The points on carbon footprint through food and the mistreatment of animals combine for a shattering conclusion: we are both abusing these animals and destroying their habitat – which they have exactly the same right to as we do – in the process. — inquisitive
Taking into account the points above one could argue then that this inevitable demise of our species may well be the only good thing to come out of this catastrophe (it is just a shame that most others will go down with us). — inquisitive
Maybe we should let nature remove the worst parasite she has ever known? — inquisitive
I don't see a good argument that they don't. What sets us apart in a way that would grant us more rights over an animal? Do we not have the same right to the land and resources as them? Do they not have the same right to pursue their own interests as we do? Theirs may stem from a more instinctive place, but I don't see how the capability of rational thought grants us more rights.Do animals have "exactly the same" rights here? I don't see a good argument that they do. — apokrisis
Well, I suppose that depends entirely of one's definition of nature's true self and whether this is a successful version of it. One could argue that it is the least successful, for example if you propose that a successful expression would be organisms living in relative balance to one another as they do in many ecosystems. Humans have clearly upset any such balance.Or Nature's most successful expression of its true self? So far at least? — apokrisis
Yes, it is only us that can act like that, but does that not put a great deal of responsibility on us that we are simply dismissing?The problem you have is that only humanity has any moral choice here. It is only us who can act according to some agreed insight. — apokrisis
I think you are being too optimistic here. How many people really care about farming humanely? The president of the US is in the process of reducing the number and size of natural parks right now. Clearly there are a great number of people that still don't care.Largely we are comfortable with an anthropomorphised planet - one where all wildlife has been domesticated or put in a reserve. We can love our pets. We can farm our meat humanely. We can have a few wildlife parks to preserve a tamed version of the untamed past. And that is what would make the majority of the world's population happy enough. So a new morality could be built around fostering those objectives. And that has already been happening. — apokrisis
Do infants? I am not sure I understand why the absence of responsibility precludes one from having significant rights.Do animals have rights if they don't have responsibilities? — apokrisis
I agree with that, I was mainly using it as an example for the atrocities we commit without even noticing it most of the time.Cruelty to farm animals might be way down that moral list, for example. — apokrisis
What sets us apart in a way that would grant us more rights over an animal? — inquisitive
Yes, it is only us that can act like that, but does that not put a great deal of responsibility on us that we are simply dismissing? — inquisitive
I think you are being too optimistic here. How many people really care about farming humanely? The president of the US is in the process of reducing the number and size of natural parks right now. Clearly there are a great number of people that still don't care. — inquisitive
Do animals have rights if they don't have responsibilities? — inquisitive
Cruelty to farm animals might be way down that moral list, for example. — inquisitive
What sets us apart in a way that would grant us more rights over an animal? Do we not have the same right to the land and resources as them? Do they not have the same right to pursue their own interests as we do? Theirs may stem from a more instinctive place, but I don't see how the capability of rational thought grants us more rights. — inquisitive
Well, I suppose that depends entirely of one's definition of nature's true self and whether this is a successful version of it. One could argue that it is the least successful, for example if you propose that a successful expression would be organisms living in relative balance to one another as they do in many ecosystems. Humans have clearly upset any such balance. — inquisitive
Yes, it is only us that can act like that, but does that not put a great deal of responsibility on us that we are simply dismissing? — inquisitive
I think you are being too optimistic here. How many people really care about farming humanely? The president of the US is in the process of reducing the number and size of natural parks right now. Clearly there are a great number of people that still don't care. — inquisitive
Do infants? I am not sure I understand why the absence of responsibility precludes one from having significant rights. — inquisitive
Do animals have rights if they don't have responsibilities? — inquisitive
Hold on, those aren't my quotes, they're from apokrisis.Cruelty to farm animals might be way down that moral list, for example — inquisitive
Humans have the capacity to create things such as rights, other animals don't, and we have granted those rights to ourselves, and not other animals. — Bitter Crank
I'm all in favor of expanded national parks and humane farming, but the two are separate issues — Bitter Crank
I don't think that savage mistreatment of large animals is routine, but the way chickens are raised amounts to something pretty close to abuse. — Bitter Crank
