Insect collapse

I'm by no means claiming there is no problem and the situation is fabricated; However, using terms like “ecological Armageddon” really makes your amygdala go into overdrive and for what? To shock people into action or something?

mikeash2• 8 years ago

That term is a quote from one of the scientists. It also seems quite appropriate. What would you use to describe this event?

thebradbain• 8 years ago

And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late.

Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care.

And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered species list as of about two months ago [1]. Go figure. When do we do something?

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes-risk...

ribasushi• 8 years ago

I read a very in-depth write-up on your last question couple weeks ago. Have tried to post it on HN a few times with no luck. Won't spoil the "when" answer for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753499

amelius2• 8 years ago

We don't do anything because people read too much pop-sci, pretending that we can just store the DNA.

brazzy• 8 years ago

When do we do something?

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.

lucideer• 8 years ago

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of relatively economically comfortable people, and not a second earlier.

EGreg3• 8 years ago

Majority of which people?

Honduras is being impacted. Our reaction in the USA is to block the refugees fleeing famine and drought from reaching us and “invading”. Similarly with Europe and African refugees.

empath75• 8 years ago

By then it will be too late.

petilon3• 8 years ago

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of uneducated Americans.

Educated people around the world already want to do something. Uneducated people outside America already want to do something (because their governments are on board.) It is uneducated Americans -- and their president -- that is going to do us all in.

This means the survival of the planet depends on our ability to communicate with and convince uneducated Americans. That's hard. Al Gore tried long ago with his movie.

EGreg3• 8 years ago

Tigers are nearly extinct.

People don’t care.

mrob4• 8 years ago

I wouldn't have any problem with tigers going extinct in the wild.

From Wikipedia: "The most comprehensive study of deaths due to tiger attacks estimates that at least 373,000 people died due to tiger attacks between 1800 and 2009, the majority of these attacks occurring in South and Southeast Asia.[1] Over the last five centuries, an estimated 1 million people have been eaten by tigers.[2]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attack

jelliclesfarm7• 8 years ago

Apparently there are more pet tigers in Texas than in the wild. (Source unknown to me)

Tigers disappeared because of humans. Not the natural ebb and flow of the planets rhythms. Less humans = less impact.

0xBA5ED• 8 years ago

Something like a sudden coffee shortage would get people involved for sure.

fsloth2• 8 years ago

It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors.

This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them.

Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it seems there are like three people on the planet who are concerned about the quantifiable properties of our biosphere and only one of them got part time funding.

voqv2• 8 years ago

For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.

addicted• 8 years ago

But even that is misleading. A small fraction of humanity has been living really well.

And it’s increasingly apparent they have been able to do so by essentially pushing the costs of their actions to future generations.

crispinb8• 8 years ago

Even 'living well' isn't quite right. By and large, we have swapped out physical for psychological suffering.

growlist• 8 years ago

Makes me think of Buckminster Fuller's World Game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game

I guess the problem is that similar to indicators of climate change there would likely be massive methodological argument, some of it legitimate, some of it mendacious, bogging the thing down so much as to destroy its usefulness.

fsloth2• 8 years ago

I'm talking just raw numbers like you get in a weather forecast. The fact that politics would happen is not really an explanation of anything. Politics happen in everything people do - at some level.

porpoisely• 8 years ago

Using the kardashev scale, we aren't even a level 1 civilization and nowhere close to be an advanced one.

We might destroy the ecosystem and ourselves because we reach the first level of the kardashev scale.

It's simply human hubris to think we are an advanced civilization and our pride may be our downfall.

dgudkov• 8 years ago

we are an "advanced" civilization

I wouldn't call a civilization "advanced" if 3 generations ago it had a vague idea about electricity and flush toilets.

karandodia• 8 years ago

The funding issue has hamstrung scientists for decades and limited our data to a very small pool, but the trends are increasingly clear: we're well into the 6th mass extinction event. See https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... and https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/animal-de....

