Some sub-species are dwindling and others are thriving, there are farms in South Africa where they are raised, not unlike how you raise other animals for food consumption and then they do the whole trophy hunting thing with some of them. The hunting funds the the efforts to care for and breed the animals. Depending on the value of the Animals, farmers will spend big money on the care of the animals because there is profit to be made from it. Given how corrupt the governments are in that part of the world and the poverty this may be one of the only realistic options for preserving some species. When the population doesn't have the basics, let alone disposable income, funding for conservation tends to be de-prioritized.
> Given how corrupt the governments are in that part of the world and the poverty this may be one of the only realistic options for preserving some species. When the population doesn't have the basics, let alone disposable income, funding for conservation tends to be de-prioritized.
I wish more people could understand this. Hunters paying for high dollar trophy hunts are literally the only thing keeping African megafauna from total extinction at this point. It may hurt for someone who loves animals in a "Disney" sense to understand this, but most hunters have a far deeper love, respect, and appreciation for the natural world than any new age "environmentalist".
We (hunters) have been doing this work for generations now, and it's not pretty. Not everything can be turned into a touchy feely bumper sticker that agrees with your political stance. The reality is that wild animals are a natural resource which must be carefully managed if they are to continue existing.
It's not just that. If you pay to shoot a lion, it's not going to be a young lion that will sire a lot of children. It will be an old lion that is actually reducing the potential population growth. This is a good thing if we want to increase the number of lions.
Hunting is a necessary evil. In terms of US conservation locally, hunting is fairly highly regulated. It is actually needed in a lot of areas where people go hunting for deer due to natural predators no longer existing. If it wasn't for hunters, there would be large population growths of deer to the point where they begin to kill off other species that rely on the same food sources as well as starve themselves.
In the past, before things were so regulated, it wasn't unusual for populations to be decimated by humans. Passenger Pigeons are now extinct; Deer, Bison, and Elk in certain areas were killed off. Heck, in Ohio, Deer were reintroduced after being decimated, so they would run-a-muck if there was no hunting unless they were to reintroduce wolves to the area (good luck getting people to agree with this).
All of this is due to humans creating imbalances in nature that conservation is now trying to keep in check, and hunting is necessary for certain species which no longer have natural predators, or in the case of lions, to ensure males that will sire more children get a chance to.
If we're assuming that international organizations are powerless to fight rampant local corruption, I have trouble understanding how those wealthy foreigners' money is going to support conservation efforts instead of fattening the pockets of those same local officers.
Are we to believe that these hunters are so ethical that they will stay around for months after they've shot their lions, to make sure the money they have already paid is used to benefit local villagers?
...Because the golden eggs in my hand today is better than the goose that might be someone else's tomorrow? Fisherfolks across the world had absolutely no problem "killing the goose", depleting the stocks and denying there was any problem right up until entire sectors collapsed.
A lot of the threat to animals is the destruction of their habitat; allowing lucrative trophy hunting creates an incentive to not turn a giraffe's habitat into a golf course or luxury resort or whatever. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070315-hunt...
The case of fisheries seems more complex because there you have multiple actors each of whose actions will have little effect on the overall fish population but who cumulatively can devastate it.
This is exactly what happens, I've seen it first hand. The land is kept is more of a natural state to preserve it for hunting. Some are hunted for trophies etc., but the numbers that are taken are controlled so that you have another batch the next year.... keep in mind that many of these places are huge (100's of acres) with high fences etc. and becuase each animal has a dollar value, more common species usually start at $400 (Bleisbok) and can go up to $50,000+ for Cape Buffalo the economic incentive to preserve the speces is pretty strong... and lucrative.
This also glosses over the whole curropt government thing which prefaced the OPs argument above. Which is why its one of the few feasible means to help protect them.
Corruption or not, having a lucrative reason to leave animal habitats alone and try to keep the animals alive (or even encourage the species to increase in number, which has happened for some species) means that people are more likely to do that and less to despoil the land for other purposes.
And what if we all stood in line at the Red Cross giving blood every day at the rate which they desperately need it? And what if we just funded every charity on earth with every penny of taxpayer dollars?
I’m all for any solution that doesnt involve hunting. But the fact is that altruism has its limits, and pretending like that’s not the case is threatening the existence of these animals.
Actually it does. Why do we have so many cows and chickens? We like to kill and eat them and that provides incentives to raise them, provide for them, and protect them so that we can kill them.
I don't take issue with your main point, but it's difficult for me to understand how you can want to shoot something you "love". Is it possible to explain this to a non-hunter?
Given how the Asian demand for rhino horns brought them down to near-extinction (or actual extinction, in case of the northern white rhinos), I'm doubtful that demand for hunting will protect the ecosystem in a meaningful way.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to see hard numbers, not just some feel-good anecdotes about local people raising giraffes for hunting.
I don't think anybody is arguing for poaching or unrestricted hunting. The kind of programs we're talking about are more limited and very expensive to participate in (like buy-a-new-car territory) and, while it's controversial, there does seem to be evidence suggesting it is effective. This recent article goes into it in depth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/10/trophy-h...
With the private game farms, some more context for people who are not familiar with them. They are generally facilities with 100's of acres of land and high fences around the perimeters to keep the animals in and the poachers etc out. Each animal has a dollar value associated with them. A Blesbok(type of Antelope) goes for about $400(what they charge a hunter if they get one) and it goes up to $50,000+ to get a Cape Buffalo.
Needless to say there is a lot of incentive to take care of the animals. For example one time I was visiting a family member that owns a Cape Buffalo farm in South Africa when someone left one of the gates open overnight. The herd of 50 got out and went a few miles down the road. That day was a "all hands on deck" to herd the ~2.5 million dollars of live stock back to the farm. There was a vet on stand by and they brought in a helicopter to do a survey and assist. The operation makes makes money for him, he employs a people and brings in money from tourists etc. and he is incentivised, by money he makes from his business, to take care of the animals.
This is in sharp contrast to the government of South Africa that has trouble taking care of the basics for the majority of the population, like education, at times maintaining reliable electricity (ask people there about the Escomm rolling power cuts when the grid is over capacity, or water in Cape Town... the water crisis has much more to do with poor utility management than climate change), most middle class people hire armed response private security services and don't rely on the police for security, etc..
Another relative works for a company the does municipal land valuations for tax assessments. It is not uncommon that they will get a contract, perform all of the things required for the contract, but then the municipality will hold off on paying (6+ months) until his company takes legal action, puts on lien on the municipalities assets and begins to seize them by going in and physically starting to take furniture, cars etc..
Some brought up a good point with the conservation efforts to hunt the older animals in the wild. Those permits can help to fund the conservation effort, but given how corrupt the government is there, someone with money could pay off a bureaucrat to look the other way with a permit etc... and then will the money actually be put into conservation efforts.
I could write a book on this (and have to an extent here) but this is in one of the larger, more developed economies in Africa that some refer to as “Africa Light”. Now imagine what is happening in African countries with even less functional governments.
> ask people there about the Escomm rolling power cuts
Glad you asked. The power utility is called Eskom. I like in Tshwane and we don't experience 'rolling power cuts'. Not sure why you think making a comparison between a private game farm(er) and national govt service provision connects with giraffe conservation efforts
1. Paid trophy hunting where proceeds go towards reservations
2. Make giraffe burgers common and desirable so we have giraffe farms for manufacturing giraffe meat
3. Domesticate giraffes and make them the new dog/cat
4. Similar to #3, progressively breed smaller and smaller giraffes so they're hardier, take less space, and can eat anything. Make them the new deer (how deer are viewed in the US).
But we enjoy the 1% of the rainforests in what wild red fowl live. After feeding billions of humans, men, women and children, we are still so ungrateful that had not granted this species an international "earth-treasure" park for the protection of the chicken and all other species in the same ecosystem. Bos primigenius are now extinct, and we left for die the last real wild horse in Poland after chasing it toward a hole and breaking their legs.
This has been your regular reminder that "endangered" is a technical term with a specific meaning, and that misusing it makes it harder to focus global resources on species that are actually endangered. Thank you for your attention, please return to freedom and consumption.
> Two subspecies, the West African giraffe and the Rothschild giraffe, have been classified as endangered, as wild populations of each of them number in the hundreds.
And also, to call Marty out on not reading the article, the first paragraph of TFA makes it clear and obvious that the article agrees with my interpretation and knew it's headline was factually incorrect, but chose sensationalism anyway:
>announced yesterday that it was moving the giraffe from a species of Least Concern to Vulnerable status in its Red List of Threatened Species report. That means the animal faces extinction in the wild in the medium-term future if nothing is done to minimize the threats to its life or habitat. The next steps are endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild and extinct.
My name isn't Marty and suggesting people haven't read the article is explicitly mentioned as something to avoid in this site's guidelines.
I think a good faith reading of the article (and my earlier comment) would suggest that the author and/or editor are (as other comments have suggested) using "endangered" as shorthand for "will go extinct soon if no action is taken".
