Bread and CircusesI'm going to post a thread here containing the text of a well-written and angry essay about our biodiversity crisis. The original piece, titled "The Silent Collapse You Won't See on the News," was authored by Angus Peterson and published at Medium.com.
Because they chose to add an AI slop image to the original — a practice that I *strongly* oppose — I won't provide a link, but you can find the full essay there if you feel you must.
Anyway, here is the first part of the thread...
_______________________________
Let’s be honest — biodiversity loss has become the neglected stepchild of environmental disasters. You’ve probably heard of climate change . We’ve got a constant drip-feed of global warming doom porn, ice caps melting, oceans rising, cities sweating, and billionaires buying bunkers in New Zealand. Climate gets the headlines. Pollution gets the silver medal because it’s mostly outsourced to poor countries. But biodiversity? The death of birds, bugs, beasts, and everything else that doesn’t look cute on an Instagram reel? That barely scrapes the media’s bottom shelf.
We pretend we care. We build butterfly gardens next to six-lane highways. We say “save the whales” while wolfing down factory-farmed beef. Meanwhile, entire species vanish and few notice unless the last one dies on a live stream. There are still plenty of rabbits in the park. Squirrels are doing backflips on the power lines. Things can’t be that bad, right? (Cue laugh track.) That’s the suburban fallacy: if wildlife, in the form of a random squirrel or a couple of rabbits, is still interrupting our barbecues, then the natural world must be doing fine.
It’s not. Not even close.
Biodiversity loss is hemorrhaging beneath our noses, and we act like a paper cut is the real problem. It’s not just about loving animals — it’s about survival. Nature isn’t an accessory to human life. It is life. Every web we unravel weakens the whole damn net. And yet, here in the land of infinite Amazon boxes and $5 throwaway gadgets, we’ve devalued the essentials so much that even the idea of resource overshoot doesn’t get airplay. If you can buy a phone charger for $1.99, how bad can things really be?
Then there’s the polycrisis — a word that sounds made-up but is all too real. It’s the ugly knot where climate chaos, collapsing ecosystems, economic fragility, and social unrest all tie together in a bow of doom. But that’s a mess for another article. Today’s concern is sharper: we are losing the natural world faster than we can document it. And we don’t seem to give a damn.
So yeah, be mad. Be outraged. Biodiversity isn’t just dying — it’s being murdered by apathy, convenience, and the relentless grind of short-term profit over long-term survival. And the worst part? We’ve barely started noticing.
_______________________________
🧵 1/5
#Politics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #BioDiversity
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷
MatthewToadAgain
Artemysia