On a more positive note, a few folks I know are in the early stages of an ambitious attempt to regenerate a bioregion: https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/we-are-regenerating-an-entire.... The hope is that this kind of work—developing models of ecosystems rooted in complexity science that expose key leverage points—can be refined through experimentation in Costa Rica and extended to increasingly dissimilar bioregions.

titzer5• 8 years ago

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth".

When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit.

And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.

amelius2• 8 years ago

And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.

Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.

xg152• 8 years ago

I'm not sure about that. Sure, the software itself won't, but the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact: It drives habitat destruction due to mining the raw materials, pollution from waste by the mining and production processes and than more pollution when the hardware is decommissioned and ends up on landfills.

Then there is the enormous energy demand of IT systems, which in turn requires more fuel to drive them.

The industry itself is not helping either. Not just is writing resource efficient software often not a priority, it's sometimes even seen as an anti-pattern (due to a misunderstanding of "premature optimization"). In the latest iteration, we have technologies like blockchains that make wasting energy into a feature.

Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.

Meanwhile, the mission of your superiors is to make sure people upgrade their hardware as often as possible so the revenue keeps coming in.

Before there is a large-scale change of that culture, I don't think software development will be innocent in this.

gaius• 8 years ago

mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods.

I read that bitcoin produces more CO2 than the global aviation industry...

https://jalopnik.com/bitcoins-annual-carbon-footprint-is-equ...

Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.

Email, word processing, the vast majority of commercial workloads, would work fine on machines with a tiny fraction of the typical PCs power today. But developers insist on using godawful “frameworks” to do the most trivial things. Like JS based text editors that take gigs of RAM to do less useful stuff than Emacs could do in megs.

The PC of the future is something like an RPi with an eInk display with a solar panel on the other side.

eecc2• 8 years ago

Unfortunately datacenters don't run on pixie dust! I'd love to know the carbon billow produced in a 5 social media session.

killjoywashere• 8 years ago

I'll just leave this here

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

112358132134552• 8 years ago

Agreed, but I believe we can act about it.

My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible. I try to save wild life as much as possible, on every possible occasion, even if it's just moving a dead one off the road, in a better place.

At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically our planet, and our sibling animals. Of course governments need to foster this change

tejohnso• 8 years ago

My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible

You forgot to mention the #1 (by far) contributor that is 20 to 50 times more significant than everything else you mentioned.

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year).

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

Cthulhu_4• 8 years ago

If everyone does it, at best we'd get a 25% decline in emissions; the vast, VAST majority of emissions, global warming, pollution, etc is caused by industry, which in turn is controlled by governments.

Some of them are doing something about it; this morning I heard the Dutch government is proposing a new emissions tax for industry: 45 euros per ton in 2021, raising by 2% annually to 80 euros per ton in 2050. Of course, the problem is that at the same time the government is subsidizing these very industries.

But that's just a tiny country that's already doing very well in that regard; right next to us is Germany and the UK with their heavy industries. And the whole emissions of Europe is negligible compared to the US and China.

Change won't come from individuals; it comes from politics. If you really care about the environment, you'll have much more influence if you become a politician instead of (or in addition to) a vegan.

scott_s• 8 years ago

Local food is not necessarily more environmentally friendly. According to a paper on food transportation and reducing its carbon footprint, about 11% of typical US food consumption's carbon footprint comes from transportation [1]. If the food you're eating from the area you're in is not suited well for growing that kind of food, it's quite possible the local farmers are making more of a carbon impact versus growing it in a more suited area and shipping it.

[1] "Food transportation issues and reducing carbon footprint", Wayne Wakeland , Susan Cholette , and Kumar Venkat. http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf

lawlessone• 8 years ago

We're essentially gobbling up all possible biomass at this stage...

bufferoverflow• 8 years ago

The insects are dying off not because we're eating them or taking their habitats. It's because of the insecticides.

