Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century. That wasn't so shocking to me, at first. But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then. Railroads. Ocean liners. Factories. Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people. Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable. All made out of steel.
Then it struck me. A few million tonnes a year in 1850. 70 million tonnes in 1910. All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes. Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.
I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die per minute to give it scale.
My understanding is also that we destroy an absolutely phenomenal amount of chicks in an entirely gruesome way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
I have trouble handling that.
I've seen videos of these chick grinders, from fully live chick to ground meat, it takes something like 1/10 of a second, I am not even sure their brain have time to register what happens before there is no brain anymore. Culling also happens very early, maybe after a day or so after hatching, so early it could almost be called abortion. Considered what happens after that, if I were to reincarnate, I would rather be one of these culled chicks than one that survives...
I think that focus on culled chicks is more because it looks ugly than real concerns about animal welfare.
It's casual destruction of life because it's a byproduct. It is as good evidence as any that there are no karmic forces and reality does not care.
I agree though. I would rather be the chick than a farmed chicken. In terms of deaths in the animal kingdom, it's probably pretty hard to beat fast and certain without prolonged striving or suffering.
There are definitely ways to improve the system to require a bit less cruelty.
We usually don't consider a person being born a tragedy almost regardless of what life this person had.
We would certainly have more humans being born in that case than now, is it a negative thing that we are not doing this?
We have religions that contain or contained at some point rules on how to be moral and have slaves. Some of those religions are not only still active today but are still huge.
And we still have it in the pockets of the world where it still makes economic sense.
We eat a lot because there are a lot of us.
I am rather more worried about hungry kids than dead cows.
I also don't care if people can subsist solely on vegetables; subsistence is not our aim -- we can live in appalling conditions, but we got out of those circumstances deliberately. It took a great deal of time and hard work in miserable environments to do so.
That's why there's so much meat now, we were tired of being hungry and we built a better world.
We have build such a peaceful, prosperous world now that large numbers of people are worried about the emotional state of our meat. They're not worried about hunger or violence or poverty because, for enormous numbers of people, those issues are gone. So now we worry about chicken burritos.
Sorry to break it to you, but humans just aren't that special.
I was trying to see if there's a way of "visualising" some of these numbers using audio, but at 285Hz (for chickens), we're at C#4/D4. For the other animals you can distinguish between the specific beats, but this is just uniform noise. (cue the quote about one death being a tragedy, 1000s a statistic lost in the noise)
From several sources like WHO or WEF the annual wasted pourcentage of food is around 50% in the world.
Guess where the inflation come from.
Amounts of grain or potatoes produced / consumed per second, in square kilometres of fields, would be impressive, too.
From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves.
We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it...
It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and darkness - literally.
Dramatic? Sure. But you're literally cheer-leading the death of billions and billions of lives as a strong economic indicator.
The fact is, we can't afford industrial farming (and many other 'indicators'). The bill is coming due for our lifestyle. Faster and closer every day.
What to you is "determination to enjoy life", reads to me as blissful ignorance - but only blissful for the ignorant.
I am fine with the death of billions of animals to keep humans fed.
This is their job. This is the way of nature. We’ve just streamlined it a bit
We may like them better, given that we are them. We may like our families more than strangers as well. That does not mean that a machine that used unfathomable cruelty to concentrate the rest of humanity into a slurry for the pleasure of our family members would not be a horror.
There is a hierarchy and although we shouldn’t torture living things, giving them “1 bad day” is totally ethical when used to endure and pleasure. I admit we don’t live up to that standard necessarily, but we should strive for it.
Ideally everyone that wants to is eating happy animals at their pleasure.
I think sone people need the guilt of being alive religion gave them. But they rejected traditional methods and invented a new religion of self hatred. Humans as sinners that need to seek redemption or some other silly idea.
Cruelty aside that is something to take so much pride in. I think it’s easy to forget the bigger picture of progress here. Are we destroying the planet, oh yeah. Have we created a machine of unfathomable cruelty, also yes. But are we well fed with exactly the food we want to be eating given the choice, hell yeah and that’s an insane accomplishment. That’s something that was not possible 150 years ago.
This is not the accomplishment you think it is. This is absolute depravity on a societal scale and the fact that we're all so okay with it is horrifying.
We're not going to get anywhere unless we can agree broadly that humans like eating meat. For all of human history it's been the most prized food and sits at the center of a lot of our rituals -- ham for Christmas, lamb for Easter, turkey for Thanksgiving, pork for New Years. I'm not assigning any value judgement to this. And so reaching a point where this thing that previously had to be savored because it was expensive and/or only available after the harvest now being a commodity is an accomplishment. You might not like the manifested will of humanity but we nonetheless did it and that's impressive in and of itself.
Rate limit edit: The fact you have to give out food for free is the opposite point. They had food lines during the great depression too. Ideally the government wouldn't have to hand any children food for free lest they not eat at all.
You’re free to choose your lifestyle of course and I’m grateful to live in a place and time where that’s possible. But I don’t subscribe to your beliefs. I have access to the same information you do. I possibly have a more critical appraisal of it and I don’t believe the hype.
People have acted like you since the dawn of time. They might be right one day but they’ve been wrong every time so far. Line the guys who claim the market is crashing every month.
If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat.
That's about 0.01666 of a month's salary for a pound of meat. So if you were willing to spend 10% of your salary on meat, you could have a quarter pounder everyday. Not cheap, but if you really liked meat and you had a semi-skilled job you could afford to eat it everyday.
