Silent sky

Several lines of evidence suggest that we are living in the middle of one of earth's periodic mass extinction events. It's the 6th one if you are keeping count of such things. The most recent previous mass extinction was about 66 million years ago when (most likely) an asteroid took out 3/4 of the plant and animal species on the planet, including most of the dinosaurs. Some of the dinosaurs did manage to escape; their decedents diversified into the myriad types of birds.

The jury is out on whether birds will manage to escape the current mass extinction---- a mass extinction that is being driven entirely by our actions. The extinction of a species is the last step on a sequence of events that begins with the loss of individuals and populations. This recently published study reports that there are 29% fewer birds in North America (in terms of abundance) than there were in 1970 (the year I was born). 
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/09/18/science.aaw1313

That's 3 billion less birds hopping and flying around us than when my mom and dad brought me home from the hospital. This shocking realization has gotten a lot of press. Here is one of the many stories reporting on the study from the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/north-america-has-lost-billion-birds-years/

As that article points out, other studies in other regions have reported similiar declines, and not just for birds (check out the links in the Washington Post story).

Partly because we are living through the changes in real time, and partly because the cause of the mass extinction are actions that largely make our lives happier and easier, we are not as alarmed about things as perhaps we should be. But in biological terms, we have self inflicted our own world altering asteroid strike.

Germinal

A new wave of robotics and artificial intelligence software might be on the verge of reshaping agriculture. This story in the Washington Post looks at prototype robots being designed to pick fruit and vegetables.
 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2019/02/17/feature/inside-the-race-to-replace-farmworkers-with-robots/

Other systems are being developed that focus on other aspects of production such as applying herbicides and fertilizer.   It is far from clear when these new systems will be adopted and in what form. Even less clear is what  all this means for workers, the environment, and the broader culture of our food system.

So long and thanks for everything

Insects are a fundamental part of life on earth in almost every way that you can think of: in their diversity, their sheer abundance, in the ecological roles they play, in the benefits and services they provide us. It should give you a sense of existential dread to learn that insects are going away. Well, they aren't going completely away. It is hard to imagine a world that is still vaguely hospitable to life that doesn't have insects. But two recent studies have shown that the overall abundance of insects has been crashing precipitously over just the last few decades. One of the studies found that the abundance of flying insects in German nature preserves has declined 75 percent in just 27 years. Another study found similar declines in a Puerto Rico rain forest, and documented how this has altered the broader rain forest ecosystem.

This longish NYT Magazine article looks at these studies, and the other evidence that we are in the midst of an "insect Apocalypse"

Three steps to a slimmer footprint

Growing crops is one of the principal ways that we alter the planet. Our global food system is a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, depletion of freshwater resources, and nutrient pollution. A recent report has looked at our options for limiting these impacts while at the same time ensuring that we can feed ourselves nutritious diets. Predictably, the authors of the report don't find a simple solution or a single magic bullet. But they outline some straightforward approaches that we can start trying. These include shifting diets towards healthier and less impactful mixes of food, improving farm practices partly through better technology, and by reducing food waste.  Check out the report here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0594-0

Oh, its about to get real

That's the basic conclusion from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If we want to keep global warming to 1.5 Celsius above per-industrial levels (a goal set by the Paris Agreement in 2016) we will need to cut our emissions in half before 2030 and go carbon neutral by 2050. The report then lays out some of the stark consequences of not doing that such as communities and even some entire nations drowned by rising sea level, food shortages caused by prolonged droughts, and more frequent or intense natural disasters such as tropical storms and fires. Given what little we have so far done to avert disaster, even many optimistic people see those warnings as a fait accompli at this point. It still doesn't have to be. But perhaps more pragmatically, we need to act now to prevent things from getting even worse.

Read the report here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/