There is a very deep anxiety that stems from knowing that the world is dying and you have very little power to do anything truly impactful about it. This turns to a profound sadness knowing that the natural world you grew up learning about from documentaries and books, that you assumed was static as a child - that it would always be there - could possibly become unrecognizable in your lifetime.

This is just one of the myriad ways that we have impacted the world without realizing and just like software bugs, where there is one there are more. Even if we overcome global warming, there is this lingring sense that this century will be the last where nature has any resemblance to the pre-sapiens world.

Part of what the natural world imparts is a sense of wonder, things that you couldn't have dreamt up, nor anyone you know. As I've gotten older, I've developed this hazy awareness of some world that was lost to me — things that I've read about that coincide with my experiences when I was very young that I haven't encountered since then.

It's like realizing this childhood world wasn't that way just because you have changed from a child to an adult, but because the world has changed.

I'm starting to become worried over what my daughter might experience in that regard. Things that were normal for me or that she might encounter that will be gone instead. Like, will fireflies still be around for her as an adult? What about walking around with piles of snow higher than you everywhere? Will she ever see a natural unlit clear night sky? It's difficult to convey what that many stars looks like, or seeing the milky way stretched across it.

More to the point of the article, I remember freshwater bivalves walking upstream across stream beds. They aren't mussels, but still — I haven't seen any in the last several years where I used to.

I deal with this anxiety by lobbying for electoral reform. There is a lot we can do, but we have to stop using first-past-the-post, to delegate power. It's like a software bug in our global decision making. Some countries have managed to debug their electoral systems. Canada has a long way to go. US, I don't even know.

I highly recommend The Once and Future World, by J B MacKinnon (http://jbmackinnon.com/books.html).

If you're outside Canada (North America?) it can be difficult to get an ebook version; I can help with that... ;-)

(Note: with the author's agreement!)

Yeah, it's a terrible feeling and it bodes poorly for our future.

Similarly I've long been saying that our generation is the first to have no real connection to the natural world. Our grandparents grew up with their grandparents who would have been firmly planted in Terra-cognito or at least been hearing stores of it. But our parents, once removed, had nothing "real" to pass on to us, just stories at best. The baby-boomers specificlly sought to cut ties to their "stiff" parental figures and mostly were successful in reshaping the world as individualistic, something that NEVER would have worked as a survival strategy for any previous generation.

My take, the baby-boomers consciously severed our ties to the past as their children we have now lost all connections to the natural world. We get what we deserve which is utter destruction of the climate and mental suffering and disease until the day we die.

> Freshwater mussels have existed in these ecosystems for thousands of years, evolving to mimic intricate fish

this is a throwaway comment in here but it describes a really cool adaptation of some bivalves which is that their mantle looks like a fishing lure -- it sticks out of the shell and mimics a prey species. When the predator comes to strike, the mussell injects its eggs, which mature in the predator's gills.

That is terrifying, it reminds me of the alien movies.

I grew up on the Clinch. While it's not as bad as other rivers in the area, one has to think the coal industry may have contributed to this. There's a coal-fired power plant and a massive coal wash plant in Russell County, VA that sits upstream from where I think the article is featured.

TFA

> At first, biologists investigating the cause of the freshwater mussel die-off suspected human activity — contamination or pollution. Rivers and streams in the coal seam-striped southern Appalachian Mountains have a long history of environmental degradation. But pollution tends to be indiscriminate, and not every species is being affected.

Yes, thanks. I have read the article too. :)

If American English isn’t your first language, please understand the emphasis in my phrasing of “one has to think...”

English is my first language and FTA your coal pollution hypothesis would seem to be refutednwhich I think was what they were pointing out because so few people DO read the article... E.g. more species would seem to be affected although perhaps it's a compound effect such as the pollution weakens some species more and some bacteria/virus/etc. kills them in their weakened state. I do appreciate your contribution about the local pollution sources.

I was born and raised in the US.

"Has to think" is not a common construction, if you're trying to communicate something across the lines of "can't help but think".

Maybe it was this:

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

TFA

> "And it's been like that week after week after week [every fall] since September 2016."

A spill that happened in 2008 and cleaned up by 2015 would be an odd cause for that; you'd expect it to happen sooner.

Sorry, what does TFA stand for in this context?

I think it's thanks for asking but that doesn't seem to make sense?

The freaking article I believe.

The featured article.

>"The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed," wrote Josef Settele, a German biologist and co-chair of the report. "This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world."

"Nobody Knows Why".

Please don't post unsubstantive comments, and especially not shallow dismissals, to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I mean, that's a very vague generalization; "Nobody Knows Why" is about the fact that we don't know the direct causal link. It's not pollution (other mussel species in the same ecosystem are doing perfectly fine) and it may be disease but no one has conclusively determined that.

Humans. Humans are the direct causal link.

There isn't going to be some single silver bullet explaining everything further than that, it is an ecosystem collapse.

Humans impact everything in small ways, these in turn impact everything else in its network.

Sometimes positively but more usually negatively via various strains.

It's not always pollution, sometimes it's disease, sometimes it's habitat sometimes it's climate, sometimes food chain, sometimes it's noise pollution, sometimes it's even more complicated than that for example you might knock out a predator but then create more disease or remove an ecological pressure that kept a species behaviour in line with its environment.

Sure, but unless your solution is "wipe out humanity" this is so broad as to be useless for solving the specific problem, or really any problem. Unless we're supposed to just throw hands up in the air and rot away fatalistically.

Some human-caused issues are fixable. As a rough example that is somewhat similar to a mussel die-off in a river, Washington was able to bring local salmon numbers back up on a river by fixing culverts blocking stream flow and blowing up dams.

I kinda wish we could fast forward to whatever ecological nadir we end up bottoming out on. This slow drip of Earth death is agonizing.