[0] https://www.money.org/uploads/pdfs/press-releases/ANAPR.10.1...
Just because we can produce (and consume) vast amounts of meant doesn't mean we must. Restraint is a virtue.
They aren't at that level at the moment, with large parts of modern agriculture more similar to a kind of mining - resources are extracted, with insufficient replenishment.
The thing with mines is that they are eventually exhausted, and stop producing.
We're not at that point right now, and we're not really prioritizing it.
Apparently now we're in upside-down world were the richest and most highly consuming people on the planet believe that the production that supports their lifestyles is now immoral, and the idea that poorer people might increase their wealth and consumption a bit is so horrible to contemplate.
But even if you set aside meat, modern lifestyles necessitate the killing of other life.
Take your protein-rich plant food, for example. Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out? The idea is basically to create a holocaust of chemical poisons that exterminates all animal, plant, and fungal life except the crop, over millions of acres, and that is after the land has been cleared and the native plants and animals killed and wiped away. Housing, water, energy, mining, all that costs lives as well.
You can't absolve yourself just by not eating meat.
If the option is eating cows that eat some grass and feed from a couple of acres of desolation vs. eating beans and grains from a quarter acre of desolation, then the option is obvious. You can still eat the tenth of the cows that can survive on the grass alone.
Reducing the desolation and increasing the yield by building an ecosystem rather than monocrop is better, but that is a harder transition.
Yet I do not desire it.
> "Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out?"
I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.
I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours. You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.
Seriously, it's a bit tiring that [vegetarians] people that want to control what I eat get a pass for posting the same tired stuff every time it came up. If any other fanatic jumped in with their own agenda at every conceivable juncture, you'd expect it to be shut down. (I suppose cyclists may get a similar pass)
If I could trap all the "unrepentant meat eaters" in a dome and let you ruin your own environment without broiling the rest of us, I wouldn't have a problem with your choices.
It seems much more moral to be eating beef than chicken. Fewer consciousnesses demolished.
The real questions are:
Does that include recycling?
If not, how do we see this being sustainable?
This is also why the Iron Age was such a big deal. The bronze age required both copper and tin which where rare and didn’t generally show up near each other while you could operate a shitty iron mine just about anywhere.
Hypothetically, if we where down to 5% being the best option, then chances are your backyard would be just as viable as anywhere else. Plants will happily grow grow with up to about 55% iron in their soil. So in some place you could literally just use surface dirt as your “ore.”
It has to be the _correct_ rock, but chucking random things into a fire is an activity that all humans like to do. Its only a matter of time before some human chucks the right rock into a wood fire to discover Tin and begins the Bronze Age.
Iron however, is far more difficult to process. One theory is that early Iron-age was helped by meteors, as pure-iron rocks from the sky would be objects of worship to any human. After experimentation with the space-metal, they'd discover the incredible properties of iron.
With the "Seed of knowledge" planted in the human's brains from space rocks, humans would build hotter fires that can better process the space-rock / space-iron (maybe not reaching 3000F, the melting point, but maybe 2500F for hot enough to make it malleable / hammerable).
Once this discovery is made, its only a matter of time before people chuck _other_ rocks into the 2500F fire and start hammering to look for the common iron that's all around us. So the process is instead to heat the iron as hot as possible with your current technology (again: maybe 2500F) Then, you smack the hot rock with a hammer until you squeeze all the impurities out (while shoving it back into the fire to keep it at 2500F+ as much as possible through this process).
Once the impurities are gone, you're left with pure iron, equivalent to the space rock.
---------
This iron-age process (even for the simplest of ores) is far more difficult to "discover" than "chuck the correct rock into a fire".
You really can start mass producing iron when you can melt the darn thing, which requires a blast furnace. But "Iron Age" smiths were largely with simpler forges / fires and with the "hammer method" IIRC.
For Mediterranean, it's mainly because the whole region, Iraq, and Northwest India/Pakistan were already integrated together as a trading unit, with factors coming hp from Sumer and Assyria to trade with Dilmun, Indus Valley, and Anatolia. Then the Phoenicians traded tin from Iberia and all the way from Britain as well.
Funnily enough, Egypt only adopted bronze (and chariot) at least for their armies after the whole Hyksos invasion stuffs. That might be the basis for Exodus.
Processing ore is very energy intensive. Problem is the world needs a lot of steel
the earth is made of iron, for all intents and purposes
asteroids are often made of ironIn this case, 1.9 billion tonnes per 7 billion people is about 270kg (600 lb) per human
It’s like comparing apples and oranges.
The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue for too long. As observers of Moore's Law will understand, eventually you run out of resources or into other physical limits.
However, I'm quite confident that we can keep innovating and growth will continue in one form or another. I don't think Elon Musk is correct that human population will collapse. All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. It's pretty much the law of life - expand to consume all available resources, be that food, space, energy, oxygen, whatever. You see it in bacteria, in fish, in mammals large and small, and of course in humans.
There will be lot's of challenges there, and lots of need for innovation so we can handle growth without destroying our remaining wild spaces and ecosystems on which we depend. Humans haven't figured out how to grow sustainably yet.
"According to his blog, between 2011 and 2013, China consumed 6.6 gigatons of concrete – that’s more than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century. Look at what the U.S. built between 1901 and 2000: all those skyscrapers, the Interstate, the Hoover Dam, the list goes on and on but all that concrete only amounted to 4.5 gigatons."
