
Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn - acdanger
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54091048
======
Hokusai
> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create
> energy, manage our oceans and use materials,"

This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce
meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-
base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition.

The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to easy
money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to
replace the problematic industries.

The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big
investors to do the right thing.

~~~
laurent92
We are addicted to high population density, making babies and helping get
everyone to what we consider is the minimum level of consumption, which is
exactly 2x higher than the Earth can provide sustainably.

At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we
want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.

~~~
tuatoru
Second reply: Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology.

The problem is not rising population, it's rising affluence and inert
technology.

As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more of environmentally
harmful products like meat, cars, and plane trips in particular.

Meanwhile we're not improving core technologies quickly enough.

We make buildings using Portland cement. Cement making is responsible for
about 1/20 of total carbon emissions by itself. Planes are not electric yet;
nor are cars. Cities are badly designed for pedestrians. Meat substitutes
aren't good enough or cheap enough yet. We burn coal to make electricity,
thanks to the coal industry's astroturfing campaign against nuclear in the
1960s and 1970s.

We also burn coal to make steel. We cut down forest to make biofuels, a
bizarre and depraved practice.

~~~
Swizec
> Cities are badly designed for pedestrians.

Eh every large city I've been to that isn't in US or Canada is extremely
pedestrian friendly. To the point of being actively nicer and easier to
navigate by foot than by car.

Even NYC and SF are way faster to navigate by foot/bike than by car. I've
stopped using Uber in SF because it's faster (and cheaper) to get places with
a rented bike.

~~~
thethethethe
Well there are thousands of small cities and towns which are not this way.
Hell, if you leave San Francisco and go to any other bay area city it's not
this way

~~~
Swizec
Well the GP was saying that density is the problem but really it’s the
solution. High density keeps our mess contained _and_ reduces carbon output.

------
tarsinge
The key quote is that 94% of the drop is in Latin America and the Caribbeans.
For example in France forests are increasing since more than 100 years [0].

So discussing diet is interesting but eating les meat in the developed world
will do nothing for the obvious big problem: Amazon deforestation.

[0] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122699/forest-area-
surf...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122699/forest-area-surface-
france/)

~~~
DarthGhandi
France destroyed basically all of their forest in the last few centuries. It's
a funny claim. It's like a homeless man saying his wealth increased by 100% in
one day.

There's a real problem with conservation in the West where we lecture
developing countries about the environmental destruction we ourselves did long
ago for pure monetary gain.

It's hard to have a proper conversation about it and find solutions when
there's a real hypocrisy that is quite blatant to one party and not the other.

I see this with the EU and palm oil in SEA, what exactly does Europe want them
to do? If they can't sell palm they'll still farm something else (probably far
less efficient too, palm oil per kg needs 4x less space than European canola).

It's not an easy issue in the first place and borders/nationalism/trade
protection makes it even harder.

~~~
tarsinge
> France destroyed basically all of their forest in the last few centuries.
> It's a funny claim. It's like a homeless man saying his wealth increased by
> 100% in one day.

Sure but the point is that it's not directly related to the "Wildlife in
catastrophic decline since the 70's".

I'm not sure I follow the rest, there is no time for philosophical debates
about wether the West has the right to lecture developing countries, the earth
cannot afford developing countries going down that path, period.

My point was that adapting our diet in the west looks useless to stop that
catastrophic decline happening now, but maybe it could be a powerful act of
solidarity to lead by example? To be clear I'm not discussing the merits of
eating less meat (I'm vegetarian), just pointing out that it doesn't look like
a short term solution for the very issue in TFA.

~~~
DarthGhandi
> there is no time for philosophical debates about wether the West has the
> right to lecture developing countries

I'm quite involved in conservation movements and this really is a huge issue
if not the biggest. You can't simply just turn up and lecture them. It's
incredibly counterproductive and everyone on the ground knows this while
people sitting comfy in their home in Europe and the States nod approvingly at
these justice warriors telling others far removed from their existence to
reign in their ways.

Let reverse it:

Will the US reduce its per capita emissions to say the level of China? That
would involve the average person reducing their carbon footprint by half,
which is going to dramatically impact quality of life if done today.

How do think that would go down if some country told Americans to do that? How
would the average person react to having that imposed on them?

------
vharuck
>New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and
deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we
produce and consume food.

I'm pessimistic with this claim. From my experience, if a productive process
like agriculture becomes more efficient, we scale up output. The resources
being used up, in this case land, won't be reduced. For an analogy, consider
how adding more lanes to a busy highway ultimately means more people drive and
congestion is just as bad.

What we need is more government protection of habitats. But it's hard for a
government to directly and explicitly oppose economic opportunities.

~~~
monktastic1
Sounds like Jevon's Paradox:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or
government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used
(reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption
of that resource rises due to increasing demand."

~~~
xg15
Thanks for the pointer and definition.

"Increasing demand" seems pretty funny when we have whole industries dedicated
to artificially generating demand (e.g. marketing and advertising) and when
the ultimate quality metric for a country is it's GDP - so both business as
well as government will do whatever it can to keep demand from going down.

Sometimes I feel we're sitting in the bus from Speed (that will explode if it
goes under 50 Mph) and just realized we're headed towards a roadblock. So now
we're paradoxically trying to come to a full stop and not go below 50mph at
the same time and wonder why it's not working.

------
AlexandrB
I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we stopped
destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are already living in small,
isolated pockets surrounded by roads, farms, and industry. Meanwhile, plants
and smaller animals face intense competition from invasive species - often
brought in by accident thanks to the constant flow of goods around the globe.
We're probably headed for a pretty homogeneous global ecology - where
"economically significant" or highly adaptable plants and animals thrive,
while the others are relegated to zoos, national parks, or extinction.

~~~
samatman
That's the direction things are heading.

It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples from as many
critically endangered species as possible. Unextinction is a difficult
problem, but without the necessary material, it's impossible.

Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like those, it's
right in the name. And it's no substitute for building wildlife corridors,
managing park lands better, extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it
doesn't draw resources away from those things either.

~~~
throw51319
Another pseudo-intellectual "solution" in the same realm as... let's go to
Mars!

This planet is made for us, we are made for it. We need a top down approach to
limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow.

~~~
fsociety
They aren’t mutually exclusive - believe it or not.

------
okcwarrior
Ok, this is a crazy comment, but I have been playing Microsoft Flight
Simulator 2020 a lot and almost every piece of land has something, somewhere
built on it. Farm, suburb, etc It's depressing but maybe it helps me
understand that we are using too much of earth. Do we really need endless
farms?

~~~
jeffbee
I believe in the contiguous USA the furthest you can get from a road is only
20 miles. There are no undisturbed places left, really. Unfortunately
preserving roadless areas is politically contentious here. Clinton enacted a
roadless area rule at the end of his administration and Bush tried to reverse
it a week later.

~~~
refurb
Not sure I believe the 20 miles thing unless you could count an old road that
hasn't been used in 100 years as "developed".

There are massive swaths of land in the lower 48 that are pretty much
untouched beyond a few footpaths that are rarely used.

~~~
jeffbee
Well, go right ahead and name any place that is, say, fifty miles from a road.

~~~
rcpt
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/20/using...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/20/using-
the-best-data-possible-we-set-out-to-find-the-middle-of-nowhere/)

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-
canada-42104894](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894)

The best one can do is 21 miles from a road - in Yellowstone

~~~
petepete
I just had a go and thought I'd found somewhere with a 60km road-free radius,
then zoomed out and found that I'd strayed into Mexico.

Sugar bunker, just NW of Las Vegas has a few places with 50km (~30 miles)
though.

------
philips
How are people on Hacker News changing their behavior around food and energy
consumption?

And besides individual action what community action have you taken?

Personally I have found myself on a similar path to Peter Kalmus[1]. Before
having kids I did what I could: didn’t own a car, commuted by bike, composted,
minimized fashion/tech consumption, etc. On the other hand my career required
significant plane travel for a time. Now with kids I feel extremely motivated
to take further action to reduce energy consumption and interact directly with
nature: through gardening, removing all plane travel, installing rooftop
solar, etc.