I am not ready to give animals rights, but I am ready to accept that we have responsibilities to the ecology we live in — Bitter Crank
My guess is that workers who mistreat animals are themselves being mistreated by the owners. — Bitter Crank
But unless you can make some argument about morality being an objective fact of nature, or some divinely-ordained reality, then moral relativism applies. Our discussion of how things go for animals is going to be framed within that particular understanding of rights and responsibilities. — apokrisis
Likewise, farming practices are changing at a gallop where I live - New Zealand. Cow sheds are now being built with cow back-scratchers. The cows choose when to come in and get milked by robotic milkers. Stuff that would be unthinkable ten years ago is becoming the norm, such is the pressure to be "ethical" when selling to an increasingly informed middleclass public. — apokrisis
Infants grow into adults. And they can't become well-formed moral beings unless they are treated as beings which can learn to grow into their responsibilities within a moral order. — apokrisis
Recently I have been thinking more and more about climate change. It is becoming very clear that, despite all the deniers, it will be a serious problem for the planet and its species – including humans, which is tragically ironic. — inquisitive
What is the best temperature for the earth? What is the optimum level of CO2 for life? — tom
I don't believe complete moral relativism is a useful concept. Perhaps this is where our divide lies. I think there has to be a certain amount of moral realism in the world. — inquisitive
Would you not agree that there are things that are objectively bad? I don't like to use extremes, but consider rape or genital mutilation. — inquisitive
It seems to me that one can reasonably argue that any moral framework which justifies these acts is not a moral framework that should be applied. — inquisitive
I'm not an expert on the subject, but it seems that a sudden change of diet to exclude all animal products can be harmful to ones health because certain nutrients aren't present in a purely plant-based diet. — inquisitive
Maybe purely "ethical" pressure isn't enough though? It seems to me that government regulations are still too lax here. — inquisitive
Smil says the human population has grown 20-fold in the last 1000 years and nearly quadruppled in just the past century. The numbers are still swelling by 230,000 every day.
So by his calculations, between 1900 and 2000 – allowing for the fact that humans have got on average somewhat taller and rather fatter – the global anthropomass has grown from 13 to 55 million tonnes of carbon (Mt C) by weight, or from 74Mt to 300Mt if you include the water and the body’s other mineral elements.
That is a lot of flesh to feed obviously. But Smil says bottom-line is what scientists call HANPP, or the human appropriation of net primary production – the amount of the planet’s total harvestable plant growth that this many humans now take as their share.
And Smil says it is about a quarter. That is, 25 per cent of the annual terrestrial phytomass production, the conversion of sunlight to plant material, winds up one way or another supporting the 55Mt of human carbon.
Hey yes, we rule!
The calculation is complicated of course. It includes not just the plant growth directly for food but also our take in fuel, fibre and timber.
And nearly half the HANPP figure represents the global loss of photosynthetic potential due to erosion, desertification, human created forest fires and the building over of good land – all the ways we have taken away from the Earth’s usual productivity.
Smil notes the world’s big cities now cover nearly 5 million square kilometers. In the last 2000 years, he says, with deforesting and other deprecations, humans have cut the total phytomass stocks from 1000 billion tonnes (Gt) of carbon to 550Gt.
But there is good news in the HANPP. At least farming efficiency has been keeping it somewhat under control.
Smil says it is estimated that a third of the Earth's ice-free surface has been taken over by human agriculture, some 12 per cent for crops and 22 per cent for pasture.
However because of the green revolution of the mid-20th Century – the switch to industrialised farming with diesel machinery, petroleum-based fertiliser, irrigation schemes and new crop strains – the figures have not blown out quite like they could have.
Over the past century, the global HANPP has only doubled from the 13 per cent supporting 1.7b people in 1900 to the 25 per cent supporting 7.2b people now.
And looking ahead, even with the global population expected to hit 9b by 2050, the human share of the Earth’s photosynthetic bounty may only hit 30 per cent.
Well, that is unless biofuels are needed as an alternative energy source and the resulting agricultural expansion balloons HANPP out to 44 per cent, as some studies suggest.
...
From a New Zealand perspective, this is where Smil’s book gets especially thought provoking. Because as well as the anthropomass and the phytomass, there is also the story of the zoomass – the drastic shift from wild to domestic animals in terms of the planet’s mammal population.
Smil calculates that the agricultural revolution of the past century has seen a seven-fold increase in plant production. In 1900, humans grew 400Mt of dry matter a year. Now it is 2.7Gt. But because humans like meat on their plate, half this phytomass goes to feed our farm animals.
