<story><title>Insect collapse</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fsloth</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny we think we are an &amp;quot;advanced&amp;quot; civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It&amp;#x27;s really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; ecological factors.&lt;p&gt;This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them.&lt;p&gt;Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it seems there are like three people on the planet who are concerned about the quantifiable properties of our biosphere and only one of them got part time funding.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>karandodia</author><text>The funding issue has hamstrung scientists for decades and limited our data to a very small pool, but the trends are increasingly clear: we&amp;#x27;re well into the 6th mass extinction event. See &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stockholmresilience.org&amp;#x2F;research&amp;#x2F;planetary-boundaries&amp;#x2F;planetary-boundaries&amp;#x2F;about-the-research&amp;#x2F;the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stockholmresilience.org&amp;#x2F;research&amp;#x2F;planetary-bound...&lt;/a&gt;
and
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&amp;#x2F;animals&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;animal-decline-living-planet-report-conservation-news&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&amp;#x2F;animals&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;animal-de...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;On a more positive note, a few folks I know are in the early stages of an ambitious attempt to regenerate a bioregion: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@joe_brewer&amp;#x2F;we-are-regenerating-an-entire-bioregion-1f1ce7cb29b7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@joe_brewer&amp;#x2F;we-are-regenerating-an-entire...&lt;/a&gt;. The hope is that this kind of work—developing models of ecosystems rooted in complexity science that expose key leverage points—can be refined through experimentation in Costa Rica and extended to increasingly dissimilar bioregions.</text></comment>
<story><title>Insect collapse</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fsloth</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny we think we are an &amp;quot;advanced&amp;quot; civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It&amp;#x27;s really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; ecological factors.&lt;p&gt;This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them.&lt;p&gt;Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it seems there are like three people on the planet who are concerned about the quantifiable properties of our biosphere and only one of them got part time funding.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>voqv</author><text>For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it&amp;#x27;s just going to stay like that.</text></comment>