'The sixth great extinction is happening', conservation expert warns
Posted by Portalrules123@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 74 comments
Posted by Portalrules123@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 74 comments
Comfortable-Eye-8391@reddit
Feels like one of those internet Explorer memes lol, where the icon goes "hey, did you guys hear about climate change??"
80taylor@reddit
You mean clippy?
Comfortable-Eye-8391@reddit
Shhh. Clippy has eyes all over this city.
darkpsychicenergy@reddit
Finally, someone titles this correctly, instead of using “climate expert”. So many dipshits for whom anything and everything relating to our biosphere is just “climate”, iswtg…
ABurningDevil@reddit
Only barely on topic, but I was watching a lefty news/politics podcast the other day and they had on some hopium dude talking about how fear is what gives fascists power and we all need to center ourselves and breath away the anxieties 🤗🤗 And at one point he made the claim that he's a climate expert and that "many therapists have told [him]" that denialism and doomerism are the same thing. Both are trying to make certainty out of the uncertain, he says... Y'know, like how if someone shoots a gun at your head, it's the same thing to say you're gonna die and that there is no such thing as guns.
I will never fully stop being angry at how people like that can just totally dismiss pessimism even in these times cause... it makes them feel sad? I feel fine, so maybe that's a you problem, random podcast guest I'm unreasonably mad at.
ndw_dc@reddit
Sounds like this interview from the Majority Report last week with a guy named Daniel Hunter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLBM2SEL6Rc
Majority Report is one of my favorite shows; I think they do really great work overall. But I do absolutely agree with you that it's a completely false equivalency to equate climate denialism with "doomerism."
In some ways, Trump's victory has given me a sort of perverse sense of peace in that I am now certain there's no going back. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that perhaps we could pull together somehow and prevent the worst of the climate catastrophe. But that's not reality.
I think 3 C is now baked in, and I need to spend the rest of my life adapting/preparing for a 3 C world. I don't think that's being a doomerist or what have you; it's just recognizing reality.
And I honestly would recommend that interview. There are some problems with what that guys says as we've already discussed, but the other topics they touch on are really solid. Mostly about not preemptively surrendering to fascism and resisting in any small way that you can.
Trump will never have enough police, military or simple street thugs to put everyone who opposes him in prison. Rather, he'll use selective prosecution to instill a sense of fear in society and quell dissent that way. We still have power.
ABurningDevil@reddit
Yeah, I'm a MR fan. That's why I didn't wanna specifically mention them cause I didn't feel that interview was representative of them more generally, so I didn't want anyone who hadn't heard of them getting a bad taste in their mouth off my opinion of this one interview.
I just really bristled at that interview but probably for personal reasons. I have never agreed that optimists take action and pessimists sit around moping, I've found people will use either as an excuse to not act if they don't want to.
ndw_dc@reddit
This is a great point. Pessimism vs optimism is not the right way to look at it; both can be weak or very powerful motivators. Personally, as I've gotten older I've gotten more pessimistic but that's increased in tandem with my motivation to try and do something, at the very least on a personal/family/community level.
And there's not going to be any show that you can agree with 100% of the time. But overall, I think the Majority Report does a great job and they actually have a pretty broad range of left-aligned voices on their show.
ABurningDevil@reddit
Yeah, MR stands well above the rest in my opinion.
Immediate-Meeting-65@reddit
Mate I told my therapist we're all fucked I laid it out and her response was actually fairly real. No dismissal she basically just said "you can carry that weight, and maybe sometimes you should. But you don't have to carry it all the time."
But as a whole yeah I feel therapy and current "mental health" responses generally are more targeted at simply keeping you engaged than actually acknowledging the real and genuine dread that we should be experiencing right now.
BenCelotil@reddit
There's a service provided to unemployed people in Australia who are signed up with Workforce Australia. The service is through a mob called Allied Health, and for at least 4 visits you can talk to a licenced therapist or psychologist - not psychiatrist, I tried and this wasn't an option.
Nowhere is it more apparent that they're focused on getting people mentally prepared to get into a job and act as if it's all business as usual.
They shouldn't be. Allied Health is supposedly a completely separate entity which just provides mental health visits to those in the Workforce system, but it's so obvious that their focus is on "job readiness".
