Not coincidentally, the human population has doubled in the same timeframe.

Is everyone else screaming inside, or is it just me?

Only a few people, I think. It's like we found the asteroid headed for Earth and instead of panicking, just shrugged.

There are probably fifty times a day I feel a deep seated dreadxiety about something I'm doing. Wearing synthetic fibre. Finding out a soap has triclosan in it. Using a disposable nappy. Eating an avocado. Eating fish (appropriately enough, eating said synthetic fibres in that fish). And yet I have colleagues who toss aluminium cans into the garbage when the recycling is RIGHT NEXT TO IT and they do. Not. Care. I don't know what to do. Individual action is meaningless - every gallon of gas I don't burn just makes it cheaper for someone else. Maybe even the driver who wants to mow me down. I despair.

My personal favorite version of this experience: Seven years ago I was working at trader joes and trying out vegetarianism for environmental reasons. A lady would come in every few weeks and buy just massive quantities of ground beef, like 30-40lbs in one trip. I finally asked her what all that beef was for and she replied "I feed it to my dogs".

What can you even do? Thats probably the no-meat diet of 10 people being offset by one persons dogs.

The higher your personal standard is the more angry you will be at your fellow human, its best to just not think about it.

If you want to change your diet for environmental reasons, I would recommend going for net positive rather than vegetarianism. It cost a bit extra, but products like honey (bee farming is generally seen as a net positive on the environment), fishing from overpopulated lakes, and meat/plants from invasive species are examples where additional commercial pressure would do wonders.

Invasive species in general often carries the problem that hunting them cost more than the population is willing to pay, so they are "allowed" to spread and cause havoc with the ecology. Overpopulated lakes generally stay such because the fish is seen as undesirable, often based purely on local cultural views. Vegetarianism do not address those issue and generally the veggies being grow are those that is already being grown beyond what would be healthy from a bio diversity perspective.

While the effect of livestock is major, my concerns were eating plastic fibres in fish (though the negative impacts of aquaculture are many) and suppporting cartels by eating avocados.

Get used to it. Everything comes to an end. All your favorite animals will, and humans will, and whatever comes after them.

I highly doubt consuming meat today affects lifestyle of most humans in 50 years noticeably.

True, and given the heat death of the universe I'm pretty nihilistic, but I like to think there is purpose in even temporary goodness and beauty. A bell's ring will fade to nothing but their sound still brought joy, if only briefly.

Nothing wrong about being an anti-nihilist. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAntiNihilist

On the counter. What if it does. What if after 50 years, humans really hate their predecessors and carry shame like the Germans do for Hitler.

Just sayin!

Well, what if instead they think how stupid were we to not develop fusion sooner? Or immortality? Or human bioengineering? Eating cows hardly can make that list if we pick top 10 pressing matters.

Seriously, you want to make real impact, learn yourself a high energy physics degree and do research. Not eating meat is a joke. We as humanity will make not eating meat much sooner if we'd focus on uploading and fusion.

If you really want to make a change, leave the city and go live in the countryside. You'll be able to consume less, grow your own food and be closer to nature.

Funny enough,I've generally recoiled at that idea because traditional exurban living has a very, very high carbon footprint. Of late though I've been investigating homesteading and inexpensive land at least 20 metres over sea level that would still be comfortable 5c warmer.

Not sure what to do about civilizational collapse though.

In most cases I think that would necessitate owning a car. I think not owning a car and living an urban lifestyle is a better tradeoff for me at least.

Cities are more sustainable for most people, by definition really. Homesteading with high biodiversity and a cargo bike might be good too, but probably not for ten billion people.

Your actions are not meaningless. They are what one person can accomplish, and thats what everybody has to be content with when in doubt.

If you make the world better by being less bad, then chances are you are already doing what one human can do. That is fine and enough for one human, by definition.

When we aim for the stars we first must learn to walk, and be content with little steps for a very long time.

I just meant that my reduced negative externalities will be produced instead by an opportunistic actor. If half of Americans said "burning carbon is bad, I'll ride a bike instead" it would largely be making gas cheaper for the other half, who would then just buy bigger, heavier SUV's. This doesn't apply to all things, just cost-limited goods where the negative externalities aren't priced in. Plastic is basically free (not cost limited) so at least there reduced consumption kind of matters.

The other option is to run for office and effect change that way. That one just might do something.

Pretty much this.

If you want to reduce the consumption of some thing, make it more expensive.

Paradoxically: increased efficiency reduces costs and so increases total consumption. This was noted by economist and engineer William Stanley Jevons, in the 19th century.

There are different ways of increasing costs, and not all necessarily involve prices (or taxes), though those tend to be the most effective and easiest ways to do so. Legal, social, and moral costs can also be imposed (criminalising use, making use anathema, making use taboo), but these take time to impose and have various side effects.

This is a difficult problem, and even recognising the dynamic is difficult. It's deviled ecolologists, economists, politicians, and others, for over two hundred years (and arguably, for over two thousand).

Smaller scale of production usually decreases efficiency, increases costs, and thereby decreases consumption.

