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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.
Can't do anything about it even if I wanted to. That's the future's problem, not mine.
"Wilderness," what's that? Wild? In some cities, wilderness is increasing. Untouched by humans? Then we wouldn't know about it, would we?
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?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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
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?
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.
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.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Since 1990? Geez...that's setting the bar pretty low...let's go back a few hundred years, I bet it's more like 80%.
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). XKCD has a stunning graphic showing the mass of all mammals on the planet.....and much is (you guessed it) livestock, followed by humans, with a sprinkling of wild mammals. NatGeo illustrates how much land there is on the planet, how much remains 'untouched', and how much we consume. We use up almost 40% of the entire non-ice land for 'agriculture', the vast majority as pastures, and you'll find much of the cropland is also devoted to this area.'Free range' is actually worse, demanding even more space than 'factory farmed'.
If you really care about this issue, consider what you're eating. When it comes to resource use (water, energy, space), livestock are at the top, or near. And it's a change we all can make. (And there's never been greater vegan options to choose from, give them a try if you haven't!)
Oh sure, focus on the loss of wilderness rather than the energy and minerals that have been sourced!
Antarctica alone is 14 million square kilometers, so the hysterical figures were obviously obtained the 'traditional way'.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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 global climate crisis progresses.
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.
-- Cheers!
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.
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.
On the other hand, biomass has been increasing, arable footprint is likely to shrink, people are better fed and live better, no shortage of wilderness.
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
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.
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.
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 that there are so many other externalities to deal with is a huge expense to business. If you can obscure cabon's role as an externality then you can bring the role of all externalities into question and avoid those costs.
PR is always cheaper than actually doing something.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
https://youtu.be/3LKQ3eX9pEg?t...
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
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
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Let's get rid of 25% by 2030! /s
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. (FWIW, over half of the designated wilderness is in Alaska.) Of course, the government's definition of wilderness is not the same as the definition in TFA, but assuming that 25% of the US landmass is wilderness by any reasonable definition is absurd.
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.
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 areas, they cannot be wilderness. If the people are politically and economically disadvantaged, wouldn't development be the route to correcting that?
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?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?