At what point did we become "unsustainable?"

When did we become "unsustainable?"


  • Total voters
    71
  • Poll closed .
Quite, yet they haven't eaten ALL the others. They are just eating a lot.

Sure the rats ate a lot of the tree seeds, but rats have colonised virtually every land mass except the moon.. why have they not caused deforestation anywhere else?
There are definitely examples of new predators wiping prey off the planet...
Generally insects versus plants I believe.

If there are no other natural predators for the prey to keep them in check... they might kill all of one species if other species also exist that can feed them.

Prime example... humans have caused the extinction of other animals...
Poor dodo birds.
 
True, humans killed the dodo.

To kill off a plant is a lot harder.

Seeds can lay dormant for decades, then come back to life and continue anew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed

It seems whatever thread we are in you are happy to supply anecdotes, but short on facts.
 
I don't accept that rats would have such a significant effect. I doubt the humans themselves would have allowed a rat population akin to locusts!
They don’t need to be that many. Do you have any idea how much a rat gnaws in a day?

There are thousands and thousands of other islands without rat predators and yet with trees....
Such as?
 
1981.

When Reagan took down the solar panels on the white house.

What we need, unfortunately, is a non-market solution to switch to an electricity based economy from an oil based economy.

Innovation can still save us, but for whatever reason our markets are prepared for the upcoming oil catastrophe. It's Malthus all over again.
 
I don't even think that the problem really is that our lifestyles are unsustainable.. (which they are, but bear with me).. It's that the rest of the planet wants to live more like us and has been making significant progress towards that goal
 
I agree, but what if there is a step after this, where we are all developed, and all in equilibrium?
 
Give me 1 example of a rat gnawing a TREE down.
You don’t have to gnaw a tree down to kill it. Simply removing enough bark and/or roots such that the plant’s vascular systems can’t function effectively anymore is enough. And eating their seeds makes this much worse.

Every other island on the planet?!?

No birds of prey? No reptiles? No larger mammals? What planet are you posting from such that nearly all islands don’t have these species?
 
I agree, but what if there is a step after this, where we are all developed, and all in equilibrium?

It would mean no more 2 cars per household, mass consumerism, etc. I don't think most people are willing to give that up quite yet.
 
You don’t have to gnaw a tree down to kill it. Simply removing enough bark and/or roots such that the plant’s vascular systems can’t function effectively anymore is enough. And eating their seeds makes this much worse.

Again, give me an example. I know rabbits, deer and a whole bunch of critturs will ring a tree, but usually not deep enough to kill it. Even then, no examples of RATS doing it.

No birds of prey? No reptiles? No larger mammals? What planet are you posting from such that nearly all islands don’t have these species?

http://www.stoprats.org/wildlife.htm

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/30/137368821/isolation-proves-dangerous-on-rat-island

http://www.amazon.com/Rat-Island-Predators-Paradise-Greatest/dp/1608191036

Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massive-and massively controversial-wildlife rescue mission is under way.

Islands, making up just 3 percent of Earth's landmass, harbor more than half of its endangered species. These fragile ecosystems, home to unique species that evolved in peaceful isolation, have been catastrophically disrupted by mainland predators-rats, cats, goats, and pigs ferried by humans to islands around the globe. To save these endangered islanders, academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and semiretired poachers in a radical act of conservation now bent on annihilating the invaders. Sharpshooters are sniping at goat herds from helicopters. Biological SWAT teams are blanketing mountainous isles with rat poison. Rat Island reveals a little-known and much-debated side of today's conservation movement, founded on a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy.

Planet EARTH. The one your computer is sitting on.
 
More of the same Malthusian arguments here. tut-tut

This is an excellent article about eco-fascism:

http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA750.htm

No it actually isn't. He doesn't seem to get that the discussion of bringing economics and the environment together has moved on since 1972, and there's a number of bits that are just plain wrong or ignorant. For example, with a cursory read:

-Utterly strawmans the purpose of the concept of natural capital
-Thinks the fact that the earth is not a closed energy system somehow proves that economic growth and activity isn't constrained by available energy
-Seems to believe environmental economics isn't aware that constraints and limits shift with technological innovations
-He also talks about "growth" as an uncontested and unproblematic concept, with no explanation of what he means by the concept.

Take a statement like "It is wrong to assume that the appropriate economic response to the problem is necessarily to hold back on development" for example. Well, gee. Thanks dude. Very few environmental economists would actually argue for that. The point is we need a fuller accounting for all the costs so better data and information is available, so developement is smarter and has less negative external consequences. Similar bits of twaddle are littered all the way through.

I mean, does he think all growth is the same? Is he talking about GDP or something else? Is he even aware that the field he's deriding devotes a great deal of time to the concepts of developent and growth? Enviro economics at its core is about finding ways to better distinguish destructive activities that look like development and growth due to flawed and incomplete metrics, from genuine improvements to the human condition. Be nice if he at least showed he kind of understood that.

