The extinction crisis is over: We lost.

[Richard D]

End of the Wild

The extinction crisis is over. We lost.

Stephen M. Meyer

8 For the past several billion years evolution on Earth has been driven by small-scale incremental forces such as sexual selection, punctuated by cosmic-scale disruptions—plate tectonics, planetary geochemistry, global climate shifts, and even extraterrestrial asteroids. Sometime in the last century that changed. Today the guiding hand of evolution is unmistakably human, with earth-shattering consequences.

The fossil record and statistical studies suggest that the average rate of extinction over the past hundred million years has hovered at several species per year. Today the extinction rate surpasses 3,000 species per year and is accelerating rapidly—it may soon reach the tens of thousands annually. In contrast, new species are evolving at a rate of less than one per year.

Over the next 100 years or so as many as half of the Earth's species, representing a quarter of the planet's genetic stock, will either completely or functionally disappear. The land and the oceans will continue to teem with life, but it will be a peculiarly homogenized assemblage of organisms naturally and unnaturally selected for their compatibility with one fundamental force: us. Nothing—not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, nor even "wildlands" fantasies—can change the current course. The path for biological evolution is now set for the next million years. And in this sense "the extinction crisis"—the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today—is over, and we have lost.

This is not the wide-eyed prophecy of radical Earth First! activists or the doom-and-gloom tale of corporate environmentalists trying to boost fundraising. It is the story that is emerging from the growing mountain of scientific papers that have been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences over the past decade.

Much more: http://bostonreview.net/BR29.2/meyer.html

[dweller]

1. guess it's time to evolve

into a weed.

dp

[tubbacheez]

2. Yuck, this is so sad.

And to think, there was a long period of time when humans coexisted with these dying species.

[ashmanonar]

3. i'm not so sure about that...

humans have ALWAYS been destructive little beings. there's anecdotal/archival evidence that the native americans (the wonderful, earth-friendly people) drove many species into extinction 40000 years before columbus sailed across the atlantic. they ran entire herds of large mammals (buffalo, mammoth, etc) off cliffs to make killing them easier (instead of doing so one at a time).

and before, when hominid species coexisted with other animals: they weren't human. they were hominid precursors. Cro-magnon, the sub-race most closely associated with homo sapiens sapiens, warred their way across europe, breeding out/killing the neanderthals along the way. there used to be lions in persia: destroyed by men. there were lions and other large predators in europe: they managed to wipe them out with stone/bone weapons.

i think agent smith in the Matrix puts it best: humans are a virus. before humans came on the scene, animals fit their own niches very nicely. we went from a small species of hominids (maybe a few hundred thousand on the african savannas)...to 6 billion. without checks, without predators (anymore) except our own stupidity and our growing technology.

i don't know what the solution to this is: i don't proclaim to know the answers. but i do know that we're headed for destruction one way or another.

[tubbacheez]

4. I was talking about times before what you describe.

No living being, plant or animal, can live without any impact on the ecosystem.

I actually don't believe that any animal is in perfect harmony with nature... at least not in the Disney-esque sense of total cooperation.

I'm talking about scale.


Nature is full of conflict and strife. Living creatures compete for resources all the time. The harmony of nature is not at individual levels or even tribal or pack levels, but at regional and global levels.

Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you. But over the years and months, both bears and humans persist in a stable balance.




In the examples you gave, just like in the OP, human smarts changed the game so that we win virtually all of the time. When humans win every conflict, and we do this for long periods of time, and we multiply our numbers (like in your Agent Smith reference), this results in a huge shift in the balance of nature.

Modern industrialization is the most blatant form of this imbalance. And I'm open to considering the examples you gave as potential imbalances too.

But the scale is the thing.

