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.
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.
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
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?
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.
The people in charge benefit the most from capitalism, so it wont happen
Then they have to go.
Who will get rid of them?
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
Agriculture isn’t the main contributor to climate change and there are known solutions for reducing agricultural land-use like not eating meat. There is research on stuff like this and a sustainable global society of billions isn’t some unachievable goal because of how much humans need to eat.
Broader than capitalism; it’s growth driven no? A planned economy that wanted a steady increase in energy/quality of life/resource extraction would also do most of this.