I'm so glad we have space rockets, flying cars and drone warfare...but I'd trade it all in for the reef to come back.
I'm so glad we have space rockets, flying cars and drone warfare...but I'd trade it all in for the reef to come back.
It's really just climate change. (Ocean warming is what causes bleaching.) Luckily, since the 80s we've had the technology to generate energy without releasing greenhouse gases. I wish more people knew about the harms caused by climate change because maybe if they were they'd be more interested in preventing them.
The power is yours.
This is not mentioned enough. The world, nature and all of its glory will thrive once human activity comes to a standstill as seen though the lockdown.
Until the Boomers finish ageing out and GenZ/A grow up to take the reins, the status quo stays
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_New_York_City_mayoral_ele...
Yes, for many swaths and types of traditional agriculture and fishing it will be doom, but this conversation isn’t about local ecosystem but global food production vs population growth.
Food production was never a problem, supply and management is.
While nearly half of all habitable land is used to some extent as agriculture, the total amount of land in active cultivation has actually been declining since the early 2000's and we currently abandon more farmland every year than we clear forest or convert to agriculture. Between 1992 and 2020, ~ 7% of all cropland was effectively 'abandoned' and much of the production capacity in the west is actually intentionally kept from being fully planted in order to control against overproduction of cereal crops which in the past has been justified by arguing that this control is necessary to prevent market crashes when distribution networks cannot absorb the full capacity of a harvest.
Globally, there are about a billion acres, 400ish million hectares, ~ about half the size of Australia, which sits unused according to FAO satellite and other observables datasets.
About half of the abandonment not due to cultivability at the simplest level, but rather that of transportation of the crops to market or of access to workforce (labor or equipment) to the land. Smaller, more distant crops without significant mechanization simply cannot compete at the prices possible through mechanization. With a lack of access to global niche markets and the higher prices for, say, premium organics, many successive generations of farming families have simply moved to town and left the land sitting, unused.
The other ~ half of abandoned land is because of degraded production capacity through mismanagement; either through over-application of petrochemical fertilizers instead of crop rotation, or through mechanized tilling without careful erosion management. Many farms have neither the time nor the resources (or in the case of large industrial operations the long-term financial foresight on the part of management) to engage in multi-year regenerative practices necessary to reestablish the soil mycostructure and probiotic ecosystems necessary to recover productivity.
However, if demand were to rise sufficiently and if production instead of distribution was the driving force behind food scarcity, we do indeed have arable land reserves which do not require further destruction of uncultivated wilderness to meet a growing demand.
There is actually an inverse relationship to land productivity at scale; the larger farms do extract more gross tonnage of product at lower costs of per-unit equipment and labor, but actually those operations significantly underproduce volumes of harvestable food if measured in 'per unit of land' instead of labor hours. Fields with multi-level, interconnected plant communities significantly overproduce in terms or total volume. This has been demonstrated in nearly every place on earth using very simple techniques that have varied names and different approaches to marketing, but are all very much the same thing: call it Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution", Bill Mollison's "Permaculture", Historic Food Forests in Africa and the Decca in India, or in the Middle East "Oasis". In the Americas it still is "Three sisters" gardening. These techniques simply are not mechanized and delivering mass volumes of single commodity product into a global distribution network and that's where the difficulty and disconnect between global populations and available nutrition originates.
If there was a technological and market incentives to connect abundant and diverse harvests in rural communities with Bodegas, restaurants, and grocery store chains in the big cities without ten middle-men adding cost for the consumer without improving the product in the least, then half of the land abandonment issue could unwind and small farms could thrive, not by delivering bulk raw indistinguishable commodity to food manufacturing, but by delivering farm fresh produce to kitchens and fruit stalls.
If that were both low-cost for the consumer, and high earning for the farmer while having quality control and assured provenance then the conversation could center around making better use of even less total cropland and restoring wilderness to a near-native sustainable state.
But as it stands now, we're not short on crop land to human population ratio so much as short on effective distribution and incentives for responsible production.
