The single most devastating environmental issue that does not get any coverage

[King David]

I am constantly shocked by the public and their ignorance in genuine environmental mechanics.  Carbon sequestration at any effective level would require a capital and human investment that would be a modern equivalent of the Great Pyramids but I have never heard one mention of the difficulties of working with CO2. Not even mentioning global warming, basically a tax for the privilege of experiencing weather.

 

So,in my opinion what would I consider to be a real example of a environmental disaster you ask? Well oceanic pollution is high on the list, however the ocean is a big place and it is very capable of taking care of itself.  The land however is another story and seeing that it is our home I think it is precedent.  Human tampering in natural ecosystem has wrought colossal consequences, some of it state sponsored and some of it private.  The effect of this incessantly uneducated meddling is nothing less than total devastation.  I predict here in North America we will experience all kinds of extinction of natural habitat and animal life within our lifetime that will involve dire consequence.  Why do we not hear about it? well one the gov't has played a hand in it being a problem for one, and two, at this point there is very little that can actually be done to stop or even curb the devastation.  

 

I have not researched too much (perhaps if Stef could make a video about this it would be great) but as far as I can tell there has never been a cross continental ecosystem engineering project that has gone well. Far from it.  Please enlighten me if this is incorrect.

 

The usual suspects:

Thistle

Dandelion

Cane Toad

Starling

Asian Pine Beetle

Domestic Cat

Snake Fish

Ragweed

 

 

 

KD  

[Wuzzums]

I have a question.

As a human animal, why would mass extinction and natural habitat destruction concern me in the slightest?

[King David]

I have a question.

As a human animal, why would mass extinction and natural habitat destruction concern me in the slightest?

If for no other reason than that this subject gives you a talking point on which to criticize liberal environmentalists, environmental hypocrites, and the like. If they really cared or knew anything at all they would be all over this topic like white on rice.  All these environmental organizations are more interested in stopping oil companies, industry and other high profile targets because there is more money to be extracted from them than the lowly rodents getting displaced from their habitats by Starlings all across North America. 

 

KD

[James Dean]

Sorry, I'm confused by the wording of your post... what is the issue that get's no coverage? 

[King David]

Sorry, I'm confused by the wording of your post... what is the issue that get's no coverage? 

That would the the introducing of non-native species into ecosystems in hope of reconciling or accentuation a particular feature of that area.  They brought Dandelions to north America for food.  The plant flourished and then people quit eating it, nowdays chemicals are dumped en mass into ground water to eliminate them from precocious green lawns.

 

KD  

[bitcoin]

Agreed. Another big issue is GMOs; as well as certain pesticides that are killing bees. 1/4th of the entire bee population died this last winter. Nothing can survive without plants and pollinators. People here, also seem to be supporters of GMOs, which is incredible to me, seeing as this is a place where we are pushed to research, dismantle propaganda, and think rationally. Please feel free to comment and debate. My biggest concerns at the moment though, are the GMOs and pesticides killing our pollinators. A close 2nd would be deforestation, nuclear energy (fukushima) - which you seemed to downplay a bit as it cesium-137 is highly toxic and wont leave the environment for decades, geoengeneering (govt/military dropping heavy metals for "global warming") and much more.

[James Dean]

That would the the introducing of non-native species into ecosystems in hope of reconciling or accentuation a particular feature of that area.  They brought Dandelions to north America for food.  The plant flourished and then people quit eating it, nowdays chemicals are dumped en mass into ground water to eliminate them from precocious green lawns.

 

KD  

 

it seems like those are two different things?

 

One is like the cane toad, an invasive species kills off native animals. Usually when that native species has no natural predator. But this happens all the time and has presumably been happening for a while. What's the problem with this in particular? 

 

The second example, with the dandelions, the problem is not that dandelions are an invasive species, but rather people's irresponsible use of pesticides; that is objectively bad and needs to stop. However I don't see what that has to do with invasive species. 

 

Maybe you could clarify it for me?

[King David]

The problem is two fold, first is the invasive species takes over and the native species that are ill equipped to compete with the more aggressive foreign counterpart and end up losing space and time which can and will lead to complete  extinction.  Dandelions will not lead to the extinction of native plants but do prevent other native plants from flourishing and perhaps starlings, snake fish and others will consume their competition.  

 

The second is how people deal with them and yes we have a devastating effect on the environment.

