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bending_sickleEdward O Wilson (2006)
Part 2: Decline and Redemption
Blinded by ignorance and self-absorption, humanity is destroying the Creation.
There is still time to assume the stewardship of the natural world that we owe to future human generations.
8. The Pauperization of Earth
“According to estimates by a team of experts in 2004, climate change alone, if left unabated, could be the primary cause of extinction of a quarter of the species of plants and animals on the land by mid-century.”
“The United States leads the world in the number of bird species lost during the past quarter century. […] Most of the losses occurred in Hawaii, America’s notorious ‘extinction capital’ and one of Earth’s most biologically ravaged hot spots.”
“…266 species of the exclusively freshwater fishes of peninsular Malaysia have been extinguished, as have 15 of the 18 unique fishes of Lake Lanao, in the Philippine Islands, and 50 species of the cichlid fishes of Africa’s Lake Victoria.”
“The decline of Earth’s biodiversity is an unintended consequence of multiple factors that have been enhanced by human activity. They can be summarized by the acronym HIPPO, with the order of letters corresponding to their rank in destructiveness.
H habitat loss, including that caused by human-induced climate change
I invasive species […]
P pollution
P human overpopulation, a root cause of the other four factors
O overharvesting
When a species declines toward extinction, not one but two or more factors are usually responsible.”
“A huge difference exists between temperate and tropical regions in biodiversity loss. First, by far the greater part of biodiversity exists in the tropics […]. The pattern of loss also differs. During the past two millennia deforestation became sever first in the temperate countries. […]
Now temperate forests have begun a limited regeneration […] with an overall increase in cover of 1 percent during the 1990s. But tropical forests have continued to retreat, dropping 7 percent in the same decade. Between 1970 and 2000 the size of populations in temperate grasslands fell by 10 percent […] tropical grasslands […] declined by a staggering 80 percent.”
“Humans take up a quarter of the accessible water released to the atmosphere […] and more than half the runoff […]. By 2025, some 40 percent of the world’s population could be living in countries with chronic water scarcity.”
“Not surprisingly, then, the highest rate of species endangerment per unit area occurs in freshwater ecosystems.”
“…in China, where chiefly because of pollution 80 percent of the 50,000 kilometers of major channels can no longer support fish of any kind.”
“…Central Asia’s Aral Sea. From 1960 to 2000 its area shrank by one-half, because of the blockage of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Its salinity has increased almost fivefold, and its fisheries have collapsed. Among the collateral Aral Sea catastrophes, 159 bird and 38 mammal species have disappeared from the two river deltas.”
“Even the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the largest and best protected [shallow tropical water coral reef] in the world, declined 50 percent in cover between 1960 and 2000. Overall, about 15 percent of the world’s coral reefs are gone or judged to be damaged beyond repair, and another third could be lost during the next thirty years if the present downward trends continue.”
“Most kinds of insects and other small organisms are still so difficult to identify and monitor as to prevent precise censuses.”
“…ongoing extinctions are very roughly 100X higher than before the arrival of modern Homo sapiens about 150,000 years ago. The 100X figure is an order-of-magnitude, or nearest powers-of-ten, estimate. The extinction rate, in other words, is likely more than 50 times and less than 500 times the prehuman baseline.”
“A marked decline during the past three decades [in amphibians] is thought by many experts to foreshadow a similar drop in the rest of global plant and animal biodiversity.
The first signs of the amphibian crisis were detected more or less simultaneously in scattered parts of the world during the 1980s. In the next decade species extinction in frogs and toads in particular was recognized as a major environmental problem and given a name, the Declining Amphibian Phenomenon”
“32.5 percent of amphibian species worldwide were classified as threatened with extinction, compared with 12 percent of reptiles, 23 percent of birds, and 23 percent of mammals.”
“But with certainty we are the giant meteorite of our time, having begun the sixth mass extinction of Phanerozoic history. We are creating a less stable and interesting place for our descendants to inherit. They will understand and love life more than we, and they will not be inclined to honor our memory.”
9. Denial and Its Risks
“Dear pastor, what I fear most is the pervasive combination of religious and secular ideology of a kind that sees little or no harm in the destruction of the Creation. The following speech might be given by the visionary who rank biodiversity of little account and sees humanity ascending profitably away from Nature and not to it. […]:
[…] Let any species that bloicks progress slip away. […] Even if the world is biologically impoverished in furthering the interests of humanity, our species is in no danger. When one resource is exhausted, our scientific and technological genius will find another.
[…] We can keep some nature parks the way we preserve historic old building, to remind us of the past. Perhaps we will even create new ecosystems with advanced bioengineering and stock them with species of our own making. […]
[…] In coming generations medicines will be synthesized from chemicals off the shelf, food grown from a few dozen genetically enhanced crop species, and the atmosphere and climate controlled by computer-guided sustainable energy sources. […] The planet will become a literal, not just metaphorical, spaceship. Our finest minds will be up there on the bridge of voyaging Earth, reading monitor displays, touching buttons, keeping us safe.
Such is the philosophy of exemptionalism, which supposes that the special status on Earth of humanity lifts us above the laws of Nature. Exemptionalism takes one or the other of two forms. The first, just expressed, is secular: don’t change course now, human genius will provide. The second is religious: don’t change course now, we are in the hands of God, or the gods, Earth’s karma, whatever.
A cheerful faith in human destiny dismisