We don't like religion (or in many cases, even spirituality), and the modern scientific metaphysics has no space for "miracles," so we don't have a coherent framework in which to talk about or even remind ourselves of this profound truth. Each of us is left to cobble something together for ourselves (and for the few people around us that we trust not to think we're crazy).
I do think that psychedelics seem like one promising avenue. Perhaps they will help give us the inspiration to fill in this tragic blindspot.
Edit: If the votes are any indication, then I was too hasty in calling this opinion unpopular. Perhaps more of us suspect this than are willing to say it out loud.
Edit 2: On that note, I've been scared to share my own crazy take on this, but I'll just leave this here: https://www.lifeismiraculous.org
I'm not sure that this is true. As my understanding of the world has increased, my appreciation of it has also increased, as has my sense of wonder. The term 'miracle' implies some supernatural cause, but I don't need something supernatural to understand the preciousness of the world I find myself in. Nor do I struggle finding a way to talk about this.
My own hypothesis is that the world is simply too complicated for any one person to comprehend on large scales any more, and when it comes to environmental concerns, the problem of the commons completely kicks our ass.
Engineering solutions to combat or circumvent Climate Change is our ONLY way forward. But first we need to get a critical mass of our American citizenry to be convinced we have an actual problem. Especially, in fact, a large segment of the electorate that's VERY religious and continually refuses to accept the facts about AGW.
I say Americans here because a disproportionate percentage was/is being caused by us, and because we also play a unique place in world affairs.
I also agree that engineering will be required. When I said "merely engineer," I meant that engineering cannot be a replacement for our awakening to the "miracle," but must be used in service of it.
I think that this perspective ignores the environmental problems inherent in a capitalist mode of production, and in fact plays into them.
I think that a political revolution could be imminent, and I would urge those concerned about the future of life on this planet to consider alternative modes of economics.
I remember as a kid that going camping was considered an "escape from reality", which made no sense to me because of course Nature is reality and our cities are the artificial "escape".
Geoff Lawton has a quote, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."
It's pretty literal: food, recycling poop and pee, medicine, building materials, not to mention the peace and happiness you have caring for other living things and accepting gratefully their care of you.
It is fun and easy!
- - - -
For practical advice on what to do I recommend Toby Hemenway's videos in re: Permaculture
http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/
Especially "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".
Permaculture is a school of applied ecology (the word itself is a portmanteau of PERMAnent agriCULTURE) that has adherents and practitioners world-wide. It's not the only form of regenerative agriculture either.
See also https://www.greenwave.org/our-work Oceanic 3D farms! And now they are building reefs?
You just need to go out to nature or a park, on a nice day, and realize you really want things like birds and (if you still have them) butterflies. And food, and air, and clean water, and not being underwater, and not having large swaths of continents be broiled to uninhabitable.
http://paulkingsnorth.net/2013/01/17/dark-ecology/
And the author gets to a similar point:
” And so I come to this point, and I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time? And I arrive at five tentative answers.
[...]
Four: Insisting that nature has a value beyond utility. And telling everyone. Remember that you are one lifeform among many and understand that everything has intrinsic value. If you want to call this ‘ecocentrism’ or ‘deep ecology’, do it. If you want to call it something else, do that. If you want to look to tribal societies for your inspiration, do it. If that seems too gooey, just look up into the sky. Sit on the grass, and touch a tree trunk, walk into the hills, dig the garden, look at what you find in the soil, marvel at what the hell this thing called life could possibly be. Value it for what it is, try to understand what it is, and have nothing but pity or contempt for people who tell you that its only value is in what they can extract from it.”
I mean that seriously. It’s a profound awakening to love and beauty we are surrounded by.
Ayahuasca is almost an alien-like technology.
Every "epiphany" that someone has told me they had while on psychedelics has been something that easily could have been come up with a bit of quite time and thought.
I have never heard a single story that blew me away or offered anything but mundane "insights" that easily could be gotten other ways.
Its time for the "psychedelics" people to come clean and just admit they are simply getting high.
However, this puzzles me:
> Psychedelics seem like one promising avenue. Perhaps they will help give us the inspiration to fill in this tragic blindspot.
Why? What do psychedelics have to do with anything? I'm not religious and I'm not about to try psychedelics either, and still I'm filled with awe at the world and want nature to continue existing. I find a lot of natural places breathtaking. I stare at a starry night's sky -- something increasingly difficult because of light pollution -- and I'm awed at the vastness and beauty of the cosmos. It's hard to describe the feeling, but anyone who's felt it knows what I'm talking about.
