Humanity Has Wiped Out 60% of Animal Populations Since 1970 (theguardian.com)

Artem Tashkinov shares a report: The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else. Many scientists believe the world has begun a sixth mass extinction, the first to be caused by a species -- Homo sapiens. Other recent analyses have revealed that humankind has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of civilisation and that, even if the destruction were to end now, it would take 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover. Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF, said: "We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it."

Comments

First generation?

[110010001000]

I'm pretty sure we have known this for generations and could have taken action earlier. Unfortunately, there is no financial incentive to do so. In fact, the financial incentive is to do the opposite: clear land for farming, living, raw materials. This is the real threat to humanity: the destruction of continuous habitat and forests. But the focus is on "Climate Change" because we can implement carbon trading and taxes on it and "fix it".

Re:First generation?

[JackieBrown]

Most logging companies in the US plan two new trees for each one cut down. The financial incentive is clear.

I agree with you that is one of the reasons there is a focus on "Climate Change." Another reason is it gives government a reason to take over or regulate industries. It gives us a handy enemy list as well - big oil, big lumber, etc.

Re:First generation?

[Ly4]

Logging companies aren't the ones destroying habitat. That's mostly from farming and ranching, and suburban growth.

Brazil just elected a president who wants to privatize even more of the Amazon, so expect the rate of deforestation there to increase from its current rate of six square miles per day.

Re:First generation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately they almost exclusively replant fast growing species like pine. They are planning for the next trip through that area in 20-30 years to cut down mature trees again. They hardly ever plant hardwoods and when they do it's only because they are forced to by state or local regulations. They will come through and cut down trees that take 50 to 70 years to reach maturity. Trees that are worth a ton of money because they take so long to grow. Then they plant cheap, fast growing pine to "replace" the hardwoods they cut. Even if they plant 10 pine trees for every hardwood they cut down it's still not a fair trade.

I'm glad they are planting more trees but don't pat them on the back. They have a financial incentive to plant a ton of evergreen trees. They will need something to cut down and process in the future. It has exactly zero to do with environmental stewardship and everything to do with future profits. The one and only reason companies in the US do anything that seems environmentally responsible is because they are either forced to do so by regulations or because they know if they don't they will go out of business since their won't be any trees left for them to cut down.

Re:First generation?

[Kyr Arvin]

Brazil just elected a president who wants to privatize even more of the Amazon, so expect the rate of deforestation there to increase from its current rate of six square miles per day.

I'm not in Brazil, so I don't know this first hand, but I suspect that as with the US, the respectable people wouldn't address things that needed addressing, so the voters went with the unrespectable person.

Cutting down the entire Amazon is one of Jair Bolsonaro's less controversial positions. Other quotes:

(Said to a Congresswoman) "I wouldn't rape you because you don't deserve it."

"I've got five kids but on the fifth I had a moment of weakness and it came out a woman."

"I visited a quilombo (settlement founded by former slaves) and the least heavy afro-descendant weighed seven arrobas (approximately 230 pounds). They do nothing! They are not even good for procreation."

"I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son [ ... I would rather my son ] died in an accident than showed up with some bloke with a moustache."

"Elections won't change anything in this country. It will only change on the day that we break out in civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn't do: killing 30,000. If some innocent people die, that's fine. In every war, innocent people die."

"the error of the Brazil dictatorship was that it tortured, but did not kill." And, "Pinochet should have killed more Chileans."

Re:And as usual

[freeze128]

Get rid of mosquitoes, and the frogs starve to death. Get rid of rattlesnakes, and you're overrun by mice.

Humans + livestock account for 96% mammal biomass

[fedor]

Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent. https://www.ecowatch.com/bioma...

Re:And as usual

[codeButcher]

...we screw it up. We get rid of harmless Dodos. We don't get rid of rattlesnakes or mosquitoes.

Allegedly, dodos tasted better than rattlers or mozzies.

Re:And as usual

[squiggleslash]

Frogs have plenty of alternatives to mosquitoes, and mice have plenty of natural predators.

Re:And as usual

[cascadingstylesheet]

Get rid of mosquitoes, and the frogs starve to death. Get rid of rattlesnakes, and you're overrun by mice.

This gets brought up every time, but I'm pretty sure that respectable authorities have said that mosquitoes aren't a crucial food source for anything. (yes, some things eat them, but nothing will starve if they went away)

Re:5-7 million years to recover is complete bullsh

[SqueakyMouse]

It's referring to biodiversity. You won't see much speciation in 5-10 years.

