Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

&gt; &quot;Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials,&quot;<p>This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat&#x2F;oil&#x2F;etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable&#x2F;plant-base&#x2F;new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition.<p>The problem with economy&#x2F;ecology is that many people are addicted to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to replace the problematic industries.<p>The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big investors to do the right thing.

The key quote is that 94% of the drop is in Latin America and the Caribbeans. For example in France forests are increasing since more than 100 years [0].<p>So discussing diet is interesting but eating les meat in the developed world will do nothing for the obvious big problem: Amazon deforestation.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1122699&#x2F;forest-area-surface-france&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1122699&#x2F;forest-area-surf...</a>

&gt;New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food.<p>I&#x27;m pessimistic with this claim. From my experience, if a productive process like agriculture becomes more efficient, we scale up output. The resources being used up, in this case land, won&#x27;t be reduced. For an analogy, consider how adding more lanes to a busy highway ultimately means more people drive and congestion is just as bad.<p>What we need is more government protection of habitats. But it&#x27;s hard for a government to directly and explicitly oppose economic opportunities.

I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we stopped destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are already living in small, isolated pockets surrounded by roads, farms, and industry. Meanwhile, plants and smaller animals face intense competition from invasive species - often brought in by accident thanks to the constant flow of goods around the globe. We&#x27;re probably headed for a pretty homogeneous global ecology - where &quot;economically significant&quot; or highly adaptable plants and animals thrive, while the others are relegated to zoos, national parks, or extinction.

Ok, this is a crazy comment, but I have been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 a lot and almost every piece of land has something, somewhere built on it. Farm, suburb, etc It&#x27;s depressing but maybe it helps me understand that we are using too much of earth. Do we really need endless farms?

How are people on Hacker News changing their behavior around food and energy consumption?<p>And besides individual action what community action have you taken?<p>Personally I have found myself on a similar path to Peter Kalmus[1]. Before having kids I did what I could: didn’t own a car, commuted by bike, composted, minimized fashion&#x2F;tech consumption, etc. On the other hand my career required significant plane travel for a time. Now with kids I feel extremely motivated to take further action to reduce energy consumption and interact directly with nature: through gardening, removing all plane travel, installing rooftop solar, etc.<p>On the collective action front I become increasingly frustrated that something as obvious and “market based” as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (HR 7173)[2] isn’t already law. Something like that feels like the bare minimum solution to putting the US on the right track.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peterkalmus.net&#x2F;books&#x2F;read-by-chapter-being-the-change&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peterkalmus.net&#x2F;books&#x2F;read-by-chapter-being-the-chan...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensclimatelobby.org&#x2F;energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensclimatelobby.org&#x2F;energy-innovation-and-carbo...</a>

50% of habitable land on earth is taken up by agriculture, 77% of which is used for meat &amp; diary (including the crops grown for livestock to eat), which contributes only 18% to the global calorie supply because of the inefficiency of animal products:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;agricultural-land-by-global-diets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;agricultural-land-by-global-diets</a><p>I wonder how much of an impact it would have to return the land used by meat &amp; diary to nature (40 million km^2 out of the 104 million km^2 of habitable land, minus some for more crops for humans). Wild animals would have more of chance, they&#x27;d be more forests to capture more carbon, and industrial animal farming wouldn&#x27;t be polluting the planet with carbon, methane and waste products that are contributing to climate change.<p>I don&#x27;t know a practical solution to the above, but people are in denial about how much damage animal farming is doing globally and the insane scale of it (about 70 billion animals are used for food each year).<p>The general attitudes of &quot;well, people are never going to reduce their use of animal products to help so...&quot; and &quot;lab based meat will save us at some point in the future and then I&#x27;ll probably switch if they&#x27;re indistinguible from real meat&quot; is depressing. We&#x27;re running out of time.

I wish we spent more time talking about &quot;habitat destruction&quot; instead of &quot;climate change&quot;, while understanding that climate change is the largest form of habitat destruction.

I believe this study but it contrasts oddly with my own experience. I have lived for many of my 60+ years in the American West. Species which have made a comeback: wild turkeys, cougar, eagles, rocky mountain sheep, even wolves in some areas. Is this because American patterns of interaction with wildlife are different than elsewhere? Genuinely curious here.

Here&#x27;s some good news for fish<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reefresilience.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;graph02.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reefresilience.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;graph02.jpg</a><p>It shows rate of fishing has plateaued or declined but importantly, &quot;effort&quot; continues to climb so I imagine cost should provide a natural limit.

The same headline would be equally true from the moment we left Africa and entered other continents, to today.

I live in a city. We&#x27;ve exterminated every animal except cats and dogs, which we&#x27;ve modified with a multi-millennium breeding program to suit our desires. Pretty much every surface is covered in concrete, all the plants are curated by humans. As far as the eye can see is a totally artificial biosphere.<p>This is where pretty much all the humans live. Most of the people who get worried about wildlife decline live here too. I get why there are some people who care, but I don&#x27;t get why they expect the median human to care or why it becomes an important political issue. People are voting with their feet - exterminating the competition is an outcome of human civilisation.

To me (at least in the area I live in) the easiest and quickest win is to plant trees massively. There is so much space available. But somehow people&#x2F;governments wants to have grass vegetation as a filler between roads, inside parks etc.

System engineer here. The economic system current is wrong, it does not reward keeping ecological systems in a good state! We need to fix the economic system so that preserving wild life and nature is rewarded.<p>Well functioning eco systems is very valuable to us as humans yet we do not preserve them as we should.<p>Wildlife is valuable Clean air is valuable Oceans clean of plastic and full of fish is valuable Not warming earth is valuable<p>How do we make a fix to the economic system that such values are kept for future generations?

What are the consequences to humans if wildlife declines past the point of no return?<p>I know bees are absolutely necessary for pollination, but what will the absence of wildlife do to our species?

I find it notable how indirect the author is about the “Why” in this story:<p>&gt; New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food.<p>&gt; The British TV presenter and naturalist Sir David Attenborough said the Anthropocene, the geological age during which human activity has come to the fore, could be the moment we achieve a balance with the natural world and become stewards of our planet.

I can’t even begin to think of how we actually fix this with a world clutching so desperately to fossil fuels and large amounts of people considering climate change a hoax.

Surprise, surprise. What did we think would happen with increasing quality of life (increased consumption) and increasing population (further increase in consumption).

Mosquitos are having no issues, to the detriment of everyone.

Fascinating to see how these comment threads debate the relative facility of different diets, and even armchair evolutionary biology... while conveniently avoiding the critical topic: the choices we continue to make are defacing the planet, destabilizing ecologies, and exterminating other species at a scale that is hard to imagine. We’re all ok with this?<p>So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions (much less to resolve to change your habits)?<p>Not to put too fine a point on it, but for all of you who ate a burger for dinner tonight, were you thinking about the devastation you’re a part of? (And of course the list of destructive-yet-normalized ways of living is long; try picking one relevant to you).

Seems like this is never the type of issue discussed at Davos.