Covid was a great example of how the natural world returns to harmony when human antagonism via noise/sound pollution and so forth is suddenly halted. I think a lot of dolphins in the sea rejoiced.
The article actually argues that the idea that nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way is not correct. A lot of what we view as stable ecosystems are stable because of our management and influence over millennia. Nature on it's own is not a thing, there are no checks and balances, no intention, no morality. The quote from the article is that nature does not organise it's self into neat parables.
In the 1960s there was a long overdue correction to the Australian constitution because the preamble mentioned the continent's "flora and fauna" in a way that implied Aborigines were part of the "fauna." The wording was grossly racist, and had to be changed because of the politics, but from an ecological standpoint, there was some truth to it. Australia's ecosystems were stable because of how Aborigines interacted with them.
So I get the sense that we can be considered part of nature, and however much or little influence we exert is a part of the overall system. It can balance to an extent with our presence and will do so without it.
The article doesn't claim that 'nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way'. It says
>> Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists.
...
>> To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough
Why is it a problem? It's not like people are somehow special. We eat and shit like every other mammal but without us the water and land would not be full of synthetic chemicals and plastics. Seems very obvious to me that human industries change the baseline to a polluted state vs what it would have been without industrial activities. But even without industrial activity the historical record is very clear on the effect that human populations have on the surrounding flora and fauna.
Nature is much too complex to fit into people's anthropocentric perspective. Either we dial back the production of industrial poisons or the natural world will continue withering from our consumption of natural resources. The fundamental problem is that industrial activity is unsustainable but it's neither politically nor economically expedient to actually address the root causes of why that's the case.
Sure, but that a complete tangent from the problem/challenge the parent post was talking about and you were attempting to critique.
Your tangent does not negate the point, as it has practical applications for public policy and managing interest groups.
One of my favorite examples to illustrate the challenge is restoration efforts around the Salton Sea. The lake is drying, causing dust, and there is a major environmental movement to restore it. The challenge comes in that the entire lake was created by accident in 1905, so the benchmark for restoration is critical. Restoring it to the dry lakebed of 1904 would not help with fish life and dust reduction. Dial the clock back to 1700, and it was a enormous lake again, but we would have to reroute the entire Colorado River from the current path along the Arizona boarder, because the Colorado river has shifted 200 miles east 300 years ago.
I am very optimistic. I don't remember where I read it but whatever remains after the current industrial civilization will not have access to the energy resources necessary for reindustrialization. Might have been Derrick Jensen but I can't remember which book exactly.
I have no idea what book might have first explored this idea, but it's a very common theme online whenever this type of discussion comes up: someone will inevitably point out that any post-human-extinction civilization that might evolve on Earth won't have such easy access to energy as we've had.
It's obvious once you think about what enables our current industrial activity: millions of years of biological growth and sedimentation. But it's all equivalent to solar radiation that was incident on the planet over millions of years which we have burned up in less than a few hundred. Once you understand this basic reality the logical conclusion is very clear and obvious: the current rate of consumption is unsustainable. The obvious next question is what can be done about it and no one actually wants to think about it so it never gets addressed.
Aftermath: Population Zero - The World without Humans
What would happen if, tomorrow, every single person on Earth simply disappeared? Not dead, simply gone, just like that. A world without people, where city streets are still populated by cars, but no drivers. A world where there is no one to fix bridges or repair broken windows…
Wikipedia has a list of ghost towns in the United States.[1]
Most rural towns were built to serve surrounding farms and ranches. As farming became less labor-intensive, the need for those towns went away, and the towns slowly died. See "Depopulation of the Great Plains"[2] It's interesting to note that the depopulated area is the best part of the US for wind power. That could work out OK.
Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.
Japan, where the population is rapidly declining, has a large number of empty rural towns. There's an incentive program to get young people to move there, but not many are interested. Because Japan's infrastructure is centrally funded, much of the infrastructure is still maintained in areas with very few people.
Russia has a declining population and entire abandoned cities. Putin is pushing young people to have kids. There's a "Pregnant at 16" TV show in Russia, which has been re-branded to encourage pregnancy.[3]
The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.
There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."
Or, more likely, people are extrapolating from current trends, and those trends won’t hold. Not that long ago, people were doing that extrapolation and deciding that overpopulation and worldwide famine were in our future. “The Population Bomb” was a bestselling book along those lines.
The population is likely to shrink, easing strain on resources, and people will look back fondly on “the good old days” when folks had big families. Trends will shift and the population will grow again.
It's a self-correcting problem. The people who don't have children select themselves out of the gene pool and are replaced by those who do have children.
It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies.
If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.
> It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies
That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have less children, which has very little to do with their genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not "replacement" with children who are genetically determined to be fecund.
Nobody is taking issue with the fact that humans that do not replicate do not pass on their genes
They are taking issue with the ludicrous assertion that falling birth rates are "self correcting" because the offspring of people who do replicate are somehow genetically predisposed to have more children to "replace" them.
Either they'll have children or they won't and the ones who do will replace the ones who don't. It's like I said, whatever people perceive to be a problem is not actually a problem because it corrects itself without any interventions.
> Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.
In Nevada/Eastern California there was a railroad that went from the Carson City area down toward Owen’s Lake.
The interesting part is if you look at the railroad map, pretty much none of the stops exist anymore. It’s a long string of communities that are all long gone from the eastern Owen’s Valley.
Even the eventual highways that were to follow ended up coming down the western side of the valley, yet more reason for those late communities to no longer exist.
And it’s pretty much all gone. No ghost towns, maybe a few overgrown foundations remnants.
But if you had never seen this railroad map, you’d probably never have any idea this land was occupied at all.
I don’t think it will work as long as women have access to information and literally anything else to do in life other than making endless babies. I fear there will be a push against women’s freedom of choice, once things become dire enough that can’t be patched with immigration.
It’s just a huge opportunity loss if you talk to any young woman, and they’re obviously right. There is no tangible benefit to have more than two children other than “for the humanity!”.
> I don’t think it will work as long as women have access to information and literally anything else to do in life other than making endless babies.
Which has happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban has cracked down.[1]
"Our analysis shows that by 2026, the impact of leaving 1.1 million girls out of school and 100,000 women out of university correlates to an increase in early childbearing by 45 per cent."
I think if everyone in the country could easily afford a 5 bedroom house on one person's salary, and they deeply felt like their kids would grow up safe and healthy environment, we'd have a population explosion. The decline is caused by a population that cannot afford enough and is constantly panicked over global events. Everyone is presented with terror of doom constantly, and squeezed by a major shift of resources from labor to capital holders. The rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer.
A family of rabbits without enough quiet, food, shelter, etc will have hardly any babies. The mother will also eat any babies.
You really think women, on average, would be willing to sacrifice 6+ years at the minimum to have 3 children? It’s easy for us, men, to say that. But all my girl friends around my age group (late 20s-early 40s) are generally happy with 0-2 children. Genuinely nothing is stopping them other than “why do I need to make that sacrifice?” question. I will never blame them either, because I would do exactly the same in their place. It is the most logical thing to do. It’s either we make women’s lives objectively worse, or figure out a way where we can live without everyone going for 3+.
> As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.
This always confuses me. If I were abandoning my home of my own volition, I'd take my possessions with me.
Every time I've moved, it involved getting rid of piles of stuff. And my next move will probably be a downsize. I'm already on a mission to get rid of X cubic foot of stuff per year. After helping my mom downsize, I've lost my nostalgia for keeping old stuff around. And my kids want none of it -- they don't know if they will ever own a house, or necessarily what country they'll even live in.
And of course I wonder why stuff piles up. The reasons include laziness and probably a mild hoarding instinct.
