird implementation of the ping protocol
Not OP, but I've noticed an uptick in both this past spring. I suspect it has more to do with the exceptional weather and flooding attracting different types of migratory birds than anything else, though.
On average, I can't say that I've seen this trend of lesser quantity or variety around my house, but I'm also in a fairly remote area with tons of natural habitat still available.
There sure are a lot of comments that ultimately don't get at the root of it: there are too many human beings alive right now for the amount of resources we require (or our technological ability to use resources without destroying everything else). Results like the article all derive from this.
I don’t know if I have some sort of selective dyslexia, but I misread this title as “A third of north americas brides have vanished” and I was trying to process that one.
That's what you get for living in suburbia. The amount of animal/bird habitat destroyed by human living is absolutely staggering in countries like the US.
Somewhere, Christian Cooper is furiously swinging his helmet at the unleashed dogs and cats of NYC with tears in his eyes, conjuring up another book deal.
I hate that graph. Not only is it not zero-based, a common mistake made by amateurs and people trying to mislead, but you can't even tell where zero is, even though the author of the graph clearly must know. They tell us in the text that 3 billion is one-third of the total. But if you didn't already know that, the graph would be meaningless. Suppose the total number of birds in 1970 was 3 trillion. Then the loss would be a tenth of a percent, which is negligible. You just can't tell by looking at that stupid graph.
i think most of the discussion to be had is with the methods of measurement, are they using satellites yet? i don't understand how its done to begin with, i hope its not just people counting things.
We? No, we will die having left the world a worse place, knowing that we were too selfish to not be the sixth great extinction event. The world will take millennia to recover assuming we stop altering it underneath other species.
If the earth was lava no birds are adapting to it. Humans dominate earths landmasses and if we don’t leave space for anything but our agriculture than that’s all there will be. Animals can’t outbreed when they have no habitat and human driven habitat loss is much faster than evolution.
Like almost every other goddamn problem we face, the solution is boring as hell: campaign finance reform.
If politicians actually represented their constituents, they would be able to effect the policy changes required. But they don’t, because campaign finance is broken, allowing the richest, most blood-sucking elements of society to have the biggest influence.
If you have the opportunity to vote for someone who believes strongly in getting money out of politics, please do it.
I don't know. It is just as likely that if Tom Steyer couldn't donate to candidates who support his idiosyncratic ecological causes, those causes would be even less relevant politically than they are now. The Green New Deal evaporated for many reasons, certainly one of which was the rising of interest rates, which caused spending everywhere, like campaign donations, to fall.
Everywhere we look, greater spending - in all sectors, including political lobbying - is almost certainly associated with support for environmental causes, because it is basically a rich man's cause. And anyway, I don't know if it even predicts the victory of the most corrupt political interests, when Trump raised just above half the amount Clinton did, and Obama raised almost twice McCain.
Like I get what you are saying, but following your logic, the problem is democracy, because in the objective reality we live in, sacrifices for the sake of the environment are unpopular.
> How do you expect electoral reform to happen, when the people elected were elected because of the current electoral system?
I expect it to happen first at the state level, in states where the people have reserved the power to alter the State Constitution and laws to themselves without requiring the involvement of elected officials in other than ministerial roles.
I don't think it's actually that simple. Let's imagine money's out of the picture. How many people are eager to keep their homes at 78 degrees? That's just one tiny example of many but I think in your heart of hearts you know that many people will resist every small step tooth and nail. On this very forum I've seen people muse about starting a civil war because California put certain efficiency standards on computer power supplies.
To what extent does 78 degree homes impact climate change? The answer is very little if we had leadership that pushed zero carbon energy production (nuclear, wind, solar) instead of being bought and paid for by fossil fuel industries
> There are just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now – about one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today. The US already uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects that as the rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13% of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year – about the same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces today.
This is missing the point - AC is problematic for exactly the reason you quoted - it produces CO2. My point is that it doesn't need to, and only does because our leadership is some mixture of corrupt, incompetent, or uncaring.
There is no technical reason why 99% of the household energy produced on Earth can't be free of direct carbon emissions. It's a societal issue that it isn't.
I’d argue you are missing my point. There are other issues with A/C (refrigerants are also contributors to CO2, production is an issue), but the finer points of any one technology are not the issue. The issue is that I think it’s a fantasy that we can solve global warming simply with some technical tweaks and no changes whatsoever to our patterns of consumption. “Consume less” is not a message that goes over well.
A quick search online shows that HFCs (refrigerants) are 2% of greenhouse gas emissions, which also accounts for them being thousands of time worse than CO2. Which is way higher than I expected, but still not exactly making-or-breaking climate change.
I really don't see the need to consume less energy if it comes from renewable or carbon-free generation. In general, energy is used for good and productive things. AC in particular lets humans live in climates that would otherwise not be used anywhere near to the extent they are without it.
Realistically with the world we live in, yes, reduction is helpful. But accountability to major producers of emissions is at minimum 100 times more helpful.
The US doesn't even allow people to truly vote. It's mathematically impossible with our several layers of crap bolted onto an already mathematically-broken voting system. It's rigged to give you a choice between 2 evils, and really it's just a choice between 2 different representatives of the exact same evil.
And even if we:
- replace First-Past-The-Post with a proportional voting method
- replace single-seat districts with larger multi-seat districts
- get rid of the electoral college
- secure the rights of referendum and representative-recall
, it's unlikely that they would actually do anything meaningful enough to make a difference. More likely they would pass the same old useless hyper-specific miss-the-point regulations they always do. The only thing that will change is their advertisement methods.
The problem with your voting solution is that the Supreme Court has constitutionalized the issue. Getting money out of politics in America is going to require a constitutional amendment.
How would they know what the views of their constituents are?
They'd require either require exhaustive, expensive but representative polling on every topic or wait in call back mode - the constituents with the most to lose or gain will call back and help them form an opinions.
The first is impossible and actually goes against the notion of representative democracy and conscious indifference. The second is the current way of doing things.
Is there a better way? Maybe technology can be leveraged to scrape public FB, LinkedIn, and other social media posts on a subject to (hopefully) get a balanced view on a subject.
> How would they know what the views of their constituents are?
The number of representatives in the US House needs to be expanded. The proportion of citizens to representatives is way out of whack. Having more representatives with smaller districts would allow representatives to better know and support their district’s interests and views.
Is that realistic? Even organizing a team lunch for ten involves a lot of customer discovery and tradeoffs and here too, the loudest voices (analogous to committed voters or lobbyists) usually win.
Even if the final ratio of representatives to voters is 1:10, you have only moved the problem upstream to this giant body of 33 million representatives who now need to agree on a policy. Simply voting Yes/No could lead to 50%-10 of the population feeling disenfranchised.
I think an expansion is logistically realistic and in the interests of voters. It’s also not in the interests of the established “ruling class” so it’ll never happen.
I tend to find the entire Our Common Purpose report[0] the Academy issued in 2020 to be pretty reasonable and in line with what I think the public interest is.
I really don’t understand why climate change and global warming commands all the attention (and invites conservatives to deny/dispute it) when we face much more pressing issues:
Collapse of ecosystems
Extinction of species
Loss of biodiversity, the world is being turned into monocultures and farms
Desertification of soil
Overfishing
Kelp forests
Rainforests
Insects … now birds — years ago when the insects were going I said the birds are next
One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning".
Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy).
What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of problems, is viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up, and in the following hierarchy:
1. Regular Individuals like me e.g. "build a bird-friendly yard"
2. Influential individuals like architects, urban planners,
3. Small groups, e.g. birdwatchers, Boy Scouts, churches, schools
4. Small towns & neighborhoods, e.g. "build bird friendly parks"
All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
Individuals cannot solve this. I leave trees up, dead or alive. I plant native plants. I remove invasive species. I only keep invasive bushes if they house birds. I don't spray for insects except around the base of my house, I don't kill off chipmunks, voles, squirrels, rabbits, etc.
How can this compete with the dozens of neighbors in a half-mile radius that have removed in excess of hundreds of trees, big ones like oak, pine, maple, hickory and up to five feet in diameter, and turn their yards into grass wastelands? I never even see my neighbors use most of their yards. How do you compete against that level of narcissisim and lack of empathy?
It is exhausting on me both physically and emotionally. There's no one I can call to get help with my own yard because every landscaper knows nothing about ecology and uses loud and polluting gas-powered machinery.
I am to the point where I consider my actions as pissing into the wind and spitting into the ocean. Seeing bees where I hadn't seen them before using native plants that I planted is amazingly fullfilling. But I know that it basically has no greater impact, and it is completely against the tide.
Unless governments take action and penalize corporations for the harm they've done and take measures to prevent further harm, we won't be able to stop what's coming.
I think it might have something to do with feral and outdoor cats killing 1.4-3.7 billion birds per year in the US alone. [1] Individuals can do something here I wager, between education and taking responsibility by spaying and neutering.
It’s pretty wild to me that cats aren’t mentioned at all in this article since they’re absolutely massacring wild birds. They’re the leading cause of both bird and small mammal deaths in the US. They kill 10% of all US birds every year.
I do agree personal responsibility isn’t enough but it can certainly help.
[edit] in fact a cursory google shows the population of cats in the US is almost a perfect mirror of the bird population graph in the article since 1970.
I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.
However, when you also have articles stating that migratory fish and insect populations have declined by 75% over the last 50 years [1,2] (which clearly isn't caused by outdoor cats) it would seem to me there are larger forces at work.
I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.
Outside of birds, cats kill rodents. I live in rural Quebec, near farms, a massive nature preserve, and a national park larger than small US states.
When I first moved here, I had no cat, and several other neighbours were new to the area. Old houses, not fresh builds, just changeover of owners... they too with no cats.
The first year I was here, I became aware of the problem, and started to lay traps. And I caught 100+ mice, sometimes several per day for months, all inside my house.
Once Spring arrived, I tried to find entrances, and did! I blocked them, but anyone that knows rodents, and owns wood houses, that won't help if you have an out of control, local colony, and once the winter comes, do they ever want in!
I spent 3+ years with traps, sometimes reducing the population a bit, but each winter more than 50 mice.
Then a neightbour got a siamese cat.
I now catch a mouse or two a year.
If you look at mouse breeding and brood numbers, and you live in a area with loads of food in the summer (near farms, nature), you need something like cats. It's not an option, it just isn't.
There's a reason farmers have loads of semi-wild cats in their barns. And both the mice they catch, and the cats that catch them, are invasive.
And with the hantavirus often touted as 50% lethal, you do NOT want the moral responsibility of trap and release, nor do you want mice in your house. At all.
