What aspects of today's society will we be ashamed of in sixty years?

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob

You may be right, but I think it's still more like 50 Shades of Arrogance. IOW, it's not just about money. It's about respect. It's about swagger. One message any terrorist is putting out there, loud and clear, is "No need for much money to say f*ck you and your power structure." When nomadic tribes did battle, they would have a party afterwards and then give away all the won goods they couldn't carry. What they retained was their Arabic-word-that-I-can't-remember, which means something like Macho-pride. Just like when U of M plays Michigan State except more gruesome, or like stags-in-heat except more advanced weaponry. That pumped up feeling you get when your team wins. That's what its about. The money, the land, the bride-of-the-right-hand, the many sons, heads of cattle, corporate stock options, classic Harley; that's just the sh*t that requires some maintenance in down time.

[cmonkey]

Industrialism combined with the religion of infinite progress. I think this is a sub-cause for many of the things listed in this thread.

We had a twelve hour layover in Tokyo. Inside the airport Toto created a functional gallery to exhibit all of their state-of-the-art toilets.

http://www.toto.co.jp/gallerytoto/en/

Over the course of the day I tried every single one just for the hell of it. I had never, you know, used one of those before. They are fabulous.

I guess there's only so much to do when you live on an island and your population has run its course? When I see some of the stuff Japan comes up with I often think they have entered a state of 'well we've done most everything we can do, lets just do the weirdest thing we can think of'.

[Ego]

Industrialism combined with the myth of infinite progress. I think this is a sub-cause for many of the things listed in this thread.

I think you might be right. But then again my bottom carriage had never been so clean and shiny as it was when I boarded the 787 that evening. Sadly, I will probably never experience that ticklishly pleasant sensation again and will from now on measure my "bathroom experience" against it. Hedonic inflation of a different sort.

[Ego]

Lab grown meat will end animal agriculture as we know it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ry-animals

It will cause future humans to marvel at the fact that we were complicit in our current system. They will be perplexed at how we willfully deluded ourselves into believing that grazing animals was compatible with a sustained future for humans when there was a perfectly suitable alternative.

Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef.

[oldbeyond]

I'd bet environmental stuff, entitlements/debt and class are likely suspects. "How could they treat the earth like a sewer, saddle us with debt and turn society into a pyramid scheme for the benefit of the 0.1%?"

[BRUTE]

Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef.

good thing the country isn't 98% empty with tons of grazing land.

[Campitor]

good thing the country isn't 98% empty with tons of grazing land.

But too bad we use factory farming for animals which concentrates their populations into small land plots which allows the concentrated waste runoff to pollutes our streams. You wouldn't want to live downwind or downriver from a giant hog farm: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... vironment/

I wish animal production was more spread out but that would be too expensive for the meat industry.

[7Wannabe5]

Giant mono-fields of soy aren't fantastic either. If wildlife preservation or ecological resilience was primary concern, then very thoughtful stewardship of any micro-region towards primarily local varied human food procurement/production would be ideal. If you run a model that maximizes human population being fed on fields of soy, you will witness species after species dying off (birds are particularly vulnerable to destruction of trees necessary for field crop production.) Dependency on one food crop has and will greatly effect resilience of our species. We have been successful because we are such flexible, observant, omnivorous scavengers. We are not bold predators. We are not gentle herbivores. Only a vague belief in some sort of imparted animism allows us to believe that we can essentially change our nature through the process of digestion.

[Seppia]

I agree 100%, the focus should always be sustainability.
I hope in the future meat is only harvested from sustainable farms, thus reflecting its real cost.
Now it's artificially low, as the negative externalities resulting from pollution (for example) are not factored in.

[BRUTE]

yay for grazed animals

[Campitor]

Giant mono-fields of soy aren't fantastic either.

I can't remember the name of the documentary or its source, but there are some farmers who are using green manure and diverse/interspersed crop planting to drastically reduce the amount of water needed for irrigation and the amount of pesticides and herbicides used; some have eliminated chemicals altogether. Nothing like sustainable agriculture that saves money to incentivize changes in behavior that lessens the negative footprint of intensive farming. We need more of this in our meat/plant production.

[Ego]

If you run a model that maximizes human population being fed on fields of soy, you will witness species after species dying off (birds are particularly vulnerable to destruction of trees necessary for field crop production.)

I think you might find that study interesting. Here is the full pdf...

http://www.cof.orst.edu/leopold/papers/ ... a_2015.pdf

Right now we are feeding soy to the cattle and then we eat them. If we were to remove the incredibly inefficient middle-man (the cattle) we'd need 97% less farmland. Meat consumption is the largest driver of extinctions. Grasslands are disappearing.

