African fauna are finished. Is there any doubt of this?
Over a billion more people there by 2050 and the continent will be the hardest hit by climate change. We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.
We Europeans (and to some extent Asians and Americans) killed our local fauna to make space for our cities, our farms and our factories.
Now Africa is growing very quickly. We should let it grow as we once did. Saying that they don't have the right to build cities and factories, since African nature is so nice and our isn't anymore, is a bit Euro centric.
I agree in theory, but (in my opinion) the difference is that we now realize how much we screwed things up in other places, so we don't want more people to do it. It's a flawed argument, seeing as modern civilization isn't really doing everything it can to prevent climate change, so the obvious, easy answer is to not let underdeveloped civilizations follow in our footsteps.
Again, I don't disagree with your reasoning, and it is easy to back up by saying everyone else has done it, why would we stop them from doing it. I guess my argument against this point is that every society in the world should be doing their best to try to prevent things like this, so we shouldn't just let people do obviously terrible things to the environment, just because we have previously done it.
This is obviously a high-level response, not getting into particulars, but I hope you get the point at least.
I was thinking how maybe industrialization in general led to the killing off of many of the larger and more rare fauna around the globe so would that mean that Africa following in our more industrialized footsteps, even if it isn't us directly guiding their hands in doing so, is still somewhat our fault for inspiring that notion?
People cite their distaste and dislike of American and European all over the world yet the vast majority of those places champion all things American or European / white, if only in things like food, music, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle -- if not more / everything. I know it's not "our" responsibility after a certain point so I'm just being curious on a very "surface level" here.
> how much we screwed things up in other places, so we don't want more people to do it
Dunno. Look at EEU; all the garbage that was known not to work in WEU was thrown into it instead of giving them the newest, safest and cleanest tech. Also pressuring them to cut their forests and sell raw wood for cheap to WEU, Ethiopian-style. Do you think Africa will fare better?
And we are spending huge sums (probably bigger than some of the economies you are pointing to) in order to undo what little damage that can be undone from what our forefathers did.
In terms of climate change, Europe and North America have made huge cuts in emissions at great cost to their economies. Unfortunately, not all large economies are doing their part globally.
Amount of money being also poured into the countries who’s cooperation is needed for conservation is also not small. No one is asking countries to help for free.
It’s a very disheartening argument to say that because others have made mistakes, anyone that has a choice today should make the same mistake. Especially, since those being killed off can’t exactly fend for themselves.
You reminded me of an interview with a woman from India, in the film "Before the Flood". She mentions:
India has 300 million people without electricity, and they're doing exactly what the US and other nations did years ago: focus on improving their quality of life, using inexpensive coal and fuels.
Exactly. If you look at Harari's book Sapiens, he has a timeline where shortly after human colonization of an area, megafauna are wiped out.
I think this push to save endangered species is basically a form of colonialism where rich white people (whose ancestors destroyed their native fauna) tell poor brown people what they should value even when it gampers development.
I'm driving a complete circumnavigation of the continent - I have just driven through 21 countries in West Africa, and I'm aiming North to drive through another ~15 in the next 12 months [1] I have also driven Alaska - Argentina [2]
The more I travel, and the more I see and learn about the world, humans, population and the environment, the more I am dead-set on the idea of mandatory population control. We need to put limits on how many children a couple can have. I know China's policy had some serious downsides, but at this point I fear much, much worse if we don't.
Let's reverse the trend and start offering financial rewards to people that don't have children.
If you put population control, you will have honest people not reproducing and dishonest people reproducing, therefore you'll end up with spreading the genes of dishonesty.
It's one thing to keep an illegal pregnancy and birth secret. It's another, much more difficult thing afterwards to raise that child in secret. I'd guess that among the penalties when the parents get caught would be losing custody and access to all their children, probably in most cases early enough that the birth parents won't have much influence on the morals and values those children end up with when they are adults.
What do you think the benefits of mandatory population control are?
Have you seen any of Hans Rosling's [1] talks on the topic of population growth? After watching, would you still think there is need for mandatory population control?
It is not African fauna that is guaranteed extinction, it is humanity.