If they only killed mice that would be a fun fact, but they also kill 20 billion small mammals a year, lol. The point was though that cats are killing all the birds, that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangential at best to the topic at hand. I can accept that mice are a problem and cats are killing all the birds and small mammals at the same time. It’s kind of like saying DDT is fine actually because it helps a few farmers improve their crop yields. That it does, but it nukes the eagles from orbit too, and we have to look at this systemically.
Once we accepted DDT as a problem we found alternative solutions. But there’s also localized solutions. A few spayed/neutered farm cats aren’t the end of the world.
that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangenti
You like to eat, yes? Because I assure you, without cats, or something to replace them that does what cats do, you and I will starve to death.
Farmers don't have cats because they're cute. 3They have them to stop rodents from eating silo, seeds, fields bare.
What do you plan to do? Spray death chemicals all over the place, as a replacement?
And no, trapping won't work. It never kills enough, and there are never enough traps.
Honestly, I sincerely doubt cats are the issue. Cats do very poorly away from human settlements, and therefore there's loads of area without cat habitat. In Canada, most of the land is cat free, there is so much land without cats, it would be impossible for them to wipe out a noticeable percentage of birds.
There's no way they're the problem, as a result of this, when we're talking about 1/3 of the birds.
A far better explanation is insect population collapse. Missing food.
> Because I assure you, without cats, or something to replace them that does what cats do, you and I will starve to death.
You could have made the same argument about DDT. You have to acknowledge the problem before you can find a different solution.
With enough determination it’s quite feasible. You know as a Canadian that Alberta is the only place in the Americas without rats. They have a very successful management program. [1]
Cats are an invasive species, so are rats. Alternatives exist, please stop being so defensive. Given this topical counterexample it hardly seems like a case of “cats vs food and hentavirus” since Alberta has no rats, plenty of food and no hentavirus without relying on cats.
> There's no way they're the problem, as a result of this, when we're talking about 1/3 of the birds.
… they kill 10% of birds per year. Times 3 years is just about 1/3. Given it occurred over 50 years I’d say we’ve got us a good candidate. Especially since there is documented evidence of them leading to the extinction of entire species. You can see how the math here is within the ballpark yeah?
Alberta is not rat free. It claims to be, but poke about a bit, and you'll see how fake that claim is.
And rats are not mice. And Alberta has plenty of cats around farms.
And the replacements for DDT are destroying insect populations. The problem is NOT cats. I notice you didn't explain why birds, in all the areas without cats, which is all areas in Canada without human settlements very close by, which is most of Canadian land, are dying too.
You're attributing cats to the problem, then explaining how it's proof it's cats.
> Alberta is not rat free. It claims to be, but poke about a bit, and you'll see how fake that claim is.
Once again no sources cited on your part other than, I guess, your gut, and "poking around."
> The problem is NOT cats.
You haven't made a case for that. The studies I dug up say quite the opposite, that cats are a massive source of wild bird mortality, that they've driven several species to extinction. I have cited sources and you seem to just be shooting from the hip?
> ... in all the areas without cats, which is all areas in Canada without human settlements very close by, which is most of Canadian land, are dying too.
What makes you think cats aren't in areas without human settlements very close by? This map shows they're all over the place. [1] And if that doesn't convince you check out the invasive feral cat population map in Australia where they actually wanted to cull the population. [2] They live on every square inch of Australia, and let me tell you, people do not.
"In some cases, house cats have singularly contributed to the virtual disappearance of Vancouver Island bird species. The streaked horned lark, once a resident of southern Vancouver Island, is now likely locally extinct in Canada, and cats were cited as one of the main causes of nest failure." [1]
"The coastal vesper sparrow has seen its population drop by 85 per cent over the past decade, and a federal government analysis cited a “high concentration of domestic and feral cats” as factors in their decline." [1]
Stop just repeating "nuh uh" and dig up some studies or lets end this conversation here, because the fact is, you are wrong on this one.
> You're attributing cats to the problem, then explaining how it's proof it's cats.
Wild house cats cannot live without prey, and they are not adapted to -40C, let alone -20C for weeks at a time. They cannot live in many parts of North America without humans settlements.
There are native cats in Canada, skilled at even detecting prey under feet of snow, but house cats are not that.
There is no significant cat presence in Canada, outside of human habitats.
I notice you cited Vancouver Island, the most temperate place in Canada. And there are deserts in Australia, cats don't live there without humans, yet there are birds adapted to the desert.
The outdoor neighborhood cats are the ones that are an issue. It sounds like promoting owl habitat would be a great targeted solution to mice problem without affecting small birds as much.
yup, If only we make all but indoor only incarcerated cat pets extinct we will bring balance to the world. It's not like we ever had outdoor cats before when the birds were plentiful. All sarcasm aside, insecticides and loss of habitat are major players in declining bird, bee and insect populations. Natural predators not so much.
I am pretty pro-climate / nature, but from a pure scientific bent and it is enlightening (and frightening) the frothing rage you get from most “green” people if you point out that having outdoor cats and having kids are two of the most damaging things you can do to your environment.
"Birds, it turns out, seem to be particularly sensitised to dogs – even on leads. In woodlands outside Sydney, for example, a study found that people walking leashed dogs caused a 'dramatic' reduction in the diversity and abundance of birds – more than double that caused by the same number of people walking without pets."
At the risk of getting flagged the logical conclusion to this train of thought is that the most effective singe action any individual can take to reduce carbon emissions is to mass murder their neighbors and then kill themselves.
"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."
Okay, I hear you; however, I'm not sure that the idea that cats bear more responsibility for birds fatalities than humans passes my smell test, though.
Food for thought [0] - 269 million bird deaths a year in Canada alone is asserted. Cited reasons for death include: feral and pet cats, agriculture, oil and gas activities, and collisions with buildings.
As noted outdoor cats are domestic and thus kept alive by humans. Who's responsible in this scenario - the cat or the human? I suppose some feral cats are the result of/spawn of domestic cat abandonment as well.
Cats in europe are even worse. You go to certain cities and there are thousands of strays lying on the roads and roofs, populations seemingly sustained by dumpster diving, rats, plus plenty of restaurant owners or workers straight up feed the cats regularly. There are seemingly no catch and fix programs like in the US.
a quick google search tells me that there are 75 million feral cats in the usa, far more than any other country - by area or population or any way you want to measure it
This seems like a number that would never be accurate no matter where you look. Either way, you just don’t see cities coated in cats like you do in Europe. Like dozens and dozens of cats up on a roof is a very common sight when you start exploring especially Mediterranean cities. Cats visiting you multiple times as you sit outside at cafes. Hotel and resort feral cat populations that the workers know by name at this point. I’ve seen it all. There’s just nothing like it in the US. Maybe in Key West at hemingways old home, I’m told.
Side issue but this is why arguments against wind turbines "because they kill birds" are never spoken in good faith.
Yes, wind turbines kill birds.
Collisions with vehicles kill 1000 times more birds than wind turbines do.
Collisions with glass buildings kill 3 times more still.
And cats kill 4 times more still [0].
Wind turbine bird deaths are deep in the noise as sources of bird deaths. Yes, we should keep trying to reduce that number further. But if we really care about saving birds we have a lot more dirty laundry than wind turbines.
actually, feral cats are what keep mouse, rat, squirrel and chipmunck populations in check and they are on their way to going extinct with the spay and neuter army out there. They do prey on birds when they can catch them but not at any great rate. You state 10%, that is not a massacre when you factor that cats are birds natural predators. Will you be erradicating eagles and falcons because they too prey on birds? Feral cats are not the same as abandoned house cats. Their home is the outdoors, why are we eradicating them to extinction? They are part of natures balance and an important rodent predator.
My neighbor has an outdoor cat. This cat kills at least one bird a day according to their kids (the cat brings the corpse to their porch). So I think you're tremendously mistaken about "not at any great rate."
Housecats are not native to most countries, and feral cat colonies are not healthy either (lots of disease). They are not part of "natures balance" and we're not eradicating them to extinction. That's just utter nonsense.
You are the owner of a domesticated species. Feral cats are part of natures food chain and natural balance. Without them there would be no stopping the rodent population.Not liking them being there doesn't make them invasive.
No, they're not. They're an invasive species brought to different locations around the world via human activity. The feral cats being discussed originated in the middle east and were brought to different continents by humans. North America's native cat species do not naturally target mice.
This is like saying the argentine black and white tegu is a natural part of the food chain in Florida. Please understand that humans bringing a species to a new location doesn't suddenly convert them to part of nature.
Cougars, wolves, coyotes. eagles, snakes (venomous and constrictors), hawks, and owls are natural predators of cats. Their populations have been decimated mostly by loss of habitat (same with birds). Peronnally I'd much rather be overrun by feral cats than rats any given day.
Er, cats are not native to North America. The 100M of them are descendants of the cats introduced by the colonists. They are an invasive species. They were never before and are not now part of natures balance in the Americas. So are rats in many places, having hitched rides on boats.
Yeah when 99% of people don't care about this sort of issue or are unaware of it and keep cutting trees down it doesn't matter if a few people are doing all they can.
I go home to my parents' neighborhood in Florida and more and more of the trees are disappearing in a 100-year-old neighborhood. It's not even new houses being built. These are 50-year old houses.
There is 1 house in the entire neighborhood (has to be at least 1,000 houses) that had a "no mow may" sign for the bees and isn't a purely St. Augustine grass yard. This is an upper-income higher education neigborhood too.
The culture is changing to be even less tree friendly from what it was a few decades ago.
Honestly I don't have hope in general for our future environment. I do not think we will be able to stop what is coming (both temperature-wise and species-wise). Humans are desperate for money and unfortunately making money means making things as easy and convenient as possible to get/buy.
I suspect it’s common that my city (France) requires 1 thick-trunk tree per ~80 square meter (9m x 9m). Also there is a ratio of concrete-vs-earth of 10% (posh neighborhoods), 15% or 20%, and parking spots per living surface.
My yard is 30x50m => 1500sqm => 1275sqm must be kept as earth, I must have 18 trees (thick-trunk) (and 2 parking spots and the street must have 0.5 guest parking spot).
I don't know about the tree requirement, as I don't believe I have that in my hometown, but we do have a mandatory 2 parking slots rule, within the limits of the property. The idea is to ease the parking space (less traffic jams, less people turning around searching for a place, less pollution also), avoid cars being on sidewalks and general security (better view of the surroundings when driving)
Yes, abstracting away that if people can conveniently park and use their car, they will use it for absolutely everything. That's why France is also champion of surburbia in Europe... We're are ruining our landscapes and cities with single family homes, only for that stupid summer bbq we've all seen on every bloody ad since childhood, and PSA's profit of course.
As soon as people have a house, they will have a car. Be realist. Building without parking space means they’ll invade the street parking.
On the other hand, I know places where companies can’t rent a house, they must stick to commercial-zoned areas. THAT’s enforcing the 10km-every-morning-to-go-to-work rule.
But again, suburbia is a pleasant lifestyle, we wouldn’t have to ruin landscapes if we could live downtown, but you guys make it horrible (Oh, hi Grégory Doucet). Sometimes intolerance bears a cost.
> As soon as people have a house, they will have a car. Be realist.
You don't even need to go to Japan or the Netherlands to understand that this is not true, you just need to spend a bit of time on YouTube: I recommend "Life where I'm from" for the former, and "Not just bikes" for the later.
> But again, suburbia is a pleasant lifestyle, we wouldn’t have to ruin landscapes if we could live downtown, but you guys make it horrible (Oh, hi Grégory Doucet). Sometimes intolerance bears a cost.
I don't think anyone is arguing about whether it's pleasant or not. I personally hate this lifestyle even though that's where I grew up, but that's irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that a car-centric suburbia is unsustainable at scale...
The planet will bounce back one way or another, short of a global nuclear war I don't see how we can do more damage than the asteroid that took out the dinausaurs. Humans just may not be here to enjoy it if we can't get out of the way and stop consuming natural resources for the sake Of GDP growth.
> The planet will be fine. It's humankind that's at stake.
This is oft repeated, but it fails short of anything meaningful. The planet, as in a rock floating around in space, will be fine, yes. But what about the untold amount of species of plants and animals that are suffering and will continue to suffer in our wake?
They will adapt or die and something will replace them. Diversity will go down for a while and then back up again. It's almost impossible to sterilize Earth and as long as something lives on it will eventually flourish again. It will never be the same but something else will flourish.
Hopefully many of them outlast us regardless of what stupid things we do, but yes this is a very real risk and we could take down a huge portion of diverse life on the planet with us.
I can't speak for anyone else that may have said something similar, but for me this is an observation rather than an argument. I don't want this to be what happens, I simply haven't seen any meaningful number of people actually willing to make the types of changes that would reverse this course.
Getting rid of or drastically reducing oil use would be a huge step in the right direction, and probably one of the most meaningful things we could do today. That will never happen by choice though, we're way too dependant on cheap energy and the conceniences (and economics) it provides.
>Humans just may not be here to enjoy it if we can't get out of the way and stop consuming natural resources for the sake Of GDP growth.
Humans may be the only species to understand the concept of a species, and it seems some members don't care at all if the whole species disappears, as long as 'the planet' is fine. Intelligence may be an evolutionary dead end.
It’s not about the planet being fine or not, it’s about the planet being a nice place to live for our descents. Your ascends made a nice job to get you a better life. Removing birds species won’t help in that direction, as well as a ton of other direct and indirect stuff we make happening here.
I completely agree and in no way do I like what we are collectively doing to this planet. I try to live a pretty minimal life and limit my impact on the environment. But the fact is that we seem hell-bent on running the planet for our own gain and it would take a miracle at this point for us to pull out of the tailspin, even if we actually had the will.
I can only speak to the people I've engaged with in the US and parts of Europe, but people aren't really willing to make the changes that really seem most important to me. Drastically reducingoil use, for example, would make a big difference but would destroy the GDP measure that many countries value so highly and would cause a huge shock to most every industry in the world. We've grown too dependant on industrialized food, easy access to products, and the power of leveraging cheap energy to go back to doing most things manually or with the help of animal power.
Once you've established that and, luckily, don't fall into the camp of the ones who don't give a damn and just profit. How do you cope? It's a very depressing thought that puts in perspective absolutely everything, including reproduction.
That's a great question and really the ultimate trick. For me the situation is oddly a bit of optimism and hope in an otherwise totally screwed up system. I find peace in the idea that the planet will go on one way or another, if we humans cause too much damage it will get rid of us like a bad cold and move on.
That can absolutely be depressing as well, but that's where I have to remind myself that the environment functions on the scale of thousands of years rather than decades. This planet and the life on it is an absolutely amazing thing, and amazingly resilient. I hope we can pull out of this nosedive so that we can continue to see what humans come up with, but I rest assured that we can't literally destroy the planet and that "the end" for us will be well down the road.
In the meantime, I just try to do my part to minimize my impact and partner with nature rather than fight it. I want to enjoy my life, and for me part of that is pushing myself to the point of some frustration and discomfort. I live in a small house with simple utilities and hope to have it off grid soon. Yes I still have a car and buy some things from Amazon or the grocery store, but I do without when I can and at least a few times a week I get annoyed that I don't have more storage in my tiny house. I figure if I'm feeling a bit of that pain I must be doing something right and can better enjoy the good parts of life.
Thanks for the detailed answer :) I am still very unable to ignore the things I can't control which is likely my main problem. I think the small house soon to be off grid part may be a very good way to take a step back... It's way too easy to focus on absurd human behaviours in rather dense areas.
The GP I was responding to did actually allude to a future of inevitable climate issues and species collapse.
For me the fact that the planet will love on regardless is a sign of optimism though, not doomsday apocalypse or some kind of perverse nihilism. It's like looking up at the stars, it reminds me of how small we are and that we're just a part of history rather than the start and end of it.
If carbon is burned its in the atmosphere presumably. Thats easily accessible as it will eventually get absorbed as terrestrial biomass. Charcoal economies are technologically simpler than coal economies.
Producing solar panels requires an advanced technical civilization being in place. You cannot jump from middle ages tech to producing solar panels with skipping dependence on fossil fuels in the intermediate steps.
It’s hard to extract the huge amounts of energy we get from fossil fuels from these sources without having a cheap energy source available to get you started.
Hard does not matter. If it takes the new life 100k years to go from agricultural to the industrial revolution rather than the 10k years it took us they will still get there. What I am saying is that it's not impossible to have an industrial revolution without coal. Not that it's not hard.
We at most did things like run a mill on a river. Now compare the megawatt output of a proper modern hydroelectric project and say it isn't much energy. Imagine a society side stepping coalburning and going right to big hydro projects. Even something like a forest specifically grown and cultivated for energy is a relatively new idea, and doesn’t require any real technology even beyond understanding systems theory.
Big hydro requires ungodly amounts of reinforced concrete, labor (to dig millions of cubic meters on earth) and transportation capacity (gotta transport that concrete on site - hard to do with ox-powered carriages on unpaved roads). I can't see say Louis the XIV's France ever pulling that off.
It's common in a 50+ year old neighborhood for trees to be diseased or dead or have a root system that is growing into the foundation of buildings or other infrastructure. It's not that people don't want trees, it's that people don't want trees that are a liability during the next storm (which I'm guessing is especially true in a place like florida).
But just think about that. Imagine someone just up and moving into your yard, without your permission, and then they decide to bulldoze your house because it's getting in the way of <x>.
I do understand the practicalities and constraints of homeownership, but I do wish we, as a species, did a bit more thinking ahead and had more empathy for literally anything else besides us.
I doubt that it's people lack empathy, it's more that if a tree root starts cracking up your concrete or a dead branch falls on your roof in a storm it will likely cost you a lot more than just dealing with the tree in the first place.
"Imagine someone just up and moving into your yard, without your permission, and then they decide to bulldoze your house because it's getting in the way of <x>."
it doesn't matter why people don't want trees. It's humans sacrificing trees for their needs/wants that matters. It's getting rid of trees and other natural things in general that is the problem. Humans' mere existence causes this.
Yeah, the systemic issues driving habitat loss are massive. I have made my yard a refuge for native plants to support insects, birds, and other wildlife, but I see exterminators on my street all the time killing off any insects that appear in neighbor's yards, and that kind of mass scale habitat destruction/loss is going on all around us in so many ways (lawns, roads, industrial farming, et al). I also really enjoy my pollinator garden and rewilded habitat, but people are culturally conditioned to destroy habitat, and unless that changes we're going to keep seeing more and more loss.
Right, which is why you have the opportunity to evangelize what you're doing.
Like for example, a two dudes in my hood have swapped their lawns over to micro clover because I did it three years ago; the lawn is packed with wildlife, and it looks great. Wouldn't have happened had they not come over for BBQ one day and asked about it.
Part of it is evangelizing, but its bigger than that - the yards of tomorrow need to look at lot more like grasslands and a lot less like farmland or golf courses, though.
Grassland is long grass, and it shelters a lot more than just insects and birds. It can be cover for small dogs, cats, beavers, possums, moles, mice, snakes, etc...
Understandably most "neighborhoods" don't want snakes, raccoons, or possums in their yards, but that's the level of "wilderness" we need to return to. Might make living a lot more difficult for a lot of folk...
Yeah a lot of inhabitants of a healthy habitat are labeled culturally as "pests" and "pest control" does a lot of damage to native plants, insects, birds, and other wildlife. I go out identifying insects under my porch lights or out in the yard submitting iNaturalist observations. There' an amazing, diverse natural world out there that can be accessible in a local yard that's a native habitat. I'm up to 400 species at my house (lots of those are moths and other insects). But in reality there's a lot of people who see any snake, insect, or arachnid, and respond with "kill it with fire."
> But in reality there's a lot of people who see any snake, insect, or arachnid, and respond with "kill it with fire."
Did you have a natural (or learned) revulsion for bugs? If so, how did you get over it?
I’ve gotten over mice completely, never felt right killing one in the first place.
I’ve been trying to make peace with bugs; I unplugged my mosquito zappers last summer shortly after getting them when I realized they were zapping mostly everything but mosquitoes.
Still something inside of me that has such a visceral reaction to bugs. I wish they would just stay away from me and I’d happily respond in kind :’(
> I wish they would just stay away from me and I’d happily respond in kind :’(
I mean, that’s kinda the line I draw and live with.
Anything in the house is fair game. I don’t feel good about it, but mice, insects, or anything else that’s in my living space has to go. I’ll do what I need to to keep my living space mine.
Anything outside… that’s shared space. As much as I can I try and co-exist. I see the bugs as much a part of the nature I appreciate as the bunnies, the deer, the turkeys, the foxes, the ducks, and everything else. None of it exists without the rest. Anything that isn’t an existential threat to myself or my property I leave alone. If I can’t personally handle them right now, I can always go back in the house.
Where I can, I try and balance my use of the space with everything else. I appreciate the nature where I live, so I only do what’s necessary to make it livable for me.
