BE NICE TO A MAMMAL, BIRD, REPTILE, AMPHIBIAN, OR FISH TODAY

Infographic: Wildlife Populations Worldwide Have Plummeted | Statista

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According to a shocking report released by the World Wildlife Fund, half the planets’s wildlife population has vanished since 1970. The vast majority of this is due to human activity with exploitation and habitat degradation/loss being the primary culprits. Overall, 52 percent of the world’s mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish disappeared over that four decade period.

As bad as human activity has been on land, the world’s waterways have suffered devastating losses with freshwater wildlife populations plunging 76 percent. The majority of the general decline has occurred in low-income and developing nations. Even though some conservation projects have proven successful, the scale of the disastrous decline makes for grim reading.

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Stucky

Just wait until the Global Population hits 10 Billion … and event almost sure to happen in the lifetimes of anyone under 21 years old.

What will be left? Rats and cockroaches?

We humans are the ebola-virus to the animal world.

chicago999444
chicago999444

We won’t get to 10B, Stucky.

IMO, we live in the era of Peak Lifespan, and it looks to me, when I look very closely, that the die off has already begun. I believe that when we have the benefit of the proverbial rear-view mirror, that the GI Generation will prove to be the longest- lived generation ever. The end run for the Silents is not done yet, so we do not yet have solid numbers, but it looks to me like the Silents are dying off at earlier ages than their GI gen parents, and I firmly believe that the average Boomer lifespan will be shorter still.

And this is in “first world” countries… which are rapidly ceasing to be “first world”. The quality of life and health care is rapidly deteriorating for all but the top 10% in income, and this nasty trend looks to accelerate as we slide down the slope of insolvency and resource depletion.

As for the “third world” countries, whose number will likely increase, not decrease, over the next few decades, look for increasing resource wars, more disease pandemics, less reliable food supplies, and more political instability… all of which will spread.

My personal prediction is that by 2050, we will be back to 3B people, and going down.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

Chicago, we’ll probably still have 8 billion in 2050 (unless the computers start killing us off on purpose). Population will definitely drop from there. With the breeders having only two kids and the non-breeders (gays, spinsters and ever-vacationing metrosexuals) having zero, total fertility rate will be well below replacement level. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. Even countries like Iran and Mexico are at about replacement level now. The only places with super-high fertility rates are Ebola-land and ISIS-land. Besides, once scientists perfect the sex robot, population will plummet.

Stucky

chicago999444

My comment was more a “what if” we get to 10 Billion. I should have been more clear.

I agree with you … for all the reasons you stated.

Plus one more. I honestly believe SOME virus (not Ebola) WILL kill off large swaths of humanity. Some … more rabid than myself … think a yet unknown virus will be an human-extinction event.

Then again, maybe I read too many Michael Crichton novels.

TE
TE

Isn’t this nothing more than a simple mathematics equation?

We are at Peak People for this planet to support. Eating more calories than we produce, using more fresh water than is made, mining the earth clean of its resources and turning them into worthless to the earth’s things.

More people means fewer resources to support wildlife.

Is it really that hard to understand?

Just because the manmade systems of pensions and Wall Street rely on ever increasing populations, doesn’t mean that in the non-theoretical world it is possible, or even likely.

Wicked, horrible, things are coming our way. We have partied hard for a couple centuries and the lights are being turned up and the bills are being delivered to us patrons.

Thankfully I see humor in the smug, assured, hubris-filled, that live among me coming face-to-face with the same reality that they are working so hard to not see today. I know I will atone for this feeling, but I just cannot help myself.

Watching the iceberg grow ever closer has been some of the toughest – and most self-enlightening – years of my life so far. One has to find humor, or they would drown in the dark.

All I know for sure is a bunch of assholes have a world of hurt coming. I’ll get it too, but hey, at least I’m toughening up for it and not opting out.

ottomatik
ottomatik

Bullshit to all of you. This party aint even close to being over, the complete loss of biodiversity will be a sad footnote in some 4th grade text. We will find a new host and use it to depletion, but before we burn the next one we will have found 4 more. Doubting our capacity to fuck shit up is dangerous business. Look at all of the massive death toll, plagues and calamity in history and none of it amounts to even a small blip in our J shaped ascent.

TE
TE

@ottomatick

Which means that the chance of a sudden, “inexplicable,” event reverting that J curve to the Bell Curve is the BEST bet. Almost a freaking guarantee at this point, we just don’t know the “when.”

Did you know that for everyday/year you fail to get into an auto accident increases the likelihood of you having an accident? Insurance actuaries surely do.

I was once in two separate, basically unrelated car accidents within 15 minutes of each other. I was not driving in either.

My insurance agent joked for years that I was his best risk for auto. The odds of my being in another accident have been substantially reduced by that one night and two events.

Of course my logging over 500,000 miles in the following years has now tipped the scales back the other way.

Just because a fire hasn’t destroyed your home doesn’t mean you should cancel your insurance.

Just because an apocalyptic worldwide event hasn’t happened in centuries, doesn’t mean we are safe.

And that is why realism is taken as pessimism by the masses. Nobody likes the fact that the future carries risks and we all die in the end.

No matter the cause, or time.

Ottomatik
Ottomatik

TE
There has never been a worldwide castastroohic event ever that has alteted our ascent, any that you can imagine is just that, imagination.

mabuk
mabuk

@ottomatik — if you are saying the planet will go on for another several billion years in some form, no doubt you are correct. I also agree that the past performance is a great predictor of future results — except when it does not. Extinction level events can and do occur, I look out my window and see not a single dinosaur, but there are many birds living on as their modern-day progeny — are we to argue that dinosaurs still exist then?

We will live on in some fashion like the dinosaurs, but it is impossible to state with any certainty that what are considered to be the core human constructs — our technology, our social structures, our moral and philosophical underpinnings — will somehow survive regardless. We still have a pretty short history as a species, biologically something of us will always be around but I doubt it would be recognized as human by any of us today.

ottomatik
ottomatik

mabuk, TE
We will replace carbon based energy industrialism. The future is already here, its just not everywhere. We have already lost the biodiversity challenge, its just not over. Is it possible we will suffer a mass extinction event, obviously one is occurring right here right now, that rivals the great Pleistocene die off. Humanity is still thriving. I have seen no evidence presented that is convincing that we will not be able to continue on our present trajectory indefinitely. What will technology bring us in 100 years? 500? 1000? We will build an Arc. Several. We will spread our consumption to new viable hosts. Embrace your core biological imperative: mobile, infectious, parasite. Write your congress critter, reinvigorate NASA, lets get this done.

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