I don't mean to imply that we're doing enough right now to keep our planet healthy. I agree with your sentiment and just wanted to provide a little context and clarification.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#quaternary-megafauna-exti...
10.000 years ago ... 15 mil. tonnes of carbon
100 years ago ... 10 mil. tonnes of carbon
now ... 3 mil. tonnes of carbon
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/04/Decline-of-wild-m...
First 5 mil. tonnes took 90.000 year. Next 5 mil. 9.900 years. Next 7 mil. 100 years. 3 mil. remain, most of the megafauna is already gone.
If we continue this trend, in 30 years there'll be only mice, mosquitos, and medusas. And farm animals, of course.
We have to switch to plant-based diets. Now. There is no other way. No time to wait for technological breakthroughs.
Whether you think this means we should eat plants or we should have 10% as many humans is an open question.
So what? What value are these species? What are they for? I'm sure we'll be able to advance medicine in other ways. I'm much more concerned about the longevity of our civilization than the other organics we happen to have coevolved with. If we have to pave over the whole planet then so be it. Organic life is common and therefore expendable. If we all die off, new life will almost certainly evolve, but a new civilization? That's much less certain.
Here is the issue: it is more than mere competition. We co-exist in a delicate balance with the rest of life, or at least we used to. Now we threaten to destroy them, and the planet on which we depend, exactly because of this implicit belief that we compete with them instead of relying on them.
Why does preservation of human civilization depend on exterminating wild nature?
The reason to persevere organic forms around us (plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc.) is rational self-interest.
Bacteria are necessary for our bodies' healthy operation. Organics generate the oxygen we need to breathe.
It isn't as if slavery doesn't exist anymore. It is not as if women aren't considered property in some parts of the world. Racism. Etc.
The theoretical human civilization that can withstand a global ecosystem collapse and exist on a paved over earth is perhaps possible with the right technology but also it is 1. very dreary and 2. much more expensive and difficult to maintain than just putting in some effort to prevent ecosystem collapse now.
Fisheries management is a good microcosm for the cost of ecosystem collapse. If we manage a fish population correctly, we can continue to harvest fish from it and get resources out of it indefinitely. If we do not manage it well and let the population go extinct, we lose that pool of resources permanently and need to replace it with another equivalent source of food which may be very expensive in comparison. Perhaps the local human civilization which relied on the fish will be unable to adjust and will also fall.
"The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year. While they claim this is to smooth supply on a year-to-year basis, conservationists believe they are acting in the expectation that in the event of the fish’s extinction in the wild, prices will skyrocket. Frozen in great stacks at –60oC by the same company who made my childhood cassette player, the bodies would be sold for astronomical prices.
It has a name, this uniquely vile game: it is called extinction speculation. It’s practised by those who collect Norwegian shark fin, rare bear bladders and rhino horn; men and women with hearts that sing along only to the song of money. There are collectors known to be building up huge piles of tiger pelts and vats of tiger bone wine. (The wine is made by soaking portions of a tiger’s skeleton in rice wine; it takes eight years to ferment, and can then be stored indefinitely.) If tigers go extinct in the wild, which is wholly possible by 2050, the value of these assets will soar."[0]
The tuna is not on brink of collapse because it competes with sperm whales for food. They were here for ... i don't know ... millions of years? It's near die off because we eat them and work tirelessly towards their extinction.
Also ... if you want to know more why it's bad when some species die off, I highly recommend the movie Seaspiracy [1]
[0] https://granta.com/tuna/ [1] https://www.seaspiracy.org/
I think this reply says it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32934162
In short, I think from a humility standpoint that's probably not the best solution. I think there's value in preserving animal life, and also they really help balance Earth's environment which we don't understand well enough nor have adequate industries to replace yet, I believe. If we're going to live in Caves of Steel anyway, why not reserve say 50% of land for wild reserves? Do you want to have paradise and however many billion people you can fit in a planetary steel maze, or do you want just one single planetary steel maze with twice as many individuals? I think the answer is the former, pretty clearly.
Also, in the long term we do have other planets we can build planetary scale steel mazes unimpeded, like Mercury -- I'm sure we'll be able to within a few centuries if we don't destroy our ourselves and our environmental sustainability (which I'm rooting for, and believe we have good chances).
The reason to persevere organic forms around us (plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc.) is rational self-interest.
Bacteria are necessary for our bodies' healthy operation. Organics generate the oxygen we need to breathe.
Is it the sense that people care about or is it a rhetorical trick to make people feel good about not caring?
The while save the planet thing isn't about the planet but about us.
If we change the environment, nature will adapt and live will continue but maybe not in a way we can survive.
So it's unlikely that we kill live on earth just the live as we know it
“… but the humans won’t.”
Yes we should conserve. But we shouldn’t get neurotic about it and depressed. We should enjoy life too.
Up farther in this thread you're celebrating increasing meat consumption as an economic victory, so I suggest you tilt your balance more towards "conservation" and away from "immediate pleasures".
Thank you for your suggestion. While I’m choosing prime ribeye steaks to grill this weekend I will consider it.
Have you considered asking those "future generations", i.e. YOUR KIDS, whether they'd like to live on a planet with a self-sustaining ecosystem or suffer through a climate catastrophe?
You can't possibly think that we don't owe it to future generations to try to leave them a better planet. Would you support setting off a nuclear war now too, because the fallout will be a future someone else's problem?
Here’s the thing - I think you believe in a weird fantasy future that you’ve been fed lie after lie about. And it has made you depressed and sad which has made you angry. You have no ability to critically examine these ideas and just accept them as fatalistic, completely ignoring the ability of humans to shape it. You sound neurotic and paranoid. Grill a steak.
We’ll be ok. We can change things as needed. Enjoy life - it’s really nice! =)
And meat eating has an enormous effect on climate change: https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-59232599
But sure, I'm the one with the fantasy future here. I wouldn't care except YOUR consumption is directly ruining the world for everyone else.
And I notice you didn't address your own comment asking why we should bother caring about future generations. How heartless are you?
If we return land to wildlife, that entails shrinking the human population by a hgue margin.
The supposed benefit is what, new medicine and regenrative dna? But why would we need that? Shrinking human population and human longevity are incompatible goals.
Switching to LED lighting put more light in my house while lowering electricity consumption. Similarly switching to more efficient daily sources of protein (plants, shrimp, etc) can give more people more food, while yielding some of the land back to wildlife.
To say nothing of inefficiencies due to weird local policies, like growing almonds and alfalfa in arid parts of California, etc.
Habitable land ... 50% agriculture, 37% forests, 1% urban and built-up land
Agriculture ... 77% meat and dairy, 23% crops
We would need just 25% of agriculture land we're using to feed the world on vegan diet, no shrinking necessary.
But on the meat diet? We'll shrink for sure, just you wait. We'll diminish and go to the west.
We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture).
Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defined by massive die off of wild species?
We have to (as a species) return the land to wildlife and let it repopulate the earth, otherwise we'll lose them. We don't even know what gems we're losing. I'm not talking about some bugs, but about dna - those are millions of years of (computer) code generated by nature, code so precious we don't even have an idea how to simulate it, let alone understand it (at this point in our evolution).
If we lose it, goodbye new medicines, new regenerative dna techniques, new technologies, and who knows what. We simply cannot know what we're stealing from future humans (this point was made for the selfish humans we are, better arguments could be made).