We've got to eat. Why not do the least possible damage?

Does anyone here other than the animal exclusively consume sustainable meat?

[Riggerjack]

Taxing the working man, to pay subsidies to agricorps to not farm the land.

Vegans.

Fecundity. Only slightly offset by starvation, among the most fecund among us. That this happens at the same time and on the same planet as the subsidies above is mind boggling, even today.

[Riggerjack]

Meat consumption is the largest driver of extinctions. Grasslands are disappearing.

We've got to eat. Why not do the least possible damage?

Or, we could try a lower planetary human load. You know, using birth control, like we were intelligent, considerate sapients, rather than locusts waiting for a plague to do to us, what we are unwilling to do for ourselves.

And since the Extinction argument came up again:
www.iucnredlist.org/search
For the 61 species that are extinct in the wild. Got that? 61. That's not the 61 that died off last year, that's the 61 species that have been observed, that cannot currently be observed. So no dinosaurs, or large North American species. There are definitely issues of species not identified, that now never will be. But the storyline of humans wiping out species left and right is rooted in mythology, not science.

When you look up the territory of these species, you see that most were only on one island, or similarly geographically isolated.

This does nothing to relieve us of culpability, but I would rather address a real problem with real solutions, than waste our time feeling bad about a myth we have adopted to help us feel like our fellow humans suck, but we feel better by comparison. The world is full of real reasons to feel superior to the average human, we don't need to make up stories to artificially lower our perceptions of the human average.

[Ego]

And since the Extinction argument came up again:
www.iucnredlist.org/search
For the 61 species that are extinct in the wild. Got that? 61. That's not the 61 that died off last year, that's the 61 species that have been observed, that cannot currently be observed.

The link above does not work. Here is the correct link.
http://www.iucnredlist.org/search

I must be misunderstand. When I did a search for 2016 alone it showed 844 extinctions. Am I reading that wrong?

[Riggerjack]

No. In actuality, different lists from different sources always disagree. When I started digging into extinction numbers, about 10 years ago, wikipedia tied to an organization that had been tracking this for centuries, and had a number of 585, going back to early Extinctions like Dodo birds.

In the years since, the page has been completely reworked several times, and the numbers change every time. Last time, they started listing extinctions by areas a species could no longer be found. So the same species of salmon would be extinct in 74 rivers or streams, yet still being commercially fished.

The other area of confusion is that we have extended the endangered species act to enforce protections of endangered behaviors. Deer living on an island in the river? There aren't many on that island, better protect that "subspecies" not enough native rainbow trout are going into saltwater, endangered. Yup rainbow trout, north America's most popular and common freshwater game fish, some are endangered, some are not, from the same clutch of eggs.

So the numbers will always be squishy, as there is concentrated effort at one end to massage the numbers to extend legal protections, and at the other to maximize the storyline of Extinctions.

I am sympathetic to the cause of environmental health, but the actual work is at best, dishonest. I don't think our real effects on the environment need to be exaggerated for narrative purposes.

Reality is bad enough to justify action, environmental Apocalypse folklore is there so people with little justification can feel superior to the average human. Good for recruitment, not good for actually fixing anything.

[Riggerjack]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_b ... ns_by_year

1970
Molokai 'Alauahio (subsp. flammea)[1]
1971
St. Lucia Wren (subsp.)[1]
1981
Bachman's Warbler
Eskimo Curlew[1]
Mariana Mallard
1987
Kauai Oo
1988
Maui 'Akepa (subsp.)[2]
1990
Borreo's Cinnamon Teal
Hooded Seedeater
'O'u
O'ahu 'Alauahio
Dusky Seaside Sparrow
1995
Maui Nukupu'u
1998
Kauai Nukupu'u
21st century[edit]
2004
Po'ouli

that is every bird that has gone extinct in my lifetime. how many are a subspecies that only lived on one island? All of them that aren't controversial subspecies. Most of that list is variations of the Hawaiian honey creeper.

Before the introduction of molecular phylogenetic techniques, the relationship of the Hawaiian honeycreepers to other bird species was controversial. The honeycreepers were sometimes categorized as a family Drepanididae,[3] other authorities considered them a subfamily, Drepanidinae, of Fringillidae, the finch family. The entire group was also called "Drepanidini" in treatments where buntings and American sparrows (Emberizidae) are included in the finch family; this term is preferred for just one subgroup of the birds today.[4][5] Most recently, the entire group has been subsumed into the finch subfamily Carduelinae.[2][6]

So you can see how soft these numbers are. It's not all agenda driven, the science of species identification is developing, and this will also affect the numbers.

is it 585? 946? 61? it hardly matters, as the numbers from any source will not back up the general knowledge that we are wiping out biodiversity in wholesale numbers. so if the science doesn't back the story, either change the story, or ignore the science. So far, we seem to be comfortable ignoring the science.

