If we were to exchange "philosophical" considerations here, I'd tell you that sunday fishermen have complained weekly that there was much more fish in the river before since the dawn of humanity. I'd also tell you that my own home in downtown Beijing has seen a slug invasion this year, and that these animals are not disappearing at all (at least in my courtyard).
Planet of weeds Tallying the losses of Earth’s animals and plants By David Quammen/Harpers Magazine
http://courses.botany.wisc.edu/botany_422/readings/Quammen19...
Obviously, there is probably some bias due to this being in part from a conservation advocacy group. However, the methodology does appear to be documented in a peer-reviewed paper [2]. So I'd personally give it a fair more weight than mere anecdote.
[1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-201... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569448/
if you keep panning, you'll find yourself looking at mostly forest and farmland with the former prevailing. you may find an occasional city, but the vast of what you will find is nature for the next 1700 miles. by then you reached the rocky moutains and things start to get a bit drier.
Nature is ok. nature is not dead. and as per comments bellow, you do not take two data points and extrapolate a linear prediction and expect anything meaningful. let alone from one small area in Germany, using a methodology that has not been widely tested. its certainly cause for additional research.
Is there still lots of plant cover? Sure. But when you get into what types of environments are intact and healthy enough to support the normal fauna, we start to see problems. So there may be forest, but there may now be a tremendous drop in the amount of wildlife in the forest because the food chain has been badly damaged.
Insects form the foundation of many ecosystems and massive drops in insect biomass would be devastating to all of the animals up that food chain. And there are a number of reasons insects can be disappearing from pesticides, to loss of specific species of plants, to air pollution.
Even if we continue on our path of anthropomorphic mass extinctions, life on Earth will adapt and move on, that's not in question. But Earth may not be very hospitable for human kind if we don't change course.
Populations become more educated, have fewer children. The power of technology and bio technology grows at a far faster rate than population. In the 1920s an acre of land would get you about 40-50 bushels of corn. A short 100 years into the future and we're averaging 180-190. We have barely even scratched the service when it comes to advancing the base breeding stock with genetics. Biotech traits (roundup ready, etc) have given us a big boost, but they too are just the tip of the iceberg. CRISPR is going to make yields skyrocket.
I know the news loves showing you doom and gloom, but really, humans have never had it better and it isn't going to stop.
More awesome statistics here: http://www.humanprogress.org/
My background is in physics, and in physics we deal with constraints- thermodynamics, conservation of energy, and so on. I'm telling you that no matter what technology we develop certain constraints are inescapable. Crop yields can only increase so much. If we restrict the domain of discussion to the surface of the earth, then we're left with limits. That doesn't necessarily imply a Malthusian scenario! But it means that we need to plan for a time when exponential growth is no longer the rule. I mean, there is nothing normal or sustainable about this wacky, unbalanced moment of time that we live in. I don't know how it ends- with a plateau or a bust- but sometime I would say this century it has to end. Look: if you assume 3% year on year productivity growth per person, in around 700 years every person is producing as much goods and services as all 7 billion of us do today. That's clearly preposterous. Your fingers could not move fast enough to write that much code, compose that much music, and your little human brain could not appreciate it all anyway if everyone was producing that much art, let alone all the physical work. The question is just how long we have left before that growth flattens out, and what happens next.
> quite obviously
I don't know about you, but for me such words are huge red flags - especially without hard data.
Birds populations face steep decline https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/january12/birds-011205.h...
Common Birds in Steep Decline List https://www.allaboutbirds.org/state-of-the-birds-2014-common...
Global collapse in huge songbird population https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=7720
Dramatic decline of bird population in Germany https://www.nabu.de/news/2017/10/23284.html
Sharp decline of birds in UK https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/our-work/conservation/centre-for-con...
Towards understanding large mammal population declines in Africa’s protected areas https://tropicalconservationscience.mongabay.com/content/v4/...
Global decline in aggregated migrations of large terrestrial mammals http://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2009/7/n007p055.pdf
Marine Fish Population Collapses https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/4/297/284117
Has Half of World's Wildlife Been Lost in Past 40 Years? https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/1409030-ani...
Marine population halved since 1970 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34265672
Half of Great Barrier Reef Lost in Past 3 Decades https://www.livescience.com/23612-great-barrier-reef-steep-d...
Since when asking for sources is "playing a game"?
Asking for sources so that you can examine the data yourself is admirable. Asking for sources because certain words "trigger red flags" for you that the other party is not acting in good faith is a different problem.
"In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity requires interpreting a speaker's statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation."