Human Population Size, Density And Biodiversity Loss

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It set X number of people in a region and then looked at population numbers and variety (plus numbers for each kind) for other species in that same region. How ambitious a study! How exhaustive and painstaking a plan!

It had a large enough sample of randomly selected, diverse regions to cover the matter accurately — i.e., places in deserts, boreal forests, prairies, mountainous regions, cities, old and new towns, and so on.
Gosh, it was excellent since it had the data (carefully gathered) to support findings. Then, comparison and contrast set into it as the findings were tabulated by different size human groups and density with all else (like size of regions explored being the same so that the evidence would not be contaminated by any factors other than those studied as being dissimilar).

Not surprisingly, the results were dramatic to say the least and since it is empirically derived with a sound research technique, I am definitely into trusting the results in general rather than being skeptical and disgusted by idiotic opinions by some group of people or an individual pushing some agenda through bogus nonsense. … Facts, facts, facts. Nothing, but the facts! … If the sample is random across climate regions and terrains, etc., and the only deviating factors are human population size, along with the population sizes and types of other species — what else could be done to make the study sound? Not much, I suppose.

Intuitively, we know that the size of human population in a given contained region is paired with loss of other species.  Here’s a perfect example using two divergent extremes in the same location, but using visual examples:

Image result for manhattan 1500's picture

Mannahatta in 1609 | Manhattan in 2009. Image Mark Boyer WCS.

Presently, I would like to see another study done. I have no idea about what human population concentration within a delimited region (i.e., X miles by Y miles or whatever measures other than miles are used) would be helpful to delimit biodiversity loss in an optimal way contrasted to alternatives. I wish that someone or some group could study this topic in a typical hard-nosed, empirically correct way to find out an answer. Then we may be able to plan for communities of the right size.

A train track is around a block from my home. It is down in a gully or a small ravine. It has freight trains all night long running through it and sometimes huge ones with a hundred or more cars carrying goods into Boston to serve the population there. Is this the best way forward … to garner supplies (biomass) from regions less densely populated to bring to concentrated groups of people or is it better to have people fanned out across the landscape.

If the latter plan is superior to curtail loss of other species, in what density per acre is most constructive? We need to know the answer, I would think.

 It seems a worthwhile investigation for times to come. The resultant finding could be helpful in myriad ways.

Okay, so I can’t find the data for which I am looking that pairs human numbers in a demarked, small region version other specie’s numbers and types capable to live there. So it goes. (And trust me: much to alarm, sorrow and dismay, I’m watching my own numbers go downward here in MA for the other kinds of life as people keep pushing for growth based on economic furtherance — money in the coffers for developers and so much more for peoples coming into my locale.)

Accordingly, this rip away for me of exact information from that research doesn’t save me from my peril of contradictory and tumultuous thinking. Here’s what I mean:

I go back and forth in the trouble of trying to think that we should let more and more people into our region in which I live and more and more thrust against the happening over watching the biodiversity shrinking around this place wherein I live as it gradually becomes increasingly barren.

How can I possibly pick one path over another? How can they work together — my two aims to help other people — sometimes desperate to find homes, employment and normalized lives — and serve environmental ones that save other life intact?

So I get unhappy since I have one bard owl (and only one left, which means that he won’t find a breeding companion)  and individuals of other species living in a wetlands near my home that will be turned into a big, three story high, condo complex. It worries me for the ever increasing biodiversity loss and the loss of a drinking spot for all species in my neighborhood when the wetlands are gone and it is a drought period. And I know that much movable life in my neighborhood of the nonhuman variety will be expelled or killed in the process of not having a place to find water.
What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to put out pots of water in my yard to help after the loss of wetlands? Oh yes, that is really good — standing pots of stagnant water that can breed Nile’s Virus through mosquitoes, a virus actually found in my region.

Oh yes, I’m sure that my town’s health and safety commission would shut down my actions of putting out containers of water due to their posing a threat to humans and, besides, do I want mosquitoes, possibly deadly ones, flying around my neighborhood — ones that originated in my yard? So this is not a viable way forward, obviously.

One of my friends sent me this writing, which is right on the mark: Urban Sprawl – at an Accelerated Pace. It still doesn’t give me any reasonable ways forward. It just ups the ante in my worrisome dilemma.

It is from:

Canadians for a Sustainable Society: Home

We look at the population as not just a measure of the size of the market but as individuals living in a complex and interdependent world. Like consumption, population growth forever is illustrated as impossible … We illustrate the human population cycles of the past and try and pinpoint our place on the current …

How can one choose between serving humans and serving the biosphere that supports all life, including our own? It does seem, to me, a largely either-or proposition. How not?

While I have become deeply despondent over starving people in the world of which there are around 18 million (mostly children) at present, should they all come here to the USA state.MA, in which I live? Should they tear down the increasingly shrinking natural world in which we New Englanders live? Should they be sent to where you live in the world so that you can try to help them? Who can pay for their transportation to a place better than where they currently live and that obviously doesn’t support their survival?

My problem, personally, is this and it sometimes gives me nightmares when I sleep at night while wrestling with the inherent contradiction in dreams. It is that I was trained by Quaker pacifists parents to both serve humanity AND the natural world. Yet what happens when they are apposite or in relation to some imperative that denies one position for another when they are deeply conflicting?
Apparently the disjuncture disturbs many others so I am not alone in being torn and I have no answers. None. After all, how does one help other people and other species when possibly dialectically opposed, and our lives literally depend on the viability to some degree of the latter? … This sort of quandary makes me at times kind of sick at heart.

In any case, I found a number of other good exposés on the main topic of this writing despite that I couldn’t discover the report with the main evidence concerning relative population numbers. Here, then, is one that really lays out the matter without providing the information that I like as proof for pairing human number with that of other species in a delimited space.

It is easy on the eye, educational, chuck full of relevant information and straightforward. So it is worth the peak in my opinion.

We can do something to help the overall situation in the world. However, we first must know the facts to go forward in the right ways. Such a link as this is capable to provide them!

Biodiversity and Human Population Growth – SlideShare

Nov 1, 2007 – Human Population Size Resources use Land Transformation Land Clearing Forestry Grazing Intensification Biotic Additions and Loss Invasion Hunting Fishing Carbon Nitrogen Water Climate Change Enhanced Greenhouse Aerosols Land cover Loss of Biological Diversity Extinction of species And …

All considered, I can relate to this short pithy statement herein:

What does it mean to wear “rose colored glasses”? – Susan Day

Apr 5, 2016 – Remember Pollyanna? She was the little girl who only saw good things and never saw bad things? It could be said that she wore “rose colored glasses“. We usually preface this slang with “see through” or “see the world”, so you’d hear the phrase “sees the world through rose colored glasses“. It means that …

We have to go forward, but not with a Pollyanna, rose colored glasses point of view. Only as we know truth can we foist ourselves forward in the best ways that we can conceive. So this means our first starkly seeing the conditions surrounding us and, then, making deliberate difficult choices.
 
Sally Dugman is a writer in MA, USA.

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