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World Wildlife Falls By 58% in 40 years (bbc.com)
Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970, BBC reports citing The Living Planet assessment by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and WWF. The report adds that if the trend continues, the decline would reach two-thirds among vertebrates by 2020. The figures suggest that animals living in lakes, rivers and wetlands are suffering the biggest losses. Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines. From the report: Dr Mike Barrett. head of science and policy at WWF, said: "It's pretty clear under 'business as usual' we will see continued declines in these wildlife populations. But I think now we've reached a point where there isn't really any excuse to let this carry on. This analysis looked at 3,700 different species of birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles - about 6% of the total number of vertebrate species in the world. The team collected data from peer-reviewed studies, government statistics and surveys collated by conservation groups and NGOs. Any species with population data going back to 1970, with two or more time points (to show trends) was included in the study.
It's too wild!
Tone it down!
Time to hit habitat loss over the head with a steel chair. And climate change with an RKO.
I am sick and tired of climate change being mentioned in every story with no evidence to back it up?
To me the solution to most problems is simple ... Less people!
Why don't we give out condoms to lesser countries and give tax incentives in wealthier ones? Face it. The reason for habit loss is economic as people need housing, food, and cheap products that produce toxins. Immigration problems wouldn't be an issue if Latin Americans and Africans could find work at livable wages. When over supply of labor hits you get a dump on demand.
When housing and food prices stabilize you get less demand to clear wooded areas for more subdivisions in former wooded areas. We as citizens get less air pollution and plastics in our seas too and more affordable housing and less out of work and migrant workers draining our resources. We all benefit.
It is 2016 and no family should have 1 or 2 kids each!
http://saveie6.com/
Means more room for humans. We're succeeding as a species. I suspect it wont end well for us though.
We need more coal to bring back jobs to white people living in the battleground states, and besides, climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese.
We'll just 3D print more when the Private Space Singularity arrives sometime next week.
You're silly china doesn't have pollution it's just fog.
http://daliandalliances.tumblr...
There is no pollution in china.
Right?
to set more wild fires!
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
I'm not saying there's any intentional bias here, I'm just curious and posing the question. If the data was collected from a any study with multiple data points on population... is there a control factor for whether studies including population data in general are more likely to occur on species that are dwindling? If a species has no population issues to begin with, is it likely to have a study?
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
I'm more worried about the current ongoing mass extinction than I am about climate change per se. (Yes, I realize that climate change is a major contributor to the mass extinction). Sea level rise is going to be catastrophic, but not an existential problem for human civilization. But our agriculture depends on a lot of non-human species (bees, for example). An agricultural collapse brought on by a combination of climate change and mass extinction would be an existential threat to humanity.
in the same timespan. It's easy to deplore the numbers, but the actual decision on who exactly has to disappear to make room for a wild-life zoo - and why - is not so easy and can certainly not be avoided by dropping condoms form helicopters.
On the other hand, man is part of nature - and humans and his house-animals are not even included in the survey. Those should be worth a lot more than your random wild beast (for us, but slashdot [i]is[/i] a human website after all).
The Chinese want them and some animal parts have the potential to produce them. Game over.
msmash is Captain Planet's secret identity!
Actually, the concept of Global Warming was initially championed by Margaret Thatcher. . .
That's all they want everyone to know that its mans fault and if we don't just die and leave the planet, all hope is lost.
Too many people ... makes you wonder if the Muslims are right and mass killing is a good thing
https://aeon.co/essays/do-people-have-a-moral-duty-to-have-children-if-they-can
The water wildlife is dying because of all the shipping ships from China putting their pollution directly in the water.
And the ships carrying fossil fuels too, those are a big problem.
Science has proved it's a fact each ship puts out almost as much carbon pollution as all the cars on the earth combined.
And it spits it directly into the water.
What a shame, I love tuna fish.
If you plot the declining wildlife, its curve is the opposite of the deep fryer sales in the US curve.