The dominant method this guy uses is to take whatever he's arguing with, then stretch it into a much more rigid and fixed version of what it actually is. Then he pretends his ideological targets hold to these extreme and rigid views, and then he puts forth a few caveats and qualifiers to the extreme strawman he's established and acts like he's disproving the underlying principle by saying things a lot of environmental economists will actually agree with.
 
Again, give me an example. I know rabbits, deer and a whole bunch of critturs will ring a tree, but usually not deep enough to kill it. Even then, no examples of RATS doing it.
One species of rat. I could find even more if I wanted to.

The rats will feed on the fruit and vegetative portions of many
landscape and garden plants including the bark of trees. Their
feeding and gnawing may completely girdle young trees.

I should not have to explain what girdling is, considering I gave the outline in my last post. In any case, you can search it yourself.

The amount of islands you gave me was off by more than 3 orders of magnitude from your original claim. Also, does "volcanic rock covered with tundra" describe Easter Island?
 
Abbadon said:
Again, give me an example. I know rabbits, deer and a whole bunch of critturs will ring a tree, but usually not deep enough to kill it. Even then, no examples of RATS doing it.
I think the one person who made that claim retracted it and, as I've said, the issue wasn't the rats killing the trees palms but damaging the endosperm, thus impeding the palm forests regenerative capabilities. Which is a situation common to most if not all Polynesian Islands though on a lesser scale as a result of differing biological endowments. This is all because the Kiore (a native to Southeast Asia) wasn't endemic to the islands it was introduced to.

But nevertheless what needs to be stressed is that no major inhabited chain of Pacific Island is in the same state it was when it was first settled. New Zealand is a good example because Maori (like moi) milled out species in inhabited areas that didn't have useful properties in favor of useful species - e.g. the Nikau palm, Ti kōuka and New Zealand flax - with the result that most of the unwanted plants are now found in areas Maori didn't reach in numbers. Europeans acknowledged this, and noted, that the bush (not forests, which are a rather different construction) were sparse and well endowed with useful plants.

The net effect of this was a variegated landscape where fields and settlements were inter-spaced with thinned New Zealand bush, heavily influenced by selective felling, burning and thinning for forage. Thus, Europeans often moved into areas that had been well shaped, and required relatively little effort to convert to 'open' pasturage. This was a major factor in the selection of the Auckland as a site for settlement, as it had been pre-contact the most heavily populated part of Aotearoa, and thus was the most suitable for farming/settlement. (Though that simplifies the picture a fair bit).

But I digress, sufficed to say that Kiore did (and do) have a detectable effect on Polynesian Islands and that because of rampant change in the environment of post-colonial Pacific Islands it isn't all together to reasonable, or rational, to point to the fact that other islands have trees and say "Aha, Kiore didn't do damage!" for the simple fact that most of the slowing growing trees and palms have long been milled out and replaced with more useful, and invariably faster growing, species. This is all, of course, academic considering the species is extinct but it should be considered.
 
True, humans killed the dodo.

To kill off a plant is a lot harder.

Seeds can lay dormant for decades, then come back to life and continue anew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed

It seems whatever thread we are in you are happy to supply anecdotes, but short on facts.
Is that last bit directed at me?
I generally come stacked with sources...

I gave you a fact of a predator wiping out a species, humans killing dodos, and you call it an anectdote.
Do you know what anectdote means?
You are aware that humans have extincted other animals as well?
You are also aware that other animals have gone extinct before (without humans)...

Your whole argument that a predator can't force its prey into extinction is completely ludicrous, and yet you're the one getting snippy at people? Classic.
 
Please learn to read kockman, I agreed with you on the premise of extinction, I did not agree with all plant seeds being eaten to the point all trees on an island go extinct. I didn't call it an anecdote, I merely said you are full of them.

You claim to come stacked with citations, yet fail to produce any as per usual. Classy.
 
One species of rat. I could find even more if I wanted to.

I'll happily concede that point. Rats can ring young trees. I still can't see a locust style population of rats eating simply everything for years and years causeing the extinction of the trees (I know Oz gets random huge bursts of rats/mice and still has trees?)

I should not have to explain what girdling is, considering I gave the outline in my last post. In any case, you can search it yourself.

I am not sure what indicated you had to?

The amount of islands you gave me was off by more than 3 orders of magnitude from your original claim. Also, does "volcanic rock covered with tundra" describe Easter Island?

There are countless island in the Philippines etc.. I didn't realise I had to actually substantiate that there are islands on this planet, that lacked predators in which rats have been accidentally introduced...
 
Rats can ring young trees. I still can't see a locust style population of rats eating simply everything for years and years causeing the extinction of the trees (I know Oz gets random huge bursts of rats/mice and still has trees?)
Once again, the ringing wasn't just the only stress the trees had to withstand. The humans helped too.

There are countless island in the Philippines etc.. I didn't realise I had to actually substantiate that there are islands on this planet, that lacked predators in which rats have been accidentally introduced...

They're pretty close together; almost none are biologically isolated. I wager a specimen of the Philippine eagle would have a range of more than one island for the smaller island formations.
 
Back
Top Bottom