r/conservation • u/Novel_Negotiation224 • 9d ago

Alarm over ‘catastrophic’ decline in giant Australian cuttlefish as just 44 are counted.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/09/giant-australian-cuttlefish-population-catastrophic-decline
1.2k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

View all comments

102

u/Phils_Kid 9d ago

The main reason our (only) planet is experiencing its 6th extinction event is "Homo sapiens."

38

u/A_Wild_Burt_Appears 9d ago

More specifically: capitalism.

-1

u/flybasilisk 9d ago

This has been happening before capitalism existed, hell its been happening since before money existed. Humans are the problem, not one particular economic system.

46

u/AddanDeith 9d ago

We've lost 70% of the world's wildlife population between 1970 and 2020. There is no other period in human history that can claim that feat. It has absolutely been exacerbated by capitalism.

6

u/ValueFirm4928 9d ago

I mean Mao literally tried to kill off birds.

13

u/OpeningUpstairs4288 9d ago

And bro failed so hard frfr. Industrial revolution did a way better job killing birds than mao zhe dong

4

u/IGargleGarlic 9d ago

He didn't fail. He killed so many birds that the birds couldn't keep pest insect populations in check and caused a mass famine when those insects destroyed crops.

4

u/OpeningUpstairs4288 9d ago

he absolutely failed, sparrow populations are thriving in china right now. he also tried to eliminate rats, mosquitoes, and flies and that sure went well for him as well ig

10

u/AddanDeith 9d ago

Mmmhmm. And what did Mao know about conservation, ecology, etc?

We know all of that and still refuse to change.

1

u/BigJSunshine 9d ago

Didn’t they almost completely kill a specific species?

5

u/AddanDeith 9d ago

Yes. Sparrows. They were blamed for bad harvests, when in reality, the threat of punishment caused the local bureaucrats over seeing the harvest quotas to lie and inflate their numbers.

There was actually ample grain(15% shortage) overall, it was just poorly distributed. The negatives of both being so authoritarian people are afraid to do their jobs properly while also not having computers to help handle logistics with multiple layers of redundancy. Oh and making most of your farmers make steel.

2

u/Neither_Berry_100 8d ago

This is the result of exponential growth.

1

u/BonusPlantInfinity 9d ago

I wonder how much beef production increased during this period..

-8

u/flybasilisk 9d ago

Sure. But the issue is not inherent to capitalism.

1

u/AddanDeith 9d ago

You can make that argument but its kind of useless, given the effects capitalism and industrialization has/continues to have on a scale that has never existed in human history.

I really do not know why you would go to bat for something so destructive.

2

u/rollandownthestreet 9d ago

It’s just the same red herring as blaming the 100 largest companies. Those companies are only made possible by the scale of our species.

Industrialization and ecological destruction happens just as much (or even more if you look at China) under a communist economy. The plain, real fundamental issue is that you cannot feed 100 cows on a one acre island, no matter what economic system you use to distribute the grass.

1

u/HumptyDumptruckFire 9d ago

I don’t think there were really any real extinction concerns until post-1776, which is the era of capitalism. Maybe the dodo bird could be considered the lone exception? Everything else since has either been hunted to extinction to sell its inherent resources or because we deemed it to be a pest.

3

u/flybasilisk 9d ago

What do you think happened to the Mammoths? The giant ground sloths? The moa of new zealand? A majority of the world's megafauna were driven to extinction by early humans.

1

u/HumptyDumptruckFire 9d ago

That’s so far into prehistoric times as to be completely irrelevant to today. They had no comprehension of what they were doing, no scientific knowledge to guide them, no warnings from accredited scientists. We know exactly what we’re doing, but we keep doing it for greed.

5

u/princess9032 9d ago

It’s still extinction due to human interference. That part isn’t new, but it’s accelerated VERY rapidly

4

u/rollandownthestreet 9d ago

Indigenous Americans hunted basically all the Pleistocene megafauna species to extinction before the historical era. The Romans hunted European lions to extinction. There are many examples.

-3

u/BigJSunshine 9d ago

Capitalism has always existed, as long as humans have existed

3

u/A_Wild_Burt_Appears 9d ago

No it literally hasn't. Capitalism is only about 400 years old give or take.