Christmas decorations and nappies both strike me as the sort of thing that would get left behind, they're pretty poor in the value/space tradeoff, not to mention that a lot of these houses were left behind when elderly people died. It's not uncommon for elderly people to have stuff they accumulated over the years, it would not surprise me if there's christmas decorations that have been unused for decades in my grandmother's attic, or nappies that were once for grandchildren that are now adults. In a country where the population is growing, this stuff just gets dumped as the heirs clear out the house to sell, but what are these houses in the middle of nowhere with infrastructure that has crumbled away worth?
The perspective of the entire article is confused. Abandonment doesn't overcome and infuse something. It's not an action; it is a state. And what happens TO nature? No, what does nature DO when humanity stops what it does to nature. Réclamation, from the proper perspective; abandonment is from the human perspective.
As I understand it, it's not about aesthetics per-se, but rather that "nature" is a semantic concept defined by us humans for anything that is outside of the human sphere - i.e. something is "natural" or "out in nature" or "nature's way" if it's what would have been if humans hadn't been involved.
Covid was a great example of how the natural world returns to harmony when human antagonism via noise/sound pollution and so forth is suddenly halted. I think a lot of dolphins in the sea rejoiced.
The article actually argues that the idea that nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way is not correct. A lot of what we view as stable ecosystems are stable because of our management and influence over millennia. Nature on it's own is not a thing, there are no checks and balances, no intention, no morality. The quote from the article is that nature does not organise it's self into neat parables.
In the 1960s there was a long overdue correction to the Australian constitution because the preamble mentioned the continent's "flora and fauna" in a way that implied Aborigines were part of the "fauna." The wording was grossly racist, and had to be changed because of the politics, but from an ecological standpoint, there was some truth to it. Australia's ecosystems were stable because of how Aborigines interacted with them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_and_Fauna_Act_myth
So I get the sense that we can be considered part of nature, and however much or little influence we exert is a part of the overall system. It can balance to an extent with our presence and will do so without it.
The article doesn't claim that 'nature finds lovely balances if we just get out of the way'. It says
>> Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists.
...
>> To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough
This is called the "baseline" problem among conservationists.
Why is it a problem? It's not like people are somehow special. We eat and shit like every other mammal but without us the water and land would not be full of synthetic chemicals and plastics. Seems very obvious to me that human industries change the baseline to a polluted state vs what it would have been without industrial activities. But even without industrial activity the historical record is very clear on the effect that human populations have on the surrounding flora and fauna.
I think you are missing the point. The "problem" is the question of what you baseline you want humans to restore it to and then actively maintain.
Many people want to restore nature, but the natural state is usually one of flux which is deeply unsatisfying to many advocates of it's restoration.
It is an interesting question.
Nature is much too complex to fit into people's anthropocentric perspective. Either we dial back the production of industrial poisons or the natural world will continue withering from our consumption of natural resources. The fundamental problem is that industrial activity is unsustainable but it's neither politically nor economically expedient to actually address the root causes of why that's the case.
Sure, but that a complete tangent from the problem/challenge the parent post was talking about and you were attempting to critique.
Your tangent does not negate the point, as it has practical applications for public policy and managing interest groups.
One of my favorite examples to illustrate the challenge is restoration efforts around the Salton Sea. The lake is drying, causing dust, and there is a major environmental movement to restore it. The challenge comes in that the entire lake was created by accident in 1905, so the benchmark for restoration is critical. Restoring it to the dry lakebed of 1904 would not help with fish life and dust reduction. Dial the clock back to 1700, and it was a enormous lake again, but we would have to reroute the entire Colorado River from the current path along the Arizona boarder, because the Colorado river has shifted 200 miles east 300 years ago.
In any event, good luck with whatever plans you think will restore natural balance. I've made my points as clear as possible.
Well, if you want to be optimistic, I think we got coal from lignin/wood being uneatable for hundreds of millions of years (I think).
