A reminder to love nature

David Attenborough's narrations for nature docs, maybe? But that's not really the same as watching a wildlife fanatic like Steve Irwin.

He has a son that seems eager to follow in his footsteps, so maybe he'll fill that void one day.

In the anglosphere maybe, which most of Lemmy seems to represent. I come across countless legends doing the same work but without the same recognition. When Greta Thunberg, who I admire, became big I read an article about all the people around her age that have been doing the same campaigning. They were mostly indigenous people so nobody came along with a TV show for them.

Wildlife is now only 4% of the mammalian life on the planet, by mass. The rest is livestock and humans. https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html

If you had half as many humans in the world, but they all lived in suburbs, it would be much worse for the environment than having twice as many humans but they all live in cities.

Compare America to India. If Americans lived the way Indians do, the population would be absolutely fine. So if you want to solve overpopulation problems, stop the American style suburbs before you worry about the actual population.

It’s amazing how many people I talk to about overpopulation simply that we get 50% of the land (or more!) and the rest of all other animals get to fight over the rest.

Why? Who decided that there aren't supposed to be this many humans? We just need to accept that humans exist and work with that. Unless your solution is genocide and mass sterelization. And historically, richer nations paradoxically breed less, which is pretty unnatural IMO but seems like the solution to overpopulation: feed and educate.

Here, I have a couple examples to kind of, illustrate why, despite the common sentiment, antinatalism, and malthusianism, inherently, like, just straight up, don't make any sense. This is all based on back of the napkin math that I did a while ago, and I don't want to redo the numbers, so take it with a grain of salt maybe, but, yeah.

Okay, so, not really taking into account consumption or supply chain, which are major factors, you could fit the entire population of earth in one city the size of about one and a quarter rhode islands, if you had the population density of kowloon. Now, kowloon has retroactively been shat on as having a low quality standard of living, which is partially true, there were leaks everywhere, it was run by the mob, yadda yadda, but there's nothing inherently problematic with that level of density, there. You could easily expand that to, say, two rhode islands, or three, right, and that would cover an insanely small portion of the earth's surface while also being more than enough for everyone to live.

On the other hand, if you divided up the earth based on only habitable zones and arable land, you'd get about 2.5 acres per person, which I think also accounts for the elderly and children. To me, that sounds like probably 2.5x more than I would ever need in a lifetime, especially once we kind of tally up all the savings that we can get at scale, at mass production, and then maybe take costs for transportation.

We also, never, never ever take into account the amount of land management which was being done by the various natives of all their lands before colonialism kind of came in and fucked everything up. We have this conception of nature as being some kind of like, inherent good entity that humans can only ever destroy with their presence. A kind of untouched garden of eden that we should basically never touch. As being like, inherently sacred, or having some inherent value, even, to the point where we anthropomorphize it. "Mother nature". We have this view of humans as also being completely separate from nature, as being an aberration, rather than being a part of it. I think these are both mistakes. We have to view humans as being a part of nature, and we have to start viewing nature as existing everywhere, rather than just being something that you minorly interface with when you go for a hike. Our built environment is part of nature, our decision to plant exclusively male trees that will give off a shit ton of pollen which covers all the windows and makes everything super shitty all spring so we don't have fruit, that's a part of nature. So are the raccoons and possums and stray cats and dogs and pigeons and weeds and other things which we see as being invasive but also simultaneously as having no real habitat anymore.

The real solution, I think, is only going to come about when humans collectively start to conceptualize and take accountability for what they go around and do, rather than just sort of, pawning off all responsibility for everything, and cooking up some apocalyptic reality where it'd just be better off if we didn't exist at all. The genie is out of the bottle. Even to conceptualize of us as being "the problem", as though there is a singular kind of problem, is a kind of anthropocentrism, and a kind of anthropomorphizing of nature.

I also assume I don't need to really discuss how like, the idea that we're currently doing everything in the most efficient way, is a little bit overconfident, and takes everything at a kind of, unchanging face value. As though we exist in the long arc of history with a kind of inevitability, rather than a random happenstance.

We need to return to preindustrial population levels so the animals can too.

What exactly are you proposing?

The flag I shoved into this penguin says otherwise.

it is the same thing as saying my community/our community/my class/my girl/boy friend/ my favourite cafe/my dad etc. Does not necessarily mean you own it, just a short hand way of expressing a more abstract form of relationship than physically owning something.

Sounds familiar

Crikey, she's a beaut.

Try adding Old Bay, or some Steak Seasoning.

plastic eating bacteria seems to be on its way atleast

There's already enough suffering in the world, no need to create more! the parts of our brain that gave us the ability to shape our environment outpaced the ones with the old tribal way of thinking we needed to survive.

Fortunately, there's enormous swaths of the planet that are totally inhospitable to human life.

Unfortunately, we've managed to deposit all sorts of toxic waste from the depths of the ocean to the hottest corners of the desert to the peaks of mountains.

Eating meat is very much a part of nature, if you're implying he would be a hypocrite for eating meat

No. His research showed that growing veggies reduces bio diversity of land. Eating a cow is better than eating rice.

It hasn't. Livestock farming started about 10,000 years ago (give or take 1000 years), although this keeps getting refined with DNA studies and I'm not sure what the consensus is. But that also doesn't mean it's necessary in the modern era with modern agricultural practices.

https://www.alimentarium.org/en/fact-sheet/history-pasture-farming

Agriculture began in fits and starts, but the first permanent farms we knew of are even newer- taro farms in New Guinea about 9000 years ago.

Also, homo sapiens have only been around for less than 300,000 years.

But it was not filmed.

Humanity fuck yeah

So that he could safely relocate crocs, in the method LEAST likely to harm or kill them, and almost single handedly save the population from collapse.

Lol, people downvoted you, but you are 100% correct. He basically tortured wild animals for profit and popularity.

And these humans celebrate him for it.