A pet tinfoil hat theory of mine is that most organisms ought to have some built in fail safe mechanism that causes populations to regulate themselves before a catastrophic overpopulation collapse. Because if it didn't have it it would be more likely to die out, so there should be a strong evolutionary pressure towards getting it.
So maybe the population growth stagnation we're seeing is due to us seeing the writing on the wall and pacing ourselves, more or less voluntary/consciously.
Also, for it to make sense in a game theory sense everyone that shares the niche needs to switch it on more or less simultaneously and it has to be embedded in the genome in a way that makes it very hard to remove by random mutation.
Say you're a rabbit, and you have a bunch of rabbit babies, and they eat all the grass and leave less grass growing. Their babies will die young and the population will stabilize around necessary resource availability.
What happens is increasing infant mortality and starvation. The interesting thing is, you never actually get to a global state of overpopulation, you get osculating population numbers between generations that are very stable.
The stabilization of human population now is the same phenomenon, but also has to do with technological advancement. As standard of living rises for a population, they become accustomed to abundance. This abundance is different from times past, in the past the more children you had the more labor you had so the more abundance you had. This created more pressure to reproduce than to reduce the number of mouths you need to feed. Since resource availability is becoming decoupled from availability of human labor the opposite incentive now dominates, and people naturally reduce reproduction to maintain personal comfort. This has the emergent, not deliberate effect of doing the same for the larger population.
Consequently, religion is going to thrive. Everyone else stops reproducing once they reach a certain standard of living.
I assume the main use is in construction?
Let's forget for a moment about other energy sources, and also pretend we use all that oil just for energy. That would mean that every day, the 8 billion humans on Earth are using the same energy that it would take 365 billion humans to provide by hand.
That is the nature of exponential growth. The nth term in a geometric sequence is always related to the sum of all previous terms.
The city and surrounds makes Mordor look nice.
Edit: Wow, Hedland is half of that, I was mainly thinking of the Mordor bit.
Surprise, it's Shanghai.
We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture).
Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defined by massive die off of wild species?
We have to (as a species) return the land to wildlife and let it repopulate the earth, otherwise we'll lose them. We don't even know what gems we're losing. I'm not talking about some bugs, but about dna - those are millions of years of (computer) code generated by nature, code so precious we don't even have an idea how to simulate it, let alone understand it (at this point in our evolution).
If we lose it, goodbye new medicines, new regenerative dna techniques, new technologies, and who knows what. We simply cannot know what we're stealing from future humans (this point was made for the selfish humans we are, better arguments could be made).
I don't mean to imply that we're doing enough right now to keep our planet healthy. I agree with your sentiment and just wanted to provide a little context and clarification.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#quaternary-megafauna-exti...
10.000 years ago ... 15 mil. tonnes of carbon
100 years ago ... 10 mil. tonnes of carbon
now ... 3 mil. tonnes of carbon
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/04/Decline-of-wild-m...
First 5 mil. tonnes took 90.000 year. Next 5 mil. 9.900 years. Next 7 mil. 100 years. 3 mil. remain, most of the megafauna is already gone.
If we continue this trend, in 30 years there'll be only mice, mosquitos, and medusas. And farm animals, of course.
We have to switch to plant-based diets. Now. There is no other way. No time to wait for technological breakthroughs.
Whether you think this means we should eat plants or we should have 10% as many humans is an open question.
Is it the sense that people care about or is it a rhetorical trick to make people feel good about not caring?
The while save the planet thing isn't about the planet but about us.
If we change the environment, nature will adapt and live will continue but maybe not in a way we can survive.
So it's unlikely that we kill live on earth just the live as we know it
“… but the humans won’t.”
If we return land to wildlife, that entails shrinking the human population by a hgue margin.
The supposed benefit is what, new medicine and regenrative dna? But why would we need that? Shrinking human population and human longevity are incompatible goals.
Switching to LED lighting put more light in my house while lowering electricity consumption. Similarly switching to more efficient daily sources of protein (plants, shrimp, etc) can give more people more food, while yielding some of the land back to wildlife.
To say nothing of inefficiencies due to weird local policies, like growing almonds and alfalfa in arid parts of California, etc.
Habitable land ... 50% agriculture, 37% forests, 1% urban and built-up land
Agriculture ... 77% meat and dairy, 23% crops
We would need just 25% of agriculture land we're using to feed the world on vegan diet, no shrinking necessary.
But on the meat diet? We'll shrink for sure, just you wait. We'll diminish and go to the west.
So what? What value are these species? What are they for? I'm sure we'll be able to advance medicine in other ways. I'm much more concerned about the longevity of our civilization than the other organics we happen to have coevolved with. If we have to pave over the whole planet then so be it. Organic life is common and therefore expendable. If we all die off, new life will almost certainly evolve, but a new civilization? That's much less certain.
The theoretical human civilization that can withstand a global ecosystem collapse and exist on a paved over earth is perhaps possible with the right technology but also it is 1. very dreary and 2. much more expensive and difficult to maintain than just putting in some effort to prevent ecosystem collapse now.
Fisheries management is a good microcosm for the cost of ecosystem collapse. If we manage a fish population correctly, we can continue to harvest fish from it and get resources out of it indefinitely. If we do not manage it well and let the population go extinct, we lose that pool of resources permanently and need to replace it with another equivalent source of food which may be very expensive in comparison. Perhaps the local human civilization which relied on the fish will be unable to adjust and will also fall.
