End of the Wild. The Extinction Crisis is Over. We Lost.

[ramapo]

Here are some snippets from a very sobering article by Stephen Meyer of MIT...

"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."

"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..."

"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..."

Meyer details the real impact we've made upon the world, how we got here, and why there is really nothing we can do except try and slow down the inevitable loss of species. Although our best efforts will be nowhere near enough to change the course of events, we must still do all we can or else suffer a quick and near complete collapse of many of the species that make Earth a worthwhile place to live.

The loss of population of some species over the past two decades is astounding. Lions from 200,000+ to 20,000, 7,000 wild tigers left, 90% of large predatory fish such as tuna and swordfish have been taken. Species of squirrels (not the grey ones in the backyard), salamanders. turtles, prairie dogs, to name a few, will not be around much longer because of habitat loss.

It is amazing the amount of damage done to the world since 1980. Funny how it corresponds almost exactly to the rise of Reagan, "conservatism", and (no surprise) the "me" decade. The '70s were a decade full of problems but it was also a time when so many problems could've been tackled head on and perhaps the world could've been a much better place than we see today. I knew we were taking a real bad turn back then but honestly didn't think we'd be so far down the tubes as we find the world today.

Anyway here's the link...
<http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.2/meyer.html>

It's a long article but well worth printing, reading and absorbing even though you won't feel very good at the end. Meyers does however close with one thought that perhaps all is not hopeless. He writes, "We have lost the wild. Perhaps in 5 to 10 million years it will return."

I've always said Mother Nature will sooner or later get her revenge. Sorry I won't be around to see it.

[knowbody0]

1. mother earth ,sister moon, father sun, brother stars

the four directions
the four races

how can we dance while our world is burning

love to you, friend of the earth

[krkaufman]

2. Yeah, we may have a tough time killing Mother Earth

Whatever we do to her, Mother Earth will be able to recover and regenerate -- short of loss of the atmosphere. We're just a blip.

Of course, that doesn't mean we should be rushing headlong to our inevitable extinction.

[dweller]

3. I posted a similar editorial today

from Wendell Berry, that alas has sunk like a stone.

I'll give your article a read, . . . check out
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x79691

for more.

dp

[phantom power]

4. dark holes

through thinning ozone
waves fall on wrinkled earth.
gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars
speak of a drowning.

but this? this is something other--
busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
where wild things have to go
to disappear, forever.
--Bruce Cockburn

[amazona]

5. it ain't over til it's over

I don't know how much negativity I'm willing to ingest in one night. Telling people it's Over is a good way to get them to give up and move onto a cause that isn't lost.

That said, the situation is likely worse than is usually acknowledged. With bird species, the bird is not counted as extinct until the last one hasn't been seen for 50 years. By that measure, even the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is not extinct, because of the last few seen in Cuba in the late 1980s. We know they're gone because their habitat was logged but we can't yet count them as "extinct." Or the Spix Macaw, the last wild one gone December 2000 but presumably won't be officially extinct until December 2050, if anyone is still bothering to keep track by then. Not to mention all the less media-genic species that never get mentioned like Bachman's Warbler, which no one seems to know when it became extinct, but apparently it was last seen in the 1960s and no one I know expects to ever see one alive again.

[ramapo]

7. It's Over but we can't give up

That'll just make it worse

[blindpig]

12. damned straight

as bad as it is, and too long contemplation of this can reduce me a sniveling wretchedness, we must never give up. It's more than any perceived material loss we may inflict upon ourselves(medicines, whatever). I find such self-serving humanism tawdry. It's not about rights or justice, those are human concepts. Maybe its aesthetics, a rejection of the stupid and brutal and useless wreckage of the magnificent result of 3 billion years of evolution. Hell, I don't know. I do know that every time I hear about another species going down the tubes it feels like a chunk is ripped out of my soul. Biophelia I guess.
For whatever reason it would be possible to same a large part of the Earth's mega fauna and flora if a concerted effort were made to control human population and the chimera of eternal economic growth were abandoned. If pigs could fly.......
But I'm still looking for a Bachman's warbler.

[villager]

6. thanks for posting. dammit.

Not that we couldn't guess this...

It makes me saddest for my two sons, who will grow up in this ever-more-sterile world...

[hatrack]

8. E. O. Wilson said it best

To follow the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, perhaps the post-20th Century biosphere could best be named the Eremozoic - "The Era Of Loneliness".

"The Baiji is a graceful, freshwater dolphin that once abounded along a thousand miles of the Yangtze River. It may now be the world's most endangered large animal. Caught in a vise of rising pollution and indiscriminate fishing during the past century, its population fell to only 400 by 1980, to 150 in 1993, and is now below 100. Zoologists doubt the species will survive in the wild for another decade. The baiji's closest rivals for early extinction include the Sumatran rhinoceros (probably fewer than 500 individuals survive) and the giant panda of China (fewer than 1,000).

The media can be counted on to take note when the last member of each of these species dies, or, like the California condor, is removed from the wild to be placed in a captive breeding program. But for every animal celebrity that vanishes, biologists can point to thousands of species of plants and smaller animals either recently extinct or on the brink. The rarest bird in the world is Spix's macaw, down to one or possibly two individuals in the palm and river-edge forests of central Brazil. The rarest plant is Cooke's koki'o of Hawaii, a small tree with profuse orange-red flowers that once graced the dry volcanic slopes of Molokai. Today it exists only as a few half plants--branches implanted onto the stocks of other related species. Cooke's koki'o may spend its last days in this biological limbo; despite the best efforts of horticulturists to assist the plant, no branches planted in soil have sprouted roots.

