My first instinct was to wedge it into another thread where I talked about positive stuff, but that would constitute going off-topic in that thread. So let’s start this new topic that is directly about “What a time to be alive!”
“The good old days” is a theme that has existed forever. You can always be negative about the state of the world. But gratitude for the present moment is a key part of happiness.
1. Sambiology video:
What prompted this latest post was that I re-watched this video by @sambiology, who talked about how iNaturalist fosters unprecedented engagement with nature:
One thing that Sam talked about in both videos, is “putting a name on it”.
I want to draw an analogy between human connection, and connecting with nature. The analogy is about intimacy.
Let’s say there’s someone you like. A human who catches your eye. You admire them from a distance, for a long time. But you don’t even know their name. Then, one day, you bump into them, and you start talking, and you finally learn their name.
How do you feel now? You feel a lot closer to them, right? Because you know their name!
Conservation is at an all time high. Gone are the days of no conservation laws. We still need to work on Africa (poaching and all that ), but it’s better than it could have been.
iNaturalist and Ebird are my two most used websites and I agree that having them makes my day much more enjoyable. I really don’t have any world breaking reasons why except they make nature from around the world more accessible.
About 25 years ago, so pre-iNat, I was trying to find the location of an introduced population of lizards in central Oregon. I asked Bob (Doc) Storm for advice and he offered to take me there to collect some. It was a 3-hour drive from the Willamette Valley to the site so we had plenty of time to talk as we drove. He said something at one point that really stuck with me. He said, (paraphrasing) that people often forget that these ARE their good old days. That we’re living at the moment in the times we will look back on fondly in some future. I don’t know why that stuck with me, but it was a beautiful sentiment that I’ve always tried to use it to appreciate where I am at the moment. Indeed, iNaturalist is a wonderful tool for the naturalist who wants to when and where things are. Indeed, we are living at a time when diversity is likely to only decline from her, but information is likely to just get better and better about that diversity. Indeed, we are living our ‘good old days’ at the moment.
That really is not a positive sentiment. It means things are only going to get worse from here on. Or more optimistically, they will never be better than they are now.
Things getting better and better would not fit with today being the best time ever. My edit was to acknowledge that things may not get worse and worse forever. They could oscillate around a level lower than today’s peak.
Though it does depend what is meant by today. I’m answering as if today means 12 February 2025. But if the today in the title changes every day, so in a few hours today will mean 13 Feb., then the message is that every day will be better than the previous, forever. I can’t subscribe to that view either.
I was wondering if someone would bring this up! I do think it’s plausible that everything already exists; sort of like determinism except time is a fixed path only insofar as that path is in a static tableau.
anyway, I could make a lot more jokes on other themes in this thread, but I’ll save those for another time. my note of positivity is that today’s age of information makes it the very best time to study taxonomy! I can access protologues easily just by looking for them online, and compare old descriptions in reading panes that offer (mercifully) full-text search, magnification, and more. iNaturalist, both through the process of identification (coming across strange plants, parasitic fungi, etc.) and observation (finding strange plants and parasitic fungi myself), has encouraged me to learn all of these things. fifty years ago, a hundred years ago – there was not only less information available, from data and analyses to descriptions and summaries, but it was much harder to sift it. I’m grateful that I can access a world’s worth of biology from my desk; it makes it easier to identify what a biologist like me still needs to go out and study.
(or well, I can access most of the biology texts and articles that I need, except for those bricked up behind the paywall and not yet snapped up by the third-party circumvention tools…)
On the same spot I sit today
Others came, in ages past, to sit.
One thousand years, still others will come.
Who is the singer, and who is the listener?
I get the frustration, but there are some problems concerning the term “poaching” when used in the context of Africa.
The term is criminalizing hunting based on whether the individual is allowed to hunt or not. Historically, a nobleman was allowed to hunt and peasant wasnt. Later, (in Europe), the permission to hunt was tied to ownership of land, but could be leased. Hunting without ownership of land (or leased hunting rights) is considered poaching.
The same principle was applied by colonial authorities in Africa. People who relied on hunting for their living where suddenly criminalized. The system of land ownership and leased hunting rights is a European thing and not suitable for cultures where everyone is relying on hunting. As a result of this history, we are now conditioned to think “poaching” if black Africans hunt, while we usually use the term “hunting” if a hunter in Europe or North America is doing their thing.
It is also important that not all large mammals which are being hunted are endangered. And it is important to think about the demands of the people and our demands as conservationists together. As a German, I live in a landscape which has already been heavily transformed, and this development is still going on. It’s so much easier to point a finger than to take responsibility yourself.
About the topic of the whole thread:
I remember a talk I heard while studying conservation for my bachelor’s. It conveyed the idea that every generation remembers the nature of their childhood, and this image becomes their reference point for “perfect nature”. However, they don’t know that the generation before them experienced even more biodiversity, meadows with even more flowers!
At least this is mostly true for grasslands in Central Europe, which experienced a steady decline in biodiversity since more than a century.
I agree that there are positive developments as well. I have the feeling that dead wood communities are recovering in Central Europe, and the same is true for many rivers, since wastewater treatment facilities where installed in the 1970ies.
Yes, Bill McKibben meant something like this in The End of Nature. And that does temper my joy somewhat when I notice, for example, that Bald Eagles, which I never saw growing up, now seem to appear in more and more places. When oksanaetal says
one could just as easily turn it around and say that micromanagement of nature, and of human access to nature, is at an all time high. Sometimes, that seems to be the definition of conservation.
I will keep to the positive intention of this thread, though, by acknowledging that non-extractive engagement with nature is more accepted now. In Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck wrote about an expedition to see some wild mountain sheep. At first, he was hesitant, because his guide had referred to “hunting” the sheep; but when they got there, it turned out that the guide had no intention of killing any of the sheep. He just wanted to appreciate seeing them, but felt that he had to say that he was “hunting” for social acceptability.
On the same note, it is a relief to know that a sighting of a rare bird can nowadays be verified with a camera rather than with a gun, as was required in the past.
Dare I be so idealistic as to hope that one day, nature will be able to thrive without the need for micromanagement of it and of human access to it?
You’re describing a phenomenon known as the shifting baseline syndrome. Every generation has a baseline of how things were from personal experience to compare in later years, but this misses the shift between generations to altered (usually degraded) quality environments. There are quite a few academic papers on the topic worth considering:
), but it’s better than it could have been.