So wood would stack up, not rot, get covered by dirt and turned into coal due to physical processes, not biological ones.
So coal deposits of the existing magnitudes couldn't be created now.
I am very optimistic. I don't remember where I read it but whatever remains after the current industrial civilization will not have access to the energy resources necessary for reindustrialization. Might have been Derrick Jensen but I can't remember which book exactly.
I have no idea what book might have first explored this idea, but it's a very common theme online whenever this type of discussion comes up: someone will inevitably point out that any post-human-extinction civilization that might evolve on Earth won't have such easy access to energy as we've had.
It's obvious once you think about what enables our current industrial activity: millions of years of biological growth and sedimentation. But it's all equivalent to solar radiation that was incident on the planet over millions of years which we have burned up in less than a few hundred. Once you understand this basic reality the logical conclusion is very clear and obvious: the current rate of consumption is unsustainable. The obvious next question is what can be done about it and no one actually wants to think about it so it never gets addressed.
This documentary explores this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l11zPNb-MFg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath:_Population_Zero
Aftermath: Population Zero - The World without Humans What would happen if, tomorrow, every single person on Earth simply disappeared? Not dead, simply gone, just like that. A world without people, where city streets are still populated by cars, but no drivers. A world where there is no one to fix bridges or repair broken windows…
Say what? Wikipedia says it's a Canadian production, Youtube says "not available in your country". I'm in Canada.
Edit: It's just that particular link. Searching for the title itself brought up a working one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHoOG4eKzbM
Wikipedia has a list of ghost towns in the United States.[1]
Most rural towns were built to serve surrounding farms and ranches. As farming became less labor-intensive, the need for those towns went away, and the towns slowly died. See "Depopulation of the Great Plains"[2] It's interesting to note that the depopulated area is the best part of the US for wind power. That could work out OK.
Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.
Japan, where the population is rapidly declining, has a large number of empty rural towns. There's an incentive program to get young people to move there, but not many are interested. Because Japan's infrastructure is centrally funded, much of the infrastructure is still maintained in areas with very few people.
Russia has a declining population and entire abandoned cities. Putin is pushing young people to have kids. There's a "Pregnant at 16" TV show in Russia, which has been re-branded to encourage pregnancy.[3]
The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.
There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Un...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_the_Great_Plai...
[3] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/11/05/as-russia-targets-ab...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
> There are two futures, both bad.
Or, more likely, people are extrapolating from current trends, and those trends won’t hold. Not that long ago, people were doing that extrapolation and deciding that overpopulation and worldwide famine were in our future. “The Population Bomb” was a bestselling book along those lines.
The population is likely to shrink, easing strain on resources, and people will look back fondly on “the good old days” when folks had big families. Trends will shift and the population will grow again.
It's a self-correcting problem. The people who don't have children select themselves out of the gene pool and are replaced by those who do have children.
It's debatable if choice/want/accident of having children is based on genetics.
It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies.
If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.
> It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies
That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have less children, which has very little to do with their genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not "replacement" with children who are genetically determined to be fecund.
Humans are animals and animals which do not replicate are selected out of the gene pool. There is nothing to argue here.
Nobody is taking issue with the fact that humans that do not replicate do not pass on their genes
They are taking issue with the ludicrous assertion that falling birth rates are "self correcting" because the offspring of people who do replicate are somehow genetically predisposed to have more children to "replace" them.
Either they'll have children or they won't and the ones who do will replace the ones who don't. It's like I said, whatever people perceive to be a problem is not actually a problem because it corrects itself without any interventions.
> Mining towns die when the resource is exhausted. They go fast.
In Nevada/Eastern California there was a railroad that went from the Carson City area down toward Owen’s Lake.
The interesting part is if you look at the railroad map, pretty much none of the stops exist anymore. It’s a long string of communities that are all long gone from the eastern Owen’s Valley.
Even the eventual highways that were to follow ended up coming down the western side of the valley, yet more reason for those late communities to no longer exist.