I think this reply says it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32934162
In short, I think from a humility standpoint that's probably not the best solution. I think there's value in preserving animal life, and also they really help balance Earth's environment which we don't understand well enough nor have adequate industries to replace yet, I believe. If we're going to live in Caves of Steel anyway, why not reserve say 50% of land for wild reserves? Do you want to have paradise and however many billion people you can fit in a planetary steel maze, or do you want just one single planetary steel maze with twice as many individuals? I think the answer is the former, pretty clearly.
Also, in the long term we do have other planets we can build planetary scale steel mazes unimpeded, like Mercury -- I'm sure we'll be able to within a few centuries if we don't destroy our ourselves and our environmental sustainability (I'll be rooting for humanity meanwhile).
The reason to persevere organic forms around us (plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc.) is rational self-interest.
Bacteria are necessary for our bodies' healthy operation. Organics generate the oxygen we need to breathe.
... I see, is just megafauna. The most competitive groups (rodents and bats) are deliberately excluded. The title is incorrect then.
> "biomass from marine mammals – mainly whales – is not included"
They discuss specifically about megafauna and large terrestrial mammals in most paragraphs and figures.
I know the article talks a lot about megafauna extinction, but the specific statistic I posted does not mention this, at least that I can see.
https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#wild-mammals-make-up-only...
I think the title of this post should be edited if it is indeed misleading.
This is clearly written for the 96% statistic shock, not to inform anyone.
Talking in terms of biomass is very common in Ecology.
What a bizarre metric, nobody thinks like this, I don’t even think “ecologists” understand why they should think in terms of mass. I, too, can have a metric: number of decibels of sound you can produce; maybe humans make up a SHOCKING 3% on that- doesn’t mean it’s a sensible metric.
The chemical energy contained in the links of the molecules
> Is a lean cheetah “less-energy” than an elephant?
Yes, of course. One cheetah, has less biomass than one elephant. But -the- rats, have more biomass than -the- elephants. Is the beauty of the ecology.
> What a bizarre metric, nobody thinks like this, I don’t even think “ecologists” understand why they should think in terms of mass.
Well, this sounds a little arrogant. The professionals that use it, obviously, know their job. They aren't stupid.
Would be like claiming that programmers don't understand why they use an if loop. Biomass is a measure as widespread in ecology as Megabytes is in computers.
And there is not need to use quotes around the word ecologists, in the same way as you wouldn't wrote: the "engineers" or the "programmers".
> I, too, can have a metric: number of decibels of sound you can produce; maybe humans make up a SHOCKING 3% on that- doesn’t mean it’s a sensible metric.
Well, the difference is that nobody uses your metric.
I will not defer to authority. I want an explanation for why the percentage of aggregate “chemical energy contained in the links of molecules” is considered a meaningful metric for anything other than “how much percentage heat would I produce if i threw them into a fire”, let alone mammal population health or diversity.
> Well, the difference is that nobody uses your metric.
Correct, because it is not meaningful, and neither is biomass.
"To understand how the richness of the mammal kingdom has changed we need a metric that captures a range of different animals and is comparable over time. We could look at their abundance – the number of individuals we have – but this is not ideal. We would be counting every species equally, from a mouse to an elephant and this metric would therefore an ecosystem taken over by the smallest mammals look much richer than one in which bigger mammals roam: if the world’s mouse populations multiplied and multiplied – maybe even to the detriment of other animals – then this abundance metric might suggest that these ecosystems were thriving.
Instead, ecologists often use the metric biomass. This means that each animal is measured in tonnes of carbon, the fundamental building block of life.1 Biomass gives us a measure of the total biological productivity of an ecosystem. It also gives more weight to larger animals at higher levels of the ecological ‘pyramid’"
https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#the-decline-of-wild-mamma...
ABSOLUTE “biomass” is meaningful, simply because mammals have relatively tight weight ranges and you can estimate the individual counts from the biomass- but let’s be real: it is most likely that they start with estimates of number of individuals and multiply that by the average weight to get biomass. So- ditch the biomass and show absolute numbers of individuals over time. That is meaningful.
It is indeed. The idea being that individuals vary greatly (it doesn't make sense to compare individual counts of humans with individual counts of ants for example), and that mass at least roughly accounts for the size of individuals.
Not. This is a very common mistake among people that does not understand ecology.
I do not agree that this is some kind of meaningful unit, especially in percentage terms, for anything that ecologists might be interested in, like population health, or whatever else.
The fact that ecologists think in terms of biomass while putting on a lab coat and getting a PhD does not make this metric make more sense.
No, meaningful numbers are # of individuals, lifespan, sex/age composition, fertility, height, weight, etc. Percentage of aggregate biomass is not among them, for good reason.
Look, I have no problem if scientists are measuring things in an exploratory way. Let's add up the mass, subtract, play around - this fun exploration is good. But if you are doing fun exploration, don't tell me this is to "measure the richness of the mammal kingdom" and throw around a shocking "96%" as if to pretend it is meaningful. It is not.
EDIT/PS: Thought of another example - say you are studying dogs and human interaction in history. You would never think of showing historical aggregate [dog biomass / dog+human biomass] as some kind of meaningful metric. You would show dog count, dogs per human, dog speciation, etc. Not dog biomass percentage.
If you, like me, wondered about poultry ...
