Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.
I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game.
Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.
Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.
I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).
Fish farms are a little like farming rabbits in packed, huge fenced in areas.
You get a lot of disease, use a lot of medicine and antibiotics - and get a lot of feces. And escaped, diseased rabbits that breed in the wild.
Fish farms on land are likely better - but at any rate, fish farms are far from being without environmental impact.
I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.
Better to avoid monocultures by buying organic/biodynamic, shopping at farmers' markets, CSA, growing your own food, etc. Eat less processed and make more from scratch. Better health, better for the environment, and you can still enjoy meat :)
When I visited Manhattan/Brooklyn recently I didn't get the sense that they were lacking in locally-sourced foods either. Main problem I can think of are food deserts, but those are more of an economic problem than scale. When I used to live in one in Baltimore though it was possible to find local food, it just took more effort.
> growing your own food
I should have quoted that directly in my original comment.
> don't consume as much non-local food
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/the_biggest_myt...
What the article is asserting and what the science shows is that even if you have Avacados being grown literally next door the environmental impact of buying them locally is often higher than shipping them from abroad.
For example, the SGU podcast they link to [1] (around 55m:50s in) discusses that the net environmental impact (carbon emissions) of shipping beef to the UK from New Zealand is less than consuming UK beef in the UK. So if you're an environmentally conscious UK consumer you should be spending extra to buy NZ beef instead of buying locally produced beef.
This is because the carbon impact of the transportation generally hovers around 10%, which leaves the other 90% for actually producing the product "locally", and some locations on earth are vastly more efficient by every environmental metric in growing certain crops or raising certain livestock.
From the podcast: "An acre of land in Idaho can produce twice the amount of potatoes as an acre of land in Kansas".
Which leaves two reasons to buy locally.
Firstly you may be living in one of the places that's efficient at producing a given product, e.g. you'd buy local beef in New Zealand instead of importing it from the UK.
Secondly there are certain products that don't ship well, e.g. heirloom tomatoes. There you simply don't have the option of buying anything except local varieties.
“environmental impact” and “carbon emissions” are not the same thing; the latter is a very limited subset of the former.
I put "carbon emissions" in parentheses there because the reason for this "buy local" fallacy to begin with is because people intuitively assume that it's the transportation of the good that makes all the difference, when the reality is that that's just 1/10 of the cost.
The environmental impact of the transportation is almost exclusively carbon emissions.
No, most of the environmental impacts of agricultural productions besides carbon emissions are still externalities, usually time-shifted, that aren't priced into the product.
This is what puts me into the defeatist group. As long as people won't even put their reproductive urges in question (and rather discuss how flying is bad), how are we even supposed to achieve anything ? This should be one of the first logical moves, yet it's so frowned upon it's never brought up. Depressing.
I see it the opposite. Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will.
My list includes:
- Flying less
- Driving less
- Eating low on the food chain
- Avoiding packaged food
- Owning and acquiring less stuff
... things like that.
My life has never been better. I wish I had started this change decades earlier.
Flying 5000 KM apparently produces approximately 1 ton of CO2. The 2010 rate average CO2 footprint per capita was about 7 tons a year, and the goal by 2050, if we mean to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming by 2100 to less than 2 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial levels, is a bit over 2 tons. So if you fly at all, making a conscious decision to fly less will help.[1]
Yes, the requirements to meet that goal of sub-2-degree warming by 2100 are pretty severe.
[1]http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/carbon-targets-for-your-footp...
For the US you have a lot of work to do before you have a moderately decent working political system.
http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-...
I posted about it here -- https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht..., although my views have continued to evolve since then -- and on my blog.
But it's not enough, right? We're completely dependent on cheap sources of fossil fuels to drive our economy. How much carbon is released in the atmosphere from just me eating food?
This makes no logical sense. Only if I fly to the moon can I ever expect anyone else too? Some things require collective action at the government level.
Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen.
Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue.
But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).
Pesticide resistant super bugs could probably breed and eat all our crops in no time.
I'm not sure it will catch on fast....
