10 Percent of the World's Wilderness Has Been Lost Since 1990s (livescience.com) 150
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Wilderness areas around the world have experienced catastrophic declines over the last two decades, with one-tenth of global wilderness lost since the 1990s, according to a new study. Since 1993, researchers found that a cumulative wilderness area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon has been stripped and destroyed. The shrinking wilderness is due, in part, to human activity such as mining, logging, agriculture, and oil and gas exploration. The researchers said their findings underscore the need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness and to protect wilderness areas from the threats they face. Central Africa and the Amazon saw the most wilderness decline, the researchers found. Of the roughly 1.27 million square miles (3.3 million square kilometers) of global wilderness lost, the Amazon accounted for nearly one-third, and 14 percent of the world's wilderness was lost from Central Africa, according to the study. The researchers determined that only 11.6 million square miles (30.1 million square km) of wilderness is left, which equates to just 20 percent of the Earth's total land mass. The study was published online in the journal Current Biology.
Whatever (Score:1, Interesting)
Can't do anything about it even if I wanted to. That's the future's problem, not mine.
Suspicious figures (Score:2)
Re:Suspicious figures (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you got a point and they didn't include Antarctica.
On the other hand, Antarctica has little foliage. And ifs not green, it won't absorb CO2 and generate oxygen.
If the last wilderness left remaining is Antarctica, we choke to death, pretty much.
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"The researchers determined that only 11.6 million square miles (30.1 million square km) of wilderness is left, which equates to just 20 percent of the Earth's total land mass"
So, not including Antarctica, humans occupy 80% of the total land mass of the planet? Doesn't look like that from the light pollution pictures that were recently released. The taiga (boreal forest) alone is larger than 20% and as they are including other areas like deserts and prairie / veldt in their "calculations" they must have mis
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Re: Suspicious figures (Score:2)
Thank god all the polar ice is melting, the we can grow some foliage and survive!
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Not to mention basically all of Canada. More than 85% of Canada's population lives within 250km of the US border.
The rest? Tundra. Forest. "The North", beyond the tree line. That's 10million square kilometers right there, minus about 1 million or so.
Outside of a couple of bigger cities, in that 9M remaining, you'll find a town of 2000 people, 200km from another town. You'll find roads where there are houses (cottages) every 10km or so.
Even where I live? I have a 1 acre lot, there are 49 other lots li
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A good definition of wilderness might be ecosystems whose composition and function has not been significantly altered by human activity.
Canada's vast second-growth tree-farms, and ex-forests that are ranch land, and prairie that has lost its original grasses and beasts, do not count. Also, forested areas which once had large contiguous unroaded areas, providing safe roaming for large prey animals etc, and which now are cut up by road networks, also do not count.
Areas whose climate changes rapidly over the n
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There are trees all around my home, trees on my land, wildflowers in my back yard, and pure nature all around.
Some of my previous residences have looked like that too. I won't speak to the situation where you are, but I will relate what I discovered about my locality after putting some thought (and research) into it. From another comment on this article:
The developers have just gotten really good at hiding it: things like strips of trees that border the main roads, blocking the view of the suburban sprawl. Roads that curve pointlessly so that you can't see down the length of them. When you drive through this area you get the impression that it's still somewhat natural land... until you take notice of the long, long lines of cars everywhere. Or the 4-story apartment complexes. Or you take a turn off any main road and get lost in suburbs for days. Or you look at satellite photos from 10 years ago, and compare them to recent photos... that lays it plain. You can hide this stuff from earth-bound humans' line-of-sight pretty well, but not from an aerial photo.
You also have to consider that things that take up a small percentage of the land - like roads - have an impact that extends way beyond the concrete itself. Likely, the definition of "wilderness" they use has to do with humans' effects on ecosystems. Not how aesthe
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Antarctica really isn't all that big, and most of that wilderness is in the remote regions of Africa, South America, and northern Canada/Russia. just because you lack the ability to grasp the numbers doesn't invalidate them. in fact, the article even points out that it is 20% of earth's land area.
