I have been trying to post something about a book I am reading, a minor controversial book, but a book which is important to us all and I cannot seem to get my thoughts into several cogent tangents or a few reasonable ideas or even some significant retorts...so you are going to get some quotes from it. (Tell me if you have read this book.)
" Calculating the background extinction rate is a laborious task that entails combing through whole databases’ worth of fossils. For what’s probably the best-studied group, which is mammals, it’s been reckoned to be roughly .25 per million species-years. This means that, since there are about fifty-five hundred mammal species wandering around today, at the background extinction rate you’d expect— once again, very roughly— one species to disappear every seven hundred years."
“I sought a career in herpetology because I enjoy working with animals,” Joseph Mendelson, a herpetologist at Zoo Atlanta, has written. “I did not anticipate that it would come to resemble paleontology.”
"But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion."
"SINCE the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels— coal, oil, and natural gas— to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually."
I have only read a third of this book thus far and it carefully follows the extinction of species over billions of years as we have grown in our knowledge and comprehension and insight. It discusses the causes, the patterns, the results. It introduced me to thousands of living things I never new had existed. Complicated life forms that hold my amazement at their survival.
Of course, there are those who say we will all go extinct anyway in the future, why focus on it? My response is: why go extinct sooner rather than later? And why at the expense of everything else?
Kolbert, Elizabeth (2014-02-11). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (p. 113). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
We should use less energy, drive less, burn less, cut down less vegetation, but the only real hope is in technological advances.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was teaching English and students had this problem, I would ask them to look at me and tell me as simply as they could what they wanted me to know. And so I ask you, what exactly do you want me know?
ReplyDeleteCalculate how much Carbon and dust that one large volcano puts into the atmosphere.
ReplyDeleteResearch coal seam fires (wherever there is coal, there are coal seam fires - some have been burning since Christ walked the planet) and determine how much carbon they put into the atmosphere.
I don't deny that humans introduce CO2 into the atmosphere (as do trees - at night when there is no photosynthesis going on) and that humans need to be tender with the planet. However, there has been massive climate change on Earth that took place without mankind and to presume that we are killing the place is a huge stretch.
Most of the CO2 is handled by the ocean and it is ground back into the core through tectonic subduction. It's one of the reasons that we are not Venus.
Nature has selected certain species for extinction since the beginning, but it deeply disturbs me that humans are contributing to the process. I don't want to live in a world without elephants, tigers and rhinos, which just might vanish on our watch.
ReplyDeleteWe need to do a better job of tending the garden, whether we are causing extinctions or climate change or not.
ReplyDeleteWith all the technology of today and the rapid way life on earth is changing, I expect that the human brain will become like the appendix, there, but useless.
ReplyDeleteI think your selected quotes tell the story well.
ReplyDeleteHis quote to powerful. Makes me want to read The World Without Us, about how and how long the earth will return to its natural state after we are gone.
ReplyDeleteWhen millions of buffalo are exterminated in a meter of a few years, I think it's safe to assume that humans are driving the extinction of many species including ourselves if we don't stop poisoning our air, water, and the very ground we grow our food in.
ReplyDeleteThat's an important read...the figures are staggering. Here in the west, we try to limit our carbon output while conserving water. We no longer shower at home. Dishes are washed every other day. We drive the Toyota (42 mpg) more and Grumpy less. (17 mpg) When I figure out more we can do, we will do it. Colleen says it well.
ReplyDeleteHello my friend. I have been absent for a long time from blogland but I see that you are still serving our group with passion. I may not always agree with you but I certainly admire your ability to stand your ground. I hope to be back in the swing of things very soon.
ReplyDeleteObviously, without human input (or output, as it were) nature would still carry on with balanced extinctions and its own natural emissions. But if this is true - "SINCE the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels— coal, oil, and natural gas— to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually" then we are hastening our own demise along with the planet's. Why would we purposely do that? Shortsightedness and greed?
ReplyDeleteIt's depressing, all right, to think of nature vanishing. Where we live, Hawaii, preserving native species is pretty much a lost cause, lost years before we showed up. We do what we can around here, with solar hot water and electricity. Many of our neighbors are similarly set up, and we see more and more solar all the time here. We have planted a lot of trees, several of them food-bearing, like the breadfruit and the avocado. Our extravagance is travel.
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