Also, there are mushroom species that can breakdown plastics in effect getting rid of stuff that woulf take hundreds/thousads of years to decompose.
Mushrooms are amazing
Lichens are incredible. Check out the book Entangled Life, which Paul Stamets proclaims is "a must-read!"
Neat evidence either way, that they thrive in that condition.
> Fungi have been proven to be a cheap, effective and environmentally sound way for removing a wide array of contaminants from damaged environments or wastewater. These contaminants include heavy metals, organic pollutants, textile dyes, leather tanning chemicals and wastewater, petroleum fuels, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, pesticides and herbicides in land, fresh water, and marine environments.
Who says otherwise?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
We are killing species at 100-1,000 times the background rate. The damage can never be undone. The Earth may recover, on geological time scales, but 99.9% of those species aren't ever coming back. It's extremely unwise to be committing mass murder on the biosphere like this, and not a matter of "frugality".
No one asserts climate change is gonna crack the planet in half.
Damage to nature, as a general concept, can often shorten lives, cause great harm to the living (warfare, starvation), and cost enormous amounts of money - climate change is very expensive. One reason is that we have enormous amounts of fixed capital - 10,000 years worth, in a way - invested in the ecosystems as they currently are, including all our agriculture, ports, cities, infrastructure, borders, food and water supply, etc. etc. It will be very expensive and pointless to rebuild it all for new ecosystems instead of just retaining what we have.
Also, most people agree that harming animals is also wrong, though not nearly on the level of harming humans. If you physically abuse your dog, for example, people will be angry and there are laws against it in most places.
And I think most people value what is 'natural' to some degree; it seems like a common value of humanity across time and cultures. They prefer the natural hill to the strip-mined one, the green field to the parking lot. They also like coal and parking their car, so there are competing values too.
[0] :)
Believe it or not, I have met many people which have a belief system close to "humans are scum and deserve to go extinct" along with "but we're hurting rabbits, and they're cute!".
These people prattle on extensively about how our activities are "hurting the planet", without caring that we're actually hurting ourselves. We aren't part of the equation. Mostly, these sorts just repeat things they've heard without ponderance or thought.
I've had conversations with people about how mosquitoes are important, not to be a food source for things, but instead, because "poor mosquitoes". It doesn't matter to them that mosquitoes are the number on killer of humans, AND the same can be said for the harm caused to animals.
I often wonder if this sort is just a troll. Trolls existed way before the internet ever existed, they can be found at town meetings.
Ah well.
Re: mosquitoes. I absolutely think we should genetically engineer methods which result in the extinction of all blood sucking animals. Leeches, mosquitoes, all flies, bed bugs, you name it. The pain and misery that humans and animals alike suffer from such horrors, is immense.
Animals have been seen to run off of cliffs, due to biting flies swarming them.
They spread disease, they cause infection, and frankly if 10% of birds of extinct as a result, well I will be sad but call it a fair price.
We need to start geo-engineering our own biosphere. This seems like a very good start.
(NOTE: before replying, people should consider. Do they live in a nice city, with almost none of the above parasites? Or do you have great experience of going outside in the spring, in a rural area, with quite literally mosquitoes so thick that you have a hard time seeing through them?
Have you lived in an area where you're being attacked by 100s of insects simultaneously? That's not an exaggeration, even remotely, I can walk outside my door in May and have literally more than 100 insects trying to suck my blood in under a minute.
If these things aren't true, if you don't know what life is actually living in nature, and not just inside a city, then I submit that your opinion has far less value.)
That does not mean you stop working towards a goal, or you drop the concept of modifying the universe around you. If that were so, we'd still be in the stone age.
Instead you observe those mistakes, consider the lesson of those mistakes, and then apply them towards further efforts. Anything else means we may as well give up all science, and cower in caves.
> I absolutely think we should genetically engineer methods which result in the extinction of all blood sucking animals. Leeches, mosquitoes, all flies, bed bugs, you name it.
We know better now.
If by this you mean "We should be afraid to do things, because once someone made a mistake", then I guess yes.
As per my prior comment, the sort of logic you are employing is "A bad thing happened once, so we MUST stop all efforts along this tact". Such thought processes are akin to "Let's curl up into a ball and cower". If we took this tact, literally every scientific improvement we've ever had would be out the window, because literally everything we've done has killed people.
Instead what we "know better now", is that we know that we absolutely must look at the entire food chain. We know that we must examine potential ramification with greatest care. We know "better now", to take great care, and move with great deliberation.
The answer is not to go back to the caves. Or to halt progress. The answer is to do better.
To speak to the posted wikipedia article?
In as with many things, it is incorrect.
Here is what it says:
The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962.
Here is what the discovery article says:
The mass deaths of sparrows and nationwide loss of crops resulted in untold millions starving and 20 to 30 million people dying from 1958 to 1962. A 1984 article on the mass famine put it simply: “China suffered a demographic crisis of enormous proportions”
Here is what the paper summary says:
The largest famine in human history occurred in China in modern times and passed almost unrecognized by the outside world. Demographic evidence indicates that famine during 1958-61 caused almost 30 million premature deaths in China and reduced fertility very significantly. Data on food availability suggest that, in contrast to many other famines, a root cause of this one was a dramatic decline in grain output that continued for several years, involving in 1960-61 a drop in output of more than 25 percent. Causes of this drop are found in both natural disaster and government policy. The government's responses are reviewed and implications of this experience for Chinese and world development are considered.