We need better ways, and technology is the only way to save us and the biosphere at the moment. No way we will choose to starve 7 billion people to death.

xupybd3• 8 years ago

The only way we’re going to get better at managing our environmental impact is going to be through technological improvement. As you say we are too many now. The only way that technology will improve is under good economic conditions. We have to weigh economic growth against its impact else we will only speed up the destruction. When people become poor environmental concerns come second place to the basics of life.

jyounker• 8 years ago

We have the technologies now. We're just failing at the political and societal organization.

latch• 8 years ago

This is silly. The economy has been booming for a while now and technology is more advanced that it's ever been. The situation is accelerating the wrong way. More of the same won't help.

Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship (overgrazing).

Better capture negative externalities. Or at the very least, stop subsidizing them. (aka, tax beef production, water consumption and plastic use).

This is a social, not technology problem.

std_throwawayay• 8 years ago

I've come to believe that we'll adjust our numbers in time. That time has not come yet but it will come.

Regardsyjc3• 8 years ago

I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it.

I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and also sometimes came off in my conversations with people which was also not helpful-because I was clearly very emotional about the issue.

My thought process is whatever happens, happens. I can't do much to prevent whatever systemic collapse that might happen or not happen. But whatever I can do, I will. When I first learned about this, I thought it meant the future that I took for granted could be nonexistent - the dying happily carefree of systemic collapse part after having a family and growing old. It made me bitter and resentful. What's the point of doing anything if the world's going to go to shit by 2030? I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic future darken my life. Sorry if this is a trash comment.

honestoHeminway• 8 years ago

You can sabotage, initiate preemptive collapse

makerofspoons• 8 years ago

This isn't a trash comment- this is exactly what I needed to read after reading this article. Thank you!

radiorental2• 8 years ago

I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today.

Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's a natural cycle and if it wasn't us, some other species would dominate the planet.

It's never a bad time to listen to George Carlin's "saving the planet"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

titzer5• 8 years ago

I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic future darken my life.

I am somewhere along this path, trying to find a mindset to cope. Yet I have the feeling that even so, widespread, happiness all but ensures the collapse, as the emergent effect of everyone being happy and living their best life, no matter what they think as they do it, is just as bad. I am sorry about this, sorry to be a bearer of bad news, sorry to bring this darkness out in the world, but honestly there is no way out of this box for humanity.

otikik3• 8 years ago

I'm still on the "affected by negativity" phase. May I ask what concrete actions are you taking (besides being optimistic).

I spent one morning with a group which plants and looks after trees in a reserve near my place. We were putting protections around young saplings so cows wouldn't eat them. It took my team of three the whole morning to put protections around a single sapling.

The whole thing made me sad. There is no way we are going to counteract our consumption with single individual actions like that. So I am looking for ways to be more effective.

jelliclesfarm7• 8 years ago

Reaching out and talking to people will help.

1. If everyone has 1/2 surviving child then in 150 years, our population will become stable.

2. It’s not transferable because we still need species diversity

3. People will be incentivized with ubi and all their needs taken care of if they agree to #1.

4.stop animal based foods.

5. Return half planet back to nature to reforest and rewind.

6.reverse acidification of oceans.

7. Find ways to restore polar ice caps and bring down planet temperature

8. Reduce fossil fuel dependence. Go nuclear.

9. Protect water.

Nature will rewild. We just need to stop being so successful with procreation because our highest achievement will result in our extinction.

My 2c.

kpennell• 7 years ago

I appreciate this helpful comment

ryanmercer10• 8 years ago

I've come to accept the fact that we've already lost the game.

I have a friend that is extremely optimistic and thinks we will figure things out, like fusion, 'because we need to' but I'm far more pessimistic.

