Nearly 6,000 monitored vertebrate species across more than 35,000 populations declined by an average of 73% from 1970 to 2022, the World Wide Fund for Nature said in its latest Living Planet Report published on Thursday.
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- codydodd@lemmy.caEnglish1 month
We are the next great mass extinction event and in some ways our impact is already faster (and this far in, harder) than most of our previous mass extinction events. But hey, billionaires need a few more yachts and need endless growth even if it literally kills the planet. So thats a price we are willing to pay for them. We should be rioting.
1 monthYeah, but it isn’t enough to know something is wrong, you should consider why people aren’t rioting (more), and whether it is too reductive to assume it is a select few individuals and not a system that empowers them (even if they have disproportionate power over that system).
Most people are working dude, and many of them have to work out of responsibility for dependents. Ending this system also doesn’t just mean taking the billionaires’ yachts away, it means ending cheap electronics or coffee for the Global North, it means that clothes and time become more materially expensive for the benefactors in the metropole, which includes you. You and the people around you are effected by climate change and ecological destruction, but your immediate material interests are more aligned with maintaining this system than it is ending it, and you guys behave as such whether you realize it or not.
People riot in colonized spaces all the time, but if they aren’t stopped by the colonial puppet states who occupy them, they’re stopped by the imperialist militaries that you pay into whether through taxes, your state’s federal investment portfolios, or the wealth that is directly extracted from your labour into the hands of capitalists. There is a reason that people in the metropole only started giving a shit after it effected them, it’s hard to risk your own security for something that you can only rationally understand is real, and if we’re being honest, the way of life in the metropole makes many of these people too exhausted or petulant to put much effort into that.
It would be incredible if all we needed was some white guys in the metropole to kill a few naughty bois to end all of this, but there’s a reason that this hasn’t happened even if it would work. Liberals in the metropole have a hard time knowing what to do about any of this because they don’t want to recognize how they materially benefit from this violence, or grapple with the commitment to risk their security once they do.
edit: well, there we go, lol.
- codydodd@lemmy.caEnglish1 month
Nah mass consciousness is on the rise. In my home province a few years ago the government tried to ban collective bargaining for custodian services to which the province responded with a planned general strike. It won, the government immediately backed down. We do have power. We just forget that until we dont.
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-threat-of-a-general-strike-shook-doug-fords-ontario-government/
I don’t know what you would have read in my comment that suggested that we don’t have “power,” and I think that your response was to say “yes, but people here use their efforts to the benefit of some workers here,” shows that you don’t really understand the comment I left (or didn’t read it and just want to say something righteous).
That’s fine that labour movements happen in the metropole, and I’ll remind you that they used to be far more prominent than they currently are, but that they happen doesn’t demonstrate solidarity even among workers throughout the metropole, let alone a willingness among those workers to sacrifice their material security to the benefit of colonized peoples in the global south. Again, so long as you don’t recognize that this is what the objective has to be in order to challenge this system, a slight raise for vulnerable workers here will amount to a snooze button.
i wish people stopped calling it “human driven”. it’s capitalism and colonialism driven. the sooner we realise this, the sooner we can put an end to it
- thedarkfly@feddit.orgEnglish1 month
100% behind you regarding the devastating impact of capitalism on society and ecology.
However, the mass extinction began at the end of the Pleistocene with the megafauna. From the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, humans never behaved sustainably.
Now that we have the scientific method and we are able to predict accurately the consequences of our actions, I want to believe that our spieces is able to change. Currently, capitalism is one of the main force against improvement.
yea, it’s a pattern that has repeated itself. humans come to a new place, wipe out the megafauna thru hunting them to extinction, then a new sustainable equilibrium is formed, with humans as a full part of the ecosystem. really, it’s what happens whenever a new species is introduced to somewhere: big changes to the ecosystem then the formation of a new normal.
but capitalism and colonialism have disrupted, and continue to disrupt, this equilibrium, more than ever before. and the difference is, we can act upon it. it’s not easy of course, but these systems can be overthrown. when you just blanket-blame humanity, what’s the implied solution? collective suicide?
- thedarkfly@feddit.orgEnglish1 month
Well, my hope is that humanity was so destructive out of ignorance. I hope that science and education, or in general the knowledge of how we impact the world and the consequences, lead to wiser choices. This could be for egotistical reasons (a healthy ecosystem leads to easier life for humans), or out of respect for other life forms.
capitalism and colonialism are both human.
It’s all human. Even if capitalism and colonialism were off the table, every person alive consumes so much food a day, and every square foot devoted to their life is unavailable for wildlife.
we don’t have to do it in the most wasteful way tho
it shouldn’t be lost on us that the two first pictured examples on the wikipedia page for the anthropocene extinction are of the bison and dodo. two animals who coexisted with humans for thousands of years and were only driven to extinction (or near extinction) a very short time after a particular group of humans (read: european settlers) came
This is a famously difficult to interpret statistic. It’s an excellent survey, but you probably do not understand what the number means (because it is a weird number). In particular, only half of species surveyed showed a population decline at all, the other half either grew or were stagnant.
The authors of the LPI go to great lengths to explain this. Yet, there is inevitably a long list of headlines claiming that we’ve “lost 73% of wildlife”, “73% of species have gone extinct”, or “73% of species are declining”. All of these are incorrect.
To give you another sense that this number is weird:
The 2022 Living Planet Index reported an average decline of 69% since 1970. In 2024, it reported a 73% decline. And this latest report finds the same: 73%.
So, what exactly is this 73% number?
To obtain the final LPI number, researchers take the geometric mean of the rates of change across all these populations. They also provide different weights to different populations, which affects the final result.
I don’t know other places where I’d take the geometric mean. I have no intuition for it. So… caution advised.
- 1 month
Yes. We’re living a human driven mass extinction event and we’re all going to starve.
- ObtuseDoorFrame@lemmy.zipEnglish1 month
…fuck. The Brazilian election going poorly isn’t going to help. I suppose we won’t know what the final nail looks like until after it happens (hindsight, and all that) but I feel like putting the Amazon in the hands of fascists could do it.
I remember reading a study that stated the Amazon is very close to a tipping point where it will cease to be a tropical jungle, becoming a giant savanna instead. Almost all other biomes from the entire South America will collapse when this happen.
