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Hm, I have the opposite feeling as well. In a heavily fragmented area without any primary forests left (Germany) I still find sooo many species that were invisible to me before I dared to look. I cannot imagine how it must have been before when humans hadn’t had such an impact on the ecosystem.
But then I also notice how all of these species exist despite our influence. How they try to keep on living in our cities. And that’s indeed very sad.
Keep up the good fight
As a child, the ocean fascinated me. I wanted to learn everything I could. As I got older, and the world got worse, the things I learned grew more and more terrifying, until I eventually stopped trying to learn more because it was just too depressing.
I don’t know how Marine Biologists and Oceanographers do it. To be surrounded every day with thousands of indicators and unquestionable data that all shows our oceans are fucked. And from hundreds of different ways too; it doesn’t even matter if you somehow fix global warming, there are so many other issues remaining that it’s still all fucked. It’s like if a guy walked into a hospital with every disease. Where the hell do you even start?
A friend of mine dedicated his life to birds and wildlife. He spent six months in Argentina weighing and banding penguins, worked to design autonomous buoys that track ocean data, and his personal birdwatching species count was over, 10k.
He passed away suddenly last March at the age of 33. He just got married the month before.
As tragic as his death was (especially for his widow), part of me thinks that there was some mercy in him dying so young rather than potentially living a long life of watching everything he cared about and worked to save get destroyed.
This is a sort of “but it’s weird that it happened twice” thing, but I had a friend out researching Orangutans in I think Indonesia and he dropped dead after (supposedly) recovering from a fever.
Probably only a few years younger than your friend.
I’ve not kept up with his research but I suspect the species is almost certainly declining worse than when he was there.
Not sure what I’m saying, but yeah.
Weird that it happened twice.
Yeah in this case, he dropped dead in a university lab. Nobody else was with him. Fucker was a marathon runner. Nobody knows what happened, but nobody suspects foul play.
My first degree is in oceanography. I didn’t make a career of it - went on to study other fields.
It’s really difficult, and hits you in unexpected places. For example, watching avatar 2 broke me emotionally during the whale hunting scenes.
There’s a real sense of powerlessness with respect to the health of the ocean.
Heavy is the burden of the wise one, when no one believes a word that they could say.
With global warming we’re in triage mode now. Not every ecosystem is going to make it. Gotta focus efforts on the ecosystems that can survive… while there’s a bunch of maniacs in the operating room trying to set fire to everything.
Hoping a cascade failure won’t happen is probably the only thing to work towards.
It isn’t that the world will not be habitable, it will just be inhospitable to humans in large groups. Humans are probably well past stopping temperature gains that will collapse marine ecosystems. Once those collapse what is going to collapse next? Bears rely on salmon coming back, forests rely on the minerals from the bears feeding and smaller scavenger mammals rely on the the fish too.
The more I learn about local flora and fauna the more this hurts
I recently found a berry bush while on a trail of a kind of berry I hadn’t seen in years
It was bitter sweet
This makes me think about golf courses…
Can’t think of a more immediately remediable and useless thing than golf courses. Well, Generative AI. But golf courses.
No water wastage there!
Harmful chemicals? Nah!Those are nothing compared to the damage done by other means, not even worth the sweat.
One of the penalties of an
ecologicaleducation is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. […]I think Team Cherry might have read this excerpt.
Quit injecting Hollow Knight into everything
I mean the game is literally about civilization and how they think it will chug on as a broken machine far past its natural life because it sacrifices the lives of those who live under it starting at the the bottom until the rot grows enough to take all but those that can’t see that it is dead.
Its actually a pretty cool tool for looking at civilization and even has a minimum wage machine in silksong.
So was Wendell Berry.
ALDO!
