#conservation

This is open for public comment until the end of May 19th. Please comment and make your voice heard.

From the article:

“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

So I went and did some quick research and

It’s basically as bad as it sounds

They started breaking ground in 2019 but the government has been trying to build this airport since 2011. More and more of the locals don’t want it because of how it’ll destroy the area even though they’ve been offered a lot of money for their land and promised jobs. None of the scientists who work in the area want it. South America like Chile/Bolivia/Peru/Ecuador/etc etc etc are such unique and old places. The ecology in South America is so special and has species that are nowhere else in the world. The landscape is unusual and special. The people there have been able to maintain traditions despite colonization in a lot of cases. The artifacts there are priceless, we’ve lost so so so much to colonization, knowledge, architecture, culture, artifacts. These areas are delicate and need protection. A lot of the governments in South America have corruption, like anywhere else. The people and land are constantly sacrificed. The Atacama desert in Chile has so so much to protect and they’re mining nonstop for copper, polluting water, evicting eighty year olds and disabled people to make way for construction, piping away their water and plowing through a delicate desert ecosystem. There’s a clothes dump so big there you can see it from space

There’s so so much to lose in South America. If you visit the altiplano in Bolivia, there are native farmers living out there essentially off grid. Chile has many indigenous groups still despite being so industrialized. We still have Quechua, Aymara and Mapuche being spoken every day. The landscape MATTERS to us. It breaks my heart to see the land so disrespected and ruined. The people are connected to the land. You can talk to almost any indigenous group and they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s a cultural thing that was passed down for thousands of years. The shapes the mountains make against the sky, the way a lake sits between the hills, flocks of guanaco and vicuña grazing. The landscape is sacred and old