David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots.

Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/live-greenpeace-boulders-...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-marin...

The relevant excerpt. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/IzG9AwlypaY?feature=shared

I watched this film last night, and it was stunning and horrifying all at once. It really brings home the impact of industrial-scale trawling on the marine environment. It's literally like bulldozing a garden to harvest the fruit.

> subsidised in marine protected areas

What do you mean?

I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.

In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?

Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"

Gentle parenting the apocalypse. What a legend.

My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.

If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.

I agree. I reflect on this from time to time when I consider that my mom, having died a few years back, would not be enjoying much of anything going on in the world right now. (Further, that she was born at the close of WWII in the U.S., she may have been lucky enough to have lived in the best part of recent history here.)

“No one cares about the bomb that didn’t go off.” - Tenet

Preventing “bombs” from going off is not rewarded. And indeed the Line Must Go Up Crowd is reliant upon someone else fixing the problem while they get theirs. But when the majority think that way we’re f**ed.

The human population is set to crash quite hard in the next 100 years. It's backed into the cake.

If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.

I can understand there is an inherit sadness in not knowing the outcome of one's life's work, but as you say none of use ever see how it ends. In terms of our natural environment humankind has only ever observed in person, let alone recorded, what amounts to the blink of an eye.

Our generations of the last 10,000 years are seeing how the story decays.

When the food supply was abundant, families would jog every day doing BBQ every night hunting down mammoths

We have become red in tooth and claw. At the summit of civilisation, we are alienated with our screens, licking frozen TV dinners in our shared flat while we work hard to support our landlords

The Sundays beg to differ.

Depends which story. Every death is the end of somebody's world.

Someone might. I think we stand a reasonable chance of self-selecting for extinction in the next few centuries. It's not the end of the story, but it's the end of our story. Someone will be the one who shuts off the lights on the way out.

Firefox with Blocking turned on and I see no ads..

You seen Prehistoric Planet[0]?

The CGI is so good, you can practically smell the beasties.

[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet

that's...actually really beautiful

There is no single "point of no return". We have obviously passed the point where bad consequences can be avoided, but every extra ton of CO2 and methane makes things a bit worse.

I worry that the sentiment of "we have passed the point of no return" induces an impotent apathy in people, when the truth is that every step in the right direction makes our future a little bit less dire.

The narrative climax to the human story around climate change has yet to happen. Assuming we continue on the current trajectory, expect riots and wars over food and clean water, possibly more.

What do you think he means when he says “how the story ends”?

Someone like Bertie Gregory could be next? https://www.bertiegregory.com/

Attenborough will be incredibly difficult to follow though. The depth of his career has made him such an iconic and reassuring force for so many.

Here's the good news: we've done basically nothing about climate change even with him, so losing such an esteemed spokesman won't actually make it worse.

Admittedly that's only "good" in the sense that things are maximally bad and cannot get worse. But we might as well fake a smile because that's all we're going to get. I'd say we won't act until it's too late, but it is already too late.