It's really amazing how much damage his loss probably did to the world.
I can't think of any pro-wildlife "influencers" that would be at his level today, much less wherever he would have reached in the remaining years.
David Attenborough's narrations for nature docs, maybe? But that's not really the same as watching a wildlife fanatic like Steve Irwin.
He has a son that seems eager to follow in his footsteps, so maybe he'll fill that void one day.
But getting that kind of popularity is like being struck by lightning, especially now. He had a very advantageous start on TV (not to belittle how amazing he was).
In the anglosphere maybe, which most of Lemmy seems to represent. I come across countless legends doing the same work but without the same recognition. When Greta Thunberg, who I admire, became big I read an article about all the people around her age that have been doing the same campaigning. They were mostly indigenous people so nobody came along with a TV show for them.
Yes there are so many indigenous cultures (certainly every one I've learned about in Canada) that are literally about working together with the earth and in balance with the earth. Steve Irwin was a wonderful person but imagine all the wiped out or nearly wiped out cultures where this was or continues to be literally their way of existing in the world, and they were dismissed for so long as "savages" for their relationship with nature.
I shudder to think that Greta is attributed to Conservation in the same breath as Steve Irwin!
Greta should be at home and in school and preparing to live her life as an adult. If she as an adult became a climate activist and held the Top-7 or Top-10 or Top-20 corporations accountable, sure that would be commendable.
Nothing gets done blaming others and while taking no action against the wrongdoers.
yourself
This is why I get so mad when people say “we don’t have an overpopulation problem, we have a resource allocation problem”.
No. There are not supposed to be this many fucking humans. Where the fuck are the animals supposed to live????
We need to return to preindustrial population levels so the animals can too
Wildlife is now only 4% of the mammalian life on the planet, by mass. The rest is livestock and humans. https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html
If you had half as many humans in the world, but they all lived in suburbs, it would be much worse for the environment than having twice as many humans but they all live in cities.
Compare America to India. If Americans lived the way Indians do, the population would be absolutely fine. So if you want to solve overpopulation problems, stop the American style suburbs before you worry about the actual population.
Actual Indian here, please DO NOT live the way Indians live in India. The worst unplanned urban sprawl and urban density and squatting and squalor and slums :-(
If you are referring to the Ancient Civilization of local produce and local distribution and local Kingdom Tithes to the Empire while living in villages and the concentrating political, commercial and military power in the major cities. Education "institutes" in deep forest with no "fees" but labor for classes. Since that type of Civilization did once exist and thrived before being wiped out by repeated invasions and conquerors. Most definitely there were social and technology issues, but the slow pace of development did not destroy the landscape.
Medicine, Technology, Transportation, Global Trade need tempering with ecological ethical and sustainable standards of implementation, research and development.
If we had below 1b global population, the world would've been a much better place.
It’s amazing how many people I talk to about overpopulation simply that we get 50% of the land (or more!) and the rest of all other animals get to fight over the rest.
Why? Who decided that there aren't supposed to be this many humans? We just need to accept that humans exist and work with that. Unless your solution is genocide and mass sterelization. And historically, richer nations paradoxically breed less, which is pretty unnatural IMO but seems like the solution to overpopulation: feed and educate.
The Earth has carrying capacity limits. I think we're probably over that, temporarily, mostly because of fossil fuels. We turn fossil fuels into energy and food, degrading that environment and decreasing the Earth's carrying capacity at the same time. It's like we're playing a game of Jinga to push population higher at the expense of our foundation.
What happens when rich nations become poorer? The world's current predominant economic system cannot function without growth. What will the elites do to maintain the status quo? Perhaps push for banning abortion, contraceptives, and taking away women's rights and autonomy?
We need to return to preindustrial population levels so the animals can too.
What exactly are you proposing?
I don’t have all the answers, it’s like saying I want candy and not knowing how to make it.
That said, maybe something like a tax on children, free contraceptives, free sterilization, free abortion. Pay people when they reach 45 if they don’t have kids. Robot caregivers for elder care in a decreasing population.
Better sex-ed in schools. A philosophy change that the best thing you can leave behind on this planet is nothing.
I propose more cool video games.
Here, I have a couple examples to kind of, illustrate why, despite the common sentiment, antinatalism, and malthusianism, inherently, like, just straight up, don't make any sense. This is all based on back of the napkin math that I did a while ago, and I don't want to redo the numbers, so take it with a grain of salt maybe, but, yeah.
Okay, so, not really taking into account consumption or supply chain, which are major factors, you could fit the entire population of earth in one city the size of about one and a quarter rhode islands, if you had the population density of kowloon. Now, kowloon has retroactively been shat on as having a low quality standard of living, which is partially true, there were leaks everywhere, it was run by the mob, yadda yadda, but there's nothing inherently problematic with that level of density, there. You could easily expand that to, say, two rhode islands, or three, right, and that would cover an insanely small portion of the earth's surface while also being more than enough for everyone to live.
On the other hand, if you divided up the earth based on only habitable zones and arable land, you'd get about 2.5 acres per person, which I think also accounts for the elderly and children. To me, that sounds like probably 2.5x more than I would ever need in a lifetime, especially once we kind of tally up all the savings that we can get at scale, at mass production, and then maybe take costs for transportation.