That depends on what's prompting the smaller-scale activity.

If increased capabilities allow more parties to engage in an activity, you'll increase total consumption.

If increased costs reduce the effective maximum scale of operations, you'll tend to have reduced consumption.

One formulation I've come up with is that "bad hygiene leads to decentralisation", where hygiene is meant in the general sense of systemic health and efficiency. Anything that reduces the capability of scaling up operations will lead to more and smaller rather than fewer and larger units of operation. This is something that proponents of decentralised systems might want to consider.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/36518392

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7h8sqk/open_th...

> I just meant that my reduced negative externalities will be produced instead by an opportunistic actor.

I don't think this is true. Humans are deeply social and copy each other. One can easily see this with young humans, but I didn't fully appreciate this with adult humans before I saw it myself. When I turned semi-custom-vegan, I did hear that it is kind of pointless because animals will still be slaughtered for others. But even suprising to me it turned out that several of the people I interact with started to reduce their meat consumption as well. We aren't all egoistical ignorants that only think of their immediate benefit.

When I cycled to work in LA people seemed more keen on terrorizing me on the roads, or joking about killing me in the office, than on copying me.

If half of the current car owners in the US stopped driving, it would have consequences on a global scale. Presumably they'd also stop buying new cars, for one thing...

But that example is extreme. There's strength in numbers, even smaller ones. If 5% did what you describe, there'd be that much more people demanding streets that are safe for biking, etc.

Many of us also despair, but the world at large thunders on. Humanity seems to be collectively determined to march full speed ahead and face any problems as they happen. Sadly this means the planet is going to lose a majority of its genetic and ecological diversity, and that is going to be a great loss to us from several angles, but modern society and our economic structures are simply not placing value in such intangibles.

Planetary carrying capacity has to go somewhere. More humans + human animals and crops = fewer wild plants or animals

That's just an intuitive thought, I am not sure if it is necessarily correct in all cases. It certainly at least correlates.

Some of us are screaming outside as well.

Does anyone know the source of those stats?

"steep decline of animal, fish and bird numbers was calculated by analyzing 10,000 different populations, covering 3,000 species"

Logistically speaking, I'd like to know how they tracked that. I've seen how caribou are tracking in Canada rather effectively (http://mffp.gouv.qc.ca/the-wildlife/hunting-fishing-trapping...)

However, specifics of their research I'd find very interesting if indeed I could see it sited.

Any help?

Not by tracking, really, but I'd assume by population sampling. Rough counting of a species in an area or on a migration path, and then comparing it to historical data.

There was a more recent study about insects in Europe confirming your assumption. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-14/global-population-fly...

Fish species used for food have been tracked in various studies, ranging from about 50-90% decline in 100 years in the 5ish studies I have read.

On my mobile with shitty 2g right now,but googling overfishing or fish pupolation is always recommended

This article is from 2014. The fact that it is 2018 and we still have to convince people this is a bad thing is alarming.

Problem is how many people really care enough to do much about it?

I think it's more brutal than that. How many humans are we willing to kill (or watch them die) in order to do much about it?

Most humans care some about animals, but they care more about humans.

(Yes, I am well aware that the developed world could accept a lower standard of living, and that would help. I question whether it's enough. And yes, I am aware that that is not an excuse for the developed world to do nothing.)

This is a good point as while there’s not an agreed upon formula for how many nonhumans are worth a human, I’m certain that the vast majority will prioritize human life over animals.

Fortunately, the human growth rate is stabilizing so hopefully we can figure out how to have humans grow to a natural equilibrium AND keep diverse ecosystem. If the question is framed as either humans or animals, society will end up with only zoos, farms, and humans.

I dislike this line of thinking. There's plenty we can do to reduce our impact on the Earth. Things like eating less beef, walking/bicycling when traveling short distances, reducing single-use plastic consumption, etc. go a long way. In the U.S., we think plastic takeout containers, driving 1/2 mi to the convenience store, eating meat every meal are normal. They're not; these are all absurd things the future will look back at with contempt.

If the world's population lived more like an average Indian, the human population could still roughly double without issue. If the world's population lived like an average American, we'd need 3.1 additional Earths to sustain us. [1] We're kind of jerks.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712

> Things like eating less beef, walking/bicycling when traveling short distances, reducing single-use plastic consumption, etc. go a long way

I think the above things are useful, but I doubt that they would really go far -- the population growth of the past several decades is unlikely to be balanced by a few relatively minor adjustments you cite. I suspect technological advances like efficient vehicles (or synthetic beef as you put big emphasis on beef consumption) will help more than biking.

I am all for biking, but you are unlikely to reduce car use by more than 20-30% by it (bad weather, aging) while increasing miles per gallon (or a similar metric) has more upside potential.

In the end though I think we have too many people already and will have way more in 20 years; unless we address this somehow all of the above could be irrelevant. Just my 2c.

Why is it bad though? Unless it affects human population, I don't see why should I care. Do you consider it immoral? Well, morality is personal, and most don't agree.