I mow only enough space around the house for us to use. I’ve been working on evicting some groundhogs because they’re trying to turn the ground under my garage into swiss cheese. I get rid of poison ivy when it encroaches in our space but we don’t “weed”. When the mosquitos got so bad we were scared to open a door I did spray some pesticide immediately around our house, but made sure to keep the space I sprayed well mowed to discourage the bees from coming here and getting caught in the crossfire.
I guess it’s just a small mindset shift—I still want the bugs to stay away from me, but I can’t be pissed about bugs when I wander into their home any more than I could wander in to a bear’s den and be annoyed that a bear attacked me.
Oh, except ticks. Fuck ticks. Those are kill on sight.
BTI is a great targeted solution for mosquitoes. Tick tubes can work well for ticks. Although targeted, the tick tubes have some potential for larger impact. More effort, but there tick drags and CO2 traps too.
Oh wow, not sure how I missed that one. I'm up in Canada so it's probably restricted or only sold in tiny 100g retail packages, but if I can chase down some industrial sized bags of that somewhere I'll definitely add that to my toolbox. A little bit of that spread around the wet spots during the spring melt would probably go a long way.
So far I've been primarily relying on permethrin. A gallon of 36.8% was something like $100 and dilutes out to ~600 litres of spray for my purposes. It's not water soluble and binds strongly to soil so I don't need to worry about it getting into the water table and spreading beyond where I spray it (or into my well water). I've been spraying just around my house (and, well, _on_ my house) to make a moat to keep away the mosquitos, ticks, ants, and all the other bazillion things that kept finding their way in.
We've also invested in a couple of the CO2 traps for mosquitos. Have those out in the yard a little ways out.
End of the day though... we live in the middle of a forest situated on wetland. That's part of how I got to a place of picking my battles. I know I'm not going to make much of a dent. As long as my house isn't overrun, it is what it is.
I have seriously considered it, but I do wonder about the neighborhood response. Although I don't think there's any danger and that there's actually more danger from the mosquitoes carrying every disease under the sun, I'm not sure if it's a battle I want to take on if someone has an issue with it. Once the bats are in place, I believe it requires engaging with state wildlife authorities to relocate them. Maybe I'm being too paranoid. I mean, there are already bats in the area anyway. They probably just have a hard time finding shelter.
I have a bat house. It's been empty for years. Apparently they prefer my neighbor's attic. But all least they'll have a place to go if they get evicted from the attic.
Sorry, late reply. I've never really had any serious issues with bugs, but desensitization by exposure is the way to go. I've used the iNaturalist app photographing and identifying insects for years, so when I find a new to me species I learn about their life history, and explore what I've seen in its taxonomy. So I'm comfortable around most bugs now since I know which are harmless, and which are the handful that have a sting/bite they'll actually use. Most insects, like most animals, don't want to fight, and would prefer to be left alone. Bees aren't going to sting unless you harass them or you threaten their hive, most wasps don't sting, and very few are aggressive. Grasshoppers and katydids totally do bite though, they scare me. Also I steer clear of anything that looks like a fire ant, centipede, warrior wasps, hornet, or yellowjacket.
I redid parts of my lawn last fall (first time ever doing so or even having the opportunity). I did about 30% of that new European microclover and 70% various fine fescues. Not sure if I feel it was a success or not, but the clover does make it look like a nice meadow. But the clover and fescue, if I let them grow, it gets so thick that I can't even mow it effectively. Do you just let the microclover fully take over and grow to a certain height before cutting? I have heard it has a memory of where it was cut and stops growing there. I haven't noticed that though. How do you keep other things fron taking over the yard?
It does have a memory of cut height, and I mow it with a reel mower once a week.
WRT other things taking over the yard, it's been rainy as hell here past few weeks and so the weeds have deff. sprung up unaccounted for; I just spend a day weeding mechanically, using a weed grabber tool.
Both count as my workout. Headphones + podcast = no gym membership required.
You'd be interested to know that this month I'll be finishing a huge trellis on the south wall of our house to let vines grow. This will reduce cooling costs and look beautiful (I hope).
Thanks. I use a battery powered mower, but because the fescue and clover retain so much moisture and has grown so thick, it has been really struggling (I think any mower would really) to mulch except at the highest height setting. I let it grow unhindered in the spring, and since it's been raining like crazy, I can't stay on top of it. (I should note that my lawn is probably only a 1/4 of my property.)
What reel mower do you use? Does it have height adjustments?
What are the environmental repercussions of that? I don't do any chemicals, weed killer, or chemical fertilizers. All I do, to feed the soil and not the grass, is dolomitic lime and organic fertilizer.
none that i saw. it just suppresses growth hormone of plants for a couple of weeks so they grow at half speed or less. less mowing. less watering. less fertilizers. etc.
for plants that are not grass pgrs usually slow down vertical growth and promote lateral branching/density
yea. generics cost 1/3.still not cheap. yet, i decided to try one this summer, because mowing grass that grows as crazy on the hill (frontyard) at 90sh weather - it's just not my definition of fun
Maybe you mean you don't use a 2-stroke engine to mow as the point you were making, but if not, what the huh? There's evangelizing, and then there's just being the crazy guy on the corner making stuff up that sounds like evangelizing. You're leaning towards the latter with these kinds of non-ambiguous contradictory statements.
I have a couple on our farm and honestly really enjoy cutting hay by hand. The key is to get out there early when it's still cool, and keep the blade sharp as you go!
wild white clover is naturally short and takes up much of the lawn where we are renting. if it weren't for the other random tall stuff we probably wouldn't need to mow at all.
Okay so my original comment was maybe lacking on its own "solutioning" so let me try one out, based on your comment.
1. Set up a bird-friendly/enviro-friendly environment in your yard. You could do this by planting micro-clover instead of grass, building bird houses, adding safe sources of water for birds, planting pollinator-friendly flora.
2. Evangelize. Plan a block party or even a birdwatching 'club'. This doesn't have to be as formal as it sounds; you could just take pictures of birds and evangelize them on a local group, or maybe point out to a few of your neighbors that they have really interesting specimens on their property.
3. Connect with the local Audubon chapter (or equivalent) and give them encouragement or support; help them with their website or social media, invite them to a BBQ, show them that you care and will help out.
Obviously I don't know your situation and can't predict all the reasons this might not work – and I'm not suggesting that you have to do all this – I'm really just trying to get your juices flowing, show you that there's ways that you can at the local level that might even benefit you – like getting to know your neighbors, having a beautiful and unique home, or even just making friends!
My religious friend takes photos of the natural areas around his town and then donates the (beautiful) photos to local churches to be displayed in their hallways – "God's bounty". He also sells calendars of same to parishioners. Each photo comes with a story about the wildlife in the area and how it interacts with the human world.
Is he intentionally psyop'ing an environmental message? He's pretty smart, so maybe. Is it effective? Maybe.
But I will tell you this: I have been on more hikes with this guy than I would have normally thanks to the majesty he documents... so it's worked on me!
The Oasis effect of habitat is valuable and can form part of corridors so insects and birds can migrate and breed.
So your actions alone can be valuable.
Your may inspire others or be part of a chain of things which inspires them.
Your hard won knowledge awaits their questions.
You may have to fight HOAs and disaproval. Your battles lay the groundwork for those that follow to succeed - setting precendent and raising issues, sometimes even by losing.
Even if others don't follow your practice you may pique their interest - which may change their opinions. Opinions are the mandate by which local officials and politicians act?
Many of these good consequences may be invisible to you. Doing good is never useless. The causes of change can be unpredictable and subtle. The future can be radically altered by small effects in the past.
Perhaps the life of a native bumble bee that survives by virtue of your planting may be the one that mutates enough so his descendants survive the coming changes.
Thank god that I do not have an HOA. Luckily things are different here, although I am very surprised that someone recently was able to cut down literally every tree on the property. (It appears the house was bought by an investor or someone quite wealthy.)
I honestly can't imagine the stress that an HOA would bring to my life.
Thanks for the kind words! I'm definitely still learning and making lots of mistakes along the way.
In some areas humans actually increase the biodiversity. My area is mostly desert most of the time. We get our water from the California aqueduct. On my property I have squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks. I've seen red tailed Hawks and Owls. Cats can't be outdoor here. I've already seen a cat's head discarded on my property. I have so many types of birds here all the time.
The open space here has a ton of animals and biodiversity but humans have actually increased the biodiversity. For example the squirrels on my property eat dates off my date trees. Date trees and eastern squirrels aren't native here but they do feed the hawks and owls. Bees are harvesting on my property constantly.
> but humans have actually increased the biodiversity
If that's even true, I would say that it is exceedingly rare, even on small local levels. And it would be dwarfed by the rest of human activity killing off biodiversity. I have squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, voles, foxes, raccoons, owls, hawks, several species of birds like woodpeckers, cardinals, nuthatches, etc., bats, coyotes, fisher cats, deer, bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, dragonflies, hummingbirds, and more all on my properly. Some are there every single day, like the chipmunks and bees, and the others are frequent visitors. But even with all that, the diversity is absolutely lower than what this area would have been like just 200 years ago. For example, mountain lions are gone and bobcats are on their way out. Same with bears. And there are several native plant species that are on their way out as well.
Also, deserts actually can be teeming with biodiversity. It's just not the biodiversity that we recognize.
Yes, but that comes at the expense of the biodiversity that existed before the California Aqueduct did. The Central Valley was once a massive seasonal wetland that supported millions if not billions of migratory waterfowl, to say nothing of non-avian biodiversity in the area (which I likewise recall being massive--this is detailed in Cadillac Desert, which I don't have on hand). I don't think that that biodiversity tradeoff is a net positive one.
I don't know why you think that. It makes no sense. The viaduct comes from far far north away of the central valley. That water would otherwise not even ever flow through the central valley. Naturally this area doesn't really retain most of its water. It just goes right into the ocean. The central valley lake naturally appears and disappears through no fault of humanity.
In NZ, there's been successful local endeavours to, for example, plant nectar bearing trees in urban backyards to encourage endemic birds to return, another I know of to bring biodiversity into monoculture vineyard areas to keep the bees healthy, and they've worked because people benefit from them - our nectar feeding birds are also beautiful singers, and the song of the korimako/bellbird and tui are cherished, and the vineyard owners themselves benefit from healthier pollinators.
It's where there's no direct benefit, or the species is uncharismaric that it gets tricky. It's a lot harder to motivate people to preserve habitat for a stick insect or mudfish.
> There's no one I can call to get help with my own yard because every landscaper knows nothing about ecology and uses loud and polluting gas-powered machinery.