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i consider sahara to be 'wilderness' and it is expanding. in a few decades, the whole of central africa will be 'wilderness'. so as far as statistics go, we'll be fine.
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How can you possibly believe we're not losing wilderness when population and resource use have expanded considerably over that time period? The only debate should be how much.
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People have been moving to cities at the same time. So the wilderness areas are being depopulated.
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Did the article say wilderness is being lost to habitation?
I'd assume a significant proportion of wilderness loss is for agriculture, mining, clearing (for resources, wood, etc) .
I'm not sure habitation has much to do with it at all. Fill a city with another 2M people and you're going to need to clear wilderness to farm food for said people.
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Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the parent was intended as sarcasm, but this is one of those cases where it's hard to tell.
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In with-in the next several hundred million years the oceans will start to boil away because the sun is getting hotter, so like, whats the problem here? We're living in the earths twilight years, human activity might be slightly accelerating its demise ? Maybe this is the natural end game for most planets like ours? Human like things evolve and disrupt everything. People need to let go of this idea that its current state must be perfectly preserved for eternity.
What's "wilderness?" (Score:2)
It takes 10 paragraphs to find that the author's "wilderness" is an area which man doesn't habitat. Why not just write about population growth, and figure out by what factor Malthus was off?
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In some cities, wilderness is increasing.
I once saw a racoon and 3 cubs walking down Market St in San Francisco. I once saw a coyote on the Embarcadero. There is a family of possums living in the shed in my backyard.
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Wild peacocks roam the streets of Palos Verdes and San Pedro. [vimeo.com] That doesn't make it a wilderness. The abandoned military housing is probably somewhat closer to a wilderness, in the sense that any animals living there do so more or less free from human interference. The bad news is that we're losing this as hungry and/or greedy humans (it makes no difference as far as the wildlife is concerned) decide they need the space. The good news is that if we leave it alone, nature eventually claws it back. It's just u
Re:What's "wilderness?" (Score:5, Funny)
Do you know what "wilderness" means?
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Do you know what "wilderness" means?
For some folks, seeing a bear in a zoo makes for a trip to the wilderness. Speaking of which, in my neighborhood, we regularly have bears wandering around. A little unnerving at first, but they just use the roads for the same reason we do. gotta get to work.
In my backyard, I've seen bear, deer, possum, skunk, raccoons, hawks ( a Cooper's Hawk seems to really like my wife) ravens, plieated woodpeckers - the "Oh my Gawd" bird - and the obligatory squirrels and chippers, and a number of bullfrogs, who actua
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That's because we are INVADING space that was once not ours.
The animals are also invading. Prior to the 20th century, coyotes did not live east of the Mississippi River. Today, they are common from New England to Florida. It is estimated that hundreds live in New York City, subsisting on garbage and rats. Other animals, from raccoons to peregrine falcons, have also adapted to urban living.
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The animals are also invading. Prior to the 20th century, coyotes did not live east of the Mississippi River. Today, they are common from New England to Florida. It is estimated that hundreds live in New York City, subsisting on garbage and rats. Other animals, from raccoons to peregrine falcons, have also adapted to urban living.
This is simplifying the hell out of the issue. About 12 years ago, about a square mile of land was cleared for a big shopping center about a mile from me. We're talking remove every tree, and vegetation, and turn that acreage into something that looked like the surface of Mars.
That summer, the population of all the animals in my backyard exploded. When evicted, the animals don't just die off right away, they migrate, fight with the animals where they try to establish themselves, and a lot starve to death
Re: OMG! (Score:1)
They use satellites, by-and-large, plus checks to determine whether sample areas that are tagged as a particular class of area match up. It's used for a lot of crop management work too. There is a huge library of decent quality images at various frequency spectra dating back to the early 1990s allowing reinterpretation with increasingly sophisticated image analysis techniques.
Not running out of wilderness... (Score:2, Insightful)
What's your point? That after 20 years of sustained growth and expansion the people that live on the edges of vast swaths of wilderness (Central Africa, The Amazon) are slowly eroding that wilderness?