[jacob]

@Riggerjack @Ego - There seems to be a bunch of concepts needed [be agreed on] to have this discussion. What comes to mind are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species%E ... area_curve --- which goes something like #species = c*Area^z, where c and z are constants particular to the type of species, e.g. frogs have different parameters than flowers. This gives fair estimate of how many species of a given kind a given habitat area can sustainably support. Use z<1... the curve will look like a plotting a [square]-root.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_debt --- which counts those species which will eventually be extinct but aren't yet. This is the origin of those large numbers (like 10-30% of all species---keep in mind that these mostly include things like worms, parasites, fungi, insects, ... and not lovable creaturs like polar bears and direwolves).

How does this work? You take the species-area curve which works pretty good e.g. plotting #species of a given ind vs area shows a reliable functional relationship. (curve-fitted phenomenologically by e.g. S=cA^z). Then you look to areas where you know there's been historically known changes. For example, you might know that a big forest of area A was divided into two forests of areas 1/2 by building a big city in the middle 200 years ago. Measuring those halves, you note that they have more species than expected by the species-area curve. You have a similar situation that is 700 years old. Or maybe you know that half of an island was flooded in the interrim since the last ice age. By considering the time-dimension, you get a species-area-time functional relation. This allows you to predict when [and how many] species are terminally irrecoverable. Such as e.g. the salmon or whatever. Even if they're still around---if they can't functionally reproduce themselves "in the long run", they are deemed extinct.

This that "extinction" in the ecological [mass statistics] sense here is typically considered at the local level. This means that a particular species can be extinct in Chicago even if some phenotype is still wandering into Chicago on occasion or if there's still a viable population in NYC. Conversely, extinction in the vernacular sense typically means that there's no living DNA left anywhere on the planet of a particular genotype that is identified and well-known (and it's typically pretty hard to verify that due to lack of time and resources of keeping track of all those millions of species).

[Ego]

Okay, but the arguing over the accuracy of the number of extinctions is a tactic used to distract from the main point.... which is.... discontinuing the consumption of meat is a (the?) large(est?) impact any of us can have. Every day we see new evidence of this fact. Is that right?

[Riggerjack]

discontinuing the consumption of meat is a (the?) large(est?) impact any of us can have.

Well, we have disagreed on this before, and it's too late for either to choose a better path.

I would say that not having children would be the biggest impact, from a sustainability standpoint. 7 billion people. We either need to be more efficient, and get comfortable as the last species, or we need fewer people. I chose to eat chickens, and not have kids, but neither choice is a signal of my virtue. I just like my chickens dead and on a plate, and children in someone else's house. Mainly because I am familiar with both, and that's the arrangement that works best for me.

@ Jacob, I am familiar with the math, not familiar enough to do it, but familiar enough to see the many ways the mathematical answer can differ from the survey answer. It's also part of the way they generate nonsensical statements like "40 percent of the insect species of the Amazon rainforest remain undiscovered by humans." Could certainly be true, or it could be off by a lot.

I only bring up Extinction numbers, because I was caught so off guard when I ran it down. We have been talking about "one hour from now, another species of life will be wiped off the face of the Earth, and the rate is accelerating. Accelerating." for so long, I assumed it was based on fact. Or math. Or at least assumptions. Turns out to be complete fiction.

When you count behavior as a means to divide a species, that species just became more endangered. Both (or more, should you decide to go with more than 2 subspecies) groups now contain fewer members, thus they are more endangered. This isn't science, this is politics. When you find that a species can be further divided because of a genetic variation, maybe that's science, I'll leave that up to the biologists. I used to think the definition of species was already defined. If 2 subjects can "breed true" they are the same species. So horses can breed to donkeys, but you get mules, that can't breed with each other or horses, or donkeys, was the classic example. Thus horses are a different species than donkeys, even though they can interbreed, they don't breed true. Nowadays, they seem to want to redefine species. There could be a good, scientific reason for this, besides better tech.

But anyone with half a brain knows that even the mossiest permaculturist leaves a footprint. Humans seem to be pretty bad at a low impact life. So, it doesn't take much to see the many ways life would be easier, with fewer people.

We have locked in climate change. Even if a genie came along and made every internal combustion engine on the planet rust to dust, we already have enough warming to release CO2 and methane from the permafrost to keep up the trend. Tofu ain't gonna fix this.

The humane way to make the world a better place is to make far fewer people. Anything else is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to cut wind resistance. That this matches my own preference is merely coincidence. Really.