 

Forgive me for saying this but this seems quite obvious a problem to me, this has not been going on for a long time as people have only began travelling vast portions of the globe in large numbers and bringing their vermin with them in the recent modern era.  The rat may be the anomaly in this case.  Originally, starlings were introduced to north america in 1870 as around 100 birds.  If you were to travel the prairies today I bet they number in the billions and probably will eventually displace the entire native bird populations and many rodents.  Do you even know what a starling is Dean?  If you cannot see a problem with any of this you most likely are a victim of  a sheltered life and a substandard state run education and media system.  In other words you are part of the problem.

 

KD

Edited June 28, 2014 by King David

[American_Crow]

Invasive species, in a sense, is a part of the natural cycle of life on this planet and has been going on as long as there has been life on this planet. When North and South America merged, there was a massive exchange of species and the South American native species were more severely impacted than the North American native species. The North American species that moved into South America are now considered native species. Native species is in fact not a static roster of plants and animals, but is constantly changing over time. In the long run nature will adapt to changes in climate, introduction of new species, loss of old species, etc.

 

That said, nature operates on a vastly greater time scale than we do. Nature has all the time in the world to adapt to changes, while we as humans are just another species dependent like all others on the functioning of the natural world and subject to the same pressures to adapt as all other species. The scale of changes brought about over the course of the last few hundred years, and at an accerating pace, are truly massive. The systems in the natural world are highly complex and interdependent, and for just a minor example of how vast these interdependencies are see what happened when wolves returned to Yellowstone. The fact is that it can be hard to see the long-term consequences of the choices that we make, and it is therefore prudent to take care in making choices that affect the stability of these natural systems.

 

In the Willammette Valley where I live, English Ivy and Himalayan Blackberry are two invasive plants that have drastically changed the environment and have claimed massive tracts of land, eliminating native plants and the native animal species that depend on them, greatly reducing the biodiversity and thus the availability of native medicine and food plants. These two plants can probably never be removed from the ecosystem here, but it is still well advised that they be controlled to the extent that important native species can survive longer - and hopefully long enough that as the natural systems here adapt to the ongoing changes that these native species will still have strong populations when the new species have become integrated enough to be 'native'.

 

Most people don't care, and many who care enough to "get involved" do so by joining volunteer crews that trample through the woods and cause a great deal of damage to the areas that they are "helping." My personal view is that very few people have a somewhat mature understanding of the situation. Much of the efforts to deal with invasive species issues are state projects, and while they do accomplish some good things they are subject to the same kinds of inefficiencies and agendas as every other state project, as well as serving as yet another way for the state to increase their control.

 

I have thought a lot about this. The best way that I can think of for dealing with this issue would be at a community level, for concerned individuals to loosely organize to identify the concerns in their locality, educate themselves and enlist whatever experts they needed to sharpen their understanding of issues, and set up resources to reach out to and educate other members of their comunity that may be interested. From there it would be largely up to individuals how they wanted to proceed, be it by gathering together into community organizations to volunteer and/or fund 'restoration' projects, or to hire a private company to do 'restoration' work on their own land, whatever it takes. If no one cares enough to do anything about it, that's just the way it's going to be.

 

This isn't likely to happen on any effective scale as long as people continue to pretend (or believe?) that the state is going to 'handle it.' Clearly there are people who care - there are several community level organizations in this area that do work on these issues, voters often vote in favor of programs to "help the environment," and lots of people give to big-name "environmentalist" organizations. Of course, many of those community organizations are stuck in statist thinking - seeking government funding, etc, and besides are crrippled in their own ability to preserve land by taxes, etc. Government programs are based on theft and coercion, and let people pretend that it's all someone else's responsibility. The big-name environmental organizations are all corrupt beyond measure, primarily selling feel-good stickers as a business model while working as go betweens for state and corporate interests (fascist middlemen?).

 

I'm glad you brought the issue up, it really deserves more discussion. I was talking with a friend of mine recently, and he said that he would be a libertarian except that he cares about the environment. It took him about a half a second to see the contradiction once I pointed it out.

[Livemike]

"but as far as I can tell there has never been a cross continental ecosystem engineering project that has gone well."

Calicivirus and Myxomatosis off the top of my head.  Both worked well.  Of course they were both a response to an idiotic cross continental ecosystem engineering project.  

[Bel Rick]

Environmentalism is just another religion.-99% of all species that has lived, is extinct.-It is natural for species to go extinct due to the actions of another-It is natural for species to successfully spread, even through the actions of another third species.What matters is that life exists and exists in our form or a form beneficial to ourselves.

[King David]

Environmentalism is just another religion.-99% of all species that has lived, is extinct.-It is natural for species to go extinct due to the actions of another-It is natural for species to successfully spread, even through the actions of another third species.What matters is that life exists and exists in our form or a form beneficial to ourselves.