I still don't believe in any gods or need any kind of psychedelics.
Wonderful! Psychedelics may not be relevant to your path.
For some, "magic" mushrooms (for example) a first glimpse, or a reminder, that this place is "magical" in a way that most of us curiously overlook constantly. That epiphany can have a lasting effect on a person.
I don't think the problem is that people are unaware per se of the miraculousness/improbability of life, but rather that said awareness is deeply frightening and most people would prefer to sublimate it. The fact that we've all already cheated the infinite oblivion of never existing is incredibly lucky (to non-pessimists), but deeply meditating on this fact is psychologically similar to having a near death experience. So we narrativize to reassure ourselves that our existence isn't just dumb luck, in any manner of ways, both mystical and pseudo scientific: our lives are preordained by God, or by a purely deterministic set of physical laws, or by the operators of our universal simulation, or by the anthropic principle.
All of these belief systems are roughly analogous to saying "Everything happens for a reason", which is something you hear even intelligent people parrot in times of distress. But as Quentin Meillassoux argues in "After Finitude", the only truly universal law of metaphysics is in fact the negation of that platitude: "Things could be as they are, or they could be otherwise."
What would our behavior look like if everyone realized that the point of their life was to work to improve the level and quality of their awareness and consciousness to the point that they also realize the point of their life is to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless? (The hard part is that everything you think you are has to die, you can see why dogmatic/skeptic will resist)
??
That is not really the case here. I woke up already long ago, but there is no way I can stop the idiots. Only governments can take action by law, not me.
France and Germany will not allow for Facebooks' Libra coin. It shows how fast they can act if their economy is at stake. But for decades already they allow pesticides for agriculture. They could and should know about allowing for mass extermination of entire insect species. So tell me what I can or should do if they let this sick economy prevail?
Here is an attempt at a framework to think about this: we have no proof that life exists anywhere else in the Universe. There is a possibility that life itself arose only once and that we are the only intelligent beings around. We have a sort of grand astronomical duty to not fuck it up and expand to the stars and keep the fire going.
I'd rather say that ~random variation plus selection is gobsmackingly impressive. But the results aren't as perfect as you might expect stuff that's designed and created to be. They're amazing, but not elegant.
I agree. I would argue the majority of people in developed countries share this view. However, it should be pointed out that it's also a luxury to have this view. If you're currently in, come from, or ever visited a developing country; you'd realize that for many other people a major primary concern is to get enough income for basic needs. They just don't have the bandwidth to fully appreciate the world as we do.
It might be that the purpose of humans, mammals, multicellular organisms, whatever.....in the holistic sense, is no greater than theirs.
Religion certainly isn't going to help anyone appreciate nature. American Christians in particular think God gave the world to them to do whatever they want, even if that means driving around gas-guzzling SUVs and polluting as much as they want. Most other religions don't have a very good track record with environmentalism either.
Modern science, however, tells us exactly why we're having problems, and what things are likely to look like if they keep going this way. What more do you need for inspiration, other than "if you don't make some big changes, you're going to have massive flooding of port cities, and a lot more extreme weather, storms, desertification, etc., which will cause shortages of freshwater and food." If that isn't enough inspiration, I don't know what is. The problem is that too many people simply don't believe this, just like there's people who think vaccines cause autism.
Then again, since I'm a believer in science and I'm not religious, I can't speak for people who are, so maybe you're onto something with the psychedelics thing. Perhaps we should try a scientific study, giving religious anti-environment people psychedelics and seeing if it makes them appreciate nature more.
I’m trying to recall which post from yesterday used this word which we probably both read.
But FYI I believe the word is merely a noun; one cannot ennui oneself.
- (verb, transitive) To make bored or listless; to weary.
But it doesn't quite capture what I mean. It's not merely that we're boring ourselves by some particular activity, but by deciding that reality itself is boring.
It's hard to imagine humans taking the corrective solution here. My gut says we either continue on this road and completely destroy the natural world a la Trantor in Foundation, just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs, or we die out and the planet recovers on its own.
That makes it sound like there's some kind of natural 'ideal state' for the planet to recover to. Without us, the planet would just go on changing, without anything to judge the current environment at any point as good or bad to any particular standard.
Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think it is fair to say that complexity and variety is a objectively good thing and that humanity's action causing a mass extinction event is objectively bad.
That's not to say that mass extinctions or biome change will occur without us.
I disagree. I think nature has a value in itself, in all its complexity and beauty.