This year, based on previous years, we will probably hit 35 gigatons of carbon emissions and it won't be long before we hit 40 gigatons. Even if a fleet of alien ships appeared in orbit today and was like "we're going to give you 20,000 fusion reactors and we should have them all operational by the end of March, this will replace all of your power needs with much room for growth" we'd need to find some miraculous way to begin sequestering tens of gigatons of carbon a year on top of what the earth can naturally do to begin to retard the damage we've done and it would take us 15-20 years to make a significant reduction in carbon that we've added since the industrial revolution.

Then we'd still have a planet lousy with microplastics that are now in the air and water. A recent study found microplastics in all participants fecal matter, on multiple continents.

Then to borrow from Loyd Blankenship in his The Conscience of a Hacker " You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, you cheat, and lie" so even if we solve our power issue, solve our carbon generation issue, summon a miracle to deal with the microplastics, make rapid advances in land management and sustainable food production, then we still have the fact that by nature humans are full of hate, full of prejudice, we are flawed with greed and the desire to wage war.

Add to that the middle class is shrinking, the lower class is growing, even a measly billionaire worth exactly 1 billion dollars has a net worth equal to 16,937 years of the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME of the United States with Forbes estimated in 2017 that there were 2,208 billionaires in the world and we are quickly on our way to seeing a trillionaire in the next couple of decades most likely...

Then student loan debt. A friend expressed to me yesterday that she "is better off dead" as she's been trying to refinance her student loans (2 bachelors degrees, different fields, decided teaching wasn't for her and pivoted to nursing) because after a year of trying to refinance the MINIMUM monthly payment is more than double what she's paying now if she consolidates and that she fully believes she will be servicing her student loans for the rest of her natural life because she's looking at 6 figures of debt that only continues to grow from interest.

I suspect this comment will be severely downvoted but my opinion stands. The world is truly and duly fucked. Barring miracle-aliens or an unprecedented number of miraculous inventions by dozens or hundreds of individuals in a very short time period, the ship is sinking.

Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.

secstate• 8 years ago

While I generally prefer optimism to pessimism, this comment seems horrifyingly accurate. We may escape to new planets, we may learn to live under the sea. Humans will likely persist for a longer time than you suggest here because we're feisty motherfuckers who are programmed to survive.

BUT when you consider how long the lizard kings owned the planet, we are but a drop in the bucket now. The thin veil of oxygen on this planet will shake us like a cold when we use it up. And like an abusive husband, we'll be stuck holding a sad empty hull of defensive behavior and anger that wont bring back ecological balance.

CuriousSkeptic5• 8 years ago

As an optimist I can just note that your, probably, fully accurate description is all artificial. Everything you mentioned are incidental issues we’ve created for our selves, and are trivially solvable from a pure technical perspective.

Organizing people to that effect might look doomed to failure, but entire economies have been overturned in decades before.

LukeB42• 8 years ago

When? Yesterday?

Enough energy enters Earth's atmosphere on days like this one to sustain 7 billion people plus the six-legged majority with room for human technological innovation. We're just not capturing each day's energy with even greater than 50% efficiency yet.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43619013?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

dharma1• 8 years ago

It feels like humans lack the capacity to optimise for success beyond reproduction and acquiring power, especially at large scales and timelines. Maybe there is a non-technological solution to this - new ways of organising that enforces better choices for the planet and our long term survival - but it's hard to see that.

Perhaps the bit flipping will be the way out of this mess - using machine intelligence to understand and help us optimise for things that we can't. I think that will take a while though - we need more legislation around polluting and overuse of resources as the immediate step.

Nasrudith• 8 years ago

I think nothing has that capacity from incomplete information alone.

One would think primitive lifestyles would produce less pollution. They would surprisingly be wrong - biomass cooking fires scale worse than petroleum ironically. Similarly the reason hunter gathers were nomadic was because they were like a plague of locusts stripping food capacity - it is no wonder humans caused so many mass extinctions with spear and arrows alone.

