I grieve for all that we’ve lost due to capitalist industry and commerce, and for so much more that we still have to lose… 😢
There have been five mass extinctions of life in Earth’s history, caused by cataclysms such as volcanic eruptions or meteorite impact. Scientists warn that human activity is now causing species to go extinct at a thousand times the normal background rate. Leading experts in the field predict that half of the world’s estimated eight million species will be extinct or at the brink of extinction by the end of this century unless humanity changes its ways.
Why don’t we react in unbridled outrage to the devastation of the natural world taking place before our eyes? A major reason is that we don’t realize what we’ve lost. Whatever conditions people grow up with are the ones they generally consider normal. This is a tribute to the amazing plasticity of the human mind, but it means that we tend to take for granted things that should never be accepted.
The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces. It’s only when we read accounts of wildlife from centuries ago that we realize how much is gone.
The next time you go for a hike in nature, and marvel at its beauty, take a moment to realize that you are looking at a pale, shrunken wraith of what it once was. An accumulation of studies around the world measuring the declines of species and ecosystems indicates that overall we’ve lost around 90% of nature’s profusion.
We live in a ten percent world.
Grief - Rage - Resignation - Defiance ... how do you respond to all this?
@breadandcircuses Great article, but I feel the author missed out on highlighting a (if not the) major cause head on, one we can all choose to impact in our day to day choices. Animal agriculture. The primary cause of species extinction, deforestation, river pollution, marine dead zones, and biodiversity loss across the globe. The main threat to 86% of the 28,000 species currently facing extinction. (1/2)
"The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces. It’s only when we read accounts of wildlife from centuries ago that we realize how much is gone. One eighteenth-century writer, standing on the shores of Wales, described schools of herrings five or six miles long, so dense that “the whole water seems alive; and it is seen so black with them to a great distance, that the number seems inexhaustible.” In the seventeenth-century Caribbean, sailors could navigate at night by the noise of massive shoals of sea turtles heading to nesting beaches on the Cayman Islands. In the Chesapeake Bay, plagued today by polluted dead zones, hunters harvested a hundred thousand terrapins a year for turtle soup. In the nineteenth century, passenger pigeons would blot out the sun when they appeared in massive flocks throughout the eastern United States. The last one died in a zoo in 1914.
The Great Dying
In normal times, extinction is a natural part of evolution: new species evolve from prior existing species, meaning that, rather than dying out, “extinct” species are really the progenitors of new ones. When extinctions occur, however, as part of a mass extinction, they represent a grave and permanent loss to the richness of life. Species exterminated by human development are wiped out from nature’s palette, terminating any possibility of further evolutionary branching. The average lifespan of a species is roughly a million years—the unfolding story of each one is, in E. O. Wilson’s words, a unique epic. We’ve seen how life’s prodigious diversity on Earth can be understood as nature’s own evolved intelligence, earned over billions of years. Through extinction, we are dumbing down nature, eliminating the plenitude it has so painstakingly accumulated."
@breadandcircuses Maybe I've lived too long, but I notice it's quieter.
Less bird calls, less vague shadows rummaging around in the undergrowth, way less bugs in the air, less things plopping in the water when I get too close, less fish hugging stones under water and so on.
It's disheartening to see it disappear.
Above all other feelings, it makes me profoundly sad.
@justafrog I don't know about you, but I've been alive for seven decades, and I know for certain -- not only through lived experience, but also from hard scientific evidence -- that there is much less natural life in my surrounding environment. As you said, it's extremely sad, disheartening, even crushing to know that during my lifetime so much decimation has occurred, so very many extinctions. Death has been much stronger than life during the last 70 years.
@breadandcircuses@justafrog Capitalist driven animal agriculture can be largely thanked for that. But few people, even those angry about the outcome, want to accept this.
"Capitalism is the only system of economics compatible with human dignity, prosperity, and liberty. To the extent we move away from that system, we empower the worst people in society to manage what they do not understand.” – Friedrich A. Hayek