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The Crisis of the Natural World

May 22, 2021

The Crisis of the Natural World

Mountain Goat, North Cascades National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The natural world is in a state of crisis, and we are to blame. We are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, the biggest loss of species in the history of humankind. So many species are facing total annihilation. Nearly one-third of freshwater species are facing extinction. So are 40 percent of amphibians; 84 percent of large mammals; a third of reef-building corals; and nearly one-third of oak trees. Rhinos and elephants are being gunned down at rates so alarming that they could be completely wiped out from the wild by 2034. There may be fewer than 10 vaquita—a kind of porpoise endemic to Mexico’s Gulf of California—due to illegal fishing nets, pesticides and irrigation. There are 130,000 plant species that could become extinct in our lifetimes. All told, about 28 percent of evaluated plant and animal species across the planet are now at risk of becoming extinct.

The rapid decline in species has occurred in recent years: 60 percent of the planet’s wildlife populations have been lost in just the last 50 years. Scientists warn that in the coming decades, if we don’t take action, more than 1 million species may vanish from the Earth forever.

Our fellow Earthlings are being overhunted, overfished and overharvested for our food, clothing and medicines. And the ones that we don’t kill are losing their homes as we destroy their natural habitats to make space for our farms and cities and to extract fuels, minerals, timber and other resources for human society. And the habitats that we don’t completely eradicate we pollute with a vast array of toxic elements, from pesticides and plastics to carbon dioxide, fracking chemicals and invasive species…

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A Lesson from the Holocaust for the Era of the Sixth Extinction

February 1, 2016

A Lesson from the Holocaust for the Era of the Sixth Extinction

Holocaust candles

Holocaust Remembrance. Photo: Ted Eytan/Flickr CC.

This article is the first in a two-part series.

My mother didn’t die when so many others did – and that means she lived to give birth to me.

I write about this now, because it has everything to do with today, even though the cataclysm in which so many perished happened more than 75 years ago. I owe my life, in part, to people who were willing to risk theirs, whose names I will never know.

The story is etched in my bones. I remember its telling and retelling as far back as my early childhood memories. The details are blurred with the passing of time. No one who lived it is still alive. I would not know how to verify the specific facts. So I write this story to the best of my memory, knowing its truth in the deepest and widest sense.

My mother’s family were Dutch Jews with a several century history of calling Holland their home. They were Sephardic Jews, descendants of those who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the 1500s. They came from a people who had a well-refined intuition about when it was time to flee and had found the ways to do so.

Sixth Extinction
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert.

More Jews from Holland died in the Holocaust than from any other Western European country. An often used estimate is 75%. Other estimates range as high as 90%.

How did this part of my family manage to survive? And what might be the implications for our times of climate crisis, when we are already living in what is called “The Sixth Extinction” (with dozens of species going extinct every day), when the future of life as we know it may hang in the balance?

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The “Sixth Extinction” Adds Urgency to Habitat and Climate Protection

July 6, 2015

The “Sixth Extinction” Adds Urgency to Habitat and Climate Protection

It’s now unequivocal: the sixth great spasm of species extinctions has begun.   We – homo sapiens – are its cause. And only we can slow it down.

Over the last century, the average rate of loss of vertebrate species — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals – has been up to 100 times higher than the background extinction rate, according to a new study published last week in the journal Science Advances.

In order to help settle the question of whether a sixth extinction episode has indeed begun, the scientific team chose assumptions that would tend to minimize evidence that it has.  As a result, their calculations almost certainly underestimate the severity of the extinction crisis under way.

“[W]e can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a mass extinction under way – the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history,” the researchers write.

The study team included scientists from Princeton, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of Florida.

The last episode of mass extinction occurred about 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and about half of all species living on Earth at the time were wiped out.

A huge crater off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula dated to the time of this event suggests an extraterrestrial impact as a leading cause.

But, in a first, the current mass extinction is driven by human activities – deforestation, dam-building, over-harvesting, wetland-draining, pollution and the myriad other ways we destroy the lives and homes of the rich diversity of animals with which we share the planet.

And this will not end in some Darwinian-style victory for we humans.

 

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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