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Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
Don't misread the headline like I did when I saw it! This isn't about extinctions: we haven't killed off 60% of species. We have reduced the population of all animals by an average of 60%.
We've semi-consciously evolved into the de-facto stewards of the planet and we've mismanaged her horribly. I don't think it's too late for us to take a more conscious and caring attitude and repair what harm we've done, and I see glimmers here and there that we are starting to. It's just a matter of what comes first: a shift in collective consciousness, or cataclysm.
There's simply too many humans for things to improve. We're outbreeding and overkilling every other species of animal.
We absolutely need to do an about face. We've needed to for a long time. The depth of our abuse and misunderstanding of our universe and our fellow beings and ourselves is rather boggling. We are at a point where we have the capacity to consciously control the course of our own evolution and to guide the entire planet, and we could do it in a sane way.
I don't think it's hopeless yet but we really need to hurry. A massive shift in our collective consciousness could stop this in its tracks and set us to rights, and everything we need for that to happen is in place. Easy access to the world's library of knowledge, worldwide instant communication, massive wealth and advanced technology (which is being hoarded and misused but exists nonetheless). And the level of absurdity in our societal narratives is reaching a critical mass as we follow our current widely-established belief systems to their conclusion and see that it simply isn't working. We are at a crossroads where we decide whether to redefine ourselves as a species or march to armageddon, and I don't think we're out of that crossroads just yet. But we're definitely leaning very strongly towards armageddon right now.
On the graphs there the rate of vertebrate animals population reduction decreases. Populations shrink much slower now than in the 70s. Also environment protection is much more prevalent, popular and enforced now than at any time before. This means that probably the situation will improve in the future. Even if not, humanity is a resourceful, resilient, adapting power that will try its best to keep surviving and progressing, even sadly without big animals and with only highly synthetic food in a bad case. Also, news can be fear mongering sometimes.
You can't turn "things aren't going bad as fast as they used to" into "things will get better" without something better than mere wishful thinking.
As long as humanity's population continues to increase, we will continue to take habitats from other animals: land to build housing on, land to farm on. As long as the globe continues to warm, animals will continue to die from the effects of climate change. It would take drastic action for these trends to be reversed.
And sometimes it just shows the facts. If you're afraid of the facts, that's not the newspaper's fault.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_laws_by_country sorry a huge number of rather new environmental laws are not just wishful thinking, and when despite human population growth animals population gradually stops decreasing, that correlates with introduction of the laws. These laws are a strong representation of globally rampant good intentions of humanity towards decaying environment. This, and increasing efficiency of agriculture, food and chemical industry, as well as popularity of vegetarian diets, sets the trend of approaching some kind of minimal point and maybe even improvement after that. Not going to zero.
It's alright if you don't want to have children, but we won't extinct ourselves. That's a fantasy.
Why do you say that?
I just think it is very unlikely that humans will become extinct in some matter of decades. I feel a lot of apocalyptic sentiment is driven by disinterest toward problem solving, or a lack of imagination in regards to the ways humans might adapt. It is a fantasy; "if there's nowhere on this planet for my way of life as I have known it, perhaps there will never be anywhere for anybody's ways of life ever again." Even in the face of advancing climate change, I don't think it makes sense to draw a line from our effect on animal populations to a hypothetical "maybe OUR population will be reduced by 60% too -- or more!?"
I don’t think humanity will end, I don’t see it remaining in anywhere near a recognizable form though.
We're not going to go extinct. Our fancy industrialised technological urbanised way of life will probably take a big hit, and a lot of us will die from starvation, disease, and war - but humanity will carry on, albeit in rougher circumstances and in smaller numbers.
There will be 8 billion of us soon, that's reason enough to stop and rethink parenthood.