For my own yard, in Washington State, I've interacted with a half dozen arborists and landscapers. Every one of them has been an expert in local species, has had concrete suggestions about what to plant and how to maintain, and is generally very excited to engage on the problem at the homeowner level.
> Unless governments take action and penalize corporations for the harm they've done and take measures to prevent further harm, we won't be able to stop what's coming.
What corporations? It sounds like your neighbors are just individuals? And can you clarify "what's coming"?
The point really is that individual action is sisyphean. The energy is too diffuse because the vast majority of people lack any real power or even real autonomy over their lives.
The only way the things that were done by mass action can be undone is through mass action. Who are the people who can invoke mass action? Basically there’s only one answer: governments.
Maybe if governments hadnt spent the last 60 years destroying labor movements (at the behest of corporations) there would be another option. But here we are in the year of our lord 2023 after decades of successful union busting.
I should make it clear that I don't see myself as a model ecological homeowner, but I do feel that I am trying. I was trying to point out that I can't even make a difference as an individual versus other individuals, so I feel individuals have no hope competing against industrial environmental damage. I feel like I already notice less bees and butterflies compared to last year. I don't think I have even seen a butterfly this year.
In terms of what corporations, just open the so-called phone book with your eyes closed and point. Our worship of scale has us destroying the environment at scale.
What's coming is more headlines like the one here and what the other commenter mentioned of ecological collapse. Without pollinators, how will we grow food?
The owning/ruling class is directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of the pollution and environmental destruction on the planet. This is not complicated.
The voting class is responsible for always wanting to “save the mother and the orphan” (metaphor, but it’s a “let’s save everyone, allow everyone to prosper, increase wages and let everyone massively live in consumerism” attitude), effectively massively overpopulating the earth, requiring more concrete poured in cities and even more poured concrete in tourism because their home city is unbearable, and all of it requiring, in a word, mass industry.
But somehow it’s the industry that’s at fault.
But “how do you dare say no to more humans!” is somehow at fault. I get it, we can be 10bn if we all ate crickets, but surprise, food is not even the reason why land gets urbanized and overexploited and polluted. Plus, creating more high-density humans, the kind who never sees any patch of earth, the kind who believes travelling across the world to see Kylie Minogue in a casino and buy some flamboyant clothes, is the best way to get voters who understand and care nothing to nature.
Ruling class just executed what you wanted. Guess what, what we want is to leave no human behind, help everyone, and raise them all to high levels of consumerism, whether in the West or in the third world. I really don’t see how the ruling class has any stake in pollution. Every time they try to get us to reduce our lifestyle, we vote them out.
Yeah you can account for it that way, but the people who buy the products and use the services the owning class owns and operates are indirectly responsible, so individual action is very much relevant!
I don’t have a solution, but I just wanted to say thank you for doing whatever you can. It’s frustrating as fuck but it’s what we’ve got and it’s the only way I can sleep at night, so thanks for being another person doing the right thing.
Just do it because you will have a better life. You don't need much more reasons than this.
Walking barefoot in the wet grass while sipping your coffee, and smirking at the neighbors that still keep doing it wrong is optional.
In most places, the probability of a snake or a racoon hiding in the grass to attack you is negligible. We are loud. They have better things to do and plenty of places to run away.
> How can this compete with the dozens of neighbors in a half-mile radius that have removed in excess of hundreds of trees, big ones like oak, pine, maple, hickory and up to five feet in diameter, and turn their yards into grass wastelands? I never even see my neighbors use most of their yards. How do you compete against that level of narcissisim and lack of empathy?
Moving might be an option. There are places where this doesn't happen and while you might have other problems, you probably won't have those problems.
I don't think the issue is whether GP lives next to neighbors with these kind of lawns, but more that the relative proportion of bird-hostile yards is outpacing any individual attempt to counterbalance. Moving only solves the problem if the only thing you care about is the extent to which you, personally, are forced to see one of the causes of this population drop in your daily life. It doesn't address the problem itself, which is kind of also GP's point.
No person can solve this. Techno-optimist HN won’t believe me now, but we’re living through the Collapse of the civilization right now. Ukraine, banks, covid, climate change and all else are merely symptoms of human population overshoot. See https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea...
Right, but that won’t happen until things become sufficiently painful enough (for the masses or corporate profits or both). Not ideal, but that’s the world we live in.
No, individuals is the only way this works. Individuals started it and they can stop it.
But ideally in addition to doing things yourself and being an example you should also try to convince and encourage others to do it by raising awareness, supporting legislation, not using suppliers and not working for companies that violate those rules etc.
I completely sympathize with you. Seriously. But I'm not sure the cause is simply narcissism - to my eyes the real root cause is abject ignorance. If they were to realize, like you, they would be unable to behave the way they do
I don't know, but that's an interesting idea. I've thought about looking into what it would take to protect certain trees and native plants on my property. But I have also wondered if that would also make my property unsellable. :(
Not OP but I’d assume something analogous to the tobacco lawsuits but for ecological damage caused by marketing of products generally known to be harmful to healthy natural ecosystems that trap users in a cycle of additional product use (once nature reacts to the apocalypse by starting additional pioneer plant growth in that are).
You say individuals cannot solve this, then go on to show how the problem is with individuals turning their yards into grass wastelands. Well if its individuals causing the problem, wouldn't it mean that individuals can solve it? Seems like your comment is contradicting itself.
And what do you call displacing hundreds of birds, animals, plants, insects by planting literally wastelands made of grass just so that the grass can be looked at? How is that not narcissism, a lack of empathy, and vanity? It's the very definitions of those words.
We must first come to terms with what we as humans do and how we interact with and perceive the world.
Look up Benjamin Vogt and Douglas Tallamy. They say the same thing. I can't remember who it was, but someone said that it was a disservice to the diversity of life found in deserts to call lawns green deserts.
What would you like to rationally talk about? What did I say that was irrational?
You know, I can admit to myself that I am vain and a narcissist in this context. The part that I have left as a lawn, I do like looking at it. It has been a journey for myself to gain empathy for things that are not human and for many things I can't even see, much less communicate with. It takes time and effort, but it also takes accepting the situation and saying "what am I going to do about it?". I do still mow the parts of my property that is a lawn, and I generally realize its general destructiveness and disruptiveness. But I try to address that, and see what I can differently.
A bon mot, to be sure, but whether or not they are labeled as such makes no difference. The behavior refuses to change in either situation. Plenty of pitiful fools are still trying to keep sod alive in the vicinity of the Mojave.
I agree with the sentiment but a couple problems with this approach
1. When you put the onus on the individual, powerful organisations will jump at the opportunity to absolve themselves of blame. Look at recycling and how it was pushed by the plastics lobby or the idea of a “personal carbon footprint” that was pushed by oil companies. There is a fact that these are systemic problems, that require systemic solutions.
2. History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. Which massive threat to human life has been solved through bottom-up grass roots action (I.e. not protest to drive systemic change)? Look at small pox, the ozone and cfcs, covid, lead pipes, asbestos, etc. these all required huge top down programmes to deliver results.
Re. #1 it drives me nuts when I see articles with titles like “Did you know that almond milk uses X gallons of water to make?” as if the onus is on me to understand the calculus of almond vs. cow milk vs. just pouring plain water on my cereal.
If we look at every issue an article like that wants to point to they all have mostly systemic causes, big Ag pushing factory dairy farms, heavy water subsidies for almond growers on land that otherwise wouldn’t support growing almonds, etc.
I hate that in the name of “conserving the earth” there’s this sort of endless game of shame and blame. Switch from cow milk to almond milk, not good enough. Recycle plastic, oh but you need to be aware of which plastics you’re recycling. You can switch to reusable containers. Oh but don’t buy aluminum, the carbon footprint for producing it is too high.
If we just decided to regulate one thing, like the diesel fuel container ships use, that would have a bigger effect than any of those environmental “tips”.
Personally, I think this is why solutions such as carbon taxes and appropriate pricing are the way to go. Market forces start bringing out the desirable outcomes as people look to find ways of living, purchasing, and consuming sustainably.
The question to me is: what is the thing I should do? Where should I invest my energy?
Time and energy are finite resources and taking political action to drive systemic change has proven results (see previous examples).
I don’t know of any transformative movement against mass threat to human life that hasn’t relied on some form of top-down implementation to achieve its aims. Maybe environmental vegetarianism in the west? But that’s hardly been an unqualified success…
Sustained political movements that drive results build upwards through the layers outlined, because that’s how you change culture — and politics is downstream of culture.
We live in a democracy, so if you don’t convince your neighbors first, then politicians will correctly respect the majority’s wishes over yours.
COVID is a great counter example:
The reason that it destroyed our society and has led to years of bitter fighting that’s doing massive damage to public health is precisely because it was authoritarian policy lacking public consensus — and now is likely to destroy many of the institutions that supported it in the backlash, as the public investigates gain of function, PSYOPs, ineffective policy interventions, etc.
But let’s assume that I must choose one thing to focus my energy. Birds are better off with me working on a habitat in my back yard that maybe homes 10 birds over my lifetime, the next 70 years.
That will have a greater impact than any way I can influence top-down implementations.
But fortunately, I can both build a habitat, donate to environmental charities, advocate for improvement, and vote for political parties.
WRT #2, I'd argue that many, MANY peoples – towns, families, cultures – have survived MUCH longer thanks to their bottom-up, localist thinking. I'm not saying top-down doesn't work, but it clearly isn't working for climate change. Too many adverse incentives, to much systemic ineffectiveness.
The unfortunate state of things is that we've run out of the problems that we can solve and are left with the problem we can't solve.
Our society/species is pretty terrible with problems that involve diffuse responsibility. Part of the problem is that we don't have social technologies equipped to handle diffuse responsibility, and another is that we have social agents who exploit this social bug to make money.
I’ve been reading Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” recently. The book makes the point that the history of Homo Sapiens coincides with mass extinction - humankind has been disrupting and destroying habitats since it rapidly expanded out of Africa 300k years ago. Even before the agricultural revolution.
It happens time and again throughout various geographies and histories, Homo Sapiens arrive somewhere and then a ton of species go extinct. Abstract ideas evolve faster than genes, and the evolution of the ability to process such ideas allowed our species to jump to the top of the food chain too fast for the typical checks and balances in nature to take place.
I think the best we can probably do is to continue to invest in education, science and technology. If people (particularly women) are educated and empowered enough, then it seems to drive down birth rates. Science and technology because if we can drive the costs of fixing these issues low enough, then we might be one day be able to “undo” some of the tragedies that we’ll have caused along the way.
