The Holocene Extinction Event -Are Humans Destroying the Planet's Web of Life?

“Humanity doesn’t need a moon-base or a manned trip to Mars. We need an expedition to planet Earth, where probably fewer than 10 per cent of species are known to science, and fewer than 1 per cent of those have been studied beyond a simple anatomical description and a few notes on natural history. At the same time, we are engaged in a genocide against those species, known and unknown; the sixth mass extinction has begun."

E.O. Wilson, Harvard evolutionary biologist and author of "The Creation."

n the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe", we have slowly begun to recognize a potentially lethal threat to our planet and human existence.

Harvard's E.O. Wilson, our modern-day Thoreau, believes that the "depth and complexity of living Nature still exceeds human imagination" -somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms have been discovered to date, and most of the world around us remains unknowable. Each species functions as a self-contained universe with its own evolutionary history, its own genetic structure and its own ecological role. Human life is tangled inextricably in this intricate and fragile web. Understanding these small universes, Wilson says, can foster human life.

Wilson urges us to forget about life's origins and focus on the fact that while nature achieves "sustainability through complexity," human activities are driving myriad species into extinction, thus depleting the  and jeopardizing civilization. Wilson celebrates individual species, each a "masterpiece of biology," and acutely analyzes the nexus between nature and the human psyche.

Five great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 per cent of the life, including the dominant life forms; the most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off.

Today, Wilson outlines, we're living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, some experts believe, the sabre-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, the human species terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, and pigs.

Now in the 21st century the extinction rate is nothing short of explosive due to habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate-change. The World Conservation Union's Red List - a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species - tells a haunting tale of unchecked and accelerating biocide.

Fully 40 per cent of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51 per cent of reptiles, 52 per cent of insects, and 73 per cent of flowering plants.

By the most conservative measure - based on the last century's recorded extinctions - the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background rate, with somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are erased from existence every day. Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100.

A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science.

Vanishing species are part of a fragile membrane of organisms wrapped around the Earth so thinly, writes Wilson, that it "cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered".

This thin, fragile membrane of life is our source of life: the air we breathe, the food we eat, cures and services that we can't even imagine we'll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify. To destroy Earth's living membrane is to destroy existence itself.

Posted by Jason McManus.

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Related Galaxy posts:

Under a Green Sky -90% of Earth's Past Extinction Events Caused by Global Warming
The Day the Seas Died: What Can the Greatest of All Extinction Events Teach Us About Climate Change?
The Timeline For 21st Century “Climate Change Events”
Coming of Age in the Holocene
"Snowball Earth" Challenged
Bigger Threat than Global Warming -Mass Species Extinction
Monitoring Climate Change -Experts Say We Need Lunar Observatories
Unraveling the Mysteries of -Clues to Climate Change on Earth?
Arctic Discovery –Ancient Connections & the Global Climate
Stephen Hawking: Climate Change Greatest Threat Facing Planet
Arctic’s Legendary Northwest Passage is Ice-Free for the First Time in Recorded History
Coming War for the Arctic?

Source links:

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2494659.ece

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0393330486/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

Comments

[Freemon Sandlewould]

Your website seems to be floundering! .. it has some wonderful liberal outlooks. I wonder why it is not much more popular! How can America be so ignorant. I can not believe people do not believe this and racial activism are not more important that learning science and math.

[Dr. J]

It's a tide that can not be turned. Although I understand how it's all for the larger universal good, it is still a sadness.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–William Butler Yeats

[Joseph]

"Humanity doesn’t need a moon-base or a manned trip to Mars.We need an expedition to planet Earth..."

If we can survive on the moon and mars, we only prove the point that we don't require all of the unknown species to continue our existence (on earth or not). Not that I don't think we should be exploring earth more, but the two fields shouldn't be compared as if one is needed more than the other.

It doesn't matter how long we study and take care of the earth, one day it will all be gone. The faster we colonize other planets, asteroids, ect, ensures we'll have at least a 50% or grater chance of surviving longer than our host planet.

Even if the sixth mass extinction has begun, who's to say we wont survive? As far as I know, we're the most intelligent and resourceful beings ever to exist in the universe. Is the goal to sustain all known life and leave no room for new species? What if the real answer to saving all life on earth was only to be found after humans were extinct and a new species had taken over?