Re:Humans + livestock account for 96% mammal bioma

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a brilliant XKCD chart illustrating this very thing.

Forest is being cut down to make room for for cattle grazing. the XKCD graphic above shows just how bad this situation is. Us humans outnumber ALL wild animal put together and out cattle outnumber us!

100 times as much water is used to create a lb of beef than a lb of crops! Producing 1 calorie of animal protein uses over 10 times as much fossil fuels as 1 calorie of plant protein!

I think in the long run the only chance we have is for us all to go vegan. It will save the animals and the planet and therefore us as well.

Cleerline

Re:And as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Texas, the rattlesnakes are about the only predators that keep the mice and rat populations down. Coyotes assist, but the rodents are in the billions. Feral hogs are another major issue here. Coyotes cannot take them and the mountain lions and other large cats are only in certain areas. My father-in-law has so many wild hogs on his land (East Texas), that we could literally shoot them from dusk to dawn for a week straight and not really even put a dent in their population. They are highly destructive to crops, domestic farm stock, and irrigation areas. I tend not to shoot coyotes unless they are a nuisance, but we'll shoot hogs all day long. Their meat is nasty and most of them are unfit to eat. The foxes have largely been pushed out by the coyotes. And the deer... so many deer. If humans don't cull them, their predators cannot kill enough of them and quite a few end up starving to death in the winter because the hogs eat up all the acorns and other tree nuts.

Fake News

[fleabay]

Vince McMahon is the chief executive at WWF, not some Tanya Steele who may not even be a real person.

There isn't a global solution

[DarkOx]

The first step to protecting a future for our grand kids is to recognize there is NOT a global solution. There are probably already to many people.

Population is the one driving factor. Everything else is a rounding error. Anyone who actually cares about the environment would be in favor of basically ending immigration. Limit agricultural exports and imports.

Here in the US we are essentially at the replacement rate in terms of birth rate. Stop letting new outsiders in. Deal with the not nearly as complex economic problem of having a flat population size as compared to growth beyond sustainability or population decline.

Let the rest of the worlds population 'naturally' adjust to the local carrying capacity of those places.

Re:There isn't a global solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the rest of the worlds population 'naturally' adjust to the local carrying capacity of those places.

The point is that there is no longer any "naturally". Even the poorest countries have access to enough technology that by the time their populations get large/dense enough that they are limited by starvation, etc. then the environments in those countries will be totally destroyed. Back when all the technology that people had was sharp rocks and rubbing sticks together to make fires, people would start starving to death long before the environment was completely destroyed. But that's no longer the case.

The interesting thing though, is that if you give people a basic education and access to affordable birth control then they don't want large families. When you're trying to survive on less than a dollar a day, condoms are hard to fit in the budget. Very few people want to tell their children that they were unwanted. So there's a lot of rationalization that goes on in developing countries. But the truth is that the high birth rate in developing countries is mostly due to unplanned pregnancies.

If people in the USA want to preserve the environment in developing countries (i.e. most of the rest of the world) then it's not about limiting immigration. I will absolutely guarantee you that people in developing countries aren't like "Oh, I see the USA has a welcoming immigration policy so let's have more kids!". Instead, it's about providing people in developing countries with enough socioeconomic assistance that they are able to choose to have small families.

Re:There isn't a global solution

[Rick Schumann]

You know, it's always really fucking easy for someone who lives in a nice, safe, first-world country, who makes a nice, tidy six-digit income, owns his own home, a couple cars, has nice things, new clothes, and is perfectly safe 24/7/365, as is his wife and kids, to say shit like "Stop letting outsiders in" and "Let the rest of the worlds population 'naturally' adjust to the local carrying capacity of those places". You've never had to struggle like these people have just to have enough to eat or a roof over their heads, you've never had to deal with a government that is so corrupt and/or disregarding of their own citizens human rights that they feel the need to leave for their own safety, or lived anywhere where violent criminal organizations threaten your life on a daily basis, or try to kidnap your children to turn into prostitutes or slaves or suicide bombers. No, you have precisely ZERO perspective on what it's like anywhere else in the world, and treat your willful ignorance like it's some sort of fucked-up virtue instead. You most likely don't even know what it's like for the homeless that exist (not LIVE, but EXIST, BARELY) in your area, and probably think they're just lazy or criminals on the run and should be erradicated "for public safety reasons" or somesuch shit. You need to shut the fuck up about things you know nothing about, you entitled son of a bitch.

