[HN Gopher] The great abandonment: what happens to the natural w...
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The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when
people disappear?
Author : zeristor
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-11-28 07:14 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| scooke wrote:
| The perspective of the entire article is confused. Abandonment
| doesn't overcome and infuse something. It's not an action; it is
| a state. And what happens TO nature? No, what does nature DO when
| humanity stops what it does to nature. Reclamation, from the
| proper perspective; abandonment is from the human perspective.
| pololeono wrote:
| It is all about aesthetics. Humanity is also part of nature.
| falcor84 wrote:
| As I understand it, it's not about aesthetics per-se, but
| rather that "nature" is a semantic concept defined by us
| humans for anything that is outside of the human sphere -
| i.e. something is "natural" or "out in nature" or "nature's
| way" if it's what would have been if humans hadn't been
| involved.
| g8oz wrote:
| In the manner of an algal bloom, yes.
| jpcom wrote:
| Covid was a great example of how the natural world returns to
| harmony when human antagonism via noise/sound pollution and so
| forth is suddenly halted. I think a lot of dolphins in the sea
| rejoiced.
| Neil44 wrote:
| The article actually argues that the idea that nature finds
| lovely balances if we just get out of the way is not correct. A
| lot of what we view as stable ecosystems are stable because of
| our management and influence over millennia. Nature on it's own
| is not a thing, there are no checks and balances, no intention,
| no morality. The quote from the article is that nature does not
| organise it's self into neat parables.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This is called the "baseline" problem among conservationists.
| benchmarkist wrote:
| Why is it a problem? It's not like people are somehow
| special. We eat and shit like every other mammal but
| without us the water and land would not be full of
| synthetic chemicals and plastics. Seems very obvious to me
| that human industries change the baseline to a polluted
| state vs what it would have been without industrial
| activities. But even without industrial activity the
| historical record is very clear on the effect that human
| populations have on the surrounding flora and fauna.
| oblio wrote:
| Well, if you want to be optimistic, I think we got coal
| from lignin/wood being uneatable for hundreds of millions
| of years (I think).
|
| So wood would stack up, not rot, get covered by dirt and
| turned into coal due to physical processes, not
| biological ones.
|
| So coal deposits of the existing magnitudes couldn't be
| created now.
| benchmarkist wrote:
| I am very optimistic. I don't remember where I read it
| but whatever remains after the current industrial
| civilization will not have access to the energy resources
| necessary for reindustrialization. Might have been
| Derrick Jensen but I can't remember which book exactly.
| vacuity wrote:
| So I get the sense that we can be considered part of nature,
| and however much or little influence we exert is a part of
| the overall system. It can balance to an extent with our
| presence and will do so without it.
| jpcom wrote:
| How convenient, an unprovable hypothesis.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| The article doesn't claim that 'nature finds lovely balances
| if we just get out of the way'. It says
|
| >> Over time, Clements' more sweeping theories were picked
| apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax
| communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies
| continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable
| cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis.
| Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is
| seen as widely debunked. But Clements' vision endured in the
| popular imagination - sometimes to the frustration of
| ecologists.
|
| ...
|
| >> To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by
| the great abandonment will require changing our conception of
| humanity's relationship to nature, and understanding how our
| species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will
| also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough
| ocschwar wrote:
| In the 1960s there was a long overdue correction to the
| Australian constitution because the preamble mentioned the
| continent's "flora and fauna" in a way that implied
| Aborigines were part of the "fauna." The wording was grossly
| racist, and had to be changed because of the politics, but
| from an ecological standpoint, there was some truth to it.
| Australia's ecosystems were stable because of how Aborigines
| interacted with them.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-
| occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place,
| ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas
| baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly
| being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain
| cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still
| stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting
| grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a
| legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it
| is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.
|
| This always confuses me. If I were abandoning my home of my own
| volition, I'd take my possessions with me.
| analog31 wrote:
| Every time I've moved, it involved getting rid of piles of
| stuff. And my next move will probably be a downsize. I'm
| already on a mission to get rid of X cubic foot of stuff per
| year. After helping my mom downsize, I've lost my nostalgia for
| keeping old stuff around. And my kids want none of it -- they
| don't know if they will ever own a house, or necessarily what
| country they'll even live in.
|
| And of course I wonder why stuff piles up. The reasons include
| laziness and probably a mild hoarding instinct.
| ralph84 wrote:
| Eventually we all die and our heirs if we have any tend to
| value our possessions closer to the market rate ($0) than we
| do.
| Macha wrote:
| Christmas decorations and nappies both strike me as the sort of
| thing that would get left behind, they're pretty poor in the
| value/space tradeoff, not to mention that a lot of these houses
| were left behind when elderly people died. It's not uncommon
| for elderly people to have stuff they accumulated over the
| years, it would not surprise me if there's christmas
| decorations that have been unused for decades in my
| grandmother's attic, or nappies that were once for
| grandchildren that are now adults. In a country where the
| population is growing, this stuff just gets dumped as the heirs
| clear out the house to sell, but what are these houses in the
| middle of nowhere with infrastructure that has crumbled away
| worth?
| Rygian wrote:
| Life After People is a TV show that covers some answers to the
| title, from several points of view.
| wmwmwm wrote:
| Book recommendation for The World Without Us which explores what
| might happen if humans vanished overnight:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
| Animats wrote:
| Wikipedia has a list of ghost towns in the United States.[1]
|
| Most rural towns were built to serve surrounding farms and
| ranches. As farming became less labor-intensive, the need for
| those towns went away, and the towns slowly died. See
| "Depopulation of the Great Plains"[2] It's interesting to note
| that the depopulated area is the best part of the US for wind
| power. That could work out OK.
|
| Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.
|
| Japan, where the population is rapidly declining, has a large
| number of empty rural towns. There's an incentive program to get
| young people to move there, but not many are interested. Because
| Japan's infrastructure is centrally funded, much of the
| infrastructure is still maintained in areas with very few people.
|
| Russia has a declining population and entire abandoned cities.
| Putin is pushing young people to have kids. There's a "Pregnant
| at 16" TV show in Russia, which has been re-branded to encourage
| pregnancy.[3]
|
| The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman)
| are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress
| women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.
|
| There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and
| pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the
| lights."
