Scene 5

The Sixth Mass Extinction

A couple of quotes from Oscar Wilde to start this off:

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."

Simple is the history of my own peasant-like life going back to living on the periphery, as I've always seemed to, outside Ann Arbor on a farm that was being crushed out of existence by encroaching suburbia. We were not wealthy, we were steadily going bankrupt. Nevertheless, my father, being an original health food nut -- health food was the term for organics before organics was popularized -- helped me to become acquainted with ways of growing food that shunned the modern industrial techniques with a deep sense of moral integrity and an organic understanding that messing with nature in that way was also messing with our own biological make up. He just turned 92 in September, still healthy and active. He may be the living proof of his own beliefs or just the lucky recipient of good genes.

Whatever reasons for his long and healthy life, a love and desire for good quality food, how it is nurtured into existence, how it can taste, is the legacy he passed on to me. While his tastes are a bit simpler, which suits him just fine, I learned to cook my own so I could have it the way I want it, and that was something I set myself to learning early on. All the women in my life have been very happy with that odd ball non hyper-masculine characteristic.

There are many other advantages to growing up a simple peasant with never enough extra cash to buy stuff. You learn skills. Kind of like the teach the man to fish and he will never need a hand out parable kind of skills. When I got tired of burning my brain cells out writing strategic plans to help corporations grow and expand like cancer, I could and did turn to those skills. I can also personally attest that having such practical abilities is also very appealing to the opposite sex, much more so than beating one's chest and shooting people dead. The result for me has been many opportunities to practice Darwin's evolution of love theory, with all the compassion, empathy and humane consideration that goes with it.

And that's why I am so concerned for so many people today who have become specialists within these technological institutions where they don't even know what the ultimate purpose of what they do is really about. The end result is a kind of perpetual life of political contradiction, a proverbial double bind with no way out. They are just part of the machinery of the Matrix. And as such, subject to its illusions, like watching an NCIS emersion military/cop show displaying all the characteristics of a high tech police state in a positive feel good light, along with Ninja fighting women acting out the female version of hypermasculinity.... speaking of watching the end on tv.

Oh, and one more comment. A friend once said "it's hard to be positive about the mess made of the environment." This goes back to my own practice here in SW Washington State where once were giant firs and cedars that rivaled California's Sequoias and Redwoods in size. I live daily with the site of clearcuts and the invisibile loss of a once marvelous ecosystem. Some of it I can see, some of it I only know by theory. But there is this force of life that is also ever present and cannot be ignored. And so my practice is to face reality and by a kind of Buddhist non attachment, come to see the deeper beauty and love it.

Meanwhile... Complexity is the history of civilization, and as Tainter shows in his Collapse of Complex Society, closely linked to all historical collapses.

Which brings me to this scene's topic, The potential for Sixth Mass Extinction crisis. In Craig's YouTube presentation on my Home page, he talks about it as "A Great Dying." This particular mass extinction is not only human related, it is, by all the evidence so far, human caused.

Some science about this issue as a launch pad. Let's begin with information from a science-grounded site called The Center for Biological Diversity:

Their Mission in their words:

At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.

We want those who come after us to inherit a world where the wild is still alive.

That statement of course makes them automatically suspect of subjectivism to a denier of any anthropogenic-related damage to the planet. So that's to be a given, admitted bias up front, we don't need to dwell on that. Humans are going to be biased when they interpret science. Find somewhere else to argue about that issue. Let's move on to some of their articles.

Human Population Growth and Extinction.

We’re in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction crisis. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history.

The current mass extinction differs from all others in being driven by a single species rather than a planetary or galactic physical process. When the human race — Homo sapiens sapiens — migrated out of Africa to the Middle East 90,000 years ago, to Europe and Australia 40,000 years ago, to North America 12,500 years ago, and to the Caribbean 8,000 years ago, waves of extinction soon followed. The colonization-followed-by-extinction pattern can be seen as recently as 2,000 years ago, when humans colonized Madagascar and quickly drove elephant birds, hippos, and large lemurs extinct. [1].

(This video offers a graphic representation of how that process is driven by humans putting their needs before an ecosystem's)

The first wave of extinctions targeted large vertebrates hunted by hunter-gatherers. The second, larger wave began 10,000 years ago as the discovery of agriculture caused a population boom and a need to plow wildlife habitats, divert streams, and maintain large herds of domestic cattle. The third and largest wave began in 1800 with the harnessing of fossil fuels. With enormous, cheap energy at its disposal, the human population grew rapidly from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1975, and over 7 billion today. If the current course is not altered, we’ll reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9 to 15 billion (likely the former) by 2050.

No population of a large vertebrate animal in the history of the planet has grown that much, that fast, or with such devastating consequences to its fellow earthlings. Humans’ impact has been so profound that scientists have proposed that the Holocene era be declared over and the current epoch (beginning in about 1900) be called the Anthropocene: the age when the “global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development” dominate planetary physical, chemical, and biological conditions [2].

Some facts to put this in perspective:

Humans annually absorb 42 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity, 30 percent of its marine net primary productivity, and 50 percent of its fresh water [3].
Forty percent of the planet’s land is devoted to human food production, up from 7 percent in 1700 [3].
Fifty percent of the planet’s land mass has been transformed for human use [3].
More atmospheric nitrogen is now fixed by humans that (sic) all other natural processes combined [3].

And visual illustration never hurts:

Graph source: Scott, J.M. 2008. Threats to Biological Diversity: Global, Continental, Local. U.S. Geological Survey, Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife, Research Unit, University Of Idaho.

When the population of a species grows beyond the capacity of its environment to sustain it, it reduces that capacity below the original level, ensuring an eventual population crash.

So where does wildlife stand today in relation to 7 billion people? Worldwide, 12 percent of mammals, 12 percent of birds, 31 percent of reptiles, 30 percent of amphibians, and 37 percent of fish are threatened with extinction [6]. Not enough plants and invertebrates have been assessed to determine their global threat level, but it is severe.

Extinction is the most serious, utterly irreversible effect of unsustainable human population. But unfortunately, many analyses of what a sustainable human population level would look like presume that the goal is simply to keep the human race at a level where it has enough food and clean water to survive. Our notion of sustainability and ecological footprint — indeed, our notion of world worth living in — presumes that humans will allow for, and themselves enjoy, enough room and resources for all species to live.

A virus is very likely not conscious enough to consider whether there would be enough room and resources for all species to live while it goes to work expanding its population and eating its host. That's virus nature, I suppose. We don't ask such a species to think about what it does.

Is that human nature as well?

Many hasten to assure me that I'm ignoring human nature when I talk about the ethical and moral implications of raising consciousness about apocalypse. It's a dilemma all right. They seem to have their consciousness about the problem and I seem to have my own, very different perspective, though I do seem to share it with a few others. Are we who do share our perspective perhaps a different species, then? I hope not.