"Here we focus on mammal populations, so neither wild birds or poultry are included. But for birds the story is similar: our poultry biomass is more than twice that of wild birds. "
> Generally, developed nations have seen a decline in their growth rates in recent decades
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_g...)
Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him.
Population numbers aren't the scary thing about our CURRENT population.
What's scary is that China and India, which is almost 3 billion people, want US-levels of resource consumption, and they are full steam ahead in doing so.
Oh, so the curve will tail off around 11 or 15 billion? Who cares. Each billion is 3x the population of the US, and they all want our standard of living, or BETTER.
Every individual migrating from developing world to developing world is increasing energy use of that person substantially even considering that (a typically skilled) migrant is likely a higher tier consumer in their origin country. Or that moving to a high consumption economy has greater compounding effects in terms of knockon consumption, i.e. 40% of RMB spent in PRC goes towards consumption vs 70% (?) for US. I joke that the most enviromental way to be a consumer is to buy developing countries with poor consumption or huge savigns rate because they're simply less likely to recycle that profit into more excessive consumption.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/china-population-shri...
> The country’s total fertility rate decreased from 2.6 in the late 1980s – well above the 2.1 needed to replace deaths – to just 1.15 in 2021.
China modified their child restriction law to 3 children in 2021 only to drop the restriction altogether a few months later.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy
> After only two months, in July 2021, all family size limits as well as penalties for exceeding them were removed.[8]
Largely yes:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/demateriali...
For me. Agent Smith isn't coded as evil. He represents the cold rationality of the scientific algorithm - "I've been studying your species...". He's simply curious. It would never occur to Smith to "justify" anything, even to simulate pleasure. Smith represents what Kant called the limits of pure reason - the ability to measure, compute and model everything, but understand nothing.
Regardless, fish outweigh mammals by at least an order of magnitude. then calculate arthropods, mollusks, bacteria and plants and you will see this is an overstating of a complex ecosystem.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0801918105
The paper is about megafauna rather than all mammels.
This highly cited paper calculates the biomass of every class of organism, figure 1 is especially fascinating.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
Animals are tiny proportion of the world's biomass, with insects dominating that class, along with fish and molluscs.
Wild mammals:
100.000 years ago ... 20 mil. tonnes of carbon
10.000 years ago ... 15 mil. tonnes of carbon
100 years ago ... 10 mil. tonnes of carbon
now ... 3 mil. tonnes of carbon
https://ourworldindata.org/mammals
"Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of human civilizations. This was mainly driven by overhunting and habitat loss."
"Wild animals only make up 4% of the world’s mammals; humans account for 34%, and our livestock for 62%."
"More than 178 of the world’s largest species went extinct during the Quaternary Extinction. Overhunting was likely the main driver."
"One-quarter of the world’s mammal species are threatened with extinction. Most are in the tropics."
"It is the largest mammals that are at the greatest risk of extinction. Most due to overhunting and poaching."
Cowspiracy [https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts]:
"Ten thousand years ago, 99% of biomass (i.e. zoomass) was wild animals. Today, humans and the animals that we raise as food make up 98% of the zoomass."
Postgrowth [https://medium.com/postgrowth/the-bomb-is-still-ticking-2810...]:
""Research by Professor Vaclav Smil from the University of Manitoba in Canada shows that as a percentage of mammalian zoomass, human beings and our domesticated mammalian animals (for food, beasts of burden and as pets) have gone from <0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10–12% at the start of the industrial revolution to between 96–98% today."
Land and marine ecosystems are decimated (70-90% die off, incl. soil & plankton). We've killed off almost everything.
The change has to come, there is nothing more important imho, or we'll be heading directly into blade-runner like future. Personally I would prefer star trek.
[thinking about internet minus points]
Learn to cook vegan, people ;)
We find that the kingdoms of life concentrate at different locations on the planet; plants (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom) are primarily terrestrial, whereas animals (≈2 Gt C) are mainly marine, and bacteria (≈70 Gt C) and archaea (≈7 Gt C) are predominantly located in deep subsurface environments.
E.g. 1 deer will feed a family of four for a week. Or somewhere about that.
There are approximately 100 deer per square mile in the US midwest.
If population were depleted to a tiny fraction of what it is now, there could still be about one family per section.
They would deplete the deer population to zero in 2 years.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/extinctions/A4B6AA42F40...
He's also written in the conversation:
https://theconversation.com/humans-are-driving-animals-and-p...
It was around 2016-2017 and I lived in a small town in northern England. Veganism was only just starting to make it into the mainstream; there weren’t any vegan options at any of the fast food places and there was about one freezer worth of vegan alternatives if you went to a large supermarket. I found transitioning over to a meat free diet surprisingly easy. The hardest thing about it wasn’t cravings for foods you couldn’t eat like you might expect. The hardest thing was the social aspect of it.
I slowly found myself being pushed out of social circles. People knew you were vegan so there was no going for a burger or a KFC or any other bonding activities over food. People would cook Linda McCartney sausages if you brought them round to a BBQ but you could tell they didn’t appreciate the extra fuss.
I tried really hard not to be the loud, shouty, fussy vegan but as soon as anyone found out the questions would start. People were curious about why I was vegan and I would tell them. The vast majority of people admitted to feeling bad about eating animals. They didn’t want to think about where their food was coming from and I was a living symbol in front of them that they could stop doing that if they really wanted to. Eating was celebration after hard work and, just with my presence, I was ruining that for them.