 

Biological diversity is what determines the strength of an ecosystem, not a successful species.  It is not natural for a third party to vastly reduce the biological diversity of continents, when this occurs it is referred to as a catastrophe.  Over-population of a successful species could feasibly lead to a epidemic that eventually collapses the entire ecosystem, thus changing the complexion of the platform on which we survive.

 

KD 

[StylesGrant]

Ecology operates on what is known as succession, of which the gestalt is -there are phases of continuous growth and renewal and death of different tiers of symbiotic relationships within a given ecosystem which create a total cycle. This is predominantly how things like fire ecology work. Certain species wont grow without fires.

 

Everything in nature is as interconnected as could possibly be, co-adapted, co-evolved. Different species function as niche's or archetypes that keep networks of symbiosis going. Ecosystems can handle species lost, but only if they have symbiosis to replace it with in comparable means. Habitat degradation on a whole almost always comes as a result of massive diversity loss that doesn't recover.

 

For instance, when a lake was drained and the soil was 'disturbed' and hauled out nothing natural could begin to grow. There were specific soil ecosystems that once destroyed, were not readily replaced except over time. This is part of the concern for interference with succession. It is actually a fact that non-climax growth young forests, as opposed to old growth forests have a greater diversity because of less canopy coverage choking out sunlight. However, the issue is the nature of the soil, the hydrology of an ecosystem, and the larger species and affect on distance ecosystems are in fact all controlled by the fully matured old growth forest. These full natural cycles from prairie to old growth tropical, coniferous, or hardwood forest are what maintain the Earth.

 

To be more abrasive. If we decided to kill everyone over the age of 40 as policy, how would the human race fair in the long run?

 

Humans are not anthropomorphically dominant in the ecosystem. Its not a choice of free will, but rather an elaborate niche in symbiosis. Doesn't mean we have to go back to spear throwing and living in jungles, or that we cannot engage in industry and agriculture and certain kinds of husbandry and animal consumption, but simply that we need our agriculture and our diets and OUR habitat to reflect natural biological relationships and symbiosis more so. This is typically considered permaculture, forestry, sustainable agriculture, environmental management, and wildlife management.

 

When we lose species diversity we die too. It's a Judeo-Abrahamic belief, and a fear of mortality in human cultures in general, that wards us away from understanding our biological nature which is actually empirical and more liberating than restrictive culture. 

[King David]

 

When we lose species diversity we die too. It's a Judeo-Abrahamic belief, and a fear of mortality in human cultures in general, that wards us away from understanding our biological nature which is actually empirical and more liberating than restrictive culture. 

I agreed with everything you say here but I would challenge this statement.  On the contrary, my interpretation of the bible is to make me more aware of our biological nature.

 

I for one believe that much of our cultures restrictive tendencies is borne from the rejection of our sexuality.  More specifically, how females reject male sexuality and how they teach and groom males how to reject other males sexuality.

 

KD

[StylesGrant]

In some ways there are parts of the bible that do preach a natural order to things, and many of the verses are very laden with nature oriented description. The agricultural societies would have had a natural respect for nature, as our earlier version of America also did. And in some ways still does, given the size of our national parks and the amount of agencies we have dedicated to managing land.

 

However, the fundamentalist components of these religions have sought out a purist version of the old testament semetic way of life that focuses very strongly on the literal tribal understanding of man's role as a chosen people. So I don't see a huge coincidence when I see pro-industrial interests strongly lobbying and buying votes from evangelicals. This is also partly because these people are dependent on blue-collar industry for jobs on a historical basis.

 

And further ironically, many religious 'folks' are actually very keen on the populist movements of sustainable agriculture and protection of natural resources. There are still conflicts between industry and land owners, fracking, eminent domain, etc. 

 

I've been associating with the people and ideas of agricultural activism and land activism for a long time, and a good portion are of the evangelical faith. I believe this plays into their hatred of 'unnatural' or 'ungodly' approaches of the industry, i.e. the pharmaceuticals and confined feeding operations. For instance, Muslim and Jews only eat Halal and Kosher.

 

Most important land conservation book I've ever read Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac is also a fairly strong religious undertone underneath it, which at times resembles the bible, John Muir, environmental religiousness, and a heavily Deist approach somewhat like Jefferson and Locke. 

 

I'd also add, that I have a background at a popular Forestry school, and I would garner most there were Protestant, being not totally conservative, certainly not far-right, but more traditionally economically conservative, though definitely in favor of some democratic concepts, after all it is a research center for government agencies.

 

It is interesting, because Stefan has said that Protestantism and environmentalism come from the same vein.