I think few people would argue that if the Louvre was destroyed it wouldn't be considered a loss for the world and for humankind, or that we don't still lament the loss of the library in Alexandria.
Of course, nothing of this matters from the perspective of the heath death of the universe. But that is a cynism that I consider juvenile.
You could say that saving the environment is just saving the current set of humans, or our modern way of life. It definitely sounds much less noble when put that way though.
I wonder, though... we know, for example, that bees pollinate plants, and that we need plants to be pollinated for our survival. But if the bees die out, we can figure out another technical way to pollinate plants - it might be a pain to carry out, and we might be kicking ourselves for not saving the bees before it got to that point, but it can be done. If it comes down to a matter of survival, humans a a species will figure out a way to get what needs to be done, done. You might say that saving the birds and the insects now is the "simpler" route than replacing them, but it's starting to look like you'd be wrong, and we're not going to have any choice but figure out how to keep the human race going without them.
If you want to know what the natural state for an area is, ask a native person from a population that has un uninterrupted culture, that is if you can find one.
A native person I know often describes a discorded ecosystem by saying: "The land is sick."
To equivocate and to claim all states are equally natural, is to deliberately miss the point.
A healthy ecosystem—and most of us haven't ever seen one—is obviously healthy when you see it.
It's a tautology to say that everything is natural. You could argue that plutonium and dioxin are natural, but without considering the concentration and distribution, it's meaningless semantics.
While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than they probably would have if we weren't here), and they are powerless to prevent that. I think this is what people are intuitively feeling a sense of when they say things like "or we die out and the planet recovers on its own".
There may not be an ideal state, but maybe parent is talking about reverting the damage we are producing.
> Without us, the planet would just go on changing
That's true, but at the same time it is not a valid excuse to keep making damage. Someone could argue that killing you today is OK since you'll eventually die.
> Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.
You can also word it as 'destroying the environment is killing ourselves', that is more or less the same we hear every day.
Bats have had a massive population dip in several areas in the americas, up to and including to the point where places bats hibernate to have been forbidden in an effort to stop the spread of a fungus ('White Nose Syndrome') that causes the bat to wake during hibernation, speeding its metabolism and causing it to starve itself. Several species have gone from common to endangered/critically endangered because of this. There's ongoing research as to how bats became more vulnerable to this existant disease- is it higher temps? Toxins?
Trantor required continuous supply from 20 agricultural worlds to survive. Pretty much all necessities of life for trantorian were externally sourced, with the possible exception of water.
Once that shut down after the 260 sack and the Imperial Family leaving for Neotrantor, population crashed from 40G to 100M.
If you cast a wider net you'll see that this mass extinction goes beyond birds and insects to all living creatures including plant life. Year after year we destroy more and more of the forests and other natural places while saturating the earth with more and more of our garbage and synthetic trash and plastic that will never decay but will serve to poison the ecosystem we all depend on to survive. The vast majority of public concern is focused on, "global warming" which is only a tiny part of the damage we are doing. Anyone who even attempts to raise the issue of our massive overpopulation, which causes and exacerbates all of our environmental issues (as well as many of our social ones) is instantly castigated and derided as a lunatic or a Malthusian, while we add another billion people to our already shattered ecosystem.
I pity the kids!
Bee populations are suffering greatly and we needs those bees to grow a lot of our food. It doesn't help that bees are shipped in to places like the Almond farms in California, putting them in a lot of stress and hurting their colonies. Even though worker bees only live 2 ~ 4 weeks, the stress of transport does affect these pollinators.
It would make sense the decline in insect populations affecting birds for sure. Pesticides aren't limited to areas around farms and most likely find their way far out into the environment.
So if pesticides are the problem the question is, how do deal with the agricultural industry that depends on them? Is it possible to get our population to stop consuming as much crop based product and prevent more of the pesticides from entering the environment? Or is there a way to limit their effects?
If I am not mistaken, Trantor relied on an external supply chain from other planets in the empire in order to survive. It struck me as enormously brittle at the time and indeed in the books.
> continue on this road and completely destroy the natural world
I'd generally agree with that dystopian line of thinking.
current administration is firmly behind even further decline: https://newfoodeconomy.org/neonicotinoid-ban-reversal-center...
Most of the insects in your area CAN NOT eat the plants in your yard.
That's one of the reasons they're planted - they look better and last longer.
However, if insects can't eat them then there are less birds.
HOAs will often fight you over this so you might need to educate them.
> In addition to habitat loss, pesticides may have taken a toll.
Which is also the main cause for insect population decline. I just cannot believe why governments still allow the use of pesticides, it is so damn wrong just for economic purpose.
I think all these scenarios are unrealistic. If at all, and that is still a big if, only the vast majority would die.
So hooray, I guess.
Plug for "Girl's Last Tour" anime/manga.
Like all those other planets without us, like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus,...
Our success (humans/mammals) is the result of one of those extinctions. So yeah, life has a strong foot hold on earth and it will continue to do so long after we're gone.
I like to think that the point of humanity is to destroy as many genetic lines as possible, before going extinct ourselves. A trial by fire that weeds out all but the most resilient. Eventually evolving into new, even better intelligence.
What are the chances that we will get our act together or be able to engineer ourselves out of all of these problems?
Bird conservation efforts in the last few decades mainly focused on wetlands. See DDT, national wildlife refuges, and the duck stamp.
So, it's not like the decline is inexorable. But it's not going to fix itself.
I took regional agricultural production and soil quality, active regional environmentalism, presence of higher education (Cornell), water sources, historical wildfires, and more into account. I'm hopeful that I picked a place that will give my children a less frightening future than the rest of the country, at least for a while longer.
I'm working on buying some land now to start working on some basic agricultural production and building a home designed around "edge case" risks being less edge than normal such as extreme weather, temperature, vermin, and unreliable utilities.
Engineering is what got us into this problem. Foolish to hope it can get us out.
We can come up with makeshift solutions to many, but for solving them all, and not to suggest it's the only solution, but a part of anything comprehensive, is there any environmental problem that a smaller human population doesn't alleviate?
This has a lot of open questions around, e.g. what happens to all the corn & soy farmers. But if we're just talking about the planet's carrying capacity at Western standards of living, it seems clinch.
It’s hard to know whats true and what isnt with all the misinformation being spread around.
Predictions without deadlines are not useful because you can keep kicking the can down the road forever. That's exactly what Paul Ehrlich has done since all of his predictions didn't happen.
I read this comment re: Silent Spring on Thursday and it kept coming to mind hearing everything about the climate strikes Friday. I think this is profoundly, frighteningly correct.
> Grassland species have suffered the biggest declines by far, having lost 717 million birds. These birds have probably been decimated by modern agriculture and development.
This one I'm not totally sure is even related to climate change. I don't want to tell the person next to me to "stop trying to make a better life for yourself" so I'm not sure what the solution to this is right now.
Part of what I think we're seeing is that people are allowed to do whatever they want with their land without consideration for its wider impact on the environment. Just like we think that maybe destroying habitats by building dams, we should be cognizant of how and what we're doing to the environment with (especially) our farming practices.
It's not until the suburbs with trees that you start seeing squirrels and larger animals.
What techniques are they using to count and estimate the birds, and what objections do you take to their methods? Sadly I can't find out as the site is behind a paywall for me.
In this day of clickbait titles, studies that are not reproducible, and suspect motivation for studies, the idea that we can calculate the total number of birds with an error rate of less than 30%, including the fact that some data is 50 years old, doesn't pass my smell test.
I would prefer waiting for accurate data rather than panic over yet another headline that is not anchored in actual science and facts. For example, did they try to count the number of birds at the same time of the year both times? Do some birds have different multi-year migratory patterns leading to them being in different parts of the world? Did they try counting the birds twice using the same techniques but two different teams, and then compare the numbers?
There are too many ways this calculation could fail for me to be trust this data point.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/moral-cost-of-...
(mostly feral cats... but your lil furball ain't helping)
Britain: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-bird-numbers-sp...
And also seabirds in Britain: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/20/seabird-...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/02/why-insec...
https://fridaysforfuture.org/events/map?c=+All+countries&d=F...
Maybe that noise level is just normal? I've only been doing meaningful hiking for the past ~10 years. Does anyone older than I am remember birds being much louder in the past?
I feed the birds in my backyard every day, it's a joy to observe the variety that live in just a small grove of trees.
I have a tendency to always look up in the sky and take note of soaring birds of prey, they are awe-spiring to say the least.
> "The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018850
This has been known for a while. I remember hearing a piece on NPR about this maybe a decade ago. The problem is actually that we have been working hard to reforest, and haven't left grassland. Everything is either forest, or developed, with very little in-between. One of the proposed solutions was to simply not mow 100% of your yard. Leave some bit of it unkempt. There's a local monastery that does this, and there are birds there that I haven't seen anywhere else in the area, so I think there's something to the strategy.