When I was asked about my future and what plans I had, I couldn't help unloading a little about watching my job opportunities disappear to AI, robots, and automation. I even offered to show news stories on my phone showing where this was happening right now, in real time.
I was told it was an "imaginary fear", something that wouldn't happen. I should just focus on the here and now, and only worry about what's stopping me getting into a job.
I'm not saying all therapists are like this, but some in those positions where they're supposed to help the most disenfranchised and screwed up, certainly are.
It's just a little difficult to find genuine people who want to help when you don't know who's paying whom.
Kaldorain@reddit
What if, 90% of everyone around you was like that? I think I have 2-3 friends that I can actually talk to, everyone just chooses willful ignorance. As if that is somehow going to save them from the fears I have becoming real.
Bringing ANY actual evidence gets you called fake news or a Debbie Downer.
All convos ended up about Marvel, Tik-Tok jokes/dances, or some reality TV show that everyone is watching. I've never felt so ostrichized in my whole life. I'm literally just ignored after 3 years.
BenCelotil@reddit
90% wilfully choosing ignorance?
You wait patiently while quietly preparing for the oncoming apocalypse, stocking up, learning new skills as relevant as they were 200 years ago as now, surveying the landscape both geographically and politically, and generally just getting yourself ready for the day when you can turn to everyone else and say with bitter happy tears in your eyes,
I fucking told you so!
SirMattikus@reddit
Could we all just rally and lead the masses into awareness? What if we all agree to show up to every city center where we live and hold up simple positive signs? The butterfly effect is we can change the world with one simple action. Let's all start hitting greedy corporations where it hurts, refuse to support them. Pull all of your money out of big banks. Ditch all credit cards so they stop making money on the fees. Let's get this going!
Portalrules123@reddit (OP)
SS: Related to ecological collapse as this article profiles Dr. Jane Goodall and her spreading the word about the sixth mass extinction that we are causing, which likely doesn’t come as a surprise to many on here. She discusses climate change too, and how much more intermittent the rainy/dry seasons are in her main habitat of study than they were 60 years ago, which is a lot of change over only a number of decades when you consider how old Earth is. She believes they’re isn’t much time left (I’m sure us on here think even less optimistically) to save nature, considering how great we are at destroying it. Expect the sixth great extinction to continue unabated even as climate collapse also accelerates.
GoalStillNotAchieved@reddit
Glad to hear she is still alive!
springcypripedium@reddit
She will fight until the end 💔. I saw her speak in the late 90's after she wrote the book, Reason For Hope. I remember thinking there wasn't much (if any hope) at that time and still . . . I admire her perseverance, her deep, abiding compassion and love for nonhuman life.
"For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected." Jane Goodall
As an aside, just got back from a 4 hour hike in (what is left of) the wilderness of N. Mn. We did not see one living creature. Except a few flying insects----yes flying insects in the upper midwest on November 18. 😥
Mourning the death of everything right now. Especially the death of all spheres of life and ecosystems. I fear the only thing left standing in the u.s. will be hate emanating from the maga fascist oligarchy. It seeps through their pores and spews out of their mouths and seeps out of their eyes.
lavapig_love@reddit
>I put some rotting grapes on the deck and within seconds it was covered with yellow jackets and flies.
They're hungry. Put out more food, like birdseed, leftover vegetable peelings and the like, and you'll see more animals come out. But be careful, the larger ones like bears will also investigate.
salamipope@reddit
fuckin love her. im sad about this, as always, but god i love jane.
PositiveWeapon@reddit
90 years old and still travelling the world doing talks to raise money for her foundation.
Pretty cool, if I was 90 I'd have zero fucks to give.
Bromlife@reddit
I love Jane Goodall but she’s polishing the raps in the titanic here. It’s going down Jane, it’s already too late. The iceberg has melted.
war3rd@reddit
It began about 3 years ago unfortunately. But idiots who didn’t want to “escalate” are now escalating because it’s the only option. I think most of us in this sub saw this coming 2 years and 9 months ago. SMH.
pistil-whip@reddit
Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an entire book about it in 2014
IsuzuTrooper@reddit
3 years? Try 203 years at least. We've been mowing down nature since before the industrial revolution but ICE really ramped up the habitat destruction. Where in the world did you get 3 years?
war3rd@reddit
I was referring to the orcs in Ukraine, so yes, it began a much longer time ago, but the recent catalyst that may push us all over the edge is putler and his assmonkeys. We didn't have nukes a few centuries ago. But the industrial era, yes, I certainly do think that was a massive trigger. But that takes time. the closeted boy-loving putler could end it all in a day if all countries launch everything that still works.