Culling luxury/non-essential consumption would already get us quite far. But we wanted dutiful consumers and boy do we have them now; plus we built a large part of our wealth on that behavior so it sticks.
And to add to that, virtually every externality of our consumption is invisible at the point of sale, and it requires abstract thinking to even get the idea that there might be something wrong with it. But even with an inquisitive mind finding out the concrete externalities is really difficult when the deed is done and hidden in complex supply chains.
Really our best bet I think is to define minimum untouchable habitat and have the effects of that ripple through the economy on its own (the effects of this will be really unpopular, I fear; wonder how 30 by 30 will turn out). Not sure (hard) technology or education could help us in a way or on a timespan that matters by now, but I guess one needs to do appropriate things on all fronts, fit-for-purpose for the various societies/target groups.
So much for the naive idea that humanity lived in harmony with nature until the rise of civilization a few thousand years ago. We and our extinct cousins were invasive species migrating out of Africa.
Agreed about driving down the cost of fixing these problems. They’re so complex and universal that there is no simple solution everyone can just vote on.
Does anyone know a good reference that discusses technology in the context of evolution? I think it's less abstract ideas and more technology that evolution can't keep up with. It's likely many other animal species can think abstractly, such as whales. But it is our technology development that surpasess everything, even our own emotional ability and intelligence.
I don't like it, but it could be worth reading Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants". I find some flaws in Kelly's thinking, but his central idea (as presented in this book) is worth considering.
I don’t know if Musk said exactly this. But what I find interesting is that people would rather evoke the name of Elon for some political point winning than to actually discuss the merits of the idea itself.
it’s more confusing to me given the fact that Musk literally commercialized and made viable the idea of a car that has a true chance to reduce pollution.
No we can solve these problems. We know the solutions. It's government regulation, complete with punative fines and imprisonment on not just corporations, but the executives of the corporations. We choose not to solve them, because it will make a multibillionare a mere single billionares and we believe this is bad, because the billionares tell us it's bad.
In the United States has been an intentional, systemic, and documented propaganda campaign (their term even!) from the 1900s, with an even larger emphasis since the 1930s, to today by the National Association of Manufacturers -- the funders of hayek and Friedman -- to delegitimize any attempt to put any regulation as not only antibuisness, but antifreedom, and it's bullshit. It's to trick people into thinking they aren't just powerless, but being powerless is actually good.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. There is plenty of precedent for society level change leading to improvement. National parks, air quality, public health, etc.
At the risk of sounding reductive, the problem in your example is getting folks to choose differently. This applies at both the meta and mesa levels or in other words, within the present system and the choice of which system. That's what I mean when I talk about social technologies. We lack the social mechanisms, or in other words, they must be developed to overcome it.
All over social media, spam, everywhere. What happened was the U.S. and state governments started offering tax incentives, so a bunch of middlemen (scammers) popped up to take a portion of that benefit while marketing it to regular folk. It's a whole cottage industry (barf):
If individuals are responsible for just 1% of the issues then even if we eliminate them "bottom-up" completely, we are still left with 99% of issues that should be fixed at another level.
For example, consider what would save more water: 10 million people stopping showering completely or one corporation stopping production of water-intensive crops in a desert.
Actually, I think that localized thinking has benefits that are so much better than the status quo of globalization that that 99% the issues you describe would be vacated.
Like let's talk about food, how we get bananas from across the globe. Who the hell needs bananas when you can buy fresh, seasonal fruit from the farmer an hour away? Yeah you might not get to have banana cream pie for Christmas, but you made a new friend (the farmer) had a good time (with your family at the peach orchard) and ate something that didn't need to be coated in poison to survive a f'ing trip through the Panama Canal! (I know I'm pulling this out of my ass – but you get the gist)
I don't expect the lone grocery shopper will be able to weigh the externalized costs of a cheap, delicious banana so accurately as a regulator. The trick is keeping the banana merchant from turning the regulator into a shareholder of BananaCo. Tell someone if you discover how to accomplish that.
Well put! Consumers have very divergent needs and desires in our system because we built our system to reduce consumer analysis and increase consumption. It's amazing that folks come on here and place additional responsibilities on consumers when all market forces are shoving them in the opposite direction. It's essentially victim blaming.
What if politicians do not have the political support to stop the one corporation because 9.99 million people like to consume the water intensive crops grown in the desert?
Individual solutions are mostly a fantasy. It's what we tell ourselves because the real solutions are fundamentally at odds with democracy and freedom. A few exceptions aside, people have never voted for a lower quality of life and personal degrowth. Instead, we prefer to slice and shift the blame around until no one is really responsible anymore. Your vision hangs on some sort of mass enlightenment that's just not going to happen. How many tragedies of the commons have been solved this way irl? Imagine being a fisherman in a Chinese trawler off the coast of West Africa. You could decide to stop overfishing. What then? You'll get fired and replaced by someone more desperate than you. The real world is a lot more complicated that "building a bird-friendly yard".
>All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
That's the entire point of having concentration of power though. The decision makers can coordinate and manage things in ways the individual cannot. That alone gives them the responsibility to seek out a solution for worldwide issues. The lone individual is bound to follow basic instincts, rule of law and economic opportunities.
The problem is none of your solutions are viable either. Even if they were executed the results are usually negligible. In fact most of your solutions end up making us feel better about ourselves. But this is all illusion.
For these huge environmental problems humanity is facing, I'm sorry to say the only way it to do huge drastic unrealistic changes that will never occur because humanity doesn't have the will power to pull it off.
The real honest answer is that there no "solutioning" the worst case scenario will likely play out.
I know you think you're being a pragmatist and a realist, but 'tis you who are suffering the illusion. Localism has incredible antifragile second- and third-order effects in the face of wider catastrophe.
The tragedy of the commons ends up making local-ism non viable at any level of legitimate scale. Any of it that does get implemented therefore becomes negligible in effect.
> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely __the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.__
(emphasis my own) Besides this, your cats will live longer and healthier. Like the average cat lives twice as long (or more) when indoor. Do it for the birds, do it for the squirrels and other small mammals, and do it for your own fucking cat.
From the quote you cited, it sounds like we need to manage strays much more so than owned cats. Considering that indoor/outdoor cats are indoors some of the time, we would assume that owned cats are not really a priority here.
30-90 birds/cat/year seems extraordinarily high when considering the behavior of all the cats I know who spend time outside.
Well cats are definitely highly in-homogeneous hunters and some do A LOT and others very little. I'm sure the high end of that number is counting strays but I've known cats to grab a bird a few times a week. The thing is that many cats aren't showing you their spoils. Also, remember that cats sleep most of the day and their hunting is primarily done at limited hours. Though (indoor/)outdoor cats tend to be more active. You're probably not going to meet these cats though unless you've been to a rural area. Barn cats tend to be pretty effective predators. If you're in a bigger city, well there's not going to be as many birds (less opportunities) and you're probably less likely to see the spoils as if you have an adverse reaction one time then they won't show you again. They're just bringing back home a toy, not a meal.
There’s a bunch of statistics that just sound like nonsense and get repeated on the internet constantly. On the Mt. Rushmore of this list is the cats killing billions of birds a year. Another one is how efficient dishwashers are compared to hand washing dishes.
Well the cat number is cited from a paper and it does pass the sniff test. There's 45 million cats in America so that's 29 - 89 birds/cat/yr. That's not an unreasonable number, even taking into account a power distribution (I would buy that there's cats out there killing several birds a week, as I've seen this with my own eyes). The higher number probably over counts domestic cats though, but that's not too meaningful to my point given how these cats come to existence. Sure, publication doesn't mean absolutely correct, but there's nothing very suspicious about this one that I'm seeing at least. But I didn't do a deep dive either.
That depends enormously on what 'efficient' means. They certainly save a lot of time so that's an efficiency. They do use less water for the same amount of washing, so they are more efficient with water. The only problem with that is that, just with most efficiency gains, the result is more consumption. In this case, dirtying more dishes.
So I would argue dishwashers are demonstrably more efficient than hand washing dishes. Whether that means better for the environment is an entirely different question that has to take into account manufacture and use.
> So I would argue dishwashers are demonstrably more efficient than hand washing dishes
Yeah my argument is that this is nonsense. Just turn the tap off often when you’re scrubbing the dishes (use the water for rinsing) and it should be obvious that you’re using less water — particularly when you take into account the fact that a dishwasher uses 4 gallons of water no matter how many dishes are in it.
Under ideal conditions perhaps a modern dishwasher comes out ahead, but again maybe the ideal Rambo bird-killing-machine cat is also capable of decimating local bird populations.
I have always, and I'm sure most people at home do, filled the dishwasher up completely before turning it on. That's quite a substantial load of dishes each time, 2 meals worth + sundry in a 5 person household. The dishwasher I have says it uses 6 litres per wash on the normal automatic mode. That's just over 1.5 gallons, and even if a total lie and it uses twice as much that's still only 12 litres / 3 gallons.
Where it probably falls down is where they have dishwashers in office kitchens where they don't fill it up and chuck it on anyway so they have their favourite coffee mug ready for the morning.
The other twist on water 'waste' is where does it go afterwards for recovery?
Cities often have systems, we're in rural Australia and are water conscious- as far as dish and clothes washing go that's grey water discharge which goes onto a near house mulch pit for household rottables and garden waste, the water that reaches the pit bottom hits a crushed stone bed with slotted pipe that drains water to above the vegetable garden and fruit trees (between the leach drains ) where it moves through the soil making tomatoes, potatoes, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, etc.
No dishwasher, no tap running - but regardless of how much water we use in the kitchen none of that truly goes to waste, if we use more we just put less on the garden from the same source tanks (which are all level gauged).
Microplastics shed from synthetic fibre clothes probably stay in the mulch, crushed rock and sand and don't reach the roots of the vegetables and trees and don't feature in the runoff (from sub surface water travel) at the base of the slope.
Mulch on garden with microplastics is likely ok as plants extract the minerals | elements they need.
I'd have to sample and check.
A great deal of our clothing, bedding, towels, etc is natural fibre in any case.
The average faucet puts out about 2 gallons per min. Even if i turn off the faucet between scrubbing it would take more than two mins of the faucet on for me. I do agree that it me use more dishes so there’s that.
You turn the faucet on at full blast every time you open it? I let out enough to rinse, but you do most of the mixing of soap and water for rinsing mechanically rather than just trying to blast it away with a high-pressure water stream.
I can totally accept the paper being wrong, but yeah this is how I feel. Fine to reject the claim, but if it's the word of a random commenter saying "trust me bro" vs that of researchers who published in nature and put all their evidence out there for everyone to see... I'm going with the latter (I'd even go with that were it not published).
Like at least make some critique about the study instead of: claims bullshit, refuses to elaborate, leaves.
In New Zealand, cats kill 100 million birds a year. We have 5 million people. I can easily imagine with US population, cats in the US could account for a billion birds.
Jane Goodall has a very simple and realistic (but not easy) framework for recovering from the anthropocene extinction:
1. Eliminate poverty worldwide (this is essential because desperately poor people will not let environmental concerns keep them from basic survival)
2. Radically reduce resource consumption by rich nations and individuals
3. Eliminate government corruption
4. Stop human population increase
Obviously achieving this will require upending many power structures and confronting many deficiencies of human nature. But when you see it laid out like that, it seems obvious that is task ahead of us.
"Bird-friendly yard" is probably the most counterproductive of these. Habitat loss is far and away the biggest problem that birds face. Anyone having a yard is the problem. People must learn to congregate in compact development forms and leave the land for the animals, if they care about having animals.
Probably the only easy life change individuals can do is not eat meat and not buy ethanol. That would return tons of land to natural uses.
Millions of people have a yard right now, today. Telling them to not do a little something for birds right now, and instead they should feel bad unless they uproot their life this instant to become one micron in what would be at best a generational reurbanization project is the kind of thing that gets people to just tune this stuff out.
The rational choice of an individual, if the “real answer” is disruptive to their life and will take massive state incentives and/or coercion, is to wait for the carrot & stick to actually be produced. So why not put some, idk, whatever is bird friendly in the yard in the meantime?
> Researchers report that an insect's ability to find food and a mate is reduced when their antennae are contaminated by particulate matter from industry, transport, bushfires, and other sources of air pollution.
So catalytic converters, catalytic combustors, AGR Acidic Gas Reduction, Net Zero homes and vehicles etc. may be pretty impactful.
(In addition to planting and allowing clover and dandelions for the bees; and leaving longer grass for fireflies and ticks and CO2 capture and grasshoppers)
An herbicide that doesn't kill clover would make for prettier lawns; but the non-grass plants in the lawn are the food of the insects, which are the food of the birds.
I’m in the Midwest. I noticed a big drop off in birds when westnile virus came through. Dead birds in the middle of the yard was a dead giveaway. Don’t see crows anymore.
But when I was a kid I never saw hawks, now I can usually spot 5 or 6 when I’m out during the day.
Makes me wonder what the baseline count should be.
This is a book I enjoyed in which the core message is that the way we first saw a place, as children, or when we moved there, influences the way we imagine its undisturbed natural state, whether that's true or not.
Each homeowner just needs to cut back a little and dedicate a percentage to native plants and wilder growth. What we need are the right insects in each region, then the birds will follow. A huge manicured lawn (pesticides make it worse but even without) and none native plantings allow the wrong bugs to win, and in some cases those bugs are not good food for the birds that live in that region or temperate zone.
We don’t need complete wilding or any bad feels, just learn to appreciate the beauty of a wilder native section of a property.
No, I am not an expert but this seems to be the easiest thing to do.
It's not a solution, it's cheap bluff. Try to voice this idea on an HOA meeting and tell Ms. Smith that you noticed her kitty outside and that next time you'd "exterminate" it. If you can't do that, how are you going to convince people to vote for such a law?
Solutions are still solutions even if you're unwilling to implement them.
I just said "keep tight control of your songbird-murdering organic robots"... and you replied with "it's a bluff, you can't convince people to do that!"
> All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
Other way around really.
"The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows."
You're not going to do anything about that individually.
You could opt out of the whole system and grow your own food, but that isn't viable as a solution across the entire population. It would take literally everyone doing that and most people simply will not.
And focusing on the individual as the solution lets corporations and governments off of the hook. We've been trying to "reduce, reuse, recycle" our way out the problem at a local level and it isn't remotely sufficient.
The problem is we shouldn’t be working against the government on this. Problems like this are why governments exist, it needs to happen at that scale. Unfortunately, it seems like we’ve forgotten how to solve social problems of any significant scale.
"We" haven't forgotten how to solve social problems. Not to get all political, but at least in the United States, there is tremendous pressure not to solve any problems. Our elites are content with the status quo.
I took my dead yard and added about a dozen apple, fig, and shade trees. This brought some birds for sure. I would still expect to see more though given the seed I put out.
I'm guessing massive cities and suburban sprawl are a big part of the problem. Most yards are literally just grass which often requires tons of weed killer and fertilizer in some areas. As a society we're so dumb sometimes. My mother also has a bunch of cats and they've killed dozens of birds over the years. That probably adds up.
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is the largest charity in the UK by membership. People do take a lot of direct personal action on this topic.
That gets dismissed as “virtue signalling” as “it won’t make a significant difference.”
That is basically the Conservative rank and file line for why Canada shouldn’t reduce emissions. They say “we are only 1.5% of emissions, so it won’t matter.”
I am not arguing that your way is bad, but that there will be stiff resistance either way. At least with government, you just need to win once and inertia means that it likely sticks.
> At least with government, you just need to win once and inertia means that it likely sticks.
This isn't remotely true. Regulatory bodies are chronically underfunded and undermined in north America because they're villainized by corporate donors and the politicians they pay for.
I disagree. If you can see immediate benefits in your neighborhood – for instance, more birds showing up – then 'acting locally, thinking globally' is more effective than the reverse.
Oh that argument from cons really gets me enraged. As a comparison to show their inconsistent reasons oh conservatives are proud of Canada’s contribution to the world wars, you never hear conservatives say “we only contributed 1.5% to the war effort, so it won’t matter”
In Sweden, the Eurasian Skylark has been in decline, due to loss of habitat. It thrives in high grass on the kind of land that is ploughed and used for agriculture. But you can now pay farmers for a "lark square". For 100 SEK for a year, about 10 USD, the farmer will leave a rectangle unplowed, which will benefit the Skylark. This photos illustrates "lark squares"
Brilliant. I read somewhere that they were encouraging the use of hedgerows in the UK for the same basic reasons; that it provides habitat for myriad wildlife amongst farming fields.
1. Regular individuals: vote for city, county, state, and federal candidates who acknowledge the scope of the problem and want to solve it. Vote against people who deny the crisis’s existence.
I think people have been doing this since the 60s and it hasn't had much of an effect, which is my point. If the political solution is ineffective, pivot.
Do you believe that the American people, by focusing on change via government, have been sufficiently effective in preventing a forthcoming (or probably currently underway) environmental collapse?
Do you believe a majority has tried what you’re suggesting? I think the answer is no. Nevertheless, over a trillion dollars will be spent over the next ten years on incentives to make our country carbon-neutral because enough people turned out to vote in 2020 to secure a slim majority of federal legislative seats to affect such a change. https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/the-us-is-po....
Here’s another example for you: it would’ve been unthinkable in 1996 when a Democratic President signed the so-called and repugnant “Defense of Marriage Act” into law that about 26 years later, support for gay marriage among Americans would be over 70%, and that a bipartisan coalition of Senators could get behind a bill to enshrine same-sex marriage into law, but here we are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_for_Marriage_Act
Nihilism doesn’t do any good for anyone. If you live in a heavily gerrymandered state with climate deniers elected to a majority of seats, start volunteering with a group that seeks to eliminate gerrymandering in your state with independent redistricting commissions.
> What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of problems, is viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up, and in the following hierarchy:
You want magic. The thing you are describing is called magic.
In my mind this is just like entropy in action. We hit the exponential growth curve and we're going to cull ourselves out of our environment, taking other things out with us or before us because humans dominate that much of nature at this point. Just seems like an unstoppable force. As far as I know exponential growth curves lead to something like that in all animals independently of their behavior because Darwinian adaptation in animals is much slower than the decline caused by exponential growth.
I'm a regular individual. I don't have a yard. I live in a city.
Renters all over have restrictions on what they can do with a yard. You simply cannot rent and "build a bird-friendly yard" in most places. Sometimes, you cannot dig to add a garden, let along replace things. And why would you? It would just give the landlord even more money.
And the landlords aren't going to do it without some pressure, which isn't going to come. Renters don't really have power in most places and we can't even get some of the folks to keep up a safe place.
Do you think a neighborhood can just "build a bird friendly park"? Many neighborhoods don't have parks, at least not in the Midwest. Who is going to donate their house or yard to do this? Are poor neighborhoods just out of luck? Where are folks and small towns going to get the money?
Don't architects and urban planners work with these "powerful forces" in general? How are they going to do anything without the government - especially a city planner?
What do you expect small groups to be able to do without a larger force? How do you expect any of these organizations to actually do anything?
All of your suggestions reek of things like "jaywalking", which came from pro-auto propaganda, and "litterbug campaigns", which were propaganda from companies to shift the blame from them to the consumer.
Recently bought a house with a beautiful backyard on a pond. I put a couple bird feeders up because I noticed a cardinal male and female occasionally hanging out on the lawn. Now my yard looks like a bird sanctuary! I love it.
My next step for a new age take on an old man hobby is to get some cameras hooked up to an NVR that can do object detection and point them right at the bird feeders so I can get a stream of recent visitors.
bottom-up solutions only have so much effectiveness though, and at some point crosses a line into feel-goodery.
does building a bird-friendly yard actually accomplish anything? does building a bird-friendly park actually accomplish anything? is there any science that backs up an argument that people have the power to do anything at all about this, or are these just individual actions that make people feel like they're helping to solve the problem while diverting their attention away from actual practical solutions?
individual actions aren't free. making people feel like they're doing something is counterproductive if it's not helping in a meaningful way. we've all been sorting our plastic recycling for the last 30 years, and the only practical outcome of that is that we feel better about creating more plastic waste. if planting "bird-friendly" gardens doesn't do anything beyond make people feel better about killing birds, then let's not do that.
I agree that I like grassroots solutions. However, what would that look like here? The main culprit is that grasslands have disappeared on a massive scale, being replaced by farms and houses. Of course there are still some bird in protected areas or larger yards, but I don't think anything will be able to make up for the population loss when the habitat loss is so great.
The one thing thats not mentioned in the article that might make a difference at a smaller level is pesticides. Many people love to have a yard without weeds and without bugs. Without some flowering weeds, many bugs have no food. Pesticides kill the rest. Now what will the birds eat? There aren't any flowering or seed producing plants and there aren't any bugs.
I hate ticks and mosquitoes, but there are some targeted solutions for those.