Jeezbus left them as stewards of the world and it's animals and they are doing a lousy job.
That's all they want everyone to know that its mans fault and if we don't just die and leave the
planet, all hope is lost.
That's all I want everyone to know that its Lefty's fault and if they don't just die and leave the
planet, all hope is lost.
I hope you understand his comments were tongue-in-cheek, right?
Follow the overpopulated countries and you will find the cause.
Hegelian dialectics. Carbon tax! Pay us a tax and it will fix everything. Here buy some other oil based products while we charge you a $6,000 fee to get a permit to install Solar panels.
We will continue dumping our toxic chemicals deep into ground contaminating your drinking water and causing earthquakes, and extracting more natural gas so YOU can dump it into the atmosphere. We will continue dumping chemicals into the rivers from our chemical plants at a rate that far exceeds what YOU could do in a lifetime. We will continue polluting the atmosphere with billowing chemicals, and dumping more from the planes.
All so YOU will pay US a carbon tax.
Well FUCK YOU New World Order. I'm with holding ALL taxes.
The comment here was tongue-in-cheek. Trump, on the other hand, was serious when he made his statements. He has since denied them, but the records are easily findable if you're interested.
Say what you will, but I don't like the way things are going in the broad perspective.
Yes, we are the dominant species. And yes that is cool.
But we need to start and act as responsible as we are. Right now we only have one planet and it's probably going to stay that way - any people moving to mars in 300 years probably will go to stay there. Just watching those old films of english colonial lords shooting tigers by the dozen just for the kicks or seeing japanese firms chopping down rainforests in the indonesian sea for precious wood because the imprint of it looks cool on cast concrete (seriously) makes me sick. This sort of behaviour is totally insane.
I actually think it might well placed and targeted eco terrorism/sabotage might even be waranted in a few situations happening around the globe. Ignorant idiots are fucking up the planet and we need a global military force to stop them. Make it really expensive in hardware, money and lives to poison rivers in south america where metals are being mined. Stop bulldozers in the amazon with an AMG shot to the motor.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What did they do? Travel to Noah's Ark every year and do a census? If they took studies out of ecology journals obviously they're going to be biased toward animals that are going extinct, not much money in studying species doing just fine. Did they include roaches or pigeons? Seems like they're more of them around then ever? If not, why not? So you're telling me 58% of ALL animals on earth died off over a couple decades and we're still here having barely noticed. Hmmm...that would make a rational person think they were less important and not more, than we previously thought.
Everyone ignores it because the source has a conflict of interest and likely didn't come to a conclusion through research, but fond research to support their conclusion.
Guess what, same thing applies here.
Same shit, different day.
IMO, this isn't about climate change, global warming, or some other complex ecological equation with a gazillion variables. Isn't it just that we're simply destroying more and more wild spaces/habitat for our own species' reasons? We've been slashing forests and clearing out new land for new subdivisions, dumping waste elsewhere, for centuries now - usually in the best places on the planet.
Mix in our propensity for permanently altering various environments with invasive species or new chemicals to support the human race's growing need for food/energy, and you have a very potent force for mass extinction.
Modern development should change to live more within the natural background it's living within, to cohabitate with other animals.. Hopefully we'll figure that out soon.
From the article: However, Living Planet reports have drawn some criticisms.
Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation ecology at Duke University in the United States, said that while wildlife was in decline, there were too many gaps in the data to boil population loss down to a single figure.
"There are some numbers [in the report] that are sensible, but there are some numbers that are very, very sketchy," he told BBC News. "For example, if you look at where the data comes from, not surprisingly, it is massively skewed towards western Europe. When you go elsewhere, not only do the data become far fewer, but in practice they become much, much sketchier... there is almost nothing from South America, from tropical Africa, there is not much from the tropics, period. Any time you are trying to mix stuff like that, it is is very very hard to know what the numbers mean."
"They're trying to pull this stuff in a blender and spew out a single number.... It's flawed."