Our species will come and go having done little more than left an mass extinction event in the fossil record. A record that will never be perceived since our specie's experiment in sentience was clearly a serious evolutionary error.
All Giraffes or any species need do is wait out the storm. Thus, if we care to, all that needs happen is to convince humans to keep a given species around in a wild state until humanity finally wipes it self out. I imagine a millennia at most.
Extinction in the long term is pretty much guaranteed for any large animal that doesn't evolve the capability of getting off this planet, or an alternative method for surviving huge rocks falling from the sky.
As it stands humans have the best shot at doing this. Perhaps we'll manage to save the giraffes as well and take some of them with us.
The meteor impact threat is just a few steps from being solved. The serious problem is that humans continuously desire to kill each other on large scales. That psychological flaw won't disappear just by changing planets. Previous this was only a mortal danger to the small percentage of young men fooled into dying. As of the 20th century however, species endangering percentages of the population could die in war.
Furthermore, advancing technology makes smaller and smaller groups with smaller and smaller budgets, more and more deadly. If there remains even a modest chance of a species ending war per century century, then our remaining time as a species is very short indeed.
So while they are certainly worth doing, the species can not be saved by something as simple shifting asteroid orbits or colonizing Mars. We have to solve the other much harder problem.
I'll agree that there are many more difficult issues to be solved, but the fatalist position takes us absolutely nowhere.
As somebody else in the thread pointed out already, violence has actually decreased since the days of bashing each other to death with stones - and it definitely was not just the foolish young men getting killed.
Also the meteor impact threat is far from being solved apart from some theoretical viewpoint, to begin with the percentage of the sky we are actually able to actively scan for such objects.
>I'll agree that there are many more difficult issues to be solved, but the fatalist position takes us absolutely nowhere.
Very, very true. I was actually pretty uncomfortable making my original post. But there seems to be too much confidence in the "end of history" narrative that assumes that the relative world stability of the last 70 years is permanent or that the cold war could only happen once.
So at the risk of posting something demoralizing, I thought it worth while pointing out (maybe overly dramatically) that there is an innate and extremely dangerous flaw in human thinking that is, by far, our most serious threat and that we neither fully understand it nor have a known permanent cure for it.
And what few fields are thinking about that problem are all soft sciences.
Humans are not going to die out. Look at the data. We have made significant progress in reducing death on every front (war, many diseases, hunger, accidents). We are doing too little about global warming because no one is predicting that it will lead to a significant number of deaths.
"Humans are not going to die out" is very short-sighted. Sure, in the past half-century we've gone from room-sized computers to self-driving cars, and we've seen similar progressions in medicine and other fields. So it might seem reasonable to think that we'd solve all of the big problems well before an extinction event.
But everything that we know is a tiny blip on the timeline, and "the data" is practically meaningless. If humans died out soon, our existence would still be so fleeting that the universe would hardly know we were ever here.
> We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.
As a US citizen, what can we really do. I realize our country shares responsibility for climate change, but isn't a major problem here also poaching? To really solve this, wouldn't Africa have to step up and crack down locally on industry damaging the environment, and poaching?
I don't think anyone is burring their heads in the sand, we just have no power to change things here or abroad. Half of our country still thinks climate change is a hoax...
> Half of our country still thinks climate change is a hoax...
That's not quite true. Most Americans (7 in 10 in a recent study [1]) believe climate change is happening. The difference is that half are unwilling to pay extra in electricity bills and other areas to deal with it.
The overtones of political tribalism in your denouncement of "half of Americans who believe it's a hoax" is good reflection of why politics is so divisive in the US and only grows further apart on important issues.
The only thing that will significantly slow down poaching is a massive reduction in it's profitability. The only way to do that is with a massive reduction in demand.
Most of the demand comes from SE Asia and China where they think this stuff cures medical conditions.
Long term, those governments need to modify primary and secondary school curricula to unambiguously dispel those myths. Eventually, the people who believe rhino horn cures cancer will die out or be pressured by their children, but this will take at least a generation.
In the meantime some species will go extinct. Their only hope is a sudden and prolonged recession or depression in Asia.