Given the sheer difficulty of predicting technology I don't think it is very possible beyond "Don't put lead in gasoline you morons!".

harshreality• 8 years ago

What's best for the individual is not always best for society or the world. As long as people have a mindset that prioritizes individual well-being, the only roadblock to environmental irresponsibility is to generate enough political awareness so that laws get passed that curtail some of the more harmful individual behaviors (in ways that are enforceable).

snikeris• 8 years ago

For most of those "7 billion stupid-ass humans", "their hedonistic blunder in search of more wealth" means acquiring things like food, water, and shelter for themselves and their families.

Seems like you want them to halt their economic growth?

I'm concerned about the biosphere too, but people gotta live. Check out ecomodernism:

http://www.ecomodernism.org/

It's a more productive way to frame your concern for the environment.

mempko• 8 years ago

The vast, vast majority of people use so little resources and energy, it's not even worth talking about. Even if there was 1 billion people , but those people were only Americans and Europeans, you would still see such a large collapse of our habitat. Billions of poor people are not the problem.

magduf3• 8 years ago

While I mostly agree, I would like to make one little point about "economic growth" not necessarily being worse for the planet: digital goods. People making money selling digital goods (e.g., downloadable songs/videos, subscriptions to internet content, etc.) doesn't have nearly the effect on the planet that making and shipping physical goods (VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, magazines, etc.) does, especially as computing devices become more energy-efficient. So I think it is possible for the economy to grow in some ways without a negative ecological impact.

But yeah, people buying bigger cars (SUVs) and houses generally isn't good for the planet at all.

zoobab• 8 years ago

Not when you consider that the total ecological footprint of the internet and computers.

Not to mention the impact of online shopping, which is fed by the internet as an advertising/profiling/consuming state machine.

standerman• 8 years ago

It's dangerous to be so confident about something that hasn't happened yet. Something about counting chickens...

EGreg3• 8 years ago

We are making the world into farms and monocultures. A very brittle arrangement.

ryanmercer10• 8 years ago

Somewhat related...

The other day I was annoyed at my allergies, in winter, with snow coming down and reflecting on how I never had allergies until around 30 a few years back. Bees. Bees dying. Bees eat pollen. It seems many of my friends have far worse allergies than previously...

What if we are already seeing consequences of insects dying off, like bees for example. I need to find time to try and see if there is good data on allergies, if there has been a general increase, and how it matches up with bee die off and pollen count. Is it possible that bees not being around to use pollen, has caused pollen count to go up on average, which is causing more allergy issues with humans?

And what happens if mosquitoes start dying off, we have chocolate because mosquitoes are one of the few pollinators that can pollinate the cacao tree due to the small size.

sigh

Cthulhu_4• 8 years ago

I'm not a biologist, but, if there's less bees, wouldn't that also mean there's less pollination done by them which would reduce the amount of seeds produced which in turn reduces the amount of plants?

ryanmercer10• 8 years ago

Bees aren't the only pollinators by a long shot, they're just the most commercialized/domesticated one. Take corn/maize, you have to rely on a pollinator speices or manual pollination if you grow small amounts in your garden but if you grow acres and acres of it wind alone will sufficiently pollinate it.

The plants still produce the pollen though. Pine trees for example produce copious amounts of pollen but it offers a relatively poor protein source so most pollinating insects don't make use of it.

Bees consume pollen as one of their food sources though, they just happen to pollinate plants due to accidental transfer while collecting pollen for their own use. You can then harvest some of the wax and honey as a commercial product and it's much easier to load up box after box of honey bees on a truck to transport to the next field than it is moths, butterflies, beetles, mosquitoes etc. Modern farming outright relies on domesticated bees, domesticated bees aren't remotely 'natural' though and nature has plenty of other means of spreading pollen sufficiently for reproduction.

A recent figure puts just domesticated honey bees at 80-100 million colonies worldwide. An average-size colony may bring in 100 pounds of pollen in a season so 8-10 billion pounds of pollen annually.

If you saw just a 10% die off of those domesticated colonies, you're talking about an insane amount of pollen. 2000 maize pollen grains weigh one milligram, so 907 million grains per pound for maize.

