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We are single handedly dooming our planet so a handful of people can be unbelievably wealthy. The vast majority of our resource expenditure is unnecessary. But the moment anyone stops the rat race means starvation, imprisonment, or execution. The human race is pitiful. I just hope we all can emancipate ourselves and bring humanity back in line with the reality of the situation.

Reminds me of that report from a couple years ago that wildlife populations have seen close to a 70% decrease in the last 50 years. Basically over my lifetime 2/3rds of what makes the world wonderful has disappeared.

Pretty rough reality.

People in cities often don't know or understand the first thing about nature and are content imagining it as some pristine "other" place outside of the cities they never leave.

Rural people who have access to nature tend to vote for the "put every chemical in the environment as fast as possible" parties.

The poor who live near natural beauty without industry have no clout or means to change anything outside their immediate village (even then its not likely)

The rich people who actually enjoy nature, live near it, and want to protect it - often only want to protect it for themselves. At best their environmental efforts are offset 1000x by their lifestyle.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of rural/urban hunters, environmentalist, nature/outdoor lovers. But it's a relatively small group with little social crossover. And aside from the cottage are probably spending their entire outdoor experience on public walking paths and aren't aware of the extent of habitat loss, pollution, and mass die offs taking place.

We're completely fucked.

If I try to make the argument that the earth is overpopulated i'll quickly get downvoted to oblivion in the typical thread.

There's too many humans. The only hope of life surviving long term is the fall of humankind. The writing is on the wall in terms of heading towards an extinction event anyway so it's not like we'll need to do anything for it to happen.

To paraphrase James Carville, "It's the insects, stupid."

The older you are, the more obvious it is.

We've got a community about animal acoustic communication for anyone interested

[email protected]

No mention of Rachel Carson? I realize she was writing about DDT, but she came up with the whole idea of the silence of nature as wildlife disappears due to human actions in 1962 and it applies even if DDT is not the cause.

Recently I've found that I often get sad listening to wildlife. I've got a sense that a lot of what I've seen and heard is very soon to be gone. Not like in 1000 years in some hard to imagine future, but rather maybe within my own lifetime. I'm mourning for a dying world.

I sometimes think about this story about a recording of a now extinct bird; and I remember that there are stacks of other examples of species that have recently gone extinct. Too many for people to even talk about each of them. Just a few nice-sounding high-profile cases capture people's attention every so often.

I do put in a bit of effort in my own lifestyle to not make things worse. But it seems to me that there will be vast damage to the world already before humanity course corrects appropriately. It's very depressing.

Oh, nice. Going the way of Silent Spring.

We have some trees on our property that have died and have some limbs that are looking pretty dead. We don't have the money to take them down, but the birds love them. Our mockingbirds love the stump in our front yard that's about 8ft tall, the woodpeckers recently had babies in one of the dead limbs in the back yard.

If you have a garden making it wildlife (particularly insect) friendly is one of the small contributions you can make that can actually end up having a big impact. In addition to providing a small area where populations can recover your also creating a stepping stone that can make it easier for animals to traverse between larger habitats.

Sucks that its bipartisan now to just build more roads, buy bigger cars, and drill more oil.

Maybe it's just hiding.

Have we tried looking extra hard?

Maybe it's under something.

Where did you last see it?