It does affect human populations[1] and morality is irrelevant.

People don't think there's inherent value in biodiversity, but in reality there are certain ecological functions carried out by many species that we take for granted. These ecological functions are critical for the environments we live in. E.g. Water Filtration [2]

Okay still don't buy it? Well let's talk about efficiency.

There are a couple of startups who are working on carbon scrubbers. [3] They see it as a potential market as the amount of carbon increases. I think this is ridiculous... grasses are extremely efficient at sequestering carbon, specifically bamboo. The entire attitude of science being able to combat climate change smells of engineer's disease[4]. Bamboo has been evolving for millions of years to efficiently remove carbon from the atmosphere. A couple of engineers are not going to be able to compete with that in a realistic time frame.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11148

[2] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120925-natures-water-purif...

[3] http://shanghaiist.com/2016/08/04/smog_diamonds.php

[4] https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...

Simple evolutional strategies are orders of magnitude less performant, than even relatively simple neural networks. I don't see how a mere million of years can compete with one dedicated 100 billion neuron network, let alone multiple of them.

I mean, I admit I have what you call 'The Engineer Desease'. I believe in scientists more, than in plants.

Steep incline in usage of synthetics and synthetic pollution might also be a leading cause. We might have to use everything biodegradable and for long. No wonder cancer, premature babies, allergies have increased in past years.

What if say 200 years from now, we have a human population of 20 billion people where everyone lives like the current top 10% of people in the USA. There is long life-expectancy, very low childhood mortality. Low inequality.

There are however no wild animals on land. Every land animal is either a pet, livestock, or in a zoo or preserve. Except for the limited species above, every other land species is extinct (but their DNA is preserved).

Would the above scenario be one that is appealing to you. Is wildlife and ecological diversity a good apart from its human benefit? Is human good worth harming ecological diversity for?

Why wouldn't it? Certainly better, than attempts to artificially limit population.

I’d highly recommend visiting Serengeti or the Masai Mara.

100’s of kilometers of wilderness where animals freely roam about and do their thing without human competition is a very surreal sight.

If the mara+Serengeti or the barrier reef disappear from the planet, I wouldn’t want to live with joy anymore.

I bet you would.

I'd say that in this utopia of yours maybe all those mostly equal super rich inhabitants of earth could afford to drop one or two percent of their luxuries for the benefit of biodiversity.

I am reading your post wondering how that could happen. Wildlife disappearing is not the problem is merely as symptom of the problem - too many people.

I don't think it's the number of people that matter, but rather the behavior of those people.

It appears that humanity lived in balance (Lotka-Volterra style) with the rest of the inhabitants of the planet until the invention of agriculture, which is still relatively recent.

The transitions that led from agriculture to walled cities to city-states to modern nation-states all occurred within the past 10,000 years or so. Whereas the oldest known human fossil is something like a million years old. Divide that 10,000 by the million years our species has been on this planet, you get 1%. So for 99% of humanity's time on the planet we probably behaved a lot like most of the other land mammals.

Something happened that led to the changes in our behavior, and we are now facing the consequences of our collective actions for the past thousands of years. It looks like we'll need to change even more before it's too late.

We have much more people on earth than we had 500 years ago. We probably have much less wildlife than before. However, people now on average live longer, healthier lives than before. As humans, we are much, much better off than we were 500 years ago. Wildlife as a whole is probably worse off than it was 500 years ago. Thus, it is not an impossible scenario to have humans thriving, but wildlife in serious danger.

> As humans, we are much, much better off than we were 500 years ago.

That's very subjective and depends on what you are measuring. Sure we have less conflict, less people in absolute poverty, but we also have more people in slavery than any time in history.

Me, personally, I would find that outcome depressing as hell. But I also recognize that as my personal preference.

- - - -

In a less personal sense I think Nature is sentient and could destroy us overnight if She wanted to, but apparently She doesn't, at least so far.

Perhaps the natural, wild world is like the yolk to humanity's chick embryo and the Earth is a cosmic egg... What we are experiencing could be totally Natural.

- - - -

Along a completely different tack, I don't think that scenario would be stable: I believe eventually something would go seriously out of whack in a simplified and artificially-controlled ecosystem (cf. Biosphere II)

- - - -

In any event, I believe there's a better option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo

"Toby Hemenway - How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization"

It would continue even if we disappeared today.

We have spread invasive species all over the place. Many of them haven't even been noticed yet. This includes stuff like soil fungus.

Even when we do notice, we do nothing. Cats are a huge problem, but obsessed cat lovers are well-organized politically. They show up in force at every town council and country commissioner meeting where a cat issue comes up, defending stuff like giant feral cat colonies right next to the beach where endangered beach mice should be reseeding the grass that holds the beach in place. [edit: getting my cat lover downmods... but this is an actual problem causing beach erosion in Florida, and there is indeed a giant cat colony in my area that isn't more than 500 feet from the beach]

If we disappeared today, the extinctions would just continue.

Feral cats in Australia are seen as pests in some region.

This is so sad.