At the time I was heavily into fitness and I noticed that achieving my protein intake was really difficult. It would require having 3 to 4 protein shakes a day or doing lots of cooking and prep. All the natural vegan protein sources outside of protein shakes weren’t lean; they also contained lots of carbs or fats. This made hitting macros hard. Food became a chore and I didn’t feel particularly healthy. If anything I felt my health declining.
I went for a walk one day and ran the thought experiment again. I decided that yes, this time I would take responsibility and kill the pig. And that was that. At the end of my walk I went into a Subway, ordered a meatball sub and went home to eat it. I expected to have gastrointestinal distress having not eaten meat for so long but there was nothing. My body went right back to processing it as if I’d never stopped.
The one thing that this whole experience taught me is that food is tied deeply into culture and bonding. I very strongly believe that plant based sources are not going to be the solution to this problem. There is just too much social resistance to overcome.
From my experience, the only way of solving this problem is petri dish meat. Not plant based, but actual meat tissue, grown in factories. Why? People will still get the joy of eating meat and maintain their traditions without the guilt. It also has the potential to actually be better and cheaper than regular meat. If scientists can perfect the processes, they can make it taste like prime beef every time but with a fraction of the economic and environmental costs. It can be sold as an upgrade not a downgrade which is what people see veganism as.
A large number of Indian people are vegetarian (plants + poultry eggs + cow/goat milk), and I've never heard of them having such problems. Why? I certainly didn't have any dietary or nutritional problems when I grew up as a vegetarian there.
The first misconception is contradicted by extensive analysis by health organizations such as [Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics][1]. Healthful vegan diets are no less healthful than healthful non-vegan diets.
The second misconception is about how much protein is needed in a healthful diet. Many people wildly overestimate how much protein a person needs, especially when strength training. It is not difficult to get sufficient protein within a given calorie budget while on a vegan diet, even without using protein supplements. For instance, tofu and seitan have protein to calorie ratios similar to meat, with seitan often having a higher protein to calorie ratio than most meats.
At the end of the day in my experience, a vegan diet is both a lot more hard work and less healthy than a non vegan one. Saying that a vegan diet isn’t any less healthy than a meat eating or vegetarian one is an absolute joke, especially considering there are no vegan foods containing vitamin B12 outside of yeast flakes and artificial supplements.
B12 - Animal products come from animals filled to the brim with B12 supplements, of which a huge majority of global B12 supplements go towards livestock. Also along with over lovely concoctions of antibiotics and drugs.
There's nothing wrong with cutting out the middle-man! Not least when so many flesh eaters are also deficient in B12 themselves. In need of taking the same B-complex as vegans.
The other thing to consider is amino acid profile. Milk and eggs have a full amino acid profile but vegan sources are normally incomplete. This means to get all the protein your body needs you have to consume multiple protein sources. And bioavailability: just because you consume 1g of protein doesn’t mean your body can necessarily use that entire gram. Vegan proteins tend to have the lowest bioavailability, often in the 0.7 to 0.8 range meaning you have to consume more of them for the same result. Which is problematic as it means you’re now consuming more carbs and fats knocking your macros further out of whack.
It is doable, it is just very hard work. Here is a vegan bodybuilder with 13.7% body fat percentage after 4 years.
https://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/a33807797/bodybuilder-v...
The other thing complicating matters nowadays is steroids, SARMS and TRT. If people are on them it makes life significantly easier: there were studies done that showed people on steroids doing absolutely nothing (no workouts whatsoever) still built more muscle than people who were natural (no steroids) doing hours of hard bodybuilding gym workouts. They are absolutely rampant, far more than people realise. For what it’s worth looking at this guy, I don’t think he’s doing roids. His physique is achievable without them. But I might be wrong.
Also, heart disease is absolutely rampant in India. So not the best country to be using as an example.
Ok yes, optimal no. You cant say a diet (vegan) that requires artificial produced supplementation (vitamin b12) in order for you to survive is the optimal diet for humans. It just doesn’t make any sense. If our ancestors ate vegan diets before we had mastered science we literally would not be alive having this conversation because they would have all perished of anaemia.
> on top of that the longest living populations are mostly eating plant-based diet.
The longest living populations are eating diets that are heavy on plants yes, but not vegetarian or vegan. If anything, the blue zones have a higher proportion of fish intake than elsewhere.
And I went off on the bodybuilder tangent because the original commenter specifically asked about a line in my story which was to do with me hitting my macros and trying to find lean protein sources in order to do that. At the time, I was doing bodybuilding and CrossFit so it was relevant to the question asked.
It’s like saying getting vitamin D fortified milk is superior to taking the fortification yourself.
I bet this cashes out into the appeal to fallacy. Frankly I see no reason why the optimal human diet can’t be some undiscovered 100% artificial diet that we can synthesize from scratch. To say otherwise, including your b12 belief, leads to some pretty hilarious reductios.
You know animals don't produce B12 as well, right? They come from bacteria in the soil.
> The longest living populations are eating diets that are heavy on plants yes, but not vegetarian or vegan.
Take a look at the Seven-day Adventist study (the population with the highest longevity ever recorded). Between this group, the ones excluding all animal products from the diet actually live longer than the rest.
https://www.peta.org/living/food/vegan-bodybuilders/
https://www.reddit.com/r/veganbodybuilding/
https://www.reddit.com/r/veganfitness/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/comments/8y4noz/vegan_...
https://www.theveganlink.com/resources/30-vegan-recipes-for-...
https://plantbasedfaqs.com/protein-in-beans-vs-meat/
And millions of other sources.
