Nearly 6,000 monitored vertebrate species across more than 35,000 populations declined by an average of 73% from 1970 to 2022, the World Wide Fund for Nature said in its latest Living Planet Report published on Thursday.
This is a famously difficult to interpret statistic. It’s an excellent survey, but you probably do not understand what the number means (because it is a weird number). In particular, only half of species surveyed showed a population decline at all, the other half either grew or were stagnant.
The authors of the LPI go to great lengths to explain this. Yet, there is inevitably a long list of headlines claiming that we’ve “lost 73% of wildlife”, “73% of species have gone extinct”, or “73% of species are declining”. All of these are incorrect.
To give you another sense that this number is weird:
The 2022 Living Planet Index reported an average decline of 69% since 1970. In 2024, it reported a 73% decline. And this latest report finds the same: 73%.
So, what exactly is this 73% number?
To obtain the final LPI number, researchers take the geometric mean of the rates of change across all these populations. They also provide different weights to different populations, which affects the final result.
I don’t know other places where I’d take the geometric mean. I have no intuition for it. So… caution advised.
Ok; I’ve thought through several examples. The geometric mean is heavily biased to show a decrease IMO. A species could have it’s total population grow substantially, but if most of that growth is to already large/successful subsets, then it’ll almost certainly show as a negative (geometric) average change, even with ~noise on the other populations. I think you should only see a positive metric here if most species measured are invasive; growing extremely fast in places not prepared for them. (and being careful not to measure the things getting killed by the new invaders)
We are the next great mass extinction event and in some ways our impact is already faster (and this far in, harder) than most of our previous mass extinction events. But hey, billionaires need a few more yachts and need endless growth even if it literally kills the planet. So thats a price we are willing to pay for them. We should be rioting.
(Careful! This statistic is not useful in predicting if the total number of any species has increased or decreased. The data could say all species had populations that massively grew, and it would still report a decline. See Our world in data for a toy example, and discussion of what the base-data are for LPI.)
We are the current great mass extinction event
Yeah, but it isn’t enough to know something is wrong, you should consider why people aren’t rioting (more), and whether it is too reductive to assume it is a select few individuals and not a system that empowers them (even if they have disproportionate power over that system).
Most people are working dude, and many of them have to work out of responsibility for dependents. Ending this system also doesn’t just mean taking the billionaires’ yachts away, it means ending cheap electronics or coffee for the Global North, it means that clothes and time become more materially expensive for the benefactors in the metropole, which includes you. You and the people around you are effected by climate change and ecological destruction, but your immediate material interests are more aligned with maintaining this system than it is ending it, and you guys behave as such whether you realize it or not.
People riot in colonized spaces all the time, but if they aren’t stopped by the colonial puppet states who occupy them, they’re stopped by the imperialist militaries that you pay into whether through taxes, your state’s federal investment portfolios, or the wealth that is directly extracted from your labour into the hands of capitalists. There is a reason that people in the metropole only started giving a shit after it effected them, it’s hard to risk your own security for something that you can only rationally understand is real, and if we’re being honest, the way of life in the metropole makes many of these people too exhausted or petulant to put much effort into that.
It would be incredible if all we needed was some white guys in the metropole to kill a few naughty bois to end all of this, but there’s a reason that this hasn’t happened even if it would work. Liberals in the metropole have a hard time knowing what to do about any of this because they don’t want to recognize how they materially benefit from this violence, or grapple with the commitment to risk their security once they do.
edit: well, there we go, lol.
Nah mass consciousness is on the rise. In my home province a few years ago the government tried to ban collective bargaining for custodian services to which the province responded with a planned general strike. It won, the government immediately backed down. We do have power. We just forget that until we dont.
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-threat-of-a-general-strike-shook-doug-fords-ontario-government/
Try shutting down imperialism from within a core country and you’ll see the resistance is much more than most living there are willing to risk.
Are able* to risk. As much as I hate settlers and privilege, there is a reality to the precarity they exist in. It is partially manufactured by the state to incentivize their compliance and punish dissidence, but this is still a brutally genocidal culture where failure to uphold employment and keep up with the constantly increasing cost of living is met with violence either through the police or shelter/food insecurity.
Most people here genuinely cannot risk fighting the state without subjecting dependents to violence. There is a will element certainly, in that you can always (unfairly) claim that we are all obligated to pay that price, but I can’t imagine you could actually let your elderly loved ones or children experience poverty for the chance to be part of a movement that would require the rest of the people here to also subject their dependents to that violence.
They’re using the vulnerable as a shield, as they always do, and they understand that to resist would be to commit violence against our most vulnerable members of society. These people (Canadians), want me dead for something as petty as culture war excitement or their meager excess property rights, there’s no way I could realistically put my child at risk out of trust for them to do the same.
This isn’t to say resistance is impossible or pointless, but to point out that there is a reason the people who resist are often younger without dependents, and why this system has made it increasingly difficult to live alone without relying on others.
deleted by creator
I don’t know what you would have read in my comment that suggested that we don’t have “power,” and I think that your response was to say “yes, but people here use their efforts to the benefit of some workers here,” shows that you don’t really understand the comment I left (or didn’t read it and just want to say something righteous).
That’s fine that labour movements happen in the metropole, and I’ll remind you that they used to be far more prominent than they currently are, but that they happen doesn’t demonstrate solidarity even among workers throughout the metropole, let alone a willingness among those workers to sacrifice their material security to the benefit of colonized peoples in the global south. Again, so long as you don’t recognize that this is what the objective has to be in order to challenge this system, a slight raise for vulnerable workers here will amount to a snooze button.
Boomers will also start a nuclear WW3 before they die off. This fucking pos generation leeched and destroyed and improvished and brought the whole planet down with them
Yes. We’re living a human driven mass extinction event and we’re all going to starve.
I don’t think starvation due to ecosystem collapse is widely expected anytime soon. That would be the headline otherwise, right? In particular, we pretty much control the whole grain + maize + soy + rice production process afaict?
i wish people stopped calling it “human driven”. it’s capitalism and colonialism driven. the sooner we realise this, the sooner we can put an end to it
The people in charge benefit the most from capitalism, so it wont happen
Then they have to go.
Who will get rid of them?
Broader than capitalism; it’s growth driven no? A planned economy that wanted a steady increase in energy/quality of life/resource extraction would also do most of this.
capitalism and colonialism are both human.
It’s all human. Even if capitalism and colonialism were off the table, every person alive consumes so much food a day, and every square foot devoted to their life is unavailable for wildlife.
Agriculture isn’t the main contributor to climate change and there are known solutions for reducing agricultural land-use like not eating meat. There is research on stuff like this and a sustainable global society of billions isn’t some unachievable goal because of how much humans need to eat.
we don’t have to do it in the most wasteful way tho
it shouldn’t be lost on us that the two first pictured examples on the wikipedia page for the anthropocene extinction are of the bison and dodo. two animals who coexisted with humans for thousands of years and were only driven to extinction (or near extinction) a very short time after a particular group of humans (read: european settlers) came
…fuck. The Brazilian election going poorly isn’t going to help. I suppose we won’t know what the final nail looks like until after it happens (hindsight, and all that) but I feel like putting the Amazon in the hands of fascists could do it.
I remember reading a study that stated the Amazon is very close to a tipping point where it will cease to be a tropical jungle, becoming a giant savanna instead. Almost all other biomes from the entire South America will collapse when this happen.
I was just reading the report and was about to make a post
https://livingplanet.panda.org/Fuck
Fuck (but with less inexplicable downvotes)
Humanity is a form of cancer.
