Biodiversity decline will require millions of years to recover

I am kinda tired of this narrative that I am part of some responsible group and should walk through life riddled with guilt about each plastic bottle or gallon of gas that my existence consumes. I am not saying you should be throwing soda cans from your Hummer, but I feel a sort of fatalism around environmental issues and don&#x27;t think individual self-deprivations is going to fix it. The people with actual power in the richest nations don&#x27;t seem to care, and most developing nations don&#x27;t even have it on their radar as an issue to care about.<p>I just look at the endless cars on the freeway and don&#x27;t want to spend this brief slice of time I am alive for apologizing for the fallout from my existence.

It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It was fun as a child to pull grass and pick it apart, to smash glass with a hammer, and to burn things with fire. It’s a way to explore. Now that I’m older I’m much more mindful about what I break. Are we collectively too child-like as a species?

This is a disaster, and we must be deeply ashamed as species for it, but I think in many of us there is some consolation in the implicit thinking &quot;ok, we are destroying our planet life, but there are other planets and surely there are many biodiversity pockets out there in the Universe&quot;. Or.. &quot;ok, maybe we are transforming the Earth to a naked rock, but let&#x27;s wait a couple of billion years and surely there will be another rich ecosystem as the one who made us&quot;.<p>Now consider the following: we don&#x27;t really know if that is true. We can be materialists, atheists, and post-copernicus evolutionists, but we don&#x27;t have the confirmation there is life in other planet. Also, we are not really sure if the process can be repeated, we can guess it can be, but we don&#x27;t have the confirmation.<p>So maybe we are extinguishing all the biodiversity emerged through eons of evolution on the only planet in the entire Universe with life on it. Just imagine that as a possibility, because life in other planets&#x2F;future is only a theoretical idea, not a known fact. We simply don&#x27;t know, maybe we are burning the only chance for life and his richness in all the eternity. In any case, we need to change.

A periodic reminder that if you&#x27;re concerned with climate&#x2F;biodiversity issues, it&#x27;s increasingly a <i>waste of time</i> to work on persuading skeptics and fatalists (who either eny it&#x27;s happening or say it doesn&#x27;t matter for philosophical reasons). Some are sincere,s ome are not, but the pursuit of persuasion and consensus is ultimately founded on the hope that the &#x27;marketplace of ideas&#x27; will move to a new stable equilibrium; available evidence suggests that this may take longer than changes in the underlying conditions, such that the more effort you spend in arguing the worse worse the problem will get. I suggest it&#x27;s better to pursue unilateral policy goals wherever possible.

It recovered multiple times before, it will recover again, luckily humanity is not yet powerful enough to sterilise or destroy the biosphere of the whole planet and I hope the next time evolution comes up with something psychologically better suited for long term survival then our own species since we are so obsessed to change our environment without thinking through the long term consequences. And even if we thinking it through we fail to prioritise to keep our environment in a state where the next 10 generation have a chance to survive. We also fail to look at humanity as part of the environment and biosphere and not as some kind of higher being who is independent from the consequences of its doing to the environment. Evolution have time to start over, I’m sad that we failing to realise we don’t.

I wonder, how exactly do we determine the ideal amount of biodiversity for the planet &#x2F; a given region?<p>Outside of ideas like ‘we should not exterminate entire species’ and ‘we should not hunt so much that we ruin hunting grounds for future generations’ it does not seem obvious to me.<p>I guess maybe we are so far gone that the only thought is to damage control.

Reminds me of some of the issues fictional humanity deals with in The Ministry for the Future - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Ministry_for_the_Future" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Ministry_for_the_Future</a>

Only millions? What are we taking about then! Who cares, there is more time between the T-Rex and the Stegosaurus than there is between us and T-Rex (about 100 million more). And we have about 4000-5000 million years before the sun gives out.

Unfortunatelly we are (in) ongoing extinction &quot;event&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Holocene_extinction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Holocene_extinction</a>

This should be retitled to be<p>Based on the assumptions built into our computer models, our models suggest that it could take millions of years for biodiversity to recover.

No it won’t.<p>Can anyone think about why this mass extinction event is unlike the last one? Anyone? Yes, that’s right: Homo Sapiens. If we want biodiversity, we’re not going to sit around smelling our farts for millions of years waiting for evolution to do it.

Genetic engineering is something that does not get taken into account in these dystopian predictions. Humans can learn to accelerate the evolutionary process as well as reconstitute extinct species. This is especially true if we consider the rate of technological change and that natural evolution moves at a snail pace.

It won&#x27;t recover, our species won. It&#x27;ll be just us, and whatever we eat and keep as pets. So prepare for a world of cats, dogs, cows, chickens and pigs.<p>I don&#x27;t like it but that&#x27;s the natural course we&#x27;re taking.

In economic terms. This is an externality. The assumption, imho, is that others can profit from externalities. This externality may endanger our grandchildren and possibly even ourselves.

The article mentions the Yucatan asteroid setoff a 5 million-year extinction event. I&#x27;m assuming this was due to a slow-reacting chain reaction of extinction events in the ecosphere? It wasn&#x27;t actually directly due to the asteroid right? Those immediate effects would have gone away in a few decades I&#x27;m assuming?

I&#x27;m not so much worried about the biodiversity as such - earth will recover, and rather quickly I think. Humans may be a very peculiar extinction event, but just one among many.<p>But I do think that the loss of biodiversity is also telegraphing troubles for humanity, or at least the experiment in civilization we&#x27;re currently all taking part in. The predatory ecosystem exploitation that we have been doing for the past two hundred years is catching up with us . And if we want to retain any chance to continue this experiment a few hundred years, we <i>seriously</i> have to change our approach in evaluating the worth that the earth&#x27;s eco system has for us. You know, our very own life support system.<p>Currently we&#x27;re losing about 30% of animal population every ten years. This cannot continue. We&#x27;re wrecking the place. We are killing ourselves.<p>(My pet theory? <i>This</i> is the great filter!)

I honestly don&#x27;t think we need to be so pessimistic about this issue, since we can all do something to enact change, no matter how small! This past year with the pandemic, I think we&#x27;ve all learned the importance and value of nature and how we need to take care - what takes care of us! I also go by the motto that we don&#x27;t need to change the world necessarily, start with creating the change in yourself by noticing where you can be more environmentally friendly, maybe pick up a scrap&#x2F;junk on the sidewalk wherever you can, and it doesn&#x27;t have to be a mandatory thing that weighs you down, more like a change of lifestyle! Once we start changing one by one, then collectively others may notice and follow along

99.9% of all species ever existed are gone today. Earth have been through 5 mass extinctions.<p>Nature doesn&#x27;t give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, nature gives us a hostile and unsafe environment we make safe through our impact of the planet.<p>Yes we need to get better at many things and luckily we are, but the idea that humans are the destroyers of biodiversity is simply untrue. We might in fact be the only species who will be able to not only avoid mass-extinction but also rebuild biodiversity. No matter what. Nature doesn&#x27;t care about us and have no issue adding us to the 99.9% if we don&#x27;t learn how to control and manipulate the planet and our nearby solar system.

<i>our burden raised the world set free</i><p><i>the earth returns to land and sea</i><p><i>our buildings burned and highways gone</i><p><i>I love my friends and everyone but we&#x27;ve had our chance let&#x27;s move aside</i><p><i>let time wash us out with the tide</i>

I get that humans are wiping out a lot of less capable species. This will turn out to be wrong if humans are themselves wiped out. But from an evolutionary sense, this is a pretty clear cut case; humans are wiping out everything else because we&#x27;re so powerful. We out compete everything.<p>And before you assume that&#x27;s bad, don&#x27;t forget that evolution makes organisms that do that. It&#x27;s a core part of the cycle of evolution. I gather the first single celled plants wiped out a lot of other stuff with their oxygen production. Now, the trees grow tall so they can wipe out other plants who can&#x27;t cut it. In the process the trees are littering their tree bits all over the place. You can barely see 100m in most parts of the world through all the tree crap everywhere. I&#x27;ve been to forests where you cant even touch the ground; it&#x27;s just like 4 ft of old logs that aren&#x27;t decaying fast enough (dry forests do this). To trees all that tree crap is trash and it even kills baby trees. To us humans, it&#x27;s beautiful. And when we pour a bunch of concrete and steel all over, maybe it&#x27;s trash, or maybe it&#x27;s beautiful in a different way. I&#x27;m just saying &#x27;nature&#x27; includes us and the stuff we make. We took over this planet. For better or worse it&#x27;s a people planet now. We&#x27;ll see what happens after people (e.g. gen-eng driven specation), but it might be that this is already nice in a way we just don&#x27;t find &#x27;natural&#x27; or &#x27;normal&#x27; yet and the next one will also be nice in it&#x27;s own way that&#x27;s different from the past.

The sooner the &quot;we&quot; stops pretending to care, the better for everyone involved. The environment is going to take a beating for as long as humans walk the earth. No one here actually gives a rat&#x27;s tail about the environment. If we did care we&#x27;d have to talk about accountability and we all know where that road goes.

It appears this analysis is limited to freshwater species. I wish that werent the case. It would be nice to be able to share the &quot;higher rate than the extinction of the dinosaurs event&quot; statement without that big old &quot;but&quot; attached.

Note that a declining number of species doesn&#x27;t mean fewer living animals.<p>As the world globalizes, 10 isolated bird species occupying an ecological niche can be replaced by 1 species across the planet, without there being fewer birds total.

Walk more.<p>Eat less meat.<p>Live a more spartan life.<p>Consume more porn and have less actual sex. (Because sex leads to babies. Duh.)<p>Someone should start a religion around those tenets. This stuff is not hard, you just have to apparently con people into living right or some nonsense.

With genetical engineering we&#x27;ll create an infinite number of new species better adapted to the changing environment and also more useful to us. In just a few years, not millions.

Sadly, it can be summed in just three words, “it’s just business”.

A biological blink of an eye.

While I don&#x27;t necessarily doubt any of the data cited in this article, this article isn&#x27;t science, it is fearmongering propaganda. Not that we shouldn&#x27;t be fearful. But the information should instill fear if there is something to be afraid of, not articles like this that are almost entirely devoid of information. Terrible, terrible article.

Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand years.<p>Funny how writers like to project some things into the future (“millions of years to recover”) but still assume that technology and society will just remain the same.

Out there there is a contradiction. The planet can support billions more people, so we don&#x27;t have to be careful about growth. The environment is in peril and people are at fault.<p>Most of the pressure is in developing nations with more lax laws around managing natural resources...<p>But, also this only matters because of people. If we didn&#x27;t live on this planet all this would not matter even if it happened. Imagine an exo-planet that is experiencing species decline for any reason (cataclysmic, new species of locust-like predator taking over, etc.), does it matter at all? Would we care?<p>Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability as a species.