I struggle with this as well. In my part of california climate change is hitting hard, and I’m watching so many of my beloved natives struggling and dying. The coastal pine forests are pretty much just dead snags now, and the ‘evergreen’ huckleberry thickets are gray lifeless brush.
The only advice I can offer is to break up your time - try to spend some in a place you know is protected and will not be destroyed.
I’ve been spending more time on plant pathogens, wood-decaying fungi, and so on - there’s plenty of them around, and I can think of the dead trees as potential habitat instead.
Documentation and research on organisms often does feel like writing their obituaries … this is what we had, here is some information on what made it interesting, but now it’s gone. Unless what we think is on the way out really isn’t and these organisms find a way to continue, with or without our help, in new places and in new relationships with the human and non-human world. I suppose that’s what keeps me in the game, seeing how life can adapt to a changing world.
A little off topic here but it’s funny how we can perceive what used to be, an area of selected planted trees then neglected or invasive blackberries and broom, as being the former natural state (likely not in your case) when it can result in the area being devoid of diversity - yet our personal bias can lead us to believe that things were better when we were younger yet possibly development of areas such as these can lead to localized biotones and diversity in the future, near or far.
You make a fair point. This area certainly isn’t free of alterations and human impacts. Essentially every corner of Oklahoma is heavily infested with invasives, and we’ve largely plowed the state over by now. I’m not blind to that, but here in central Oklahoma there are still decent patches of the cross-timbers ecotone left standing. This happens to be one of those (admittedly not “pristine” patches). When these post oaks and blackjack go, they aren’t going to be replaced with anything similar, and the local systems that rely on them are going with them.
The temp of development for housing is impressive. However, it makes me feel pain. This way people reduce the area of the habitat of animals (animal populations declined by 70% since 1970 ). Thus, humanity will make more endangered species. For what? For money.
The developers who building the housing are probably in it for the money. However, people are buying/renting those houses for better lives. We’re filling up the earth because we want safer and more comfortable houses, food, clothing, etc. I mean, it’s easy to dismiss the sprawl as greed for money, but there are legitimate human needs behind that, I think.
Indeed. Every new housing development in my area is something I disapprove of. Of course, that disapproval excludes the older neighborhood where I happen to live.
The problem is too many people and they all want the same things I want. So what do we do about that?
One thing we could do that would help in the long run is to provide effective contraceptives to women of child-bearing age everywhere, free of charge. Most women don’t actually want to give birth to 8 or 12 children. Where affordable contraception if available, birth rates (and abortion rates) go down, even below the replacement rate.
Number of people is directly linked with economics, and there’re big prolems starting when number of people is going down, those can lead to some things happening that are far from being eco-friendly, maybe making more damage than just more people, problem is not with numbers, but how resources are used and divided.
You’re right, but I’m not wrong. How we use resources matters!!! However, more people matters, too. Impact on the environment = # of people X how many resources each one uses. And I think that a decline in population in the more developed countries now creates opportunities for people who want to migrate into them, as many do. This could be a situation where everyone benefits, though I admit it isn’t being managed that way now!
Yes! I worked in South and central asian countries where contraception is often frowned upon. You wouldn’t believe how many women (and men) asked me if I could get them contraceptives. For a Muslim woman to risk asking non-Muslim foreign male for contraception takes a mix of desperation and courage. The desire and need is there.
Many layers to that discussion. But women choose 2 (or less for this GINK) if permitted. We are reaching the barriers of unlimited Grow the Economy and Trash the Environment.
It comes back to what I read in a UN report 40 years ago? Educate women (no, not about contraception - educate and empower women so they are able to make choices)
Disturbed land, especially in development, rarely will allow all the former biome to resurge. Wetlands and other fragile ecosystems that have had housing superimposed do not repair, and roads, septic, digging for electric and water, are often irreparable.
I worked in an area of the Costa Rica cloudforest that had formerly been agriculture; though what you saw 40 years later looked like natural jungle, many species did not come back, and what had been tilled made for a different growth environment.
We are indeed in the midst of a tragedy, documenting now what used to be there, so that perhaps later there can be a census that could be restored.
No: educated people need to face up to the fact that the planet will have the last laugh, and our “needs” are mainly selfish. Life is a mathematical equation, and when you make too many of your species wanting too much, requiring too many resources, making too much unusable and dangerous waste, and righteous rules that could not possibly be fulfilled, you get the present impasse.
We were talking about how already disturbed land was built on, maybe we see it as different places, but builduings are mostly built on places that here are called “empties”, with different amounts of weedy plants and depending on how long they’re in that state young trees and some amount of build-reltated trash from somewhere nearby. It’s nothing like a natural area from the start, maybe in Oklahoma it is, but for the most of the world it’s not that even if it’s a steppe region.
I imagine that’s mostly the case, though when development takes place somewhere other than a plot of weedy plants or build-related trash it’s all the more shocking.
Here in South Korea, for example, a relatively new “environmentally-friendly” state-of-the-art city was built on an intertidal mudflat that is/was home to several endangered species. [1], [2]
Yes, but OP specifically mentioned it in the main post, so my comment should be taken as an answer to it, and not an answer to a general “new construction site”.