On the collective action front I become increasingly frustrated that something
as obvious and “market based” as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act
(HR 7173)[2] isn’t already law. Something like that feels like the bare
minimum solution to putting the US on the right track.

[1]: [https://peterkalmus.net/books/read-by-chapter-being-the-
chan...](https://peterkalmus.net/books/read-by-chapter-being-the-change/)

[2]: [https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-
carbo...](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbon-
dividend-act/)

~~~
11235813213455
Same here, I'm on a bike for everything, I eat organic (literally, I forage a
lot of fruit when going for a ride, currently there are many figs). So my
consumption and my environmental impact is certainly super low.

I pick up plastic trash every now and then, it's hard to counter all that
continuous litter volume

Next step is to spread this philosophy, but it's not easy or even possible to
change other people lifestyles. It's sad because, it's definitely healthy to
live that way

Just talked with someone today, near a fig tree, he said they should cut that
tree next to the road because it was dangerous, I replied to him, the fig tree
is more important than the road and car traffic with a smile, and a bit of
sadness inside because I know what will happen

~~~
nverno
This brings back memories of living in Portland. It would be amazing if cities
were designed with this type of foraging as a priority :D

------
seanwilson
50% of habitable land on earth is taken up by agriculture, 77% of which is
used for meat & diary (including the crops grown for livestock to eat), which
contributes only 18% to the global calorie supply because of the inefficiency
of animal products:

[https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-
diets](https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets)

I wonder how much of an impact it would have to return the land used by meat &
diary to nature (40 million km^2 out of the 104 million km^2 of habitable
land, minus some for more crops for humans). Wild animals would have more of
chance, they'd be more forests to capture more carbon, and industrial animal
farming wouldn't be polluting the planet with carbon, methane and waste
products that are contributing to climate change.

I don't know a practical solution to the above, but people are in denial about
how much damage animal farming is doing globally and the insane scale of it
(about 70 billion animals are used for food each year).

The general attitudes of "well, people are never going to reduce their use of
animal products to help so..." and "lab based meat will save us at some point
in the future and then I'll probably switch if they're indistinguible from
real meat" is depressing. We're running out of time.

~~~
chongli
I think these figures are pretty misleading. First of all, they only look at
calories, not protein. If you wanted to replace all the meat and dairy with
equivalent protein substitutes you’d be looking at huge amounts of land for
growing soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts. Replace all the milk with almond milk
and you’re still dealing with huge water and land use for a product that has
inferior protein and nutrients.

Second of all, you can raise livestock like cattle, sheep, and goats on
extremely rough terrain. Good luck growing soybeans on a bunch of jagged
cliffs. Those areas may be highly inefficient in terms of land area per gram
of protein, but it’s not going to be productive farmland otherwise.

~~~
adrianN
You _can_ raise livestock on rough terrain, but the vast majority of the
world's livestock is not raised like that. Meat prices would explode if we did
that. You don't have to ban all meat to get most of the effect, not everyone
has to become vegan. Livestock are part of a healthy agriculture; for example
by turning waste into manure. Grazing is also important for maintaining
certain biomes.

What we need to stop is industrial meat production. Americans eat nearly 100kg
of meat per year. How about we reduce that to 25kg like in Turkey for a start.
That's still a steak per week.

~~~
lrem
Switzerland does a lot of raising livestock near mountaintops and I think none
of the cows in boxes factory farming. Prices of beef in shops seem to not
exceed $100/kg, for most cuts hover around $50/kg ($22.5/pound). How does that
compare?

------
xnx
I wish we spent more time talking about "habitat destruction" instead of
"climate change", while understanding that climate change is the largest form
of habitat destruction.

~~~
philips
Why do you feel discussing habitat destruction would be helpful?

~~~
pvaldes
There is an huge difference between saving giant panda in zoos and saving the
forests where giant panda lives (and all the other species of birds, flowers
and mammals including pandas with it.

De-extinction would be to save just one screw from a perfectly tuned and
complex machine that produces more than pandas. No-extinction is better than
de-extinction and also much more cheap.

------
cleandreams
I believe this study but it contrasts oddly with my own experience. I have
lived for many of my 60+ years in the American West. Species which have made a
comeback: wild turkeys, cougar, eagles, rocky mountain sheep, even wolves in
some areas. Is this because American patterns of interaction with wildlife are
different than elsewhere? Genuinely curious here.