So the NAB scale, depending on the type of pollen, 5-89 grains per cubic meter of air is moderate and 20-1499 grains per cubic meter is a high pollen count.

Yeah, there's a LOT of air but you can see how even a small reduction in colonies could drastically increase average pollen counts. Add in global warming which can extend the growing season and open up new regions and you also see an amplification of pollen during a given period.

tatami• 8 years ago

I heard that pollen are more aggressive in areas with high emissions - on a reputable German radio show. This could be one reason for worse allergies, especially when you add in lifestyle changes such as moving to a city.

Personally, I could not remember a situation where I felt this could be true.

Eric_WVGG• 8 years ago

Urban planning is a factor too. Someone decided that trees dropping fruit everywhere was messy, so urban planners made a blanket recommendation to only plant male trees. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-se...

chakalakasp4• 8 years ago

For those who haven’t done so, the Pulitzer winner “The Sixth Extinction” is well worth reading. We are on the cusp of popular culture realizing the world as we know it is coming to a close and we are probably half a century beyond the point where our ingenuity or actions can do anything about it.

sethammons2• 8 years ago

Reminds me of my favorite demotivational poster:

Responsibility: no single raindrop feels it is responsible for the flood.

Simon_says• 8 years ago

That's a great quote. Very similar to: "The avalanche has has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8

gerbilly3• 8 years ago

Wendell Berry once wrote that we are at war with nature, and I think the metaphor is quite appropriate.

This war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: that is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to both sides are extremely high.

The second surprise is that we are not winning. [...] Even in our most grievous offenses against her, as in the present epidemic of habitat destruction and species extinction we are being defeated, for in the long run we can less afford the losses than nature can.

crispinb8• 8 years ago

Though I sometimes enjoy Berry, he's wrong. We can't be 'at war' with nature. We are nature. Human destruction of ecosystems is a natural process - it's not fundamentally different from introduced flora & fauna overrunning island ecologies. It's just happening on a planetary scale.

The only 'unnatural' aspect of the picture is the common notion that humans (primates designed for small-scale tribal interactions) could somehow magically adapt to managing planetary-scale populations (let alone the vast network of ecologies hosting them).

The story of human 'progress' or 'destiny' is a religious myth. Amusingly, it is held with particular vehemence by many technologically-inclined atheists without a shred of irony.

gerbilly3• 8 years ago

I read it more allegorically than that.

Being at war with nature is a good metaphor for our behaviour, because we seem determined to completely vanquish it and bend it to our will.

Of course it's a bitter irony that if we are at war with nature, we are at war with ourselves (because as you say we come from nature). I think that's implied by the passage.

The way we interact with nature is different in kind from other species, not just in scope.

For humans, it's not enough to take , say, just the fish that we need. Because of money we take _all_ the fish we can get and then sell them. What doesn't sell is thrown out.

quantum_magpie2• 8 years ago

Though I sometimes enjoy Berry, he's wrong. We can't be 'at war' with nature. We are nature. Human destruction of ecosystems is a natural process - it's not fundamentally different from introduced flora & fauna overrunning island ecologies. It's just happening on a planetary scale.

Yes, we are nature. However, in this case, we assume a role of a parasite. A cancerous growth that keeps consuming it's host until they both die. That is the uniqueness of humanity, the ability to completely destroy the habitat of the species on global scale.

coldcode• 8 years ago

Evolution will ultimately prevail; it just may not include us. In all eras of mass species die off, eventually new niches created new opportunity. Even with idiot humans messing up stuff, in a long enough timeframe, evolution will eventually route around us.

cs7022• 8 years ago

The growing body of anecdotal evidence, including the disappearance of insects at the bottom of the food pyramid in more than one area, suggests that it is now too late to reverse these dramatic changes to the earth's biosphere and humankind's ability to extract food from it.