I personally don't think the difference between "Vulnerable" and "Endangered" is as significant as the difference betweeen "Least Concern" and "Vulnerable". From the IUCN's 2016 assessment (http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/9194/0):
> Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) is assessed as Vulnerable under criterion A2 due to an observed, past (and ongoing) population decline of 36-40% over three generations (30 years, 1985-2015). The factors causing this decline (levels of exploitation and decline in area of occupancy and habitat quality) have not ceased and may not be reversible throughout the species’ range.
I'd agree that it's in a non-technical way. Most people only think of "the endangered species list". Colloquially, "Not on" would be on Least Concern (which is every species that's not on anything higher), and anything higher than (including Vulnerable) that would be "on the list". The paragraph your parent quotes further explains the details as to what specifically was happened, which also educates people that what they may believe is a binary state (on/off the list) is actually more granular than that.
Edit to add: looks like there's a step between Least Concern and Vulnerable: Near-threatened. Also, the definition of Vulnerable is "faces a high risk of endangerment in the medium term."
It seems to me that we paused in killing them off so rapidly from ~10,000 years ago when we stopped spreading around the world (there were a few stragglers, but the bulk of them were gone by then) to ~19th century when industrialization and globalization started letting us destroy all habitats everywhere.
I'll suggest again that we should legalize fraud in some narrow cases regarding faking endangered animal parts.
Let startups and big corporations manufacture convincing fake shark fins, rhino horns and giraffe tails, and mail it to anyone who would try their luck passing it off as the real thing.
This article (and most comments here) assumes that all African countries are the same.
Hans Rosling of gapminder made it clear how different they are. South Africa is very dependent on tourism.
And it's not just SA National Parks. The municipality of Tshwane/Pretoria has reintroduced giraffe and other herbivores into some of its reserves. And now it collects more revenue from ticket sales and property tax.
"many giraffes are slaughtered just for their tails, which are considered a status symbol and have been used as a dowry when asking a bride’s father for his daughters hand in marriage in some cultures."
I would say more that humans have evolved to be very interested in status (as stated in the text you quoted) and that wasting resources is high on the list of how to show your high status. Status used to be critical to survival when being kick out of the tribe was basically a death sentence. Tim Urban wrote a good article about this[1] with some good ideas to ponder about the value of caring about what other people think about you.
„Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept.“
James Damore will be eager to know more about this theory.
Yeah in a world where people are known to commit suicide because of rejection from their peers, in a world where people die homeless on the streets of the richest cities due to rejection from their peers, I would strongly disagree that social survival is no longer a real concept.
I think of Arby's "ITS THE MEAT!" campaign to make it appear manly by slamming a sandwich in slow motion on the table. You can just do a google search for something like "Meat and Masculinity", "Meat and Toxic Masculinity", or "Meat Heads" to see what I'm getting at. Basically, there is the continued association between meat and masculinity when its mostly caged animals and you just go to the grocery and pick it up like any commodity.
Materialistic modern cultures are the most wasteful. Native American Plains tribes used every part of the buffalos that they killed. Then white Americans came and killed for their fur and for sport.
This might be an example of how a specialized dataset that was used to train an AI for a specific task, was later taken as part of another dataset to train a more general AI and the result was an AI with a "distorted view" of the world.
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.
---
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.
While I understand (and agree with to some extent) the sentiment, I hate that this is the first and most prevalent argument. Instead of worrying about the loss of individuals that make up a species, the concern always seems to be what humans are going to miss out on being able to look. If we focused more on valuing the individual organisms and how we interact with them, then maybe we wouldn't get into this position so frequently.
In "What You Should Know About Politics ... But Don't", these two points of view are labeled "environmental moralists" and "environmental utilitarians". For the most part, the goals remain the same, but the reasons given for those goals are different.
Things tend to break down a bit when utilitarians try to force moralists to adopt their view, or vice-versa. In the end, it should just be sufficient to have some reason to care about the environment.
There is nothing "normal" about evolution, unless you include everything in it. Humans are a results of evolution, like any other species. And great extinctions are completely natural.
Great extinctions are "natural" where natural means "part of the universe." There is enormous debate as to which and by how much great extinctions were "natural" where natural means "resulting from the system level dynamics of the ecosystem in question."
It's not sad by itself. Life on earth will recover eventually, as it has done after previous periods of mass extinction. On a geological timescale everything will be all right.