What are they supposed to do, live in poverty, stop growing their civilizations on the edges of, say, the Amazon, because all the developed nations used up their wilderness growing their countries? We got ours, now you need to stop?
I suspect there is still plenty of wilderness - for example, The United States g [nytimes.com]
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as a species - we have to stop multiplying and cut down our numbers to a sustainable number of people,yes.
It's already happening in first world countries [wikipedia.org]. As soon as third world countries catch up with living standards, urbanization, and education of women, the same thing will happen with them as well. The world's population is probably going to peak out at around 10 or 11 billion or so at the end of this century, and then level off or decline from there to a perhaps 9 billion or so.
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> What are they supposed to do, live in poverty, stop growing their civilizations on the edges of, say, the Amazon, because all the developed nations used up their wilderness growing their countries? We got ours, now you need to stop?
Actually we should nuke all their major cities and let nature reclaim them.
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Add the summary points out, much of it is logging, mining, oil and gas. Destructive and avoidable processes.
It's calling for the more developed nations to help use other technologies instead. Obviously some of it is unavoidable, like agriculture, but even that can be done the responsible way or the cheap way.
Since the developed nations need wilderness to exist to avoid other problems like climate change, there is a case for helping.
Re: Not running out of wilderness... (Score:2)
By 'helping' you mean retard their progress?
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What are they supposed to do, live in poverty, stop growing their civilizations on the edges of, say, the Amazon, because all the developed nations used up their wilderness growing their countries?
Yes. Yes they are. If they don't, we'll all die, or at least all of our societies will be destroyed. They must be stopped by force if necessary. Of course, by the same token, the burners of fossil fuels must also be stopped by force if necessary.
I suspect there is still plenty of wilderness - for example, The United States government owns 47 percent of all land in the West. (That's about 1/4th of our country that is, essentially, wilderness.)
The problem with your idea is that literally none of the BLM land which is not desert is untouched wilderness. It's all been logged, and it's still used for logging and for cattle grazing. You can only really count the desert part (about half) as wilderness and when
Re: Not running out of wilderness... (Score:2)
Logging is sustainable, cattle grazing is too. 47% of all land in the west is not being drilled, mined, etc - take a good look at the land the federal government has in Utah, some of it is a datacenter, most of it is untouched wilderness.
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Logging is sustainable, cattle grazing is too
[citation needed]
We've depleted forest biomass, so (among other reasons) CO2 isn't being fixed sufficiently fast for us to have a bright future. Young trees fix less carbon than old trees. Cattle land fixes none and emits a bunch of methane.
More like 4.5% of the US is wilderness (Score:2)
The United States government owns 47 percent of all land in the West. (That's about 1/4th of our country that is, essentially, wilderness.)
Could you explain the logic of "It's owned by the government, therefore it's wilderness"? A lot of federally-owned area is used for cattle grazing, logging, indian reservations, recreation, man-made bodies of water, military facilities, etc.
The federal government does have designated wildernesses, but they form only about 4.5% of the US land mass [wikipedia.org]. (FWIW, over half of the designated wilderness is in Alaska [wikipedia.org].) Of course, the government's definition of wilderness is not the same as the definition in TFA, but as
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sorry, it's not essentially wilderness.its more wild than the burbs, but much of it very much still marked by humanity. Yosemite as a whole isn't wilderness. Neither is Yellowstone. though both have areas designated as such, and are access points to designated wilderness areas. that's why actual wilderness areas are specifically marked out and left as pristine as possible.
Stop breeding already (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Stop breeding already (Score:5, Insightful)
The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.
If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly. Until populations decrease, all the evidence shows that the population is sustainable.
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he current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.
If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly.
If the plane were at 100 ft., that would be true. If the plane begins at 100,000 ft., then (given a decent glide angle) it can stay aloft for quite some time after the engines have failed.