Adventurous_Chard738@reddit
Insane that you're literally cheering on U.S. nuclear Armageddon escalation in a sub about "collapse"...
war3rd@reddit
I'm not sure what you are talking about. I'm cheering on nothing and merely responding to the previous comment as this is r/collapse where we talk about these things. I would recommend a reading comprehension course or ESL if you couldn't understand what I wrote.
SomeRandomGuydotdot@reddit
I, think, there's a bit of the story that gets left out.
You've got deforestation in the UK before you've got coal... It's sort of the unspoken story here in MN... We didn't do clear cutting to make charcoal because we already had access to fossil fuels so instead of deforestation and mining we just had mining.
We want to blame fossil fuels, but the truth is that fossil fuels extended industrialization not that it caused it.
IsuzuTrooper@reddit
That's what I said. It ramped it up
SomeRandomGuydotdot@reddit
My bad. Took 203 years to literal. Slowed down past channel purple, not followin' my best.
lavapig_love@reddit
Dr. Jane Goodall, world famous conservationist, confirming what this sub has known for decades now. It doesn't matter what the idiots at the International Commission of Geological Scientists think. Human behavior has left permanent damage on this planet to our own ecosystem. The new one that pops up certainly won't be as habitable to Homo Sapians.
powershellnovice3@reddit
but what about the economysystem?!?!?
chaseinger@reddit
ftfy
AlludedNuance@reddit
I disagree. Most people have no clue, not even really being conscious of the changes one can see in a lifetime as a sign of anything.
chaseinger@reddit
eh. for the last 20 years (at least), "having no clue" constitutes as an effort in ignorance. you had to work hard to look the other way. and a lot did. but that's no excuse in any way.
AlludedNuance@reddit
I'm not excusing it, hell I think either is equally bad in the end. Willful or incidental ignorance results in pretty much the same thing.
cherry_city@reddit
We must invest money in terraforming Mars.
Jukka_Sarasti@reddit
The most obvious question is.... Instead of wasting enormous amounts of time, money and effort chasing the pipe-dream of making an uninhabitable Mars fit for humans, why not spend that time, money, and effort un-fucking our own currently habitable planet(Not that I think it's possible)? Seriously, if you want to wave the magic wand of terraforming, why not wave it where we already fucking live?
cherry_city@reddit
We literally just need to bring human population down to 10 million for a few hundred years then.
SpongederpSquarefap@reddit
Lol the warming isn't a temporary thing - over the next 1000 years the earth's surface is likely to raise above 10C
That's enough to sterilise the surface for the most part
Have fun trying to repopulate that
Ok_Act_5321@reddit
Yeah, fuck that, I will die here.
Madness_Reigns@reddit
It'll be a catastrophe for earth sending that many shipping over and it's gonna be 10,000x easier surviving here despite all the damage we've done. That's how inhospitable mars is.
cherry_city@reddit
Earth is doomed.
Madness_Reigns@reddit
We also absolutely aren't teraforming anything.
piousp@reddit
I thought this was a known fact for several years now
KochuJang@reddit
Biodiversity is something that takes millions of years to rebound after extinction events. Unless we figure out the technology to revive species that were rendered extinct during the Anthropocene, and accurate models to at tell us which species should go together and where, we is good n’ fucked.
Designer_Valuable_18@reddit
Yeah we've been aware of it for the past 20 years but thanks buddy.
brezhnervous@reddit
The way humanity is trending atm...possibly just as well 😬
Crow_Nomad@reddit
She is just confirming the bleeding obvious. It's over. Just a matter of how soon.
npcknapsack@reddit
I thought we already knew this? Does the world not know this?
AgitatorsAnonymous@reddit
Next time you are in the grocery, no matter how full that grocery is, take a look around. If you see 20 people, know that including yourself, maybe 5 of them are aware.
