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10 Percent of the World's Wilderness Has Been Lost Since 1990s (livescience.com)
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.
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 government owns 47 percent of all land in the West. (That's about 1/4th of our country that is, essentially, wilderness.)
Ken
The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable. This can either change by design or we can wait for the inevitable wars over increasingly scarce resources. Anyway, I hear soylent green tastes like chicken.
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.
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.
Well of course you could do something about it, virtually all of the driving force behind this is either economic or due to the expanding population... but it would require something from you. It would be more expensive and less convenient than doing nothing, and it would not entail solving the problem by yourself. It would mean contributing to the solution in a small way for which you wouldn't receive any praise or gratitude, and for which some people would dismiss and insult you.
Maybe the parent was intended as sarcasm, but this is one of those cases where it's hard to tell.
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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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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.