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Nature On The Eve Of Destruction -- The UN Extinction Report

This article is more than 4 years old.

M.R.Hasasn

One million species are close to extinction, thanks to Homo sapiens.

Thus warns a landmark new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), presented at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary meeting earlier this month in Paris.

Sir Robert Watson, Chair of the IPBES, said, “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

The Report highlights the urgency of global decarbonization and the need to increase nuclear power along with all other non-fossil energy sources. But while global warming will have a multiplier effect, this rapid decline in species is not just the result of climate change, but of humans all on their own.

Watson did say that it is not too late to make a difference. But we must start now at every level, from local to global, to make transformative changes, the type of changes the Nations of the World can’t seem to make on anything.

We grow enough food to feed the world and we can’t even agree on how to do that.

The U.N. assessment is the product of an international team of about 150 experts performing systematic reviews of over 15,000 scientific and governmental sources, which also draws on indigenous and local knowledge.

Pablo Lopez Luz

The authors of the Report ranked the five direct drivers of change in nature with the largest relative global impacts so far. All can be thought of as some form of loss of natural habitat.

These culprits are, in descending order: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species.

Let’s face it. Nature is losing the battle against humans. The wild places of the world are disappearing, and will continue to disappear, until they are no more. We even have a term for this human-dominated time period – the Anthropocene.

The “Global Population Speak Out” campaign has captured the faces of this era, with photos both of Nature and of Humans, that drive home these points with exquisite beauty and sorrow. Some are shown here from their campaign to raise awareness of population pressures and habitat destruction.

The trees and plants left alive in the latter part of this century will be mostly those we want, or can’t get rid of. Some of the animals will be the ones we’ve spent billions to keep alive, but most will be those we eat and those we like. Plus those that can not only survive being around us but thrive, like cockroaches and rats.

Mark Gamba/Corbis

Unfortunately, most people on Earth don’t know or care very much about this future, especially the 4 billion people that are just looking for a regular meal and clean water that doesn’t make them sick.

And that’s the real problem. Keeping almost 8 billion people alive, soon to be 10 billion, simply takes a lot of space and resources. We’re burning billions of acres of pristine Indonesian rain forests to plant palm oil trees (Scientific American). Palm oil is now the world’s cooking oil of choice since it’s one of the healthiest oils available with a low price tag and a long shelf life.

But the low price tag doesn’t cover destroying one of the two key rainforests on Earth. On the other side of the planet, the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed for soybeans, sugar, coffee, cattle and wood.

I’m not saying that life will disappear and the Earth will become a dead planet. It’ll just become more like our back yards. Some nice and manicured, some dumpy with weeds. With a few nicely kept parks. But definitely not natural.

However, humans need a certain amount of natural wildness for our own survival. Over 35% of our food needs pollinators, which this report says are in danger. There’s a reason that oxygen is in the air. It doesn’t come out of the ground. Organisms have to put it there. Continuously. If the photosynthesizing organisms in the upper 100 meters of the ocean die, and we keep deforesting the planet, we won’t be breathing for very long.

No one remembers the passenger pigeon, but when my grandfather was born, the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world. People would gaze in wonder as a flock of ten million pigeons would block out the sun with a deafening roar that would last an hour as a single huge flock passed overhead.

But by 1900, their billions had dwindled to a few dozen wild flocks. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo.

The passenger pigeon fell to the fallacy that no amount of human exploitation could endanger a creature so abundant. We are infected by that same fantasy today – that the Earth is so large, the oceans so deep, the atmosphere so vast, that nothing we do can really harm it.

This is completely wrong. Humans have the numbers, and the technologies, to pretty much destroy the surface of this planet. Or remake it into some dumbed-down version of a specimen garden.

Zak Noyle

For over 100,000 years, the Earth had only 10 million people on it at any one time. But the population began to grow dramatically just before the beginning of the Common Era, rising to 300 million during the Middle Ages and to a billion at the beginning of the Industrial Age.

Then 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999 and 7 billion in 2011. 8 billion will be achieved by 2022, 9 billion by 2030 and 10 billion before 2040.

This exponential growth is textbook for a bacterial colony in a petri dish, right before it dies from outpacing its food sources and drowning in its own waste.

Humans now comprise the largest single mammalian mass on Earth. The rest is almost all our food and friends, mainly the animals we domesticated plus a bunch of xenobiotics we’ve transported far from their habitats that seem to able to survive anything.

Hardly any vertebrate mass left on land is wild or natural (In These Times).

Let that sink in for a minute. Most of what people see in National Geographic, on the Discovery Channel, in the Blue Planet series or in movies about animals, IS ALMOST ALL GONE. Humans have dammed a third of the world’s rivers. We have covered, destroyed or altered half of the world’s land surface. We use up most of the fresh water faster than it can be replenished.

And this is all continuing apace. The U.N. warnings come as no surprise to the scientific community. We’ve been watching this train wreck in slow motion since the 1960s.

It’s just that now we’re seeing the darkness at the end of the tunnel.

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