We also, never, never ever take into account the amount of land management which was being done by the various natives of all their lands before colonialism kind of came in and fucked everything up. We have this conception of nature as being some kind of like, inherent good entity that humans can only ever destroy with their presence. A kind of untouched garden of eden that we should basically never touch. As being like, inherently sacred, or having some inherent value, even, to the point where we anthropomorphize it. "Mother nature". We have this view of humans as also being completely separate from nature, as being an aberration, rather than being a part of it. I think these are both mistakes. We have to view humans as being a part of nature, and we have to start viewing nature as existing everywhere, rather than just being something that you minorly interface with when you go for a hike. Our built environment is part of nature, our decision to plant exclusively male trees that will give off a shit ton of pollen which covers all the windows and makes everything super shitty all spring so we don't have fruit, that's a part of nature. So are the raccoons and possums and stray cats and dogs and pigeons and weeds and other things which we see as being invasive but also simultaneously as having no real habitat anymore.
The real solution, I think, is only going to come about when humans collectively start to conceptualize and take accountability for what they go around and do, rather than just sort of, pawning off all responsibility for everything, and cooking up some apocalyptic reality where it'd just be better off if we didn't exist at all. The genie is out of the bottle. Even to conceptualize of us as being "the problem", as though there is a singular kind of problem, is a kind of anthropocentrism, and a kind of anthropomorphizing of nature.
I also assume I don't need to really discuss how like, the idea that we're currently doing everything in the most efficient way, is a little bit overconfident, and takes everything at a kind of, unchanging face value. As though we exist in the long arc of history with a kind of inevitability, rather than a random happenstance.
"Our wildlife"
It's not ours, just like the planet isn't.
The flag I shoved into this penguin says otherwise.
Careful. You start shoving flags into living things and who knows where it will end up?
it is the same thing as saying my community/our community/my class/my girl/boy friend/ my favourite cafe/my dad etc. Does not necessarily mean you own it, just a short hand way of expressing a more abstract form of relationship than physically owning something.
Cold uncaring universe MFers realizing we are not separate from the universe and are, in fact, the universe itself observing, bettering, and caring about itself.
Philosophy and Science have always had an impact and influence on each other.
I miss Steve
Evolution just needs to kick the rest of the animals into high gear and do some defcon 1 shit, like making seaguls venomous and thirsty for human blood, or inventing funnel-webbed Taipans that can fly and open doors. New airborne bacteria that feeds exclusively on the human optic nerve, and daffodil pollen that causes category 5 cytokine storms.
Level the fucking playing field.
There's already enough suffering in the world, no need to create more! the parts of our brain that gave us the ability to shape our environment outpaced the ones with the old tribal way of thinking we needed to survive.
But since we shape our own environment, we are guest and shouldn't be everywhere on the planet.
Fortunately, there's enormous swaths of the planet that are totally inhospitable to human life.
Unfortunately, we've managed to deposit all sorts of toxic waste from the depths of the ocean to the hottest corners of the desert to the peaks of mountains.
Those places are also inhospitable to most life, period. Just because the TD habitable to humans doesn’t make it ours, either.
Humanity’s ability to repair and control is far from being able to keep up with its destructive power
I wonder if he was vegan
Eating meat is very much a part of nature, if you're implying he would be a hypocrite for eating meat
No. His research showed that growing veggies reduces bio diversity of land. Eating a cow is better than eating rice.
Meat production is much, much more agressive on the biodiversity of land than veggies with comparable nutritional value. Lots of research shows that. Not only is the area needed to farm animals immense, but then you also need to grow feed crops like soy and corn to feed the animals. Both are major sources of deforestation. You are absolutely wrong.
Absolute Legend.
Rest in peace.
Love it to (your) death, Steve.
Everyone in here acting like farming and livestock hasn't been the cornerstone of human population since 400k years ago...
It hasn't. Livestock farming started about 10,000 years ago (give or take 1000 years), although this keeps getting refined with DNA studies and I'm not sure what the consensus is. But that also doesn't mean it's necessary in the modern era with modern agricultural practices.
https://www.alimentarium.org/en/fact-sheet/history-pasture-farming
Agriculture began in fits and starts, but the first permanent farms we knew of are even newer- taro farms in New Guinea about 9000 years ago.
Also, homo sapiens have only been around for less than 300,000 years.
But it was not filmed.
Yeah, right. As if the Flintstones documentary wasn't on TV for multiple seasons.
We do not own her, and she does not own us. Mother Earth made us out of spite, to be constantly challenged, until we are let loose on an unsuspecting universe. Her peers scorned her, so she has given us one trial after another to make us as resilient, and eternal, as she is. Soon we will leave our cradle carrying our mother's wisdom, and wrath, with us. Woe to all that seek to oppose us, for we have been tempered in a deathworld crucible. Blessings to all that are neutral, or join in our crude attempts to make a better galaxy and universe.
Oh and those of us that stay behind shall finally tame our mother, and make her into her final form of a true Gaia planet.
Humanity fuck yeah
Church
it's just amazing how he basically invented modern biology with natural selection and eventually led him to loving animals so much. very inspirational dude!
So deep. Now watch how I manhandle this croc for your chortling entertainment.
So that he could safely relocate crocs, in the method LEAST likely to harm or kill them, and almost single handedly save the population from collapse.
Man always kept animals close to his heart, especially that one stingray...
"So what I'm going to do is travel around the world and harass animals for television."
Lol, people downvoted you, but you are 100% correct. He basically tortured wild animals for profit and popularity.
And these humans celebrate him for it.