Note how the Wikipedia states 20 to 30 million died directly from starvation. The discovery article states that "untold millions" died from starvation, and as well, "20 to 30 million dying", which of course can be "related". EG, mass migration, unrest, civil disobedience, and more.
Note how the paper itself says, that it was caused by "natural disaster and governmental policy", with "natural disaster" listed first.
I cannot access the paper, but I presume there was not just locust, and not just governmental policy, but a myriad of things happening at the same time, of which governmental policy was one of them. Otherwise, governmental policy would be the primary discussion, not one of the events.
In short, I dispute the numbers presented. I suspect this is a tale that has grown more and more dire, with each retell.
However! I absolutely agree that unplanned efforts, and mistakes, can indeed be disastrous. There are other examples of how dire, messing with an ecosystem can be. Yet that does not mean we stop!. If anything, we'll have to do more work in this regard, as global warming changes things faster than evolution and species migration can happen naturally.
No; you're fighting a strawman.
Interventions of this nature must be carefully planned, tested, and understood. I support, for example, efforts to eradicate Aedes aegypti because the due dilligence has been done. We have a reasonable understanding of its position in the food chain, smaller-scale test efforts have been done in a variety of places, etc.
"We should eradicate everything that eats blood" is... not the same.
Without the goal (eg, get rid of those damned bloodsuckers), the amount of diligence required isn't going to even start.
You need a goal, and then, you need to assess.
The bloodsuckwrs must go.
To my (admittedly layman) understanding, they're sort of life's premiere resource extractors. Their whole thing is breaking down things that other life can't, so it's not surprising at all that some species can consume oil.
We know they co-evolved with plants, and one theory suggests that fungi allowed plants to make the jump from water to land by using their hyphae to act as a proto-root system, unlock nutrients like phosphorus from the soil, and transport water, while early land plants provided sugars produced from photosynthesis in return.
One of the main differentiations that might have led to the split between proto-fungi and proto-animals is their nutrient acquisition strategy. The organism that would become fungi had extracellular digestion, while the organism that would become animals captured and ingested other organisms.
This split led to different approaches to cellular adhesion along with different developmental and signaling pathways (different strategies for achieving homeostasis for instance).
---
If you want to read about some really wild stuff, look up the Late Paleozoic era in the Carboniferous period. Basically plants evolved Lignin (wood) but there was nothing in the world that could break it down so it rapidly accumulated along with a hyperoxgenated atmosphere due to the extensive growth. This meant there were 8 foot long millipedes and dragonflies that size of crows flying around. There were also massive forest fires spanning the globe since fire was one of the only ways to get rid of the lignin until, eventually, some fungi evolved to take care of the problem.
That was my understanding too until recently, when I have read in a couple of places that things might not have been like that. Checking the Wikipedia article about Carboniferous [1] it seems there is not consensus yet:
"There is ongoing debate as to why this peak in the formation of Earth's coal deposits occurred during the Carboniferous. The first theory, known as the delayed fungal evolution hypothesis, is that a delay between the development of trees with the wood fibre lignin and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading fungi gave a period of time where vast amounts of lignin-based organic material could accumulate. Genetic analysis of basidiomycete fungi, which have enzymes capable of breaking down lignin, supports this theory by suggesting this fungi evolved in the Permian. However, significant Mesozoic and Cenozoic coal deposits formed after lignin-digesting fungi had become well established, and fungal degradation of lignin may have already evolved by the end of the Devonian, even if the specific enzymes used by basidiomycetes had not. The second theory is that the geographical setting and climate of the Carboniferous were unique in Earth's history: the co-occurrence of the position of the continents across the humid equatorial zone, high biological productivity, and the low-lying, water-logged and slowly subsiding sedimentary basins that allowed the thick accumulation of peat were sufficient to account for the peak in coal formation."
One way or another, I find fascinating how different the planet has been along its geologic periods.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Coal_formation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...
500-600 million years: The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop once the oceans evaporate completely. With less volcanism to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall. By this time, carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that use C3 photosynthesis (≈99 percent of present-day species) will die.
...
800-900 million years: Carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C4 photosynthesis is no longer possible. Without plant life to recycle oxygen in the atmosphere, free oxygen and the ozone layer will disappear from the atmosphere allowing for intense levels of deadly UV light to reach the surface. Animals in food chains that were dependent on live plants will disappear shortly afterward. At most, animal life could survive about 3 to 100 million years after plant life dies out. Just like plants, the extinction of animals will likely coincide with the loss of plants. It will start with large animals, then smaller animals and flying creatures, then amphibians, followed by reptiles, and finally, invertebrates. In the book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, authors Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee state that some animal life may be able to survive in the oceans. Eventually, however, all multicellular life will die out.
So this doesn't shock me at all, its an example of how regardless of humanity's arrogance, life on Earth will be around long after our species and its descendants cease to exist, to think otherwise is to prove one's ignorance.