Neither of us are disputing that it is possible to be a vegan bodybuilder. But it is significantly more difficult and extra work compared to being either a meat eater or a vegetarian and to try and claim otherwise does not chime with our experiences or those of others I have encountered. The protein sources are inferior in density, amino acid profile and bioavailability, prep time is longer, more cooking is involved, meals can easily get monotonous and your social life is strained. It is hard work on top of already gruelling work in the gym. I will not be going back.
I can also say without a shadow of a doubt that several of the bodybuilders on that PETA page are using steroids which completely changes the game. Studies have shown that a steroid user doing no training puts on more muscle than a natural bodybuilder training as hard as they can.
But, you know, you're the one who selected a lifestyle where you value your muscles above life of innocent beings, above the future of the nature and cause immense suffering with every meal you take.
You're killing innocent beings. Not just the ones you consume, you're also the reason why wildlife is dissapearing.
> The protein sources are inferior in density, amino acid profile and bioavailability, prep time is longer, more cooking is involved, meals can easily get monotonous and your social life is strained.
When somebody points out that you don't have to do that, you counter argue that it's inconvenient to prepare vegan meal? As if your convenience was somehow relevant.
> It is hard work on top of already gruelling work in the gym.
I bet you look awesome.
Your own source admits that it is difficult to get enough protein in a vegan diet without supplementation. I'm on a medication that increases my insulin response, and I can't eat 400+ grams of carbohydrates a day just to get ~100 grams of protein without both getting fat and putting myself at risk of pre-diabetes.
> https://www.theveganlink.com/resources/30-vegan-recipes-for-...
Many of these are just carbohydrates. One of the recipes is literally just overnight oats, others are full of bread, grains and other carbohydrates with little to no protein at all.
We're really only on the second wave of veganism right now. I can't say exactly when the first wave "ended", but I'd say the second wave started to roll in after 2010. But in this second wave, there is a lot of culture being developed that I believe will sustain a third wave. Whereas the first wave had a bunch of early adopters who had very odd food habits (i.e. eating barely palatable food or eating 50 bananas a day), this second wave is developing new food culture. There are large communities like the Vegan Soul Food Group. Groups like this share recipes and tips for making vegan food and, frankly, it's damn good. Not everything is the best nutritionally, but that's not why everyone is adopting veganism in the first place. There are also high profile chefs (and burgeoning chefs too) who are coming on the scene. Gaz Oakley, Yeung Man, Andrew Bernard, Vegan Bunny Chef. There are all sorts of accounts on tiktok with culturally-specific vegan foods - Mexican, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Ghanaian. Not to mention all of the "accidentally vegan" foods that already existed before.
These people are leading the way to a vibrant vegan food culture. They're developing new traditions and practices right before our very eyes. And a lot of people are joining in as a result. The younger generation is much less obsessed with this sort of "tradition perfectionism" where every element has to be there to make it a tradition. They were much more willing to change and adapt traditions to fit their own personal and moral beliefs.
The third wave, I think, is going to come as a result of what you're talking about. We have some great things like nut-based cheese, but also on the horizon (beyond meat ;) are things like vegan casein and whey, which will make it even easier to be vegan. At that point, the third wave will be as if people were never vegan in the first place.
They do not want “new food culture” they want the existing culture but more environmentally friendly. You aren’t going to pry the burgers out of their hands no matter how good your beyond burger is. But if you make a petri dish burger that tastes better than a dead cow you might stand a chance of them getting behind it.
You can say the younger generation doesn’t care about old traditions but people have been saying this throughout time. Young people have a habit of growing old and more conservative when they gain more life experience and realise that the traditions they rallied against in the youth were actually developed for a good reason.
I suppose with sufficient vegan base the political will to remove (huge) subsidies for meat/dairy industry will materialize.
It simply doesn't make sense that meat burger/milk is cheaper than plant-based burger/milk now.
You need 100x more land to produce same amount of calories (beef vs. peas). Removing subsidies will drive prices of meat/dairy up, and plant based food prices will go down (as seen now with increasing competition and growing vegan movement).
With higher prices of meat/dairy many more people will switch.
As things are now, we need to remove subsidies for all unsustainable stuff, meat/dairy/oil/plastics/agri poisons ... we can't pretend forever that (negative) externalities don't exist.
I know who my money would be on if vegans decide they want to try and overthrow the country.
> we can't pretend forever that (negative) externalities don't exist.
I agree but like I said, I think petri dish meat is the answer which would most likely be even less resource intensive than plant based alternatives when perfected. You only use the exact resources you need for each Petri dish and you can literally build a meat factory for every city. Next to zero transport emissions.
There is a good reason why those farming subsidies exist. It does not end well when people are hungry en masse.
If we'll succeed in making them, it may take decades. Like finding the bugs to eat the plastics. That also takes forever.
And meanwhile the show goes on ... and on ...
Plus there is more that a cow is used for than just ground beef. 99% of the cow is used for things. You'd have to bring a capable alternative to market for each and every part of the cow that currently sees a use if you want to end pasturalism, and right now even coming up with an alternative to the most common use people think of when it comes to a cow is hard enough.
They are huge, they are not ridiculous. They literally stop wars breaking out.