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Un...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_the_Great_Plai...
|
| [3] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/11/05/as-russia-targets-
| ab...
|
| [4]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
| RestartKernel wrote:
| [3] is really interesting. I'm not surprised, but it really
| feels like history is _happening_ when even the mundane starts
| to reflect it.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I don't think it will work as long as women have access to
| information and literally anything else to do in life other
| than making endless babies. I fear there will be a push
| against women's freedom of choice, once things become dire
| enough that can't be patched with immigration.
|
| It's just a huge opportunity loss if you talk to any young
| woman, and they're obviously right. There is no tangible
| benefit to have more than two children other than "for the
| humanity!".
| Animats wrote:
| > I don't think it will work as long as women have access
| to information and literally anything else to do in life
| other than making endless babies.
|
| Which has happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban has cracked
| down.[1] "Our analysis shows that by 2026, the impact of
| leaving 1.1 million girls out of school and 100,000 women
| out of university correlates to an increase in early
| childbearing by 45 per cent."
|
| [1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1153151
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I think if everyone in the country could easily afford a 5
| bedroom house on one person's salary, and they deeply felt
| like their kids would grow up safe and healthy environment,
| we'd have a population explosion. The decline is caused by
| a population that cannot afford enough and is constantly
| panicked over global events. Everyone is presented with
| terror of doom constantly, and squeezed by a major shift of
| resources from labor to capital holders. The rich get
| richer, everyone else gets poorer.
|
| A family of rabbits without enough quiet, food, shelter,
| etc will have hardly any babies. The mother will also eat
| any babies.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| You really think women, on average, would be willing to
| sacrifice 6+ years at the minimum to have 3 children?
| It's easy for us, men, to say that. But all my girl
| friends around my age group (late 20s-early 40s) are
| generally happy with 0-2 children. Genuinely nothing is
| stopping them other than "why do I need to make that
| sacrifice?" question. I will never blame them either,
| because I would do exactly the same in their place. It is
| the most logical thing to do. It's either we make women's
| lives objectively worse, or figure out a way where we can
| live without everyone going for 3+.
| whartung wrote:
| > Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go
| fast.
|
| In Nevada/Eastern California there was a railroad that went
| from the Carson City area down toward Owen's Lake.
|
| The interesting part is if you look at the railroad map, pretty
| much none of the stops exist anymore. It's a long string of
| communities that are all long gone from the eastern Owen's
| Valley.
|
| Even the eventual highways that were to follow ended up coming
| down the western side of the valley, yet more reason for those
| late communities to no longer exist.
|
| And it's pretty much all gone. No ghost towns, maybe a few
| overgrown foundations remnants.
|
| But if you had never seen this railroad map, you'd probably
| never have any idea this land was occupied at all.
| jdlshore wrote:
| > There are two futures, both bad.
|
| Or, more likely, people are extrapolating from current trends,
| and those trends won't hold. Not that long ago, people were
| doing that extrapolation and deciding that overpopulation and
| worldwide famine were in our future. "The Population Bomb" was
| a bestselling book along those lines.
|
| The population is likely to shrink, easing strain on resources,
| and people will look back fondly on "the good old days" when
| folks had big families. Trends will shift and the population
| will grow again.
| benchmarkist wrote:
| It's a self-correcting problem. The people who don't have
| children select themselves out of the gene pool and are
| replaced by those who do have children.
| debesyla wrote:
| It's debatable if choice/want/accident of having children
| is based on genetics.
| benchmarkist wrote:
| It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do
| not persist in the environment and so are selected out of
| the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the
| environment are tautologically the ones that managed to
| replicate and persist. The people who do not have
| children are selecting themselves out of the pool of
| genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that
| do make copies.
|
| If you're talking about environmental pollution and
| declining fertility because of it then that's something
| else but even then, those who manage to survive and
| persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who
| pass on copies of their genes.
| notahacker wrote:
| > It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do
| not persist in the environment and so are selected out of
| the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the
| environment are tautologically the ones that managed to
| replicate and persist. The people who do not have
| children are selecting themselves out of the pool of
| genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that
| do make copies
|
| That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have
| less children, which has very little to do with their
| genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not
| "replacement" with children who are genetically
| determined to be fecund.
| benchmarkist wrote:
| Humans are animals and animals which do not replicate are
| selected out of the gene pool. There is nothing to argue
| here.
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| This documentary explores this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l11zPNb-MFg
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath:_Population_Zero
|
| Aftermath: Population Zero - The World without Humans What would
| happen if, tomorrow, every single person on Earth simply
| disappeared? Not dead, simply gone, just like that. A world
| without people, where city streets are still populated by cars,
| but no drivers. A world where there is no one to fix bridges or
| repair broken windows...
| pvaldes wrote:
| Some years of great success ended by a rust nuclear plant
| suddenly exploding.
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