And it’s pretty much all gone. No ghost towns, maybe a few overgrown foundations remnants.
But if you had never seen this railroad map, you’d probably never have any idea this land was occupied at all.
[3] is really interesting. I'm not surprised, but it really feels like history is happening when even the mundane starts to reflect it.
I don’t think it will work as long as women have access to information and literally anything else to do in life other than making endless babies. I fear there will be a push against women’s freedom of choice, once things become dire enough that can’t be patched with immigration.
It’s just a huge opportunity loss if you talk to any young woman, and they’re obviously right. There is no tangible benefit to have more than two children other than “for the humanity!”.
> I don’t think it will work as long as women have access to information and literally anything else to do in life other than making endless babies.
Which has happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban has cracked down.[1] "Our analysis shows that by 2026, the impact of leaving 1.1 million girls out of school and 100,000 women out of university correlates to an increase in early childbearing by 45 per cent."
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1153151
I think if everyone in the country could easily afford a 5 bedroom house on one person's salary, and they deeply felt like their kids would grow up safe and healthy environment, we'd have a population explosion. The decline is caused by a population that cannot afford enough and is constantly panicked over global events. Everyone is presented with terror of doom constantly, and squeezed by a major shift of resources from labor to capital holders. The rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer.
A family of rabbits without enough quiet, food, shelter, etc will have hardly any babies. The mother will also eat any babies.
You really think women, on average, would be willing to sacrifice 6+ years at the minimum to have 3 children? It’s easy for us, men, to say that. But all my girl friends around my age group (late 20s-early 40s) are generally happy with 0-2 children. Genuinely nothing is stopping them other than “why do I need to make that sacrifice?” question. I will never blame them either, because I would do exactly the same in their place. It is the most logical thing to do. It’s either we make women’s lives objectively worse, or figure out a way where we can live without everyone going for 3+.
Book recommendation for The World Without Us which explores what might happen if humans vanished overnight: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
> As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.
This always confuses me. If I were abandoning my home of my own volition, I'd take my possessions with me.
Every time I've moved, it involved getting rid of piles of stuff. And my next move will probably be a downsize. I'm already on a mission to get rid of X cubic foot of stuff per year. After helping my mom downsize, I've lost my nostalgia for keeping old stuff around. And my kids want none of it -- they don't know if they will ever own a house, or necessarily what country they'll even live in.
And of course I wonder why stuff piles up. The reasons include laziness and probably a mild hoarding instinct.
Christmas decorations and nappies both strike me as the sort of thing that would get left behind, they're pretty poor in the value/space tradeoff, not to mention that a lot of these houses were left behind when elderly people died. It's not uncommon for elderly people to have stuff they accumulated over the years, it would not surprise me if there's christmas decorations that have been unused for decades in my grandmother's attic, or nappies that were once for grandchildren that are now adults. In a country where the population is growing, this stuff just gets dumped as the heirs clear out the house to sell, but what are these houses in the middle of nowhere with infrastructure that has crumbled away worth?
Eventually we all die and our heirs if we have any tend to value our possessions closer to the market rate ($0) than we do.
Check out the DMZ in Korea and Chernobyl.
Life After People is a TV show that covers some answers to the title, from several points of view.
Some years of great success ended by a rust nuclear plant suddenly exploding.
The perspective of the entire article is confused. Abandonment doesn't overcome and infuse something. It's not an action; it is a state. And what happens TO nature? No, what does nature DO when humanity stops what it does to nature. Réclamation, from the proper perspective; abandonment is from the human perspective.
It is all about aesthetics. Humanity is also part of nature.
As I understand it, it's not about aesthetics per-se, but rather that "nature" is a semantic concept defined by us humans for anything that is outside of the human sphere - i.e. something is "natural" or "out in nature" or "nature's way" if it's what would have been if humans hadn't been involved.
In the manner of an algal bloom, yes.