More seriously, we need to be pursuing sustainable agricultural practices. I believe that means treating crop fields as the complex microbiomes that they should be, instead of highly-tilled, species-restricted biomes. Read up on how no-till and low-till farming practices change the soil communities of worms and microbes. It's huge. We need to move away from heavy reliance on pesticide and herbicide for the health of the soil and environment neighboring the fields, not to mention our own.
The thing is, we got to heavy chemical agriculture in part because of a drive to lower fuel consumption by making fewer passes over the field doing mechanical weed disruption. Of course, mechanical weed disruption is the kind of tillage that disrupts the soil biome, so we shouldn't go back, anyway, even if you could magically make diesel fuel cost $0. We need a new way forward to feed a hungry planet in a sustainable fashion.
Now deliciously enriched with 35% more of weedkillers
I wonder if we could infuse it with some Octopus brain matter? Also, I'd like it to have the ability to remember across generations, but Octopus probably already do this.
Edit: Also, a simple step: leave parts of your lawn unmowed for a full year. This gives insects and certain endangered birds much needed habitat in what is otherwise a wasteland of suburbian lawns.
That said, "Florida friendly landscaping" (creating a yard that can adequately handle Florida's natural irrigation, which is not necessarily grass oriented) has been steadily growing in support. In fact, it's actually illegal for an HOA to prevent a Florida friendly landscape (https://www.volusia.org/core/fileparse.php/4163/urlt/HOAs.pd...), although in practice a lot of HOAs still enforce a "thou must have a large thirsty St. Augustine grass front lawn" code.
Where I live, the city has the power to abate nuisances, which involves notifying the property owner with a period of time given to bring the cited issue into compliance. If the property owner fails to correct the issue, city workers correct it and the property owner is billed an (outrageous) hourly rate, minimum 1 hour.
Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.
1) Japan's population is falling and I expect it to have fallen further, maybe to half or two thirds of current, until a global economical collapse.
2) There are ways to heavily increase the land use intensity with modern technology, which I'd expect to happen when the situation gets dicey. The Netherlands are a good example of how this can be done, essentially green houses everywhere. The actual bottleneck is how much energy you have, not the amount of land - Japan has lots of space in the sea for wind and solar energy, plus lots of unused geothermal.
- so many people don't understand statistics or science and
- some beekeepers in Germany wrote a paper. Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...
The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot.
- People panic, post it here and everywhere else, presuming that:
- proper scientific methodology was used and
- what applies to a 220-acre plot in the German hinterlands must apply to the whole world.
See how almost everyone's reply to the original post has a different recommendation? If they all worked hard to make those things happen, there would be a symphony of screams and no consensus and effective action. It's possible the right answer isn't even in there. It's possible the right answer even is, "Oops, wasn't a problem." When you act in uncertainty you make things worse.
Yes, getting the right answer is hard. It may take a good chunk of a lifetime. If you really want to change the world for the better, though, it's not a step you can skip. Saving the world over lunch while you're young is a fantasy.
You're never going to persuade everyone. There are people who know how dirty fossil fuels are, how risky pollutants are, and so on. They know that research costs money and that preserving a healthy environment will require major changes - and they don't care. Maybe because they're old and bitter, maybe because they're selfish and figure they'll ride it out while the rest of the world goes to hell, maybe because they have a death wish. You're never going to convert that group, and in fact they'll oppose you every step of teh way because they're assholes. Too bad.
The large mass of uncommitted people in the middle want to be told what to do, and the best way to tell them is to lead by example. You don't have to rush out and start dismantling pipelines, but you do have to do something - whether that's raising awareness, embarrassing a political opponent in public, blocking the loading of chemicals you've decided are especially toxic, establish a weekly neighborhood cleanup crew or whatever.
