[HN Gopher] Over 10k species risk extinction in Amazon, says lan...
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Over 10k species risk extinction in Amazon, says landmark report
Author : uptown
Score : 48 points
Date : 2021-07-14 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| ProAm wrote:
| This could really be either Amazon
| aboringusername wrote:
| It's been pretty obvious for a long time there's an overabundance
| of humans on earth that is simply unsustainable in the long term.
| WW1 and WW2 along with the Spanish Flu and others relieved the
| earth of hundreds of millions of humans.
|
| Covid didn't have much of the same affect as we exerted our
| dominance over nature - there's absolutely nothing that can
| eradicate the plague of humans we have today (aside from other
| humans, it seems)
|
| So something's got to give, and whether for good or worse earth
| is for humans by humans, unless we cull our population
| significantly that's an uncomfortable but true reality.
|
| I'll be surprised if in a decade or two the "Amazon" will be a
| thing.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I am pretty sure that the only way to halt deforestation and
| overfishing is to use technology to produce such vast abundance
| with current resources that those using damaging practices are
| driven out of the market.
|
| There just isn't political will for anything else.
|
| People will mock the "yet another startup" attitude in this, but
| is anything successfully moving the needle except products that
| outcompete worse products (Tesla vs internal combustion)?
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think where you'll run into trouble is approaching the
| problem of inventing a new building material/foodsource from
| the 100,000-foot level of abstraction that is "use technology."
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I was more thinking of applying Walmart/Amazon's mindless
| obsession with optimization to production to price out
| everyone else.
|
| This had more to do with fish, but one of the documentaries I
| watched had these small scale fishers fishing with dynamite.
| I want to get to the point where fish farms are so efficient
| that the fisher can't get back his gas money.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If the plan is to apply "optimization" to fish farming,
| that's not a lot more specific than applying "technology"
| to fish farming.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| This has long been Michael Shellenberger's viewpoint--
| basically that conventional "green" advocacy/politics is mostly
| about erecting arbitrary barriers and preventing people from
| doing or having the things they want.
|
| Which is all well and good when it's a rich country setting
| aside slivers of land as national parks for the common good,
| but it's pretty unfair when it's rich nations telling the BRIC
| what they can and can't do with the same kinds of natural
| resources that the now-rich countries happily strip mined from
| themselves and have plundered from elsewhere for the past
| century or longer.
|
| Anyway, I don't agree with all of it (particularly his total
| dismissal of wind and solar), but a lot does ring true,
| especially when basically the end conclusion is that the route
| to saving the planet is to get everyone as rich as possible as
| fast as possible, because that's how to get them to care. And
| the route to that is cheap energy, and that means nuclear-- not
| vapourware tomorrow-nuclear (thorium, fusion, whatever), but
| today's nuclear technology, en masse.
|
| He's given a few TED Talks on this, worth a listen.
| sjtindell wrote:
| The problem of political will seems to me to be one of money.
| Many if not most governments are already funded substantially
| via debt. The massive outlays required to make a real
| difference will be nigh on impossible to obtain unless the
| average voter starts to see tangible, daily consequences. And
| then the economic consequences of so much money creation would
| be hard to manage. Ironically, the system itself is threatened
| by collapse, so trying to operate within the system to get the
| problem solved seems like folly...if you could get everyone to
| agree, perhaps we could simply wipe the "debt" away somehow.
| Find some other way to "pay for it". But our financial
| constructs are so fundamental to daily life, it's hard to
| imagine what that would look like.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| > But our financial constructs are so fundamental to daily
| life, it's hard to imagine what that would look like.
|
| We have politicians asking if we can change the orbit of the
| moon because changing the system which is creating these
| problems somehow seems more impossible. I cannot fathom how a
| system created by humans cannot be changed by humans, but
| here we are.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The problem is that if you can produce this vast abundance in
| the US, you might be able to produce it cheaper by moving your
| operation to a previously undeveloped part of the Amazon
| rainforest - where land values are and taxes are lower. And the
| market always demands more growth. No level of efficiency will
| ever be "enough".
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