Think of it this way: you've got a water pump at the bottom of a hill pumping water into a damaged tank. The tank can only hold so much before it bursts. Maybe you've got days before your little pump can cause a tank failure, but running that pump is still unsustainable. HTH, HAND!
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Then go kill yourself and your family.
You and yours first.
See that is what you dont understand. We sre nowhere near the limit of what we can sustain.
No, see, that is what you don't understand. What we theoretically can do is completely fucking irrelevant in the really real world, where greed rules the day.
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The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.
If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly. Until populations decrease, all the evidence shows that the population is sustainable.
Until you hit the ground, all the evidence shows that you can fly.
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The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.
If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly. Until populations decrease, all the evidence shows that the population is sustainable.
It's been a while since my college biology course, but if I recall correctly, it's not uncommon for a population experiencing exponential growth to shoot right past the carrying capacity for a while. Eventually, the population crashes until numbers fall under the carrying capacity, at which point several outcomes are possible.
The simple fact that population size is not decreasing is NOT evidence that the population size is sustainable. Rather, the fact that population size isn't slowing down might very
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The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.
If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly.
It's like a plane that's continuing to climb even though it doesn't have enough gas to get to the next airport. It's climbing, but it'll reach a bad end soon.
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The population is.
Otherwise it would be not there.
However the capitalizm we have right now is not. Killing sharks by catching them, cutting of their fins, for fancy soups, and dropping them living back into the see is a crime to nature and if you belive in gods: to your makers.
The workd can easily feed 50billions, probably more, and still retain a huge amount of wilderness.
The only thing preventing that is human greed, striving for power etc.
(40% - 50% of all food produced today in western nations: is rotti
We Are Made of Wilderness (Score:3, Interesting)
We forget ourselves, and what we are made of.
Our value system is totally fucked: the new housing index. Apples building new buildings in a Silicon Valley of empty buildings. We've used so much raw materials and fuel for pointless wars. We don't turn off the lights when we leave the room. We have too many instant on appliances with no regulation. Our government hasn't asked us to watch energy usage since the 1970s.
Perhaps we ought to be extinct.
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Everyone always talks about extinction, but no one ever does anything about it. If you want us to take you seriously, show some leadership.
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Some things that will help in more than one way:
Our leaders should ask us to take it easy on resources and fuel, and generally, they are not.
We need to to plant more trees, anywhere we can.
We need to cut down on unnecessary packaging.
We need to recycle ABS plastic. It's good plastic, but made of 3 cancer causing chemicals, and made fire retardant with a bromine halogen.
We need to ration powerful chemicals such as bleach and drain cleaner.
We need to cut down on detergents. I use 1/3 as much as I am supposed
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The most important thing is that we need to put a value on the nature that we destroy for our needs.
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You have some good ideas, but you need to focus on whats worth while... Recognise what the core principle behind each of your points is and then see if that principle makes sense in their order of execution and context.
Categories of your points in order of effectiveness:
By Designs (Preemptive)
By Mindset (values):
By Reduction (Damage Control):
I want the same end result of environmentalists, but I find 99% of self proclaimed environmentalists to push annoyingly futile ideas against obvious resisting forces.
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Saw that a while back. The maths makes sense but does not consider whether 10-11Bn people is sustainable, how, and whether it is even desirable to have so many people on the planet. Considering how a scarce millions migrating to Western Europe from Syria/M.E. lead to political paralysis and chaos, it won't be easy to deal with many millions relocating as resources like drinking water become hard to get in India/China, or many areas in Europe and Africa that look likely to become more like desert as the glob
Let's talk about the meat of the matter. (Score:2)
Sadly one of the main culprits almost sounds like a footnote - 'logging' is often done to clear land for livestock, just look at the Amazon. And most of the 'agriculture' is also to support that same livestock. In the US, 1/2 of ALL land is used for livestock - either space they take up, or for producing their food (and 70-90% of all corn, soy and wheat grown in the US is fed to livestock).
Re: Let's talk about the meat of the matter. (Score:2)
Genuine free range is better for the envt. Not fake 'free range', where cage hens get a plank to perch on.
I once visited a farm where the famer was raising pigs and cattle using organic methods and intelligently 'rotating livestock' in his farmland, giving it time to recover. He had turned the farm around; topsoil was coming back, a nitrogen loving weed overgrowth was receding, vegetation native to the area was returning. The farm was heathier and closer to homeostasis.
To distinguish between fake and true,
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You really REALLY think that people eating less meat would reduce farming scale in any way?
Thats just... so cute (being kind here).
Hint: high value land use for livestock is very small compared to total farming, and also tends to be concentrated on poorer land.
Hence, if you want to save your wilderness (which, if it is forests, is usually on better quality land), then time to stop eating
those grains and vegetables! they use far FAR more land area, and are the primary cause of deforestation.
Yes, I know that
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Some good points, just remember the west doesn't have a deforestation problem. Poorer countries do because they're trying to increase acreage to feed more people. It also doesn't help that shit-tier environmental groups and general stupidity(of the people that support them) stop things that could easily help those countries like GMO seeds, or improved farming techniques, basic farming practices. Groups like greenpeace would much rather dry wash their hands and declare high-nutrition grains/rice "poison"
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Groups like greenpeace would much rather dry wash their hands and declare high-nutrition grains/rice "poison" and let people starve to death while decrying modern farming techniques that use less acreage per person as "wasteful and destructive." ...
You are an idiot.
Groups like Greenpeace advocate better farming techniques, educate farmers, finance projects since nearly 50 years. You must have a very confused idea what greenpeace and world wild life fond etc. actually are doing.
Moron
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Livestock requires land for it AND land to grow the grains to feed them. How is that better than only using land to grow grains? In which fantasy world do you live in where 1+1 is lower than 0+1? And livestock eats more grain than people, too.
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Yes, I know that doesnt fit in with you 'I'm a vegetarian, so *I* am saving the planet!' worldview, but suck it up - its the simple facts of farming.
Err...as a "meat-eater", you do realize that you're just as biased? Perhaps this is an opportunity to learn from a differing opinion. I grew up as a regular meat-eater, and as I learned more about what's going on, I changed my habits in response. I have a very strong feeling that, as someone who's spent a *lot* of time reading and researching this area, I've possibly l
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Oh sure! (Score:2)
Oh sure, focus on the loss of wilderness rather than the energy and minerals that have been sourced!
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Oh sure, focus on the loss of wilderness rather than the energy and minerals that have been sourced!
As the saying some here like to quote goes; "With taxes I buy civilization" there's a corollary to that here; 'With energy and resources I build civilization".
IMO the ultimate goal should be to move as much industrialization, resource gathering, energy production/collection, and other manufacturing and industrial processes as possible & practical off of the planet. This will solve or greatly mitigate a whole host of problems.
In order to accomplish that goal, we must advance our scientific, industrial, a
Aren't we good? (Score:3)
That's pretty impressive and a testament to human ingenuity! If we are smart enough to destroy so much nature in so little time we should be smart enough to find alternatives to destroying it too.
Only one specific stat (Score:1)
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv... [econtalk.org]
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On the other hand, biomass has been increasing,
Uh no. Biomass is a tiny fraction of what it was before human intervention. We have approximately the same forested area as hundreds of years ago, but the trees are very young. Older forests not only have more biomass, but they also fix more CO2. (It's not true for every species, but on average, it is the case.) The word "biomass" also does not appear in the linked transcript.
Bullshit (Score:1)
Only 20% of the earth is wilderness? One look at a map of the earth or a globe will show you this isn't remotely true. Canada, Siberia, China, the American West, Antarctica, Africa, South America - all have vast area of wilderness.
Thing that irritates me is that I'm a tree-hugger and this kind of sensationalist crap only makes the cause look like childish idiots. That's not helping.
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And a lot of those areas are farms. Take a look at the prairies in Canada and the US and most of it has been converted to farmland. Sure there's the Boreal Forest in northern Canada and Alaska and the area above but it's not as large as it looks on maps (I forget the name of the effect).