~~~
mac01021
The article obviously and necessarily omits thousands of pages worth of
detail, but I'm pretty sure that if you dug into the scientific findings a
disproportionate amount of the decline in vertibrate biodiversity has been in
places like Peru, Brazil, Congo, Malaysia -- all the places with jungles and
tropical rainforests, which contain a disproportionate amount of the world's
terrestrial biodiversity in the first place and which are near-universally
under dire threat of being logged into oblivion, cleared for palm plantations,
etc.

The USA is not doing fantastic when it comes to conservation, but much of the
world is doing far worse.

------
lopmotr
Here's some good news for fish

[https://reefresilience.org/wp-
content/uploads/graph02.jpg](https://reefresilience.org/wp-
content/uploads/graph02.jpg)

It shows rate of fishing has plateaued or declined but importantly, "effort"
continues to climb so I imagine cost should provide a natural limit.

------
LostTrackHowM
The same headline would be equally true from the moment we left Africa and
entered other continents, to today.

------
roenxi
I live in a city. We've exterminated every animal except cats and dogs, which
we've modified with a multi-millennium breeding program to suit our desires.
Pretty much every surface is covered in concrete, all the plants are curated
by humans. As far as the eye can see is a totally artificial biosphere.

This is where pretty much all the humans live. Most of the people who get
worried about wildlife decline live here too. I get why there are some people
who care, but I don't get why they expect the median human to care or why it
becomes an important political issue. People are voting with their feet -
exterminating the competition is an outcome of human civilisation.

~~~
sanjay_316
There’s room outside the cities. Even cities require farms at the very least,
which — while not wilderness — are not concreted over. Wilderness is good for
mental health, clean air, and having options in the case of a collapse of our
artificial ecologies of food crops.

~~~
roenxi
There isn't anything especially natural happening on a farm either, they are
artificial environments to the same extent as a city. There isn't going to be
anything there that isn't being managed by humans.

And if our artificial crops collapse we're doomed. Nature can't support the
population levels we've reached.

------
holoduke
To me (at least in the area I live in) the easiest and quickest win is to
plant trees massively. There is so much space available. But somehow
people/governments wants to have grass vegetation as a filler between roads,
inside parks etc.

~~~
wozer
Or just stop mowing these areas. Shrubs and then trees will grow there all by
themselves.

~~~
droopyEyelids
The thing is, unmanaged natural life is generally not compatible with human
flourishing.

Let the land go feral and soon you're looking at an unfathomable amount of
ticks fed on unchecked deer who breed faster than anything can handle and
infect each other with prions because the alternative is reintroducing wolves
to the environment.

And even the plant life is dangerous as unpruned, splintery trees drop
branches in every windstorm, the brush periodically catches on fire, thorny or
irritating plants proliferate and roots infiltrate and destroy nearby
structures.

It can take millennia to develop a stable, beautiful, all-natural environment,
and there are sort of 'minimum size requirements' in the range of hundreds to
thousands of miles.

------
acd
System engineer here. The economic system current is wrong, it does not reward
keeping ecological systems in a good state! We need to fix the economic system
so that preserving wild life and nature is rewarded.

Well functioning eco systems is very valuable to us as humans yet we do not
preserve them as we should.

Wildlife is valuable Clean air is valuable Oceans clean of plastic and full of
fish is valuable Not warming earth is valuable

How do we make a fix to the economic system that such values are kept for
future generations?

~~~
qnt
I think "the economic system is wrong" is a bit of a stretch, but despite
objectively working pretty well there are a few glaring problems (some of
which potentially lead to society imploding if left unchecked... but aside
from that, pretty good!)

As far as I'm aware, I think the most glaring problems (tragedy of the
commons, dealing with negative externalities) are very well known & have
relatively well understood policy solutions (e.g. Pigovian tax).

When there is wide enough social buy-in that these policy solutions can be
implemented without expending/risking too much political capital, the
"problem" ends up resolved.

A good example might be smoking in Australia. Very highly taxed, forced
grotesque health warning images plastered all over the cigarette packets, etc.
The comparison travelling through Italy vs Australia with respect to number of
smokers is pretty amazing. The population understands & accepts the negative
externalities of smoking well enough to accept the forced hand of policymakers
intervening in their lives, and won't vote anybody out because of it.

So to me, the more appropriate question is, how do we incentivise enough
social buy-in that people will accept the personal disadvantages of e.g. a
carbon tax, and still lend their support (vote) to the party who choses to
implement it? Didn't work well for France last time they tried to hike taxes
on fuel.