The average person is absolutely blind to just how bad it is. 60% of the people you see every day haven't the foggiest how much damage capitalist economics has done to the environment. They really, truly believe that they have 70 something years to turn this all around.
Most people don't realize, as an example, that at 2.5°C a bit under half of the world's population will die due to the storms and environmental collapse of supply chains, especially for food.
It just isn't something they realize.
Just like at 3.5°C the global carrying capacity is reduced to 1.7B. Which means that three quarters of the world's population will likely die as conditions become untenable.
ConfusedMaverick@reddit
A few years ago, in an interview on UK national radio, Roger Hallam mentioned that the global population could easily drop to under a billion by the end of the century.
It causes uproar, and widespread denial. Even a spokesperson for XR said they didn't know where he got this idea from.
I had already read something similar in a scientific paper, it was a totally respectable, defensible position. But everyone in the country's media stuck their fingers in their ears and screamed obscenities at Roger.
Most people don't have the vaguest notion of what's coming.
Old-Adhesiveness-156@reddit
No, and most think things start going badly around the year 2100.
NSFW_hunter6969@reddit
Somehow, "I told you so" doesn't' feel as good this time.
I keep hanging on to this hope I'll see something that will change my mind. I really envy the people still in the matrix.
AntonChigurh8933@reddit
The Matrix scene with Cypher and Agent Smith reminded me of what you said.
NSFW_hunter6969@reddit
That movie was waaaaay ahead of its time lol
AntonChigurh8933@reddit
I rewatched it the other day. Way different perspective this time around.
NyriasNeo@reddit
"She believes they’re isn’t much time left to save nature"
That is just stupid. It is already too late. We already passed 1.5C and blew through 2C briefly. Plus, there is no interests in saving nature anyway. We just voted for "drill baby drill".
solarview@reddit
Is it ‘stupid’ to just give up?
Texuk1@reddit
It’s not stupid, it’s just not very realistic. At this point what is required to stop this is not politically or technologically feasible and so stating there isn’t much time left when there isn’t any time left is denial.
Sans_culottez@reddit
This was clear as a window when Silent Spring came out.
Ruby2312@reddit
Wow, cool cool. And how is it gonna affect the economy and which stock should i buy than?
chaseinger@reddit
and what is taylor swift and mr. beast are going to say?
Butt_acorn@reddit
puts on society
EllieBaby97420@reddit
Uhhhh, any military equipment firm is bound to make tons in the years to come.
lavapig_love@reddit
Actually, in 2010 Indonesia and Russia had been working out a barter trade for arms. A bunch of Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets, in exchange for a bunch of palm oil and other agricultural produce.
At the time the United States laughed while simultaneously threatening Indonesia, tanking the deal. We offered them our own fighters, but Indonesia decided to buy French jets instead, which actually surprised us. Seven other countries followed suit and bought French, turning them into a massive fighter jet exporter overnight.
We're not laughing so much these days. We gave Argentina a massive discount for some used F-16s so they wouldn't buy Chinese jets. A smart idea would be to take people up on the barter deal.
ShareholderDemands@reddit
Cool cool. Now when the food supply collapses unexpectedly after the next major climate incident I'll be all set to weather the storm.
Wait... I can't eat dividends?
InvisibleTextArea@reddit
Water futures options.
hannahbananaballs2@reddit
..super not good, kinda just bad even..
Deguilded@reddit
No it's not.
jthekoker@reddit
Oh brother, extinction will be better than listening to 1/2 the U.S. piss & moan about political bullshit.
extinction6@reddit
Extinction6 here - you rang?
ThunderPreacha@reddit
Yawn...
(It is a great tragedy and most people find economic and social issues way more important).
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Portalrules123:
SS: Related to ecological collapse as this article profiles Dr. Jane Goodall and her spreading the word about the sixth mass extinction that we are causing, which likely doesn’t come as a surprise to many on here. She discusses climate change too, and how much more intermittent the rainy/dry seasons are in her main habitat of study than they were 60 years ago, which is a lot of change over only a number of decades when you consider how old Earth is. She believes they’re isn’t much time left (I’m sure us on here think even less optimistically) to save nature, considering how great we are at destroying it. Expect the sixth great extinction to continue unabated even as climate collapse also accelerates.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1gtnbm5/the_sixth_great_extinction_is_happening/lxnf0ad/