But let's be clear, right now, we are sh*tting where we eat. There will be consequences for us as a species if we carry on the way we're going. At best our civilization will be greatly reduced in advancement, quality of life, and many will die in the process. At worst we'll join all the other extinct species.
I don't think we should. I don't see any rational argument for the inherent moral value of a species. And we should keep in mind that species is just one rung on the taxonomic ladder. It's also an arbitrary grouping with multiple, competing definitions.
I'm saddened by the pain and death of individual organisms, but not the loss of a species that they make up.
I strongly doubt we would let giraffes as a whole go extinct. There are many species (mostly birds) we have kept around for over thirty years now that went extinct in the wild since invasive species have rendered a lot of habitats uninhabitable for native fauna.
It would be an undesirable state of affairs to see giraffes go extinct in the wild, but zoo populations can maintain themselves and would probably expand to compensate if they were the only populations left.
I don't see any reason to see that as implausible. There used to be so many passenger pigeons in North America that they blocked the sun. Now there aren't any.
Except the Passenger Pigeon died off in 1914. A lot of noteworthy fauna died in the 19th and 20th centuries from the combination of mass human expansion, industrialization, and globalization. The difference is that in 1889 there weren't passenger pigeons in every zoo and an active awareness they were critically endangered. Even if people knew they were endangered back then, the US might didn't do enough to keep the species alive - our awareness as a species of the danger we pose and our responsibility to preserve other lifeforms is something that is fairly new to the last couple decades.
Today, we have the IUCN, which didn't even exist until 1964, fifty years after the Passenger Pigeon was gone. We keep track of at risk populations and have a vast infrastructure of care facilities and a lot of interested parties and money in keeping species from dying out. We have an interconnected global communication system to always know what is at risk everywhere. Whereas bans on the hunting of passenger pigeons in the 1880s and 90s weren't enforced and few were aware of them it would be much easier to spread information on and enforce such bans today.
The only captive population of passenger pigeons in the early 20th century was at the Cincinnati Zoo, which slowly died off because they only had an unsustainable population starting out of 20. Today, there are thousands of captive giraffes around the world, and the news of their endangerment should promote more preserves to adopt giraffes to make the species can be kept stable if they die off in the wild.
A lot of those same factors still apply. If the giraffe becomes a species that exists only in captivity, I suppose it's better than it not existing at all, but it's basically a failure from a conservationist standpoint.
I know this opinion is probably going to be wildly unpopular on an engineering-centred newsfeed, but most of our problems could be solved by going back to a more primitive lifestyle or at least trying to emulate it. So far ever since we tried to solve a problem with technology a multitude of new ones have sprung in their place. Solve lack of food - people form progressively larger living spaces until disease wipes them out. Solve disease by using medicine - the disease mutates until we have no more antibiotics to prevent it. If nothing kills us off we start multiplying exponentially until climate change and pollution reach levels incompatible with life. And to what end? From what I see most people living in the developed world have a pretty uninspiring lifestyle - sedentary, devoid of meaning(probably less relevant here since most people here are brimming with enthusiasm for their job, but that is not the case for most people), depressed and isolated. On the flipside of such benefits as buying meat in supermarkets and Netflix-watching leisure we're ruining the climate, killing off most living creatures that we have no use for and condemning most of the ones that we do need to a life that is most unenviable to put it lightly, and consequently tightening the noose around our necks ever tighter.
For the majority of the homo sapiens' history we were hunter-gatherers and were doing fine because that is how we were designed by nature. Because our population didn't spiral out of control or was at least tempered by the amount of food, our hunting and gathering didn't throw whole ecosystems out of balance. Small communities offered close relationships that are rare to find now in our multi-million strong cities. Hard conditions permitted for only the most fit to survive so there was no need for extreme medical intervention.
I find this whole narrative parallels how when people who grow tired of cities and go into the forest to try out that lifestyle at first completely disregard, say, the Native American's techniques to build houses and try to build cottages until a tree almost kills them when it barberchairs and even if they do manage to build something that resembles what they're used to they have to abandon it quickly because it's just hard to build and maintain, doesn't go well with fire and so on. Then over trial-and-error they eventually come back to the original Native American design because it was tried for millennia and can't be improved any further.
So this very much reminds me how now everyone says how sitting is bad for you - yeah, no wonder. Or how the obesity sky-rocketed when some unscrupulous or ill-advised agencies decided to recommend that ridiculous amount of carbohydrates and sugars aren't bad for you, but fats are. The physique and athletic ability that so many people strive for by going to the gym was effortless for hunter-gatherers because they didn't overeat and physical activity were a part of their daily life(not to say that hunting all day is effortless, just the physique came as a by-product of surviving).
