Protecting Many Species to Help Our Own

[ellisonz]

By RICHARD PEARSON
Published: June 1, 2012

NEARLY 20,000 species of animals and plants around the globe are considered high risks for extinction in the wild. That’s according to the most authoritative compilation of living things at risk — the so-called Red List maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

This should keep us awake at night.

By generalizing from the few groups that we know fairly well — amphibians, birds and mammals — a study in the journal Nature last year concluded that if all species listed as threatened on the Red List were lost over the coming century, and that rate of extinction continued, we would be on track to lose three-quarters or more of all species within a few centuries.

We know from the fossil record that such rapid loss of so many species has previously occurred only five times in the past 540 million years. The last mass extinction, around 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs.

More: NY Times Story

[GliderGuider]

1. The thing that disturbs my sleep...

is the possibility that one of the endangered species we extirpate is going to turn out to have been a keystone species. Like, oh, let's say bees for example. Saying "Oops!" after that fact is understood isn't terribly useful.

The bees would get along without us a whole lot better than we would get along without them.

[RobertEarl]

2. Can we live without them?

The environment we were handed, say back in the 50's, was an environment rich in diversity, clean air and unspoiled reaches of landscape.

Most of that is now gone. Why? Because we polluted the world. When an astronaut went back a second time to space, after 10 years, he came back saying that globally it was a dirtier world.

That learned consciousness was the beginning of the modern environmental movement.

Aldo Leopold said that anytime we mess around with complex machinery the last thing you want to do is take it apart and begin throw parts away.

Can we live without the species we have thrown away? We shall see.

[Odin2005]

3. "the last thing you want to do is take it apart and begin throw parts away"

That's one of the best analogies ever ever read, thanks!