/todays-soapbox
... this is kind of my area of peculiar skill and work. I've tried to steer multinational, multimillion Euro/dollar agriculture operations that produce significant volumes of global "organically produced" harvests in the direction of cooperating with rural and indigenous farming communities in conserving soil health to the benefit of all. That's been a mixed bag, so the forward momentum is with the local rice production in rural Yamagata. Same objectives, more cooperation and long term planning.
Additionally, I'd like to remind you that we have a lot of wiggle room: if we stop growing alfalfa and stop doing stupid things like biofuel, that will free up an enormous amount of land.
Longer. Nuclear power tech was pretty good in the 60s (outside of the Soviet Union).
https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...
This doesn't mean everything is fine, but it is doing way better than 2017.
Bleaching is not death of the coral, it is the expulsion of algae (typically in high temperatures). The coral can find a different species of algae, or the algae can return once temperatures drop.
There are corals living in regions of the ocean with different temperatures, so it is not that high temperature alone would kill all coral, but populations adapted to a given region (like north vs south GBR) are being affected by the speed of the changes.
Was in central GBR this year, can't say I'm super impressed but not sure how I should set my expectation
Typically the biggest change in diversity is due to cyclones which kill of the delicate and fast-growing corals like staghorns, which are also the fastest to grow back.
We just aren’t applying it fast enough for terrible & lazy reasons.
If only we were just debating why/who! Thanks to Social Media, filter bubbles, and “alternative facts,” we are back to debating whether it is actually even happening or not.
This is the only planet we'll ever meaningfully have and we're killing it for "eternal" growth.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Because it’s nice to say these things in Sentiment, until you see past the naïveté to see human lives are what cause the wear and extraction on the environment. Humans live, eat, shit in, consume their environment for their lives.
How many humans are worth restoring the reef for you? And would you sacrifice your own friends and family?
You don’t need to sacrifice humans, you need humans to behave different. Do you know the energy requirements that go into war? The chemical, carbon and physical changes to the ocean from all we do?
We don’t need to kill more humans, we just need to stop being fucking idiots for a few hundred years.
So don't straw man please into changing the focus into war because you're uncomfortable. I can see I struck a chord - would you agree you're shifting onto a straw man? And sounds a defensive retort to then reduce my argument to absurdity to dismiss it and invalidate it.
Why should I engage your straw man? Are you uncomfortable? I'm not - but why would I engage you if you failed to demonstrate you heard me. edit: if you're going into an emotionally hostile state, I refuse to take on the emotional labor of being your emotional processing for you - we can agree to mutually disengage.
You responded with Ad Hominem, which is fundamentally intellectually dishonest - and then accused me the exact thing you're doing.
Anecdotally I was also there around 2006/2007 - somewhere near Cairns - and the part I saw was esentially dead, not just bleached. It really depends on where you go.
Btw since many in this thread mention ocean warming I want to mention that after having followed this for many years, and observed changes first hand in different parts of the world, my conclusion is that the main factor is direct human influence, not something more abstract like global warming. Especially water pollution as a result of agriculture, unchecked population growth and tourism.
One of the problems is all the people who say they love the reefs want to go where the reefs are still intact, after other parts have already been destroyed. Which then puts even more pressure on those last remaining healthy reef systems. Just talk to divers and listen to the exotic locations they travel to these days. I think many aren't even aware they're part of the problem. Or maybe they subconsciously shift the blame. Reefs are usually healthiest where there are no or very few people around.
The good news is you don't have to be an expert in geoscience to see the connection isn't as simplistic as many assume. Look at the data instead of having preconceived ideas. As an example, when you look at sea temperature data for many of the areas worst affected by coral death in recent decades (Maldives, Seychelles, parts of the Caribbean) you will see they have only seen moderate or even no temperature rise, while many other regions have seen more dramatic rise in local sea temperature and yet have healthier coral.
The fact that the GBR in Australia has seen temperature rise and coral death does not necessarily mean that there is a direct causation or even that it's the main cause. Have you considered other causes play a role?