Let us hope that as these dramatic changes start affecting more and more people in concrete ways, we, human beings, will search for and develop technological solutions that will allow us to survive and thrive in a changing environment.

rootusrootus• 8 years ago

It's an interesting position we've put ourselves into, at least in the US. Half the population in denial that anything is wrong, the other half convinced the only solution is conservation.

Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying. But I expect it will get pretty dire before enough people across the spectrum get on board.

cs7022• 8 years ago

Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying.

Exactly. That's a much better way of putting it.

graeme• 8 years ago

The guardian links to a study of a nature reserve in australia. The abstract is terrifying.

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Aim We characterized changes in reporting rates and abundances of bird species over a period of severe rainfall deficiency and increasing average temperatures. We also measured flowering in eucalypts, which support large numbers of nectarivores characteristic of the region.

Location A 30,000‐km2 region of northern Victoria, Australia, consisting of limited amounts of remnant native woodlands embedded in largely agricultural landscapes.

Methods There were three sets of monitoring studies, pitched at regional (survey programmes in 1995–97, 2004–05 and 2006–08), landscape (2002–03 and 2006–07) and site (1997–2008 continuously) scales. Bird survey techniques used a standard 2‐ha, 20‐min count method. We used Bayesian analyses of reporting rates to document statistically changes in the avifauna through time at each spatial scale.

Results Bird populations in the largest remnants of native vegetation (up to 40,000 ha), some of which have been declared as national parks in the past decade, experienced similar declines to those in heavily cleared landscapes. All categories of birds (guilds based on foraging substrate, diet, nest site; relative mobility; geographical distributions) were affected similarly. We detected virtually no bird breeding in the latest survey periods. Eucalypt flowering has declined significantly over the past 12 years of drought.

Main conclusions Declines in the largest woodland remnants commensurate with those in cleared landscapes suggest that reserve systems may not be relied upon to sustain species under climate change. We attribute population declines to low breeding success due to reduced food. Resilience of bird populations in this woodland system might be increased by active management to enhance habitat quality in existing vegetation and restoration of woodland in the more fertile parts of landscapes.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642...

peacetreefrog2• 8 years ago

It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

Edit: a lot of down votes, I'm not saying it's bad that it's frequently posted or isn't a very serious or alarming problem, or that it's showing up here so often due to some conspiracy or something.

It's just interesting, given the non-technical nature of the topic. I wonder if environmental Armageddon is of particular interest to engineers/hackers, or whether it's just an alarming story to humans generally, or what.

pohl2• 8 years ago

Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?

peacetreefrog2• 8 years ago

I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.

crispinb8• 8 years ago

1. It's not 'this story' - it's a stream of new stories about collapses of insect populations in different ecosystems (a part of the wider stream of stories about ecosystem breakdown) 2. As for motivations for submitting the stories, I can only speak for myself: ecosystem collapse is more important and interesting to me than tech. I live in ecosystems (indeed I have nowhere else to go), whereas I merely make a living from tech.

gzu• 8 years ago

The Puerto Rico rainforest? You mean the same island that got hit by a massive hurricane last year?

jelliclesfarm7• 8 years ago

Speaking as a farmer..We should return half the earths landmass to nature. We must change how we grow food. We must even reconsider our ‘food for survival and fuel’. We can all do without pork and HFCS and kale to live. We can’t live without this planet and it’s natural systems sustaining us. We should waste less. Use less fossil fuel. Every time I hear another VC flog their investment with the tired old line ‘we must feed 10 billion by 2050’, a chill runs through my spine. And another species inches closer to extinction. We have a population problem. Not an environmental problem. All this ‘innovation’ is enabling our addiction to procreation. .. all our traditional and modern methods of Ag and producing food + having breached the carrying capacity of the planet so long ago , we are losing this battle of species survival ...with willful ignorance. It’s all very disheartening.

refurb• 8 years ago

But 1/2 of the world is already wilderness.[1]

I think people underestimate just how big Russia and Canada are and the fact that for most the part, they are completely undeveloped.

