The Sixth Extinction
There’s a sobering article in the Washington Post called It Happened to Him. It’s Happening to You.
Now we face the possibility of mass extinction event No. 6. No big killer asteroid is in sight. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are not of the scale to cause mass extinction. Yet recent studies show that troubling earlier projections about rampant extinction aren’t exaggerated.
In 2007, of 41,415 species assessed for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, 16,306 (39 percent) were categorized as threatened with extinction: one in three amphibians, one quarter of the world’s pines and other coniferous trees, one in eight birds and one in four mammals. Another study identified 595 “centers of imminent extinction” in tropical forests, on islands and in mountainous areas. Disturbingly, only one-third of the sites surveyed were legally protected, and most were surrounded by areas densely populated by humans. We may not be able to determine the cause of past extinction events, but this time we have, indisputably: We are our own asteroids.
Human beings are a force of nature. We’ve converted over 40% of the world’s surface area into monocultural crop lands just to feed ourselves and, sadly, we waste a vast proportion of this food! According to an article in Just Food Japan is the nation that wastes the most food per head of population, more than three times the USA or Australia. The average home throws away almost 8% of the food it buys, compared to restaurants that throw away on average just under 4%. Nearly 10 million tonnes of food is wasted in Japan each year. In the USA it’s 25.9 million tons. I have not been able to find numbers for the total amount of food wastage world-wide but it would measure in the billions of tonnes. Now that food waste mostly ends up rotting and releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2.
The Earth is simply not as robust as it once was in dealing with these excess greenhouse gasses and this is entirely due to this wholesale shredding of the biosphere. Life on Earth is a complex web of inter-relationships. Lose a species of pine here and you may trigger a whole host of species losses nearby. These in turn trigger more problems. It’s the living things on Earth that regulate the climate; more-so than any other factor. All this excess CO2 is not only raising the temperature, it’s acidifying the oceans. And we people are not only letting it happen, we are making it all worse by continuing to clear land, dumping toxins into the soil, air and water, boiling our rivers to cool power stations, damning rivers to trap water and cutting off the lifelines for all manner of fish and other river creatures. We are a blight on this planet and it seems like it’s trying to shrug us off.
I believe we can turn this around however. But it’s going to take work and it’s going to take time. And alas, as a species we tend to avoid hard work and we don’t have the time it will take. Something’s gotta give. — DS
PS: For those of you in Australia, Happy Invasion Day.
Technorati Tags: Australia, Australia Day, biodiversity, climate change, disrupted nature, doom, extinction, food waste, global warming, Invasion Day, species loss, tipping point, waste
