Post by Bread and Circuses

10d

I'm going to post a thread here containing the text of a well-written and angry essay about our biodiversity crisis. The original piece, titled "The Silent Collapse You Won't See on the News," was authored by Angus Peterson and published at Medium.com.

Because they chose to add an AI slop image to the original — a practice that I *strongly* oppose — I won't provide a link, but you can find the full essay there if you feel you must.

Anyway, here is the first part of the thread...
_______________________________

Let’s be honest — biodiversity loss has become the neglected stepchild of environmental disasters. You’ve probably heard of climate change . We’ve got a constant drip-feed of global warming doom porn, ice caps melting, oceans rising, cities sweating, and billionaires buying bunkers in New Zealand. Climate gets the headlines. Pollution gets the silver medal because it’s mostly outsourced to poor countries. But biodiversity? The death of birds, bugs, beasts, and everything else that doesn’t look cute on an Instagram reel? That barely scrapes the media’s bottom shelf.

We pretend we care. We build butterfly gardens next to six-lane highways. We say “save the whales” while wolfing down factory-farmed beef. Meanwhile, entire species vanish and few notice unless the last one dies on a live stream. There are still plenty of rabbits in the park. Squirrels are doing backflips on the power lines. Things can’t be that bad, right? (Cue laugh track.) That’s the suburban fallacy: if wildlife, in the form of a random squirrel or a couple of rabbits, is still interrupting our barbecues, then the natural world must be doing fine.

It’s not. Not even close.

Biodiversity loss is hemorrhaging beneath our noses, and we act like a paper cut is the real problem. It’s not just about loving animals — it’s about survival. Nature isn’t an accessory to human life. It is life. Every web we unravel weakens the whole damn net. And yet, here in the land of infinite Amazon boxes and $5 throwaway gadgets, we’ve devalued the essentials so much that even the idea of resource overshoot doesn’t get airplay. If you can buy a phone charger for $1.99, how bad can things really be?

Then there’s the polycrisis — a word that sounds made-up but is all too real. It’s the ugly knot where climate chaos, collapsing ecosystems, economic fragility, and social unrest all tie together in a bow of doom. But that’s a mess for another article. Today’s concern is sharper: we are losing the natural world faster than we can document it. And we don’t seem to give a damn.

So yeah, be mad. Be outraged. Biodiversity isn’t just dying — it’s being murdered by apathy, convenience, and the relentless grind of short-term profit over long-term survival. And the worst part? We’ve barely started noticing.
_______________________________

🧵 1/5

#Politics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #BioDiversity

1 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original

10d

🧵 5/5
_______________________________

The Takeaway — A Final Chirp Before the Silence

The 2025 State of the Birds report isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know — it’s just screaming it louder while fewer and fewer people are still listening. It’s another bleak milestone in a long parade of red flags that have become wallpaper. Three billion birds lost? Yawn. Now 112 species cut in half since 1970? Barely a blip in the news cycle.

But make no mistake: this is collapse. Slow, grinding, and brutal. We are witnessing the unraveling of life-support systems on this planet, and we’re treating it like a minor subplot. And behind it all? The usual suspects — corporate boards, billionaires, and politicians who treat the Earth like a junk drawer they’ll never have to clean out.

It’s tempting to say this is just Republican delusion, and sure, there’s some truth to that. A good chunk of the right-wing elite thinks climate change is a hoax, that biodiversity is for snowflakes, and that their wealth will shield them from whatever hellscape they’re engineering. American exceptionalism, baby. As if physics cares about flags.

Some of them even think mass extinction is a feature, not a bug. That maybe the planet is due for a little “natural selection” to thin out the weak — just not them, of course. They’ll be fine in their gated communities, hoarding water and buying farmland in New Zealand. The rest of us? Good luck.

(This makes total sense once you realize that evangelical Christianity, which has a stranglehold on the Republican party, is a true death cult.)

And while they rot everything from the top down, we — the ordinary people — are left holding the bag. We didn’t create this mess. We didn’t greenlight the drilling, the deforestation, the deregulation. We didn’t sign off on the pesticides or fund the think tanks telling people that solar panels are communist. But we’re the ones who’ll suffer first and hardest. And the wild world? It’s already suffering.

The truth is, I don’t know if we can fix this. I don’t even know if we care enough to try. But I hope — naively, maybe desperately — that somewhere in the ashes of this mess, there are still people willing to fight. To remember that we are part of the natural world we keep on destroying. And that letting it die is just another way of killing ourselves.

Hope is not a plan. But apathy is a death sentence.
_______________________________

(See 🧵1 at the top for ID of original essay.)

#Politics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #BioDiversity

1 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original

9d

@breadandcircuses

>I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. **The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy**, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that." -James Speth

0 0 1 View Post & Replies See Original