<story><title>Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans</title><url>https://ourworldindata.org/mammals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hayst4ck</author><text>Militant-ism isn&amp;#x27;t going to win people over.&lt;p&gt;The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away.&lt;p&gt;There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job.&lt;p&gt;Killing rodents, mosquitos, and ants is something most people will do without a second thought. I&amp;#x27;ve sprayed a wasp nest with wasp killer and one writhed on the ground for 5 minutes and I felt awful about it, but there is practically a whole aisle of it at the local hardware store.&lt;p&gt;How many insects do you think have been harmed by industrial pesticides used in growing grains? What type of animal harm do you think pet ownership brings? How many wild birds do you think are killed in how many different ways? How many animals do you think are hit with cars? What do you think the effect the shipping industry has on sea life? What about trash? What about the smog? What about the chemicals dumped into the environment that are used to produce the hardware we are communicating with?&lt;p&gt;How much animal testing has been done by scientists on all types of animals to have what we have today?&lt;p&gt;My desire to pay as little as possible for coffee means the barista can&amp;#x27;t afford a home and likely will have their body harmed by the stress of not having enough money to operate in today&amp;#x27;s society. We send manufacturing off to poor countries were pollutants more directly harm their citizens than ours.&lt;p&gt;The wikipedia article states that poultry sex can be determined before hatching and that European countries have legislated that culling must stop, so it sounds like we are able to make progress. &amp;quot;Beyond&amp;quot; shows there is at least research going into lab grown&amp;#x2F;cruelty free meats.&lt;p&gt;Do I have a moral obligation to go live next to a pond feeding on what I can forage while living in a dwelling I built with my own hands or is it satisfying enough that I vote progressive and hope to make progress over time by regulating the more atrocious of our actions.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I have tried vegetarianism and I did not enjoy it at all. I found it greatly limited my food choices. It felt ascetic and I felt miserable. So while it is easy for you, I did not find it easy.</text></item><item><author>fnimick</author><text></text></item><item><author>hayst4ck</author><text>I am an unrepentant meat eater, but your visualization was absolutely fantastic.&lt;p&gt;I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die per minute to give it scale.&lt;p&gt;My understanding is also that we destroy an absolutely phenomenal amount of chicks in an entirely gruesome way. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Chick_culling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Chick_culling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have trouble handling that.</text></item><item><author>SCUSKU</author><text>I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;zach.ws&amp;#x2F;meat&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;zach.ws&amp;#x2F;meat&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>retrac</author><text>Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp.  I&amp;#x27;m probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away.  About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020.  Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers.  Context is needed.&lt;p&gt;Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes.  So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century.  That wasn&amp;#x27;t so shocking to me, at first.  But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then.  Railroads.  Ocean liners.  Factories.  Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people.  Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable.  All made out of steel.&lt;p&gt;Then it struck me.  A few million tonnes a year in 1850.  70 million tonnes in 1910.  All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes.  Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flarg</author><text>We&amp;#x27;re all guilty aren&amp;#x27;t we, even speaking as a vegetarian, but for me it&amp;#x27;s about how much cruelty I can avoid, not all or nothing.  I don&amp;#x27;t kill insects but I eat eggs. I try to use public transport  but I do have a car. Don&amp;#x27;t let perfection be the enemy here.</text></comment>
<story><title>Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans</title><url>https://ourworldindata.org/mammals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hayst4ck</author><text>Militant-ism isn&amp;#x27;t going to win people over.&lt;p&gt;The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away.&lt;p&gt;There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job.&lt;p&gt;Killing rodents, mosquitos, and ants is something most people will do without a second thought. I&amp;#x27;ve sprayed a wasp nest with wasp killer and one writhed on the ground for 5 minutes and I felt awful about it, but there is practically a whole aisle of it at the local hardware store.&lt;p&gt;How many insects do you think have been harmed by industrial pesticides used in growing grains? What type of animal harm do you think pet ownership brings? How many wild birds do you think are killed in how many different ways? How many animals do you think are hit with cars? What do you think the effect the shipping industry has on sea life? What about trash? What about the smog? What about the chemicals dumped into the environment that are used to produce the hardware we are communicating with?&lt;p&gt;How much animal testing has been done by scientists on all types of animals to have what we have today?&lt;p&gt;My desire to pay as little as possible for coffee means the barista can&amp;#x27;t afford a home and likely will have their body harmed by the stress of not having enough money to operate in today&amp;#x27;s society. We send manufacturing off to poor countries were pollutants more directly harm their citizens than ours.&lt;p&gt;The wikipedia article states that poultry sex can be determined before hatching and that European countries have legislated that culling must stop, so it sounds like we are able to make progress. &amp;quot;Beyond&amp;quot; shows there is at least research going into lab grown&amp;#x2F;cruelty free meats.&lt;p&gt;Do I have a moral obligation to go live next to a pond feeding on what I can forage while living in a dwelling I built with my own hands or is it satisfying enough that I vote progressive and hope to make progress over time by regulating the more atrocious of our actions.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I have tried vegetarianism and I did not enjoy it at all. I found it greatly limited my food choices. It felt ascetic and I felt miserable. So while it is easy for you, I did not find it easy.</text></item><item><author>fnimick</author><text></text></item><item><author>hayst4ck</author><text>I am an unrepentant meat eater, but your visualization was absolutely fantastic.&lt;p&gt;I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die per minute to give it scale.&lt;p&gt;My understanding is also that we destroy an absolutely phenomenal amount of chicks in an entirely gruesome way. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Chick_culling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Chick_culling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have trouble handling that.</text></item><item><author>SCUSKU</author><text>I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;zach.ws&amp;#x2F;meat&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;zach.ws&amp;#x2F;meat&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>retrac</author><text>Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp.  I&amp;#x27;m probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away.  About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020.  Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers.  Context is needed.&lt;p&gt;Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes.  So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century.  That wasn&amp;#x27;t so shocking to me, at first.  But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then.  Railroads.  Ocean liners.  Factories.  Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people.  Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable.  All made out of steel.&lt;p&gt;Then it struck me.  A few million tonnes a year in 1850.  70 million tonnes in 1910.  All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes.  Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jibbit</author><text>Reminder to self: don’t read the comments</text></comment>