Re:There isn't a global solution

[CrimsonAvenger]

Let the rest of the worlds population 'naturally' adjust to the local carrying capacity of those places.

Hmm, so, what's the "carrying capacity" of New York City? Or Los Angeles? Hell, it's not like they grow enough food in either of those places to feed the Police Department, much less the rest of the people!

Or was this just your way of saying, "let them brown people starve, damnit! And pass the mashed potatoes"?

Note that if we were to drop back to the "natural carrying capacity" of the land, we'd have to drop back to the "natural" number of humans. Say, a few tens of thousands living in caves.

Oddly enough, I'm willing to bet that everyone who wants to "drop back to the natural carrying capacity of the land" assumes that they'll be part of the 0.001% who survives the famines/plagues/wars that'll be required to make sure Those Others do the dying.

Re:There isn't a global solution

[quenda]

or lived anywhere where violent criminal organizations threaten your life on a daily basis, or try to kidnap your children to turn into prostitutes or slaves or suicide bombers.

Yes, and he would like to keep it that way, thankyou.
If I'm in an overcrowded lifeboat, in freezing North Atlantic waters, I should pull more people on board until it capsizes? Describing foreigners that way is really not helping your argument, just scaring him more.

Re:There isn't a global solution

[religionofpeas]

stop being a selfish dick

The people that are coming over from Africa to Europe are all selfish dicks too. Most of them are young, strong men that are lucky enough to have the money to pay for the fare. Instead of helping to overthrow their corrupt government, they quit, and leave the problems for the less fortunate to solve.

Re:60% of species

[JoeDuncan]

Bugs are animals, and many of them are thriving on our leftovers...

Nope.

Bugs dying off too:

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

Welcome to the Anthropocene Extinction Event!

[His name cannot be s]

Better get used to it.

It's still a long slide to the bottom.

Obligatory /. meme

[Tablizer]

It's their fault for being delicious.

Re:And as usual

[Errol backfiring]

Actually, no.

The Dodo was named "walgvogel" ("disgusting bird") by the Dutch because its flesh tasted awful. They wiped out the entire species because it was so easy (it feared no predators) and, er, just because.

Re: the web of life, billions of years in the maki

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Those 99% of the species have gone extinct in the previous billion years. We are now talking about a period of time which is less than 0.000005%. I'm not sure Earth has ever witnessed such a rapid and currently irreversible extinction event.

Re: Unsurprising

[jd]

Mathematicians declare 1+1=2
Objectors declare mathematicians have vested interest

Sometimes, interested parties lie. Yes. Sometimes they tell the truth by accident, not intending to do so. And sometimes they are indeed being honest.

Is it a better use of time to be cynical or skeptical?

Skeptics need evidence, but will be persuaded by what they see (and not by what they don't).

Cynics don't want evidence and will never be persuaded. They don't want to be, and will move the goalposts to infinity to ensure it, if they have to.

Be a skeptic, not a cynic.

You don't have to be schooled, there won't be any significant new species forming between 1970 and now, so the maximum percentage of species must be all the ones we know went extinct divided by all the ones we know about now plus the ones that went extinct, all multiplied by 100.

We don't know about cleared land, loggers aren't known for tracking such things. So we use the biodiversity of rainforests as a guide for estimating unknown species that went extinct and unknown species total. That will give us a second percentage. The tundra has a lower species count and a lower extinction level, so we've a second lot of unknowns there. Add those to the rainforest totals to get a third percentage.

We now have a spread of three possible values. It's unlikely to be below the minimum, it's unlikely to be above the maximum, it's probably close to the figure between those, but it won't be exact.

Doesn't require any schooling. Just requires a skeptical, enquiring mind.

Re: the web of life, billions of years in the mak

[jd]

Irrelevant.

Branches of the tree of life become irrelevant ant die off. That's natural and normal.

But that is not even remotely equivalent to taking an axe to the trunk or lopping off healthy branches to make way for the diseased.

Re:And as usual

[hey!]

Rattlesnakes are fine if you have the sense to leave them alone. They have a rattle *to warn you off*. They don't want to inject you with venom, any more than you want to get up and run ten kilometers. You're about 3.5x as likely to be killed by a dog as you are by all venomous snakes combined.

As for mosquitoes, don't get your hopes up. One female can lay 100-500 eggs depending on species every three days; under the right conditions those eggs can reach sexual maturity in about ten days. That means, in theory, that missing a single gravid female in your pre-summer eradication efforts can lead to over a million trillion descendants by the end of a 13 week summer. While in practice no single mosquito is likely to be *that* reproductively successful, in practice you're always going to miss a lot more than just one.

