Extinction Rate on the Increase

A little off topic but this ties in with the environment and how the actions of mankind is contributing to our own extinction. I read a report, produced by World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London, and the Global Footprint Network, that says land species have declined by 25%, marine life by 28%, and freshwater species by 29% over the past 35 years.

This Living Planet Index tracks populations of 1,313 vertebrate species - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals - from all around the world. By tracking wild species, the Living Planet Index is also monitoring the health of ecosystems. This global trend suggests that we are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history.

This chart by courtesy of World Wildlife Fund.

Since the late 1980s, we have been in overshoot – our ecological footprint has exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity – as of 2003 by about 25%. Effectively, the Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand – people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.

Humanity is no longer living off nature’s interest, but drawing down its capital. This growing pressure on ecosystems is causing habitat destruction or degradation and permanent loss of productivity, threatening both biodiversity and human well-being.

The eminent Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, and other scientists, estimate that the rate of extinction is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than what has historically been recorded as normal. Humanity’s pillaging of Earth’s biodiversity is directly resulting in animal populations declining by 30% between 1960 and 2000.

The Yangtze river dolphin is a case in point. Scientists believe it is extinct, as successive searches for the freshwater mammal have proved fruitless. There are many reasons for its rapid path to extinction: collisions with boats, habitat loss and pollution. These factors all point back to one perpetrator: mankind.

The implications of such drastic reductions in biodiversity are already having an impact on human life. “Reduced biodiversity means millions of people face a future where food supplies are more vulnerable to pests and disease and where water is in irregular or short supply,” said James Leape, director general of WWF.

“No one can escape the impact of biodiversity loss because reduced global diversity translates quite clearly into fewer new medicines, greater vulnerability to natural disasters and greater effects from global warming. The industrialized world needs to be supporting the global effort to achieve these targets, not just in their own territories where a lot of biodiversity has already been lost, but also globally.”

How mankind tackles the growing problem of greenhouse gas production in these next few years, to maybe a decade, will determine the quality of our very future existence. No matter what ‘solution’ we come up with, the way in which we conduct our business as well as our leisure time will be forever changed. Wildlife, on the other hand, will always depend almost entirely on us for everything, including their very survival.

It is estimated that life on this volatile planet has existed for 439 million years. During this time, there has been five great extinction events. Each event wiped out between 50% - 95% of life. During the aftermath of each near-extinction period, studies have shown that it takes roughly 10 million years to attain the biodiversity that existed before the near die-off.

Today we are living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We kicked off this event nearly 50,000 years ago as we migrated out of Africa with our Stone Age tools into a pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changed it forever by wiping out at least some of the unique mega fauna of the times, including, the sabre-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, and pigs.

But that period of this current extinction does not compare to what we are doing today. We have participated in the degradation and overexploitation of habitat, we have created agricultural monocultures and we have brought about climate-change and the rate of these changes are increasing exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is nothing short of explosive. 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, unaddressed, and accelerating biocide.

It is extremely difficult for our imaginations to fathom the devastating effect human existence is having on plant and animal life on this planet. The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no scientist believes that the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species on earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed between best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.

Those of us who do not give much thought to extinctions usually, when it is brought to our attention typically at a zoo or university level class on the subject, think of the plight of the rhino, tiger, panda or blue whale. But these sad sagas are only small pieces of the extinction puzzle. The overall numbers are truly terrifying. Of the 40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have assessed, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one in three amphibians, one in three conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analyzed, but fully 40% of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51% of reptiles, 52% of insects, and 73% of flowering plants.

Every week, the world loses two breeds of its valuable domestic animal diversity, according to estimates just published in the 3rd edition of the World Watch List for Domestic Animal Diversity. The publication, issued by FAO and the United Nations Environment Programme, results from ten years of data collection in 170 countries, covering 6 500 breeds of domesticated mammals and birds: cattle, goats, sheep, buffalo, yaks, pigs, horses, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, pigeons and even ostriches.

"In the past 100 years, we have already lost about 1,000 breeds," says Keith Hammond, Senior Officer of Food and Agriculture Organization's Animal Genetic Resources Group. "Our new findings show that domestic animal breeds continue to be in danger: one third are currently at risk of extinction."

In a 2004 analysis published in the journal Science, Lian Pin Koh and his colleagues predict that an initially modest co-extinction rate will climb alarmingly as host extinctions rise in the near future. Graphed out, the forecast mirrors the rising curve of an infectious disease, with the human species acting all the parts: the pathogen, the vector, the Typhoid Mary who refuses culpability, and, ultimately, one of up to 100 million victims.

More than 16,000 species of the world’s mammals, birds, plants and other organisms are at present officially regarded as threatened with extinction to one degree or another, according to the Red List.

With all of these grave and, hopefully, eye-opening numbers, we still cannot expect mankind to be concerned to actually improve the situation. Unless we can come up with a way in which to make saving the diversity of this planet profitable, biodiversity and the future of mankind are at risk.

There is plenty to go around on this planet to support our population as well as the several billion more that is expected, but we need to learn how to grow it, share it and use it. If we continue to cause other species to go extinct we cannot help but increase our chances of extinction because we are all connected.