There is no individual solution to climate catastrophe. The vast majority of individuals have little to no impact on carbon emissions. We need concerted legislation focused on fixing the causes of our ecological collapse to make a dent. The market will not save us and neither will individual action.
What would be the bottom-up way to handle, say, the acid rain crisis, which was caused by excessive sulfur dioxide emissions and was resolved by top-down legislation.
Or alternately, what would be the bottom-up solution to World War 2?
My garden is full of birds. The neighbour forgot to trim his huge tree one year and it was full of bird nests.
Birds are left with no place to live near / in cities if there's so little gardens and trees.
But put some water, grass and trees and birds show up.
Having a water source is also huge. Saw migratory birds too, multiple years.
I don't think it's on purpose or not but our small towns and back yards are just not welcoming for nature. If there's a little room, animals do come.
But real estate is all about room! People need to keep storing stuff. My neighbors on basically all sides keep building sheds and extending their homes. Pretty soon they will have no grass to speak of. But plenty of room for storage.
I know your intentions are good here, but honestly the less human interference the better. we didn't design their habitats, and i highly doubt we'd get it better than mother nature did. we humans are an self-excluding and blameless bunch. we constantly lust for providing solutions for ecology, but no matter how much "solutioning" we throw at it, the problem cannot, and will never be fixed by human involvement. the best thing we can do is live our lives simpler, and start to think how we can lessen our impact on the environment. i am willing to bet all my money that not a single person on this planet, is willing to do this 100%. yes, it is hard to go back to our roots, but living as an exclusive being, that considers itself deserving of reaping the benefits of industrialization and high-tech, at the same time not realizing the enormous impact our daily lives have on things, is not acceptable behaviour.
we are like bacteria in a petri dish of agar. eventually we will consume all and destroy our own thriving habitat. it's inevitable. go to any developed area of the US! watch the highways in that area everyday! tell me that we don't have an impact after seeing how many cars pass you that day (i bet you couldn't even count them all)! the massive amounts of energy consumed, toxic chemicals that enter the water tables, runoffs, and larger bodies of water, the emissions from each vehicle, and the amount of natural resources consumed to make each car. this is just one example of our gigantic impact we have, yet we treat it as if it was nothing.
1. don't build bird friendly yards! you draw in predators to a centralized location, and can lead to a large localized food-source dependency that is detrimental avian health, and what happens when that location is no longer maintained? stop building!!!
2. see #1 and don't draw natural beings into an artificial environment, but do the reverse. these are beings of nature, not downtown.
3. these things already exist and is not helping (i birdwatch while hiking. good for me, useless to ailing birds).
4. see #1 and #2
this is solutioning. sorry to point that out. my point being, lessen your impact don't increase it
The main issue with humans and their ancestors and the environment is from agriculture. We went from hunting and gathering for millions of years, skimming excess carrying capacity off the land in low numbers, to agriculture only a few thousands of years ago, where we manipulate the environment to suit our needs where we are. We just aren’t adapted to agriculture let alone modern life. Mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships do not happen overnight, nor in the timespan that we have been farming and amassing population. So long as we insist that there must be some 8 billion people living at once on earth, the biomass to fuel that massive population has to come from somewhere in the system, and considering the complexity just about anything we do is liable to have deleterious nth order effects we will never be able to anticipate until they are plainly obvious.
Most people don’t want to hear the hard truth, which is that political activism - that is, incentizing large institutions to change behavior - is the single most effective individual action we can take for both things like birding and things like climate change (which are of course linked).
It’s not fun to hear this. It’s a lot more fun and rewarding to build a bird house or start a local bird park. These aren’t net zero effect things but if we’re ultimately concerned about efficiency and impact, they are nominal.
We are clearly at the stage of human civilization where we have to start looking beyond immediate gratification. Is that possible? I don’t know.
Ask HN: Are there any companies doing good work in this space?
I'm looking for a new gig and have been shocked at how few companies seem to understand the types of solutions that stand a chance at making a difference re: these sorts of problems.
The most impactful solution for individuals is also enormously unpopular in certain societies, especially the US and Canada: eat less beef. Beef takes a horrendous amount of land to produce: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
Yep, #1 works well in my experience, and for us, it mostly involved doing less - letting most of our yard go back to not being an all-grass yard, leaving dead trees when possible, not trying to kill the insects that live around our house, not putting netting around our berry bushes, so it's not been particularly hard.
That is certainly one way of seeing it. I agree that government regulation can be overbearing. OTOH, although I care about environmentalism and climate protection, I am not willing to inflict personal costs upon myself, if everyone else isn't also guaranteed to be playing along. That would just be unfair.
You missed the biggest point - North America is a capitalist society and there's no money in any of these solutions. There's profit in deforestation. There's profit in using pesticides. There's profit in razing forests to expand suburbs. But there's no profit in maintaining a natural and healthy habitat for the creatures that live in the areas we want to exploit.
Do local solutions work? Yes, they absolutely do. I've been working with state and local foresters on a habitat improvement project on land that I own and it is producing real results. Since 2018 I've been converting ag land to forest and meadows. I've planted over 6000 trees with my own hands and constructed and curated scrapes (ponds) and meadow areas with local grasses and flowers. It took a couple years but the turnaround is evident. I have families of ducks living on my land that never used to be there before. The area has become popular with migrating geese and sandhill cranes. I have a healthy array of woodland creatures who took up residence including a family of bobcats. Local wildflowers have attracted and given a home to more bees than I've ever seen out on that property. By all measures my project is a success and I'll continue it for as long as I can, but all monies that fund this come out of my own pocket. I can enroll in the state's managed forest program to receive tax breaks on my property, but that's about it. I could solicit donations and look for grants to help foot the bill, but even then I'd still be in the red. The only ROI I will get from these actions is the belief I'm doing my part for a social cause. And just like governments or social groups or even corporations, when times get tight the feel-good programs and dollars are the first to get cut since they don't show a return that can be expressed on a balance sheet. If I reach a point where I can't pay for more trees or spend time planting them, I just won't plant more trees. I have 42 more acres of trees to plant but I also won't starve myself and my family to make it happen. I've talked to lots of people about the options I have for funding this work but it all comes down to either pay for it yourself or take charity.
Everyone wants to save the trees. Everyone wants to save the birds and the bees and all the furry woodland creatures but no one wants to pay for it. You're not fighting against goodwill, you're fighting against capitalism and you'll always lose because there are no objective returns on investment for the preservation of natural habitat.
That's like putting a band aid on your haemorrhaging jugular. You can plant as many trees as you want, as long as Dupont&co dump their god awful shit in the soil/water/air 24/7 it's game over
> All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
I love this idea. Affecting large change is best done by embracing the status quo of large power structures. Few have the fortitude to ask “What if everybody individually just sort of came up with their own ideas of what solutions to problems are and eschewed organization”
Rubbish. Individual action is a joke. One might believe big actors put that idiotic notion in to our collective heads to escape responsibility.
One single supermarket with open fridges and unreasonable AC settings nullifies several families’ worth of energy saving efforts. And that is one trivial example.
I’m so tired of these conservative freedom arguments. Somehow on one side it’s always the freedom to consume, like the freedom to own a 5,000sq ft home, or an oversized SUV.
Conservative freedoms never seem to be about my freedom to enjoy listening to the birdsong of native birds because we saved their habitat.
The implication is that if someone actually wanted to save the birds, you should support them, but actually everyone is just looking to curtail your freedoms and nobody is actually looking to save the birds. Therefore don't even bother trying to save the birds, if you care at all about your freedom. Otherwise you're a soft gullible mark, you wouldn't want to be a mark, would you?
That such propaganda tends to align with consumption and/or antisocial and/or selfish behavior is a big clue, but it's not the end goal.
It's probably not worth arguing about the definition of "freedom". To my eye, you're referring to two concepts that are so different that trying to use the same word for them just creates more confusion.
It is my freedom to have a big lifeless lawn that takes the place of local plants and displaces insects, which in turn starves bird populations. Why doesn't my yard have any birds?
Lawns aren't the problem. I used to live within the Willamette National Forest in Oregon and there is no wildlife there. Sure, there's a few deer, bear, and birds, but no where near as much wildlife as I can find in my suburban neighborhood. The original forest was nearly completely clearcut and replanted very densely with just a few species of timber trees. The canopy is so dense, there is no under story. There is nothing for wildlife to eat in these forests.
> The original forest was nearly completely clearcut...just a few species of timber trees.
So clearcutting and planting non-local, dominating plants isn't the problem,but clear cutting and planting non-local, dominating plants is the problem.
This is obviously two sides of the same coin, when you remove native plants, native wildlife goes away. Just because certain species of wildlife can make it work in the suburb doesn't mean that large lifeless lawns, especially in areas without intermixed native green space, are not killing off birds, insects, etc.
When Alfred Hitchcock filmed "The Birds" in Texas, his production company brought in grackles. These are the black birds in that movie. They promised to clean them up afterwards, but grackles are birds and can get away. Grackles are an invasive species in Texas, and have almost exterminated our native bird population.
I blame Hollywood, not warming for bird extinctions.
as far as i can tell, every part of this comment is fabricated. grackles are not invasive in texas, nor have they driven other birds to near-extinction, neither were they brought in by hitchcock, neither was the film produced in texas. where did you get this idea?
You're either a clueless bot or just gullible as all hell.
You can visit the filming locations on the Sonoma Coast in California. I have, quite recently actually. You can verify for yourself they are the same places by comparing movie stills to real life buildings and geography. That is, if you have eyes and legs, of course.
If you continue to break the site guidelines like this, we are going to have to ban you. I actually did ban you because your comments here and in the other recent thread have been so egregious (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36748560). But I changed my mind and unbanned you because it doesn't look like you've been doing it too frequently.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, though, we'd appreciate it. You violated both the spirit and the letter of HN's rules badly, and we've already had to warn you repeatedly about this.
Every time something like this is reported it seems like there is an opposite report posted, especially on HN. Comments or posts will show up soon that the bird population is at an all time high. Ocean temperatures are normal. Weather has been boring as of late and no unusual occurrences of anything.
So, really nothing to worry about. We can go about our lives as usual.
The second link I provide hs some harrowing statistics: eg - Tree sparrow -95 per cent. That was from 1970 to 1999. I recall recently (Countryfile - BBC programme that covers agri, countryside and enviro. issues) that Turtle Doves are now (2023) 90% down. They were ~70% down in 1999. I remember seeing and hearing turtle doves on farmland back in the day (late 70s - early 90s). One of my grandads retired to a small holding in S Devon with a mere 30 acres to worry about.
https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7381/insect-decline-an....
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/how-you-ca...