This combination of short reproductive cycles and large brood sizes is characteristic of a "weedy" species. In a stable ecosystem, weedy species are kept in check by species with more specific adaptation to local conditions, but when you disrupt an ecosystem, it tilts the competitive balance towards species whose ecological niche is rapid colonization of unstable habitats.

Life always finds a way, but it doesn't mean it'll be a way we as humans will find pleasant. A world in which we don't constrain our disruptive activities will have plenty of life, but it'll be algal blooms rather than salmon runs; poison ivy and sumac rather than chestnut trees. A world of mouse plagues, poison ivy and mosquitoes.

Re:And as usual

[ElizabethGreene]

AC is right. History teaches us, specifically the Four Pests Campaign , that eliminating "pest" species can end very poorly.

Re: 5-7 million years to recover is complete bulls

[jd]

Pigs doubling in number isn't quite the same thing as 90 species of megafauna suddenly coming into existence at 10% the number of pigs.

We both know that.

Therefore we both know that you don't listen to the experts because they don't agree with what you believed beforehand. Has nothing to do with whether they're right.

Re:You Can Help

[turp182]

Alligator Wrestling of course.

Re: the web of life, billions of years in the maki

[greythax]

Funny, but not factually accurate. The KT extinction event was just the start, it took thousands of years for the extinction of species to reach its peak. We are outpacing it by a fair clip.

Re:Pure speculation with zero actual facts

[crunchygranola]

The report, written for the general public is documented with 281 references. The Living Planet Index maintained by the WWF is backed with solid research, some of which is also linked to in the references here.

So no, this is not "pure speculation", and yes there are absolutely massive observed decreases.

Ignoring the science doesn't make it go away.

Re:Humans are the "devil"

[rogoshen1]

It's unfortunate that the areas of the world with birthrates high enough to actually lead to population growth do not read Slashdot.

Westerners should probably have more children to offset the 'migrations' they are being subjected to -- if they want to keep their cultures and societies intact.

Re:60% of species

[Sperbels]

We tried to bring back Passenger Pigeons before they went extinct, but we killed too many and crossed a threshold where they couldn't recover. Recovery is not a guarantee.

Re:And as usual

[hey!]

We can pretty confidently say that we can eliminate mosquitoes these days and we're almost 100% sure that our last practice run didn't create zika.

I worked in vector borne disease surveillance for decades, I can say with equal confidence there is no technology known or proposed that has the potential of completely eradicating a mosquito population from any region larger than a thousand acres or so. Even those genetically modified mosquitoes you've been hearing so much about only reduce an infected population in a limited area short term. That reduction will last, at most, for a matter of months; in many situations mere weeks. Still, even that could be useful in reducing anthroponotic (human-to-vector-to-human) transmission.

And by the way yes, human activities didn't create Zika, but they were a big factor in its global emergence. 70 years ago it likely existed only in a small population of rhesus monkeys in a forest on the shores of Lake Victoria, where it no doubt had persisted for thousands of years. Human encroachment offered an alternative host for the primate virus, and human trade and migration patterns carried across the entire tropical world, with anthroponotic outbreaks spreading into temperate climates. That same combination of human incursion on isolated animal populations and global emergence through migration and trade routes is behind SARS, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, Lassa Fever among others in modern times, and are likely the sources of influenza and measles.

I reiterate: life always finds a way, but given a rapid rate of global change it's not going to be a way we'll be happy about.

Pfft

[Maury Markowitz]

"the world has begun a sixth mass extinction, the first to be caused by a species -- Homo sapiens"

Cyanobacteria wiped out 90% of life on the planet. They still have us beat by a landslide.

Re:Pfft

[religionofpeas]

Cyanobacteria wiped out 90% of life on the planet. They still have us beat by a landslide.

Patience. We have only really started our efforts in the last century. I'm sure we'll catch up. Maybe we'll even get the cyanobacteria to pitch in.

So the real question is...

[SocietyoftheFist]

What species will adapt to these changes and thrive?

Re:And as usual

[omfglearntoplay]

I had no idea about that weird Four Pests Campaign. This tidbit from the wiki link says that that crazy campaign, which was intended to end disease, helped contribute to 20 to 45 million people dying. Wow.

"With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[10] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20–45 million people died of starvation."

Re:And as usual

[ElizabethGreene]

This event is one of the reasons I am quietly afraid when we talk about eliminating, introducing, or de-extincting a species. I don't trust us not to repeat it.