~~~
xg15
Climate change and environmental collapse are somewhat larger dimensions than
smoking though, both in impact as well as required policy changes.

The tobacco industry has never had a particular good reputation, so getting
social buy-in is not that hard. It has no more utility than the alcohol
industry, so getting rid of it has not a lot of knock-on effects. Even then,
demanding a few scary pictures was a slap on the wrist, compared to outright
banning them. (Not sure about Australia, but other notions actually work with
local bans in a gradually increasing number of locations)

I think fighting climate change and environmental collapse are harder problems
because the responsible industries are deeply intertwined into our economic
systems and lifestyles. They are also providing a significant amount of
political power. We'll have to actively work to find alternative ways of doing
things in many areas before we're able to scale back here.

------
sizzle
What are the consequences to humans if wildlife declines past the point of no
return?

I know bees are absolutely necessary for pollination, but what will the
absence of wildlife do to our species?

------
philips
I find it notable how indirect the author is about the “Why” in this story:

> New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss
> and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way
> we produce and consume food.

> The British TV presenter and naturalist Sir David Attenborough said the
> Anthropocene, the geological age during which human activity has come to the
> fore, could be the moment we achieve a balance with the natural world and
> become stewards of our planet.

~~~
ojnabieoot
Many people consider anthropogenic extinction immoral and the ongoing human-
caused mass extinction event to be an urgent moral crisis.

But let's suppose you were going to take a cynical argument along the lines of
"these species are going extinct due to their poor adaptations to a changing
environment, it's just evolution," or let's just say you think moral
objections are irrational. Then from this (ignorant and needlessly cruel)
perspective,

\- the destruction of the Amazon is likely to have profound
climatological/geochemical impacts, including increased C02 in the atmosphere

\- widespread defaunation of predators could very well lead to increased pests
or disease-carrying animals

\- loss of insect life could be catastrophic to industrial agriculture

\- overharvested fishing and agricultural resources means diminshing returns
(and possibly famine) for future generations

More generally, the destruction we've wrought upon the world in the last 150
years is scientifically uncharted territory, and it's deeply naïve to assume
that 150 years of strong economic growth can be extrapolated to suppose that
destroying the planet will work out for humans in the long term.

~~~
dariosalvi78
which, from the Darwinian perspective, will cause either our extinction, or an
adaptation, but only after many have died. It's probably all avoidable, but I
don't see the human kind, in its current form and way of societal organisation
being able to get out of this.

------
etxm
I can’t even begin to think of how we actually fix this with a world clutching
so desperately to fossil fuels and large amounts of people considering climate
change a hoax.

------
giantg2
Surprise, surprise. What did we think would happen with increasing quality of
life (increased consumption) and increasing population (further increase in
consumption).

------
annoyingnoob
Mosquitos are having no issues, to the detriment of everyone.

------
aporetics
Fascinating to see how these comment threads debate the relative facility of
different diets, and even armchair evolutionary biology... while conveniently
avoiding the critical topic: the choices we continue to make are defacing the
planet, destabilizing ecologies, and exterminating other species at a scale
that is hard to imagine. We’re all ok with this?