Of course, our population has grown much too large for everyone to go into the forests, so we've kind of screwed ourselves already by burning that bridge, however I think we can at least steer humanity in the right direction by looking at where we came from and trying to chart our future path using that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck may be a starting point for surveying the current hypotheses about the human population bottlenecks that have occurred in the past. You're also expressing a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary selection mechanisms, resulting in incoherent conclusions. (most egregious example: "Hard conditions permitted for only the most fit to survive so there was no need for extreme medical intervention." The "most fit" for a selection lie at a tail end of a distribution. There is "no need for extreme medical intervention" only when ignoring the concerns of more representative samples of the distribution.)
Can you explain what is incoherent in thinking that in times where you can't survive unless you're mostly physically fit enough to do so without medical intervention? I understand that most physically fit will be an outlier, but my point is that the average fitness would have been better because of more fierce natural selection due to lack of medicine.
I'm genuinely interested in hearing criticisms about this hypothesis since it's been brewing in my head for a while and I figured the best way to test it is to put under some form of peer-review.
The average fitness only increases while the species' environmental is stable. Humans are a famously migratory species that also compulsively reshapes it's environment. (see also: non-human species in human dominated environments experiencing accelerated evolution)
I think the misunderstanding comes from me using the term "fit" without actually specifying the precise meaning. I meant it more as having better general health in the colloquial sense(e.g. not having life-threatening congenital diseases) rather than fitness in the Darwinian sense where certain characteristics allow one to prevail in natural selection.
Do you have any suggestions on what I could read to better understand the issue at hand and get a better idea of what I'm trying to talk about? Perhaps a good book on the history of ancient humans?
To some extent I agree. Many of the problems that are going to become increasingly serious over the next few decades are caused or amplified by previous solutions to problems. Maybe in some cases the new problems are far worse than the original problems.
> course, our population has grown much too large for everyone to go into the forests, so we've kind of screwed ourselves already by burning that bridge
Yeah, that's the ugly part of it. I think we've roughly got the choice of consciously trying to damp population and affluence (the resource & pollution cost per unit of population) , or maintaining the status quo of growth and accelerating into a pretty hard population crash.
My mental model for continued climate change, as a reasonably predictable consequence of continued human "business as usual" is +4 degrees C or higher global warming with billions of people dying.
Your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines a bunch. We ban accounts that do that, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. That means commenting thoughtfully and avoiding flamebait and flamewars.
Many folks pine for yesterday, but honestly until/unless we all embrace (and stop demonizing) birth control and increase the meaningfulness of lives worldwide, there will continue to be massive ecological damage just from people, leave alone industry.
But the population doesn't grow much where standards of living are high. People have lots of kids in poor areas because their survival rates are relatively low, and need them for labor. As conditions improve, birth rates lower.
The argument is that when people have better living conditions, they have less babies. Namely, babies will survive so two people will only have one child.
If you're referring to the 2016 ILO report[0][1], that was a short-term trend partially attributable to the refugee influx. Overall, global poverty has been on a steep downward trend for decades.
You are right (because out of control overpopulation is almost always a precursor species extinction event, true for any species in this planet, no reason why it isn't true for humans) and I agree with you. Population control is hard because most of democracies believes that reproductive rights is a basic human right, government cannot control it or take it away.
But one country AFAIK, China, did it (control population via fiat) and got overwhelmingly criticized all over the world. But in hindsight, China probably won't make it without it - still barely making it with 1.5 billion people today.
The total cost of human living is the entire cost of basic needs (food, water, waste management etc.), education, social, interactive and the change of natural environment, a lot folks forget about that bigger picture.
You are being downvoted because population control is often a totalitarian idea. There are few things that are more ingrained in us as a species as the urge to procreate. Taking that possibility away from people is extremely oppressive. Your animal analogy also doesn't help as a literal interpretation of it would seem to support genocide.
There are other ways of addressing this problem. For example, birth rates have consistently been shown to be inversely effected by education rates and standard of living. Population growth will therefore decrease if we raise the education level and standard of living of the world.
Our economic systems do not support that solution, and I'd bet my life on it this will never happen. In theory a lot of things are fine, reality is ugly, very ugly.
In regards to your edit, that looks like a false dichotomy. I don't think everyone who disagrees with population control is anthropocentric, illogical, irrational, etc. For me, I just don't want any government to have that much power. There are lots of other arguments, population control is not the only answer, we have saved other species without it.