> Long term, those governments need to modify primary and secondary school curricula to unambiguously dispel those myths.
How many people in the developed world believe that vaccination causes autism? Or that they have biological intolerance for MSG? Or take extreme doses of vitamins or minerals?
I don't think that any amount of grammar school curricula could overcome the human tendency to believe in crazy shit, non-backed by science or reason. This human nature even transcends class, and appears among the relative elite (e.g. fear of irradiated food, avoidance of gluten when your not even celiac, Elon Musk's belief that we live in an alien computer simulation, etc).
You can perhaps use school curricula to shift mainstream thought, the Overton window, etc. But there will always be enough "alternative view" enthusiasts that I doubt you could ever eliminate demand for rhino horn as an erectile dysfunction treatment.
Do the Chinese/Asian governments do anything WRT to education now?
This seems like it has being going on for a while and the Asian governments just don't do anything.
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Also WRT to finance incentives for locals: IIRC rhino horn goes for obscene ammount of dollars in Asia, so any tourism dollars will have to compete with that.
The issue of poaching comes up repeatedly on Nat Geo for instance, the usual community outcry being that authorities need to crack down hard on poachers. The end of the day reality though is these poachers are just poor hunters trying to eek out a living and provide for their families and the economic benefit will always trump the legal risks for them. More systemic changes are needed in these locales to reduce the incentive.
EDIT: and worldwide, i.e. reducing the international demand
The economic benefit to the government from the giraffes is higher than to the poachers from the hunting. That’s why governments will start protecting these animals with more extreme violence towards poachers as numbers diminish.
Perhaps there is a non violent solution to this problem: turn poachers into park rangers. This has been done before[0] and perhaps could solve the problem in governments wanting to protect their wildlife (for tourism revenue) and the necessity of common people to provide for their families.
Will not work. This is not a case of poor people freely making choices. If you try to stop Cocaine traffic turning farmers into innkeepers, they will be assassinated or forced to cultivate drugs again by the local narco-chiefs in no time.
If you convert some poachers in park rangers, you are just rewarding their past activity. More poachers will come and fill the place in seconds (now with the hope to reach a redemptive ranger position in the future). The extremely rich families that raised this lucrative system will exerce their power to keep the business running. The name of the poacher pawns is irrelevant for them.
Education will not work either. Too little too late. There are lets say 3000 extant tiger in the planet. We could easily find 3000 selfish people in the planet that want to show a stuffed tiger in their house next year as another rich toddler toy and symbol of power. Not to mention the yummy idea to earn lots of money speculating with the "tigercoin viscera market". Is not realist to expect future generations will have the chance to cleaning this mess. Would be like expecting current australian people to fix the Tasman tiger extinction by their grand parents.
Closing the market and exportation is the only way, but is a difficult goal when a diplomatic luggage can be send to any part of the planet with a full order of lioness bones or leopard tortoises alive inside.
What is the economic benefit of giraffes to the government, tourist draw? Regardless they don't have the resources to cover millions of acres of open savannah, enforcement just isn't going to work for this problem.
If the economic benefits of protecting the giraffes outweigh the economic benefits of hunting them, then the resources for enforcement do exist. It's "just" a matter of distributing the benefits effectively.
There isn't just endless savannah. Poachers need local infrastructure, supplies, protection, etc. If locals can make a living from tourism and from protecting the animals, they will stop the poachers and/or stop being poachers.
If poor hunters poach, it is usually to feed their family. Many poachers are professional and make a lot of money for it(because of the risk if caught). Poor hunters usually don't have connections to international smuggling gangs, which is what you would need if you wanted to make money from exporting poached animals.
AFAIK climate change is a small factor in the endangerment of African species. I could be wrong, but is seems like it's not even close at this point compared to poaching.
Yes you are right. India tiger population is increasing but they are still under threat. Government recently joined two tiger reserves near my hometown to create an ecosystem. Maybe they are doing something right. https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/india-s-tiger-populati...
> climate change + population growth will stress humans on the continent and increase environmental destruction
I find it interesting that population growth is discussed so little in the context of climate change. It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates. This would have a major impact on both climate change, and the depletion of the planets resources.