Carrying on with your own life while waiting for something you can just vote or donate to is not working very well, is it? I don't mean that as a criticism of you, but of the system that purports to offer you environmental policy as a set of consumption choices that you can choose and feel good about. I've been doing recycling and conscious consumption and 1-1 advocacy for maybe 30 years. Those efforts are great, but we're not going to conserve our way out of the problem any more than you can become wealthy by saving a few $ a week. You can outsource it by making donations to organizations you approve of, but let's be honest here, unless you can throw large sums of money at a cause on a rolling basis you might as well be flinging quarters at an oncoming steamroller. Devoting some of your time and labor and investing a bit of your capital if you can is more likely to be effective, because people are primarily motivated by the example of others. And you need to think boldly, or you won't have any impact.
Of course people who are predisposed to study and able to do so should consider academic routes. But we already have lots of highly qualified scientists, while the head of the Environmental Protection Agency likes to do photo opportunities with coal miners to show he's not a creature of the evil science lobby. There is a political conflict here and it needs activists as well as researchers, because just having the correct answer isn't enough.
Do not do something. Do something effective.
To suppose that the insect biomass is reduced because of problems with the environment, and that doing good things for the environment will help fix it, is sloppy, superstitious thinking. Will recycling help? Dunno. Will establishing a neighborhood cleanup crew help? Seems unlikely. Will raising awareness help? Only if it serves to better identify the problem or uncover a real solution.
Back when leaded gasoline was poisoning everyone, no amount of recycling, environmental advocacy, neighborhood cleanup, embarrassing politicians, etc., would have helped. The problem had to be understood well enough that people could be persuaded to agree to act in concert to solve it specifically and at great cost. This takes time and study.
Nature is not a moral agent. It will not heal and be kind simply because we act piously toward it. We must understand problems in the specific and fix them in the specific. If you want to help with this insect biomass thing, begin by studying it. Is it really happening? Is it really a problem? What is the cause? Then ask what we can do. Then try to persuade people to do it.
You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.
I am committed to acting vigorously on problems that I know are real, in ways that I am convinced are effective. There is plenty of that to go around!
I don't care about insect biomass in particular. I care about it as a possibly-wrong indicator of general environmental degradation, of which we have numerous indicators. I also have a possibly-wrong model of the root causes of this and other problems.
You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.
You can't solve everything overnight, but you can lose everything overnight while you're fretting over whether a problem exists or vacillating over its severity or dithering between a multiplicity of unpleasant solutions. An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory, and my exhortations to act, which will sometimes lead to unproductive or ineffective results, are the product of decades of observation and thought.
I'm sorry that this doesn't lead to a neatly wrapped General Unified Theory of Sustainable Sociopolitical Development - because I too would love to have a verifiable roadmap to a brighter future - but chaos is preferable to predictably circling down into a drain. Overall, I have concluded that the world is getting shittier, that this trend is accelerating, and that the costs of your gradualist approach exceed the benefits.
- Moved closer to work to minimize driving
- Take the train downtown (on nights out)
- Bike to work on occasion (it's a huge freaking hill)
- Bought programmable thermostats, LED bulbs, vent louvres. Dropped electric use 20%
- Eat organic (helps my IBS), cook at home, buy in bulk, freeze
- Started composting and recycling more. My city has good programs for such
- Ask for paper bags at grocery store, avoid plastics. Use glass storage containers, etc
Note, though this won't scale, you need to take political action to make a real change.
Yes it will. If everyone does it that's called scaling.
Build a time machine, and instill this sense of dismay, terror, and dawning realization into everyone then.
Barring that, a series of technological miracles would help, but we needed them yesterday.
Don’t have kids.
Find or form a group in your area, consider dumping or downgrading your existing career which may well be meaningless anyway, and take up activism. At least you won't be subject to suffocating feelings of futility and guilt. Start tomorrow, it'll take you a year or two of work to figure out your new job so you'd better get busy with it.
I'd recommend reading earth first! or black and green press for some better politics on a similar wavelength
Serious question: Did you only get serious with news reading in the last year or so?
I suppose reducing spending and food waste is one way an individual can help.
Or for specific problems like insects, if you have a lawn, don’t use pesticides, and cultivate areas of local plants. Grass only lawns aren’t very helpful for insects.
Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.