My bet is on chemtrails not being accounted for, but actually being responsible for a large percentage of the die-off. The Great Barrier Reef is not dying due to global warming, but is dying due to the chemicals in the chemtrails.
http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
If you mean "succeeding" as in producing more and more people who don't do anything but buy things and pollute, we're champs. We're also the only species that does such things. Success! You should trademark that.
IMO, this isn't about climate change, global warming, or some other complex ecological equation with a gazillion variables. Isn't it just that we're simply destroying more and more wild spaces/habitat for our own species' reasons? We've been slashing forests and clearing out new land for new subdivisions, dumping waste elsewhere, for centuries now - usually in the best places on the planet.
Mix in our propensity for permanently altering various environments with invasive species or new chemicals to support the human race's growing need for food/energy, and you have a very potent force for mass extinction.
Modern development should change to live more within the natural background it's living within, to cohabitate with other animals.. Hopefully we'll figure that out soon.
A good starting point would be to require at least 20% of the land in every government jurisdiction be kept in a wild state. This could be public or private land: in the latter case, it would not be subject to property tax or any other form of rent - even if owned by a business. The tax provision would be conditional: the land must be subject to the right to roam, i.e. owner could not fence it off or otherwise interfere with reasonable travel (including travel at night for purposes such as stargazing, exercise, or photography).
Without such a fixed (and strictly enforced) rule, we can expect local government to eventually be bribed by developers to permit development. There's just too much money in development: it inevitably leads to corruption.
We might also need a rule that each major natural ecosystem in the jurisdiction be reasonably well represented in the reserved areas.
There would probably need to be special rules to handle entry to (and modifications of) the land for utilities, or for maintenance purposes such as removing noxious weeds or other invasive species, and problematic animals (such as man-killers, rabid animals, and so forth). It might even be necessary in some situations to clear the land and start over - perhaps if there is a particularly bad noxious weed problem. Thus, the land would not be entirely "wild" in the sense of "always untouched".
Similarly, the issue of homeless people staying on the land would need to be addressed - probably by requiring every jurisdiction have appropriate shelters and low income housing. It would then be reasonable to prohibit homeless people from staying on the land, with an exception for major regional disasters that deprive many people of their homes.
Existing cities would need special handling. There tend to be large numbers of vacant lots and unused buildings in many cities - especially those in economic decline or with rent-control. This could be a starting point for establishing wild spaces. We might also do something similar to what is done in some large regional parks: people could keep their existing lots as long as they live, but not pass them on to their heirs. Something similar could be applied to properties owned by businesses. Some sort of lottery might make sense to determine affected properties, and appropriate compensation would be needed, as usual per eminent domain.
Another option would be to count appropriate rooftop gardens towards the 20% in very dense urban areas. This might still come with a tax benefit, so that a business could be located under the garden and would have an incentive to maintain it.
Unlike a business, a home should never be subject to property tax, since that means one effectively must rent one's home from the government - i.e. one is never free to own one's home in any jurisdiction where the government requires property tax (an unconscionable contradiction in the law that inherently represents unethical practice of law and unethical government for any government that is expected to respect individual freedom) - so there should be no need for a property tax benefit to home owners. Still, some other form of tax benefit would probably be appropriate for homes with rooftop gardens - to help offset the cost of maintaining these gardens - perhaps part of a general income tax benefit that applies to a variety of environmentally friendly actions.
The number is not falling,it skyrocketed.
We are wild.
Nice! Only 42% to go.
The biggest threat is the so-called conservationists. Conservationists have shifted from "sustainable use" to animal rights. An animal that does not have a "use" is a parasite. An animal that has a "use" will always be welcome on private land, while an animal that has no "use" will most likely be unwelcome. This might not sit well with many people, but it is reality. If you want animals to survive, don't make them useless. Unless you want just a handful of animals in public reserves. And even then, you will have to be prepared to spend a lot of money on protecting them from poachers.