> It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates.
You don't need to do this. The simplest solution to birth rates is to improve the economic power of your women--generally by education. Once women have choices that don't suck, birth rates drop dramatically.
People generally don't like it when they're told to not have children, as opposed to say buying an electric car or turning off the lights. Restrictive policies, if applied selectively, can also have an effect similar to eugenics.
Restricting population growth is just another restrictive policy, and not all forms of it resemble eugenics as you've implied here. If you just had a yearly quota of births and members of the population were eligible to enter for a random drawing from the quota, it is not eugenics.
I was only pointing out an obvious example approach which is not eugenics-like, it wasn't intended to propose the hypothethical as an ultimate solution. Debating it as such isn't something I have time for or interest in right now.
The point I was trying to make was that a levying a fine would end up being a impose a crude way of eugenics on the population, since it might end up allowing for those that are rich to over-reproduce since they can better deal with the consequences.
I'm not convinced enforcement is even necessary at all. Just a quota with zero enforcement would be a significant difference.
Simply having a department receiving resources supporting scientific research and planning of what is an appropriate population size for some kind of nationally recognized standard quality of life, and having that department publish annual figures comparing our size and trajectory to their data would be useful.
Today one often can't even have the conversation without what's effectively a table-flip reaction in the form of terms like eugenics, forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, fascism, nazism, and the holocaust.
I personally think the only way to gracefully manage population size is culturally. A population that's cognizant of how impactful their decision to have excessive children is to everyones' long-term quality of life will behave differently. Today we don't even inform people of what excessive is in this context. Can we even agree in this conversation what an excessive number of children is? Where has it been defined? There's zero consensus, and our leaders willfully ignore the topic.
We have MPG figures on vehicles, we have MPG standards put out by the government as targets, people can qualify what is a fuel-efficient vehicle according to current standards relatively easily as a result. There's _nothing_ from the government saying what is an excessively large family to the best of my knowledge. When people can start having real conversations on this topic, with generally respected data behind the figures, then the culture can begin to evolve through the natural course of societal life.
When the EPA started talking about fuel economy and setting standards, it normalized the conversation surrounding fuel-efficient vehicles while supplying tangible figures. It would be quite useful if something similar happened with the topic of population size. Normalizing this conversation would go a long way towards helping people acknowledge that the main cause behind anthropogenic-caused global problems is the multiplier.
It's not something I expect to ever happen. Our economy is too dependent on continuous growth.
Somewhat off-topic but relevant: If this UBI concept actually gains any traction, it will be very interesting to see what happens to all the optimistic predictions of population size flattening out relatively soon. Occupying people while they make just enough to scrape by is, I suspect, a big part of what keeps their numbers down. UBI is just one example of something that may inadvertently blow those predictions away. When you've got a population on the order of hundreds of millions like in the USA, it doesn't take many doublings to become a billion.
What is the relationship between overpopulation/climate and poaching? I was under the impression poaching was more of a consequence of China's huge homeopathic market than Africa's temperature or population density.
Bushmeat consumption is a huge problem for many African countries and will only get worse when climate change wipes out other crop sources and populations increase. Africa already has massive issues as it stands, and climate change will only make it worse.
If you really think it's going to get better, it won't.
The issue is completely politicized and no longer has anything to do with objective reality, so about the only way that's going to happen is Donald Trump going on TV and talking about how global warming is horrible.
> Over a billion more people there by 2050 and the continent will be the hardest hit by climate change. We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.
I do not bury my head in the sand. Instead I try to convince people on HN all the time that people in Africa should stop procreating to solve these problems.
Unsustainable (human) populations should shrink, which is alright and can't happen fast enough. A pragmatic and realist approach to demographic management, long overdue by today, I think, was last workable on a large scale in China (1-Child-Policy) and is never going to be effectively implemented again unless a major collapse happens. Ideally, that collapse would be local to areas where pressure on resources is especially high and the cost to civilization is relatively low, like in Africa, so that humanity overall can develop further.
Over a billion more people there by 2050 and the continent will be the hardest hit by climate change. We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.