We know the equation of course. It takes about 10kg of grain to produce 1kg of burger meat. And Smil says the consumption of meat in developed countries has shot up from just a few kilos per person per year to over 100kg.
In 1900, the world had 1.6b large domestic animals including 450m head of cattle and water buffalo. Today, that number is 4.3b, with 1.7b cattle and buffalo, and nearly 1b pigs.
In terms of biomass, the increase is from 35Mt of carbon to 120Mt. So about double the 55Mt of humans treading the planet in fact.
Wild zoomass has naturally gone skidding in the other direction, halving from 10mt to 5Mt during the 20th Century. With large grazing animals, the drop has been especially severe says Smil. Elephants have gone from 3Mt to 0.3Mt, the American bison is right off the radar at 0.04Mt.
Tot it up and the numbers are a little bonkers. The combined weight of humanity is today ten times the weight of everything else running around wild – all the world’s different mammal species from wombats to wildebeest, marmosets to rhinos.
And then our livestock, the tame four legged meals soon to end up on our dinner table, outweigh that true wildlife by 24 to 1 all over again. Talk about transforming a planet within living memory. The world is now mostly constituted of people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs.
As Smil says, the balance has gone from 0.1 per cent 10,000 years ago, to about 10 per cent at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97 per cent today. There may still be tens of thousands of wild mammal species sharing our Earth, but really they don’t add up to much of any consequence.
Again, just think about it. We harvest a quarter of the biosphere now. Ourselves and our four legged meals outweigh other terrestrial mammals by a combined 34 to 1.
And no, I’m still not sure I can quite believe Smil’s numbers either. Sometimes in life you are left just shaking your head.
Hi. I'm not sure what you're alluding to. Are you implying that recent climate developments may in fact not be negative? I think you would be quite alone in that assumption. We can show that changes in climate are harmful to species, especially if they are as rapid as human made climate change of the past two centuries. I don't think there's an "optimum" CO2 level as such either, though I would propose that the optimum 'range' for CO2 is lower than the current levels. Yes it may be good for trees technically, but the planet as a whole, as a system, does not benefit from such high levels. — inquisitive
What is your reason for proposing that the optimum CO2 "range" is lower than it is today?
Plants disagree: — tom
The combined weight of humanity is today ten times the weight of everything else running around wild – all the world’s different mammal species from wombats to wildebeest, marmosets to rhinos.
And then our livestock, the tame four legged meals soon to end up on our dinner table, outweigh that true wildlife by 24 to 1 all over again.
That's a philosophically shallow approach. It boils down to the view that others who didn't grow up my way, in my culture, are probably wrong when they seem to disagree with my socially inherited belief system. They are wrong because I am right. — apokrisis
Hold on, those aren't my quotes, they're from apokrisis. — inquisitive
I have trouble with the fact that you don't see animals as beings that deserve rights (maybe limited compared to ours). However, your admission of responsibility seems 'good enough' to work with as a strategy. I think that's what a lot of the argument comes down to - a complete shift is probably impossible, but we need to move in this direction I believe. — inquisitive
You'd be surprised what you can find with some Googling. From a certain scale onwards (and depending on the country and its laws/policing) most farm animals receive bad treatment. — inquisitive
I granted you the fact that higher CO2 levels may be positive - at least short-term - for plants, simply because it's a fundamental part of photosynthesis. — inquisitive
The reason I don't believe animals other than humans have rights is that they can not articulate anything about their rights. Pigs can not object that their rights are being trampled. — Bitter Crank
Plants disagree — tom
OK, so you refuse to answer my questions about the optimum temperature and CO2 levels.
At least we have established that you are wrong in describing me as "alone" in suggesting there are benefits to higher CO2. Certainly farmers across the world experience this in higher yields and in less need for irrigation. It is estimated that in temperate latitudes an increase of 10% is achieved, freeing more land for wildlife. — tom
Would you agree that the major disagreement between our views comes from you leaning more relativist than me? — inquisitive
If we can clearly show that a certain thing creates the most well-being and well-being is the thing we optimize for, then we have established a moral truth. — inquisitive
To be honest with you, I think we've reached the point where I've exhausted my current knowledge of the underlying philosophical concepts as well as my own beliefs and thoughts. — inquisitive
Yes, I was aware that those were apokrisis's quotes, but I wanted to address my response to you, since this is your thread. — Bitter Crank
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