...from Insects to starfish, we’re edging toward 'biological-annihilation'
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..we share the planet with as many as 8.7 million different forms of life... 86% of all plants and animals on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be named and catalogued... about 70% are insects... and many of them are as foundational to the food chain for land animals as plankton are for marine life... if insects vanish, the environment will collapse into chaos...
..there's good evidence here why her work is so highly regarded... ..this piece is absolutely brilliant..!!
...many entomologists are convinced the collapse of insect populations is now a worldwide phenomenon... 'biological-annihilation' is now an essential part of life.. main causes are over-exploitation of species, agriculture, and land conversion (and geoengineering..?) — all driven by 'runaway human consumption'...
..climate change, too, is a growing threat... old-growth trees are dying all over the world... from global climate-change-induced forest mortality.. hundreds of millions of trees have recently died and many more hundreds of millions will soon be dying... now think of all the other lives, including birds, animals,and insects, that depended on those trees...
..the oceans are rapidly heating up and dying.. ..in the '60's there were 49 'dead-zones' in the oceans.. now there are more than 400.. and the number is growing...
.."barely 14% of creatures on Earth have been logged in central databases – just 9% of those in the seas.. .. many of those species will be extinct before scientists have even registered their presence... governments are more preoccupied with finding life on Mars than on Earth.... one flight to Mars could fund research for decades in exploring and understanding life on this planet.."
.."the truth is we are still so ignorant … there is still not a plot of tropical forest anywhere in the world that has been inventoried completely – not even a hectare."
"There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.”
...we have made and are making colossal mistakes in our priorities & pursuits,
that are eventually to cost us everything.. 'existence' on this planet.
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| Earth's 6th mass extinction is underway—Humans causing 'biological annihilation' of all life. |
...extinction is not the only tragedy through which we’re living... what about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were?
..the world’s largest king penguin colony shrank 88% in 35 years, that more than 97% of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone..
..tigers still exist, but 93% of the land where they used to live is now tigerless..
..one result of all the loss is what’s known as trophic cascade.. the unraveling of an ecosystem’s fabric as prey populations boom & crash, and various levels of the food web no longer keep each other in check... these places are emptier, impoverished in a thousand subtle ways...
..and we have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar, numerical extinction)...functionally extinct animals & plants are still present, but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works...
..some phrase this as the extinction not of a species, but of all its former interactions with its environment — an extinction of seed dispersal & predation & pollination & all the other ecological functions an animal once had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist...
..the more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes...
...since 1970, earth’s various populations of wild land animals have lost 60% of their members...
..we most relate to mammals, and for every six wild creatures that once ate & burrowed & raised young.. only one remains. ...what we have instead is ourselves... if you look at the world’s mammals by weight, 96% of that biomass is humans & livestock.. just 4% is wild animals...
..7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, yet since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds..
..in “The Once and Future World,” the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: “In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in mid-ocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.”
...there were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now.
“These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes.
“We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”
.."The future will be unlike anything humanity has experienced before."..
..we are today brought up in a world far removed from nature.. never being adequately instructed how critically important a 'complete-nature' is to our continued survival on this planet..
..we can continue to keep on ignoring what we are doing to wipe out species.. but not for very much longer.