[1]https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/12...

ryanmercer10• 8 years ago

I think they meant more along the lines of

"We should take half of the 17,235,800 square kilometers of cultivated land in the world and return it to nature"

Or even

"We should take half of the 1,549,600 square kilometers of permanent cropland"

StanislavPetrov• 8 years ago

Unfortunately pointing out the obvious - that the destruction of our ecosystem is a direct result of the massive overpopulation of humans - almost always results in denials and rationalizations. Those who prefer to keep their heads in the sand about massive overpopulation wave their hands and attempt to rebut the problem with two absurd arguments.

First, deniers say that people who have been warning about overpopulation for centuries have always proven wrong. This flies in the face of all the evidence, such as the article being replied to. The verdict is in, there's no disputing the damage that has been done. The insects, the birds, the fish, virtually all large mammals (and most of the smaller ones).

The Second response deniers go with is that "we can solve the problem of overpopulation with new technologies". The damage is done! What's left of the environment is being destroyed right now. Talking about solving the problem of overpopulation by developing new technologies is like talking about inventing new ways to fight fires as you watch a building burn down in front of your eyes.

This is obviously not to say that we should be killing people off or forcibly sterilizing people or any of the feverish rhetoric used by those who don't want to face reality. It means that if we as a society want to continue to live on the planet earth we need to start having a conversation about what sort of population the earth can sustainably support and what sort of policies we should enact to reach that massively reduced number at some time in the future (which hopefully isn't too late).

ackfoo• 8 years ago

The data underlying this study were taken most recently in January 2013. I wonder why it took almost six years to publish the results? Given the catastrophic nature of the findings, six years seems a long time to wait before publication.

It's hard to replicate this kind of data six or seven years out. If someone repeats the survey this year and gets different numbers, it can be discounted as an anomaly. It would have been better if the study could have been repeated right away: in the same year, or in the following year.

Also, the authors are overwhelmingly biased in favour of climate change as the cause. This is mainly a bug count. How hard is it to count the bugs and present the data and the analysis, leaving speculation about the cause to the discussion? I have to be very suspicious of a study that starts off implicating climate change instead of following the evidence. Especially when the conclusion is "we need more money to study this".

It does not make much sense to try so hard to fit climate change to the curve of this data. If it turns out that something else is operative, such as pesticide use, or the unusual solar minimum, or the unexpectedly rapidly diminishing magnetic field, then we have missed an early indication of something huge.

There is overwhelming evidence that humans are screwing up this planet, but no matter how politically correct and funding-expedient it may be to nail everything with the climate change hammer, it's not really how science is supposed to work.

It's hard to lay an insect apocalypse at the door of a 2C change in temperature. Measuring the temperature of a whole planet is hard. Pons & Fleischmann had trouble measuring the temperature change in a beaker and look at the stupidity that occasioned.

Lister & Garcia mostly rely upon increased variability in the weather to make the connection, but the fundamental mechanism is never explored. It's pretty hard to swallow that all the insects in a tropical rain forest died because they were a little too warm a few days out of the year.

Climate change has become a religion, and, like a religion, it makes a lot of money for its practitioners.

If 98% of the bugs in Luquillo are dead, then we are likely in dire trouble. If true, this finding is way too important to screw up with curve-fitting.

rubarax• 8 years ago

Someday, we will realize that it's too late. There only will be regrets. Meanwhile, we just have to ignore it and complain about stupid stuff. That's humankind.

syncmaster913n5• 8 years ago

How do we know that global warming won't ultimately lead to a better future, all things considered?

Why is all the focus on what can go wrong?

Serious questions, not trying to be cute.

eecc2• 8 years ago

Watched this the other night: https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/... It's from a Dutch broadcaster, but most of the program is in english. Very pertinent, disturbing and the questions it lays on the table unsettling.

Insect collapse

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