So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of
your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions (much less
to resolve to change your habits)?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but for all of you who ate a burger for
dinner tonight, were you thinking about the devastation you’re a part of? (And
of course the list of destructive-yet-normalized ways of living is long; try
picking one relevant to you).

~~~
tomhoward
The answer is similar to the one for those who retort to the suggestion that
taxation should be higher with: "if you love paying tax so much why don't you
just send a big cheque to the government?".

In both cases, it is that an individual's actions don't move the needle. Even
a low-to-mid double-digit percentage of the population's actions don't move
the needle that much.

So, to address your accusatory question: no, thinking people are not OK with
the destructions of ecosystems, the decline in animal populations or the
extinction of many species.

And if it were the case that through my own avoidance of consuming meat for
the rest of my life I could significantly abate these problems, I'd happily
make that choice.

But thinking people also know it's not remotely as simple as the question
implies. I could avoid meat for the rest of my life, and it would make zero
difference to these problems. Even worse, everyone in the world could avoid
eating meat, but that would still leave (indeed possibly exacerbate) the issue
of land and resource use for the production of plant-based foods. And it would
also have no bearing on the issue of animal poaching for medicinal or
ornamental uses, of which I'm pretty sure just about nobody on this website is
an advocate or customer.

None of this is to say it's a lost cause, that there's nothing that can or
should be done to improve things. Plenty is being done, and plenty more should
be done.

To the extent that heathy ecosystems are necessary for human survival, self-
interest will ensure that more efforts go into that, and social/political
pressure will continue to see benevolent efforts being undertaken.

But for solutions to be truly effective, they have to be co-ordinated across
society, and that is the great challenge we face.

I often observe that people who choose to avoid meat for environmental reasons
and finger-wag at others for not following suit are avoiding confronting the
deeper realities and challenges involved with solving these problems.

~~~
aporetics
My question is not accusatory, though I did frame it quite specifically, so
maybe it feels confining. But, in reading your response I’m not sure what
question you’re answering. I didn’t ask why people don’t behave differently. I
asked the question that comes before it. Why is it hard to think about the
meaning of your actions?

In a way, your response does answer it: you said people see that their actions
won’t be effective unless they are a coordinated with other’s on a scale that
can make a difference. I think that’s the same as saying: your actions are
meaningless in themselves. What an interesting idea. But I’m sure you don’t
feel that way about everything.

A better analog than people sending the Federal Reserve more money than they
owe to the IRS would be voting: does your vote not matter unless it is the
decisive one? Which vote is decisive? Is the meaningfulness of a vote or of
voting found only in its effectiveness?

But that’s still not a good enough analog. The points that you and other
commenters have made all point to the need for collective, coordinated action.
I won’t dispute that; but if we’re talking about effectiveness and not
meaningfulness (or, again, do you think they’re the same thing?) then the
dynamic of collective action is fundamentally a social dynamic: people are
neither provoked by nor affirmed by what they see the people around them
doing. If you made visible, ethical choices (as I’m sure you do) you find that
a friend or colleague is starting to make similar choices. The visibility
encourages others. Maybe the very same arguments about the futility of action
make it all the more critical.

I should be explicit about one other thing. I may be wrong, but my assumption
in asking my question about how thinking about the meaning of your actions is
hard is that that thoughtfulness is what will change your behavior.

~~~
tomhoward
The central question of your original comment seemed to me to be: "We’re all
ok with this?"

You've followed up pointing out that the actual central question was "So, why
is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your
decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions".

As I said in the my first reply, I think it's pretty clear that people in this
discussion thread, and most people frequenting this website, are not OK with
this.

And in response to the more recent comment: plenty of people in this thread
are demonstrating that they are thinking about the consequences of their
decisions.

But as I, and plenty of others here have pointed out, no amount of "thinking
about consequences" will change the fact that the consequences of an
individual's actions in insolation are profoundly different to the
consequences of the same action co-ordinated across the entire society.

The voting system works (to the extent that it does work - and I must say
where I live, in Australia, it works much better through being legally
compulsory and therefore not subject to manipulation of
eligibility+attendance), because the cost is low (take a few hours out of your
day once every couple/few years) and the payoff relatively high (feel you have
a stake in your democracy/society, influence policy, celebrate the victory if
your candidate/party wins).

Other forms of co-ordinated activity all have equivalent factors of cost vs.
payoff that lead to the intended outcome.

So I guess there's your answer: to solve this problem, there needs to be a
cost vs. benefit formulation that leads to a widespread change in behaviour.

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sul_tasto
Seems like this is never the type of issue discussed at Davos.

