Loss of intensity and diversity of noises in ecosystems reflects an alarming decline in healthy biodiversity, say sound ecologists
Sounds of the natural world are rapidly falling silent and will become “acoustic fossils” without urgent action to halt environmental destruction, international experts have warned.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.
Today, tuning into some ecosystems reveals a “deathly silence”, said Prof Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol. “It is that race against time – we’ve only just discovered that they make such sounds, and yet we hear the sound disappearing.”
“The changes are profound. And they are happening everywhere,” said US soundscape recordist Bernie Krause, who has taken more than 5,000 hours of recordings from seven continents over the past 55 years. He estimates that 70% of his archive is from habitats that no longer exist.
If I try to make the argument that the earth is overpopulated i’ll quickly get downvoted to oblivion in the typical thread.
There’s too many humans. The only hope of life surviving long term is the fall of humankind. The writing is on the wall in terms of heading towards an extinction event anyway so it’s not like we’ll need to do anything for it to happen.
We can probably manage at our population level with better habits. Most of this loss is linked to pesticide use and our impact on the climate imo.
Our population levels amplify this but it would be fine if we weren’t spitting out poison.
With 8 billion humans it’s too hard to centralize control or do anything to realistically get people to follow the rules. Things being technically possible is one thing, but human nature means it’ll never actually happen. Humans are awful.
We’re so obsessed with rules that nobody actually follows and covering up how things actually work. Whistleblowers have their lives ruined and these giant multibillion dollar conglomerates get a slap on the wrist. This is the world we live in and the systems we push for actively dissuade it from getting better.
All we have to do is get off oil and find a better solution than pesticides. 8 billion humans aren’t individually fracking their backyard.
I think the problems go much, much deeper than oil and fracking. American QOL is not sustainable for 8 billion people, and it only exists for a couple hundred million really anyway.
I’m all for making big sweeping changes but I am not one of the rich stakeholders who control how things work in this world.
Space stations. Space is full of space, so much so its named after the stuff. We need to get off planet
Getting people into space is very resource intensive though. I’d rather go towards ultra dense cities or even underground ones if it’s feasible.
It is, but once we’re set up, its getting back onto Planets that will be resource intensive and not the other way around. Ultra Dense cities would be a good temporary solution until we can set up a stable society in space, but we’ll never escape having a population cap or having to think of the nock on effects of any new piece of technology or infrastructure project until we’re off this planet
Oh life will survive on this planet no matter what we do until the sun runs out of fuel. It’s just us and a lot of stuff that might go with us that science gets concerned about.
It’s basically impossible to wipe the earth of every last living species even if we nuke the surface of the earth and cause a nuclear winter some species would survive.
That had always been my assumption, but after looking more closely at the history of previous mass extinctions I’m not convinced that a near 100% extinction is unthinkable. It’s not just the number of species in the initial die-off, it’s the cascade of further extinctions caused by ecosystem collapse and the tenuousness of the eventual recoveries. Those recoveries often involve the recolonization of devastated regions from local ecosystems that survived relatively unscathed—but with the global spread of introduced species and the resulting homogenization of ecosystems, there won’t be as many sources of potential recolonization.
Pretty much all life on earth is now dependent on a host of other species to survive—even simple plants at the base of the food chain are dependent on microbes to extract nutrients from the soil and pollinators to reproduce. There are some bacteria that could probably survive just about anything, but it took bacteria over a billion years to evolve into anything more complex so there’s no guarantee they’d do it a second time.
It’s so weird how any time you suggest it, a bunch of people show up and accuse you of being a Eugenicist, and how the earth can support 28bbillion humans or whatever.
Edit: although you kind of lost me with your second paragraph there.
My second paragraph is basically: I have no faith in humanity coming out of all of it. I don’t think humanity as a whole has any chance of changing course because of how humans just are.
Maybe we’ll have runaway greenhouse gas causing catastrophic climate change. Maybe we’ll blow everybody up in what some might call world war 3. Maybe we’ll just have more and more humans be born until Earth can’t support practically any non-human, non-livestock life. Maybe we’ll have a biological outbreak that actually causes extremely high mortality rates. Maybe we’ll have a CME hit and wipe out all electronics on the majority of the developed world. There’s so many things that are more likely to happen than the majority of humanity changing course.
We can’t even stop two pointless wars or fix American politics. There’s no way humans can solve a global problem that requires believing in science and putting business owners second.
Don’t look up.
Same, there are too many humans and too much development and exploitation of Earth. None of the wealthy want to stop building and stabilize things.
To my knowledge we not heading towards an extinction event, were IN ONE. But more seriously, we just need to get off this planet. So many of our incompatibilities with nature wouldnt be a problem if Earth was turned into a nature reserve and we just lived on space stations and harvested our resources off asteroids