End of the Wild

[chlamor]

End of the Wild
The extinction crisis is over. We lost.

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.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=56&ItemID=7620

[bloom]

1. While people are no doubt to blame

for wiping off thousands of species from the planet, I like to think maybe the world is due anyway (wishful thinking... :shrug: )

-----------------

Mass extinction comes every 62 million years, UC physicists discover

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor


Thursday, March 10, 2005


With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.

Their findings are certain to generate a renewed burst of speculation among scientists who study the history and evolution of life. Each period of abundant life and each mass extinction has itself covered at least a few million years -- and the trend of biodiversity has been rising steadily ever since the last mass extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life forms went extinct about 65 million years ago.

The Berkeley researchers are physicists, not biologists or geologists or paleontologists, but they have analyzed the most exhaustive compendium of fossil records that exists -- data that cover the first and last known appearances of no fewer than 36,380 separate marine genera, including millions of species that once thrived in the world's seas, later virtually disappeared, and in many cases returned....

<snip>
Muller's favorite explanation, he said informally, is that the solar system passes through an exceptionally massive arm of our own spiral Milky Way galaxy every 62 million years, and that that increase in galactic gravity might set off a hugely destructive comet shower that would drive cycles of mass extinction on Earth.


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/10/MNGFIBN6PO1.DTL

[seemslikeadream]

2. WHEN BUSH LIES OUR PLANET DIES

Dust Bin America
http://www.ericblumrich.com/sp.html




Smothered Hope

withered rope you hang what's empty can't remain to put it simply
in time cry the hollow words to sing with false disguise
smothered hope fly from sorrow for a new divine tomorrow
i just don't want to know anymore
life shifts up and down everybody knows it's wrong
why don't you care? now do it seem fair?
it's not in the rhyme or reason
so it goes with every season crawl to top fall through bottom
first hand love is really rotten
slice of life find what's plenty inch towards a sanctuary
light with me inside the womb
i know everyone everybody knows it's me
it's my voice, my voice cries out obscenity
sightless eye regard my past sometimes it should
i just don't want to know anymore.

skinny puppy