I think it’s a brilliant thought experiment as (providing you’re not completely desensitised) it makes you sit and think whether you truly want something or if there are alternatives out there you’d be happy with it. And it forces you to take personal responsibility for the consequences of the things you do want.
If you want to enact the change you expect to enact by going vegetarian, then move to a district with a slaughterhouse and show up to local government meetings every day to raise hell until such land use is made illegal in this jurisdiction. If you rely on consumer demand alone, industry will just find either nonconsumer demand or will use its ability to strongly influence government to keep it in existence in perpetuity.
1. Just eating less meat would go along way without the social awkwardness. Have a burger with friends once a week who cares. But reduce otherwise.
2. I’ve been drinking huel and it has good nutrients and lots of protein. Might be easier to be vegan without feeling like trash these days.
1. This is something I would consider unlike the ridiculous points above some of the absolute militant vegans are trying to make. If I was going to do something again it would be more like this rather than strict veganism.
2. Huel is great. I drank it a lot at the time and still drink it today. It’s pricey though.
Obviously, we want to preserve pre-existing biodiversity as much as we can, at the very for our own sake and for future generations to have all the tangible and intangible benefits of these species. But I wouldn't say that human-symbiotic species are inferior or that relative biomass has to have a particular ratio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Yo...
2). We're the major drivers in the processes that used to limit biomass on the planet. The nitrogen cycle is dominated by humans [0] where depending on how you measure it we've done something between doubling it and increasing it by an order of magnitude. The same is true for all the other limiting cycles. By comparison the carbon cycle has been barely touched.
3). Mammals are rather big and we don't like big things trying to eat us/step on us. Mammal global mass has been decreasing since the last ice age when we figured out how to hunt mammoths to extinction and 8,000BC when we domesticated goats.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitrogen_c...
1) Life is remarkably adaptive. 2) There probably won't be much longer.
Only us, and that which serves us, is permitted to exist. Everything else is burned.
This goes for people too, actually.
And the ultimate "us". I dunno. Some old money family living in a fortress in Switzerland maybe.
And what’s the main limiting factor?
"plants make up 82.4% and surprisingly, bacteria make up 12.8%. Animals make up just 0.47%."
So, your question is basically "is the biomass in plants increasing or decreasing"? It appears to be increasing:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2021/nrs_2021_xu_001.p...
Consider the minimum space and resources necessary to maintain a software developer.
Consider amputation of unnecessary limbs.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130725551/what-the-cancellat...
nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to me—I don't understand what would make someone think that way. what could have caused this level of innate shame felt on behalf of one's species?
the only thing I can think of is that people overestimate the power of mankind and underestimate the power of nature possibly due to living in dense urban environments surrounded by nothing but artificial creations of man all day every day, and this skews their perspective.
You don't need to be depressed or nihilistic about it. You can still live a great life and so can your children. The reality is that we need to start reducing consumption over the long term to prepare for the inevitable. Being aware is the first step.
The wrong path is to close our eyes and assume Elon Musk is going to transport us to another world, or that some unrealistic hollywood technology will magically terraform the planet and bring back the glaciers and mammoths.
Can you provide some evidence of this?
I think the important thing to contemplate is that this might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done anything wrong – just that the circumstances that make this possible for us might preclude it for others.
> nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to me
For some people, I think, it's jarring to realize that much of the world, including life for other people and creatures, is very different from anything they've experienced, and that the future could look very different from the present – despite it having not changed much so far in their lives. And the feeling of that realization might be the reason for platitudes like that.
this is called the natural order of things. nature is competition. this is all self-evident. all of our ancestors innately understood this. what exactly has made us forget it? again, the only thing I can think of is sheer societal decadence, being so far removed from nature that we only have an abstract concept of it.
The natural order of things is only important inasmuch as it is a stable, desirable order. Lots of things we don't like happen in nature: starvation, disease, rape, murder, torture, isolation, immense pain. If these things happen to us we don't blithely say, "Ah, the natural order of things. It's all good!"
People want to preserve the natural order because they like the things they find in it. These things make them happy. Also, they like security. The natural order has persisted, with occasional mass extinctions and other disasters, for quite some time, so splitting off from the natural order into something that holds no promise of stability and security doesn't seem like a good choice.
But to the extent possible people who value nature and stability of existing ecosystems are still picking and choosing for themselves from what nature offers. No disease, please. Delayed senescence, please. No freezing to death or drowning. Less tooth decay.
And I suspect you don't adopt a throw-up-my-hands-and-let-shit-happen philosophy in your own life. You look both ways before you cross the street. You don't eat every mushroom you see. You stop walking when you come to a cliff edge.
So basically "[being happy to be alive and reasonably healthy] might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done anything wrong – just that the circumstances that make this possible for us might preclude it for others" is just applying this same foresight and judgment more broadly. The qualitative difference is that it is not selfish. It is the difference between "I shouldn't step on this landmine" and "I shouldn't place a landmine where someone else will step". Why do this? Again, the same old reason: other people's happiness makes you happy; other people's sadness makes you sad.
When we want the natural order, it's only by accident.
I feel like this is so ironic in a conversation about how we're utterly destroying the natural world.
To anyone who's tired of reading those frequently espoused, virtually now mainstream, apparently self-hatred fueled viewpoints, or to those who are interested in positive outlooks on humanity, I can recommend this book:
https://www.superabundance.com/
and this news aggregator: