Posted by pseudolus 11 hours ago
Push your leaders to stay the course
Uhh, yeah, I think that one was certainly known to be a non-starter when drafted in 2022. Most of the targets are vague and subject to interpretation. Some of them are loaded with overly effusive language. Not an agreement, it seems, that will garner much in the way of political support. It was clearly designed as idealism rather than policy.
Paraphrased: "Nature will be fine, it's humanity we should be worried about."
Bounce back can take millions of years.
In the end this is about protecting and preserving our own ecosystem without which we will perish.
Instead of trying to perform a balancing act with nature we should just continue to shape things into things that are more convenient to us. Like redirecting water into a desert.
When this is the status quo, I'm not very hopeful of humankind's general capability to control the nature in ways that ultimately benefit us.
Or take the Netherlands, that used to be a lot of water and now it is a lot of flat land.
The knock on effects of those changes to one of the most important and diverse ecosystems on the planet cannot possibly be completely predicted beforehand.
For all we know the universe could be teeming with life, in whatever shape or form. And since we see the first signs of life about 500 million years after the plant was formed, there's a good argument to be made that life doesn't need much more than a stable energy gradient and some basic building blocks to get started.
Nearby me is a cloud forest in central America. The last time we had a strong El Nino, substantial amounts of endemic amphibians that live up in those forests lost the mist-melt puddles they depended on. If the drought we're experiencing continues as long as expected from this cycle, we're going to lose a lot of beautiful frogs forever.
Can I do anything about this? Find my favorite frog community on my favorite mountain and regularly lug a backpack of water up there? Run up a sprinkler system? Will it make a difference?
I refuse to believe that humanity on a whole is that incapable. Or at least unwilling to try to do something different.
call me crazy but i think human behavior is in fact a subset of "life"
That's all observation, reasoning, and logic. Merely observing what occurs in a system that loses or gains is enough data to make fairly striking conclusions. The systems never return to baseline. Not once. Not ever. We've never observed a return to baseline after a species is destroyed, nor if an invasive species enters the system.
Once balance is lost, it cannot be attained again. Will not be. Has not been. Observed data is clear about this pattern. There is no equilibrium. There is a system that is functioning and then there is a system that no longer functions. There are no return to function systems in nature. Humans have not observed a mechanism that would bring that about, nor observed the occurrence of such.
One failure leads to another, and to another. Cascading. That's what we observe over generations of data collection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0
> (11:55) ...of our 500 native bees... the most... found... in a restoration... is under a hundred. So, more than 80% of our bees are confined to remnants. And... a garden... [only] 16 different species of bees... in the best prairie garden... If you look in our book under [a specific plant species], we have... well over a hundred insects listed for that plant... but only in remnants... You could plant [species] in your garden, you get the same old 15 bees... they're not as agile as we think.
> (21:00) (Comparing his 'restored' prairie to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) This isn't a remnant, never will be. Once a prairie is gone, it's gone.
> (34:15) (Again comparing his 'restored' prairie compared to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) It'll never have the insects that a remnant does, not even close. The insects require a whole lot more things, so if we don't save the remnants, the home of all of our remnant biodiversity... what was it, the guy going on telling everybody 'if you plant nature in your yard, it'll come back'... it's assuming that the insects are just going to come there. It doesn't happen. You have to save the remnants... Our generation needs to deploy great armies to identifying and preserving what little remnants we have left. Otherwise, there'll be no germ material out of which to build a tomorrow. It'll all be gone.
> (49:40) Our culture is so out of phase with reality... we just don't have any sense of the cascade of consequences that flow from... things that we think are just fine.
> (52:55) The average person today in Illinois can get born, can live, and die, and not see anything that was not made by man.
Even letting aside any survival mechanism we have there are two rational posibilities:
1. We are alone in the universe => super huge loss of complexity and consciousness
2. We are not alone but at Universe scale intelligent life seems rather scarce => still huge loss in diversity
That's why it's important to find joy in the moment and ways to share that joy and happiness with those around you.