Around the world, biodiversity, defined as the full variety of life from genes to species to ecosystems, is in trouble. Responding to the problem, conservation experts have in the past two decades shifted their focus from individual species to entire threatened habitats, whose destruction would cause the extinction of many species. Such "hot spots" in the U.S., for example, include the coastal sage of Southern California, the sandy uplands of Florida, and the dammed and polluted river systems of Alabama and other Southern states. Arguably the countries with the most hot spots in the world are Ecuador, Madagascar and the Philippines. Each has lost two-thirds or more of its biologically rich rain forest, and the remainder is under widespread assault. The logic of the experts is simple: by concentrating conservation efforts on such areas, the largest amount of biodiversity can be saved at the lowest economic cost. And if the effort is part of the political process during regional planning, the rescue of biodiversity can gain the widest possible public support.

In hot spots around the globe, mass extinctions of local populations have been commonplace. Among them:

More than half the 266 species of exclusively freshwater fishes in peninsular Malaysia.

Fifteen of the 18 unique fishes of Lake Lanao in the Philippines, and half the 14 birds of the Philippine Island of Cebu.

All of the 11 native tree-snail species of Moorea in the Society Islands. Those on nearby Tahiti, as well as in the Hawaiian Islands, are rapidly disappearing.

More than 90 plant species growing on a single mountain ridge in Ecuador, through clear-cutting of forest between 1978 and 1986.

These well-documented cases notwithstanding, it is notoriously difficult to estimate the overall rate of extinction. Some groups, like the larger birds and mammals, are more susceptible to extinction than most. The same is true of fishes limited to one or two freshwater streams. Most kinds of insects and small organisms are so difficult to monitor as to make exact numbers unattainable. Nevertheless, biologists using several indirect methods of analysis generally agree that on the land at least and on a worldwide basis, species are vanishing 100 times faster than before the arrival of Homo sapiens."

EDIT

[villager]

10. thanks, Hatrack...

...for telling it like it is. It's odd that even on DU, the enviro posts get short shrift (relatively speaking -- and this is a far more enlightened bunch than the norm...)

I may use "Eremozoic" in some of my own writing...

And I wonder if a DU wilderness gathering might be in order down the road...?

[villager]

11. thanks, Hatrack...

...for telling it like it is. It's odd that even on DU, the enviro posts get short shrift (relatively speaking -- and this is a far more enlightened bunch than the norm...)

I may use "Eremozoic" in some of my own writing...

And I wonder if a DU wilderness gathering might be in order down the road...?

[hatrack]

9. E. O. Wilson said it best

To follow the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, perhaps the post-20th Century biosphere could best be named the Eremozoic - "The Era Of Loneliness".

"The Baiji is a graceful, freshwater dolphin that once abounded along a thousand miles of the Yangtze River. It may now be the world's most endangered large animal. Caught in a vise of rising pollution and indiscriminate fishing during the past century, its population fell to only 400 by 1980, to 150 in 1993, and is now below 100. Zoologists doubt the species will survive in the wild for another decade. The baiji's closest rivals for early extinction include the Sumatran rhinoceros (probably fewer than 500 individuals survive) and the giant panda of China (fewer than 1,000).

The media can be counted on to take note when the last member of each of these species dies, or, like the California condor, is removed from the wild to be placed in a captive breeding program. But for every animal celebrity that vanishes, biologists can point to thousands of species of plants and smaller animals either recently extinct or on the brink. The rarest bird in the world is Spix's macaw, down to one or possibly two individuals in the palm and river-edge forests of central Brazil. The rarest plant is Cooke's koki'o of Hawaii, a small tree with profuse orange-red flowers that once graced the dry volcanic slopes of Molokai. Today it exists only as a few half plants--branches implanted onto the stocks of other related species. Cooke's koki'o may spend its last days in this biological limbo; despite the best efforts of horticulturists to assist the plant, no branches planted in soil have sprouted roots.

Around the world, biodiversity, defined as the full variety of life from genes to species to ecosystems, is in trouble. Responding to the problem, conservation experts have in the past two decades shifted their focus from individual species to entire threatened habitats, whose destruction would cause the extinction of many species. Such "hot spots" in the U.S., for example, include the coastal sage of Southern California, the sandy uplands of Florida, and the dammed and polluted river systems of Alabama and other Southern states. Arguably the countries with the most hot spots in the world are Ecuador, Madagascar and the Philippines. Each has lost two-thirds or more of its biologically rich rain forest, and the remainder is under widespread assault. The logic of the experts is simple: by concentrating conservation efforts on such areas, the largest amount of biodiversity can be saved at the lowest economic cost. And if the effort is part of the political process during regional planning, the rescue of biodiversity can gain the widest possible public support.

In hot spots around the globe, mass extinctions of local populations have been commonplace. Among them:

More than half the 266 species of exclusively freshwater fishes in peninsular Malaysia.

Fifteen of the 18 unique fishes of Lake Lanao in the Philippines, and half the 14 birds of the Philippine Island of Cebu.

All of the 11 native tree-snail species of Moorea in the Society Islands. Those on nearby Tahiti, as well as in the Hawaiian Islands, are rapidly disappearing.

More than 90 plant species growing on a single mountain ridge in Ecuador, through clear-cutting of forest between 1978 and 1986.

These well-documented cases notwithstanding, it is notoriously difficult to estimate the overall rate of extinction. Some groups, like the larger birds and mammals, are more susceptible to extinction than most. The same is true of fishes limited to one or two freshwater streams. Most kinds of insects and small organisms are so difficult to monitor as to make exact numbers unattainable. Nevertheless, biologists using several indirect methods of analysis generally agree that on the land at least and on a worldwide basis, species are vanishing 100 times faster than before the arrival of Homo sapiens."

EDIT

http://raysweb.net/specialplaces/pages/wilson.html

[TexasSissy]

13. Great article. Thanks.