Just as a note, I don't think it's fair to make that comparison you make in your edit. One thing is that we want to reduce risks with other species, to keep a "normal" balance, with "normal" meaning "what we've been seeing the last days we've been taking notes", and another what affects us personally. Are we willing to take some risks with overpopulation? Otherwise, are we willing to take some risks to prevent overpopulation? I think you can't compare the two situations like that.
Personally, I don't know where to stand. I used to believe overpopulation was a big problem we needed to actively tackle. Then I started considering self-regulation theories and the issues with population control methods, and compare it to other global problems. I don't have a clear view anymore. Definitely worth discussing, definitely a very complex situation.
Well, there are several ways to look at this, but we have enough resources to end starvation and enough science to produce those resources both economically and climate responsible.
The fact that we don’t is down to greed. We throw out so much food each year that we could feed 10x populations.
Sure we could kill all humans, but we could also kill all rich capitalists and redistribute wealth better. Obviously the best solution is somewhere in between, but the fact that big parts of society is talking about the extreme is worrying.
> the vast majority already lives in daily misery and it won't get better
That daily misery is still likely multiple times better than what it would have been 100 years ago. You may consider it misery compared to your own standard of living, but it's entirely possible that 100 years from now someone may consider your current situation as "misery" as well.
If you asked these people you are referring to whether they would rather continue on as they are or be put out of their "misery", I suspect we both know what the answer would be.
Additionally, I don't think it's any more useful to prioritize comfort of all living people than it is to prioritize advancement of the species as a whole. Focusing on both to greater and lesser degrees is worthwhile in my eyes, and advancing the species to the point we can get off planet and colonize other locations also vitally important in my eyes, as making everyone more comfortable (which is not the same as happier) is pointless if we're extinct in 50 years when we could have prevented that.
Colonize other locations? If we can't live in equilibrium with our home planet, there's no way we'd be able to manage a second less habitable one. How about a third? Then we're a plague of locusts, descending, destroying, departing.
> Then we're a plague of locusts, descending, destroying, departing.
Locusts don't die out though, they just consume enough resources that they can't sustain their numbers, and their population sees a vast drop.
I would much rather humans learned how to utilize resources in a much more stable manner, bit given the option of humans as locusts that strip-mine planets or humans as a species that used to exist until they died out, I'll take the former every time. As long as we exist, so does the possibility we'll change. But I would support us doing what we need to survive as a species even if I knew we would never change.
Species survival and propagation is the name of the game. If you're (the general you) not for that, you're a fairly poor example of a human (which is not meant as an insult, it may very well be that the same things that make someone a bad human make them a good person). I would just prefer if we could achieve both, and be good people and good humans.
There are so many issues with this comment (I appreciate it though, wish we could have a full conversation about this).
a) If you'd do some research you'd see that "100y ago" actually was often times better b) Getting off this planet? To where? Colonize Mars? To do what exactly? The category to that jeopardy answer is: Things that won't happen for 200
> If you'd do some research you'd see that "100y ago" actually was often times better
Again, better is relative. If you consider child mortality[1] and dying from sickness important in assessing whether people are better off or not, then those are values that negatively affect the assessment of 100 years ago.
If you consider some other values important (I'm not going to belittle you by assuming I know what you are thinking of, the only ones to that come to mind for me right now seem irrelevant), then that would affect the assessment of 100 years ago positively.
Personally, I think there are far more indicators, and far more important indicators, that affect the assessment of 100 years ago negatively.
Resources are abundant. The distribution is the hard part.
Birth rates are high because of poverty, not the other way around. You need a lot of kids if you want your family to survive harsh conditions. Eliminate poverty and you'll see birth rates go down to a sustainable 2-per-family.
Ultimately most people take it as more or less axiomatic that human life is of greater value than any other kind, and this kind of argument is unlikely to sway them.
Population control only means to limit human populations to a responsible and sustainable level, and brings economic benefits to other humans as well as animals, so I don't understand your sentiment.
Western countries aren't nearly as overpopulated as most Eastern countries. Compare the States, one of the larger Western countries, to China. Or India.
It's absolutely an issue, but the West is a saint compared to the East right now.
Yet the US has double the carbon footprint per capita of China and more than 8x that of India. It would be much easier for Western countries to cut their resource consumption in half than for Eastern countries to cut their population in half.
that's literally "ad hominem" & what kind of answer you want to hear now? a) yes I wish too b) lucky me ? in either case it doesn't provide any good points to a solution