[ashmanonar]

8. yea, scale is important.

and if you look around you: we have the sort of numbers usually associated with bacteria in a vial. most species never get as numerous as us. 6 billion people living on a "tiny" ball of dirt that's far too small for us=big problem for the world.

and as to bears and humans: there used to be bears all over in the wooded area that used to be here (where i'm sitting)...there were also wolves and moose and fox and countless animals. where did they all go?

where one bear against one man is a sure thing for the bear, all of us against all bears is a sure thing for us. our tools and intelligence have given us an advantage that is quite frankly uncontrolled. when any stupid asshole of a human (who would have won the darwin award in a natural life) can carry a big gun, and bears have only their wits and their claws...i feel sorry for the animals of the world. older orders of humans were able to live in comparative harmony with the wilderness, if not every specific animal. but now the environment is a "nuisance" that's in the way of "progress". the woodlands are sources of wood for burning and furniture instead of wonder and rest, and lakes are places to run around on boats and pour stuff into bc we're too damn lazy to take care of the lake's beauty. mountains are obstacles to be dynamited. oceans are even bigger obstacles that we need expensive and noisy and polluting vehicles to cross. even this computer i type this on was once oil and metal that was ripped out of the ground at the cost of the environment. i do appreciate the irony, and rue that our world has us living this way. i frankly wouldn't mind living in nature if it meant we had a beautiful world to live in once again.

/ramble

[Big Kahuna]

5. I think you're giving humans too much credit...

in the extinction of the large, ice-age mammals. There were other forces at work, such as a changing climate, which left many species like mammoths with dwindling habitat and food sources. I wouldn't rag on the native americans too much. Us white guys nearly wiped out the buffalo in a very few decades.

My belief is that all civilizations eventually reach a point when they become unsustainable, people realize that they are miserable and have been enslaved. It's more trouble than it's worth. They return to the land, and a simple happier life.

[ashmanonar]

6. yes, there were extenuating circumstances involving the large

iceage mammals. the iceage ending had a great impact on them. but they COULD have survived, animals are marvelously adaptable (especially mammals). there's evidence that the iceage mammals (mammoth, sabertooths, etc) lived for thousands of years after warmer climates returned. it's known in non-linear theory as "softening the beaches". the ice-age ended, but it wasn't what killed the great specie. it was another circumstance that killed them off.

us.

:(

and i do think you're right, species/civilizations become unsustainable sooner or later. problem is, in human history (as far as we can tell) it happens every few hundred years. among animal species/epochs, it happens after thousands or millions of years. we humans are such short-lived beings that our experiences are skewed: we're a drop in the bucket as far as the earth is concerned. we think of ourselves as the pinnacle of millions of years of evolution, when we may in fact be an extinction event. earth has them fairly regularly. usually they're asteroids, comets, or meteors which destroy a lot of life but serves as a heightened evolution for the others. we humans are doing the same thing over hundreds of years, thousands if you really look back into history. we're the brillo pad of evolution: we scrub over the preexisting order and leave the deck clean for a new order. we are much like viruses, which i actually think is one of the most interesting messages in the movie. it's easy to look at humans and think that. and yet, we're still here. we haven't destroyed ourselves yet. there's still hope.

just not for the things we've already destroyed.


/ramble

[Lexingtonian]

7. Amen to that

A lot of the large animal species that went extinct after the Ice Age seem to have remarkably small numbers even at their height; the dozens and hundreds of good skeletons we've found of them, mostly because they were preserved in caves and tar pits and ice and/or too large for other animals to eat, distort the real populations rather extremely. Humans had some part in what took place, but a lot of these species were hovering on the edge for entirely different reasons.

All civilizations do have to adapt to their land or fail. I prefer to focus on the positive aspect of it, of how cultures change and adapt, and a lot of what is going on in the U.S. is something of the kind. In social matters I'm always surprised at how the best solutions seem to resemble American Indian ones, and how American culture in the large picture seems to be in a slow transition from European conventions toward motifs also in Native American culture.

[Selatius]

9. Agent smith's quotation:

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.

[Richard D]

10. Interesting

I've always found that civilization can easily be compared to cancer in the way that it spreads. It started out in just a couple locations, then started to spread. The cities got bigger and bigger by taking over and killing the surrounding nature, something cancer does to it's host as well. Parts of the cities broke off and then started cities in other locations that continued to spread and break off and so on. Sort of like cancer metastasizing.

It's a really clear picture when you look at the planet from the air, especially in areas where new development is occurring.

[ashmanonar]

11. yea, that's why i have a serious belief that humans are

different from other mammals. throughout most of our history we've EXCELLED at killing and destroying things. mammals always find an equilibrium: we make the equilibrium come to us.

we ARE a virus, so to speak. like i said in another post: we are the Brillo pad of nature. we scour the world, clearing decks for the next major epoch. happens with every epoch: usually by some disaster that is uncontrollable. now we find that we CAN control this: and we don't. welcome to the new age! :(