Depends on how one defines "wilderness" (Score:5, Insightful)
Once wilderness is gone, it cannot be restored because the ecological processes that underpin the ecosystems are destroyed, the researchers said. The only option, they said, is to proactively protect what is left.
This is true only because they define wilderness so narrowly. I've seen what happens when people no longer inhabit an area, wilderness takes over. The ecosystem can grow and restore itself. If we define "wilderness" only as areas undisturbed by human activity then, by definition, wilderness can only shrink or stay the same. Which then leads one to ask, how did that ecosystem get there in the first place? The answer is either it grew there naturally, or some deity wished it into being.
I don't know if I should assume these people are Creationists or that they didn't think this all the way through. What I really think though is that they are trying to simplify the problem to the point it has become a lie. They lie to us hoping we don't think it through.
They also assume that "wilderness" is always better than what human activity can create. I've seen many great gardens, animal habitats, parks, arboretums, etc. where there was just barren land before. If allowed to occur naturally it would have taken thousands of years for so much plant and animal life to spread like that.
Do these people think humans can only destroy? People create things too, beautiful things even. People can even make the world better. Preserving wilderness at the cost of humanity's ability to grow, learn, and explore is beyond wrong, I believe it is a mental illness.
Externalities (Score:2)
All companies around the world produce negative externalities that have a detrimental effect on the ecosystem of the Earth. It is profitable to obscure them so as not to spend money on acting to correct the externality. There are tens of thousands of negative externalities that all contribute to destroy the environment the human species depends on, with carbon based pollution being the alpha externality of them all.
That's why the denialist rhetoric is hyperactive about carbon externalities. The very fact t
Obligatory Robocop (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/3LKQ3eX9pEg?t... [youtu.be]
Foolishness (Score:4, Informative)
TFA states that once an area ceases to be wilderness, it can never be wilderness again.
By about 1840, nearly all of New England was farmland. No wilderness, except for areas too steep or rocky for agriculture. Now, most has reverted to forest. Keeping an area open requires constant effort; trees colonize unmowed areas pretty quickly.
We can do better (Score:2)
Let's get rid of 25% by 2030! /s
Is that objectively bad? (Score:2)
Reading the article, there are plenty of claims being made, but I'm not seeing any basis for them other than the assumptions of researchers. Some, like "supporting many of the world's most politically and economically marginalized communities", seem inherently contradictory. If there are communities in these area
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Right, that's why Communist Governments encourage so many of their citizens to immigrate to the West. I forget, which communist countries encourage their citizens to leave?
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Re: Humanity is a parasite species. (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution is simple. Birth control and education. In almost every nation where that's available we have negative population growth(not accounting for immigration) or they are headed in that direction.
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Did Muhammad have anything to say about Allah's feelings on birth control? I wasn't aware of anything that says that followers of Islam cannot use condoms. Can you point to this directive of Allah's?
Re:Humanity is a parasite species. (Score:4, Interesting)
An invasive species is a plant, fungus, or animal species that is not native to a specific location, and which has a tendency to spread to a degree believed to cause damage to the environment.
I hear an invasive species which escaped from Africa has been causing unprecedented damage to the environment.
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The Earth is a wet ball of rock. Rocks can't get parasites, they aren't living organisms.
The ecosystem existing on that ball of rock comprises all life, therefore any organism is a component of the ecosystem. So, even under the "ecosystem as organism" model, no organism can be a parasite on the global ecosystem itself as that would generate a logically impossible infinite loop of self-parasitism.
Re: Humanity is a parasite species. (Score:1)
Prehistoric people in North America are strongly suspected as having been instrumental in finally killing off the last if the prehistoric horses and camels there, although climate change may also have been a factor.
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Native Americans learned to live in harmony with the land and take only what they need.
If we tried to "live in harmony with nature" (aka slash-and-burn agriculture plus hunting, or whatever other old technologies you like) at our current population levels, then two things would happen:
1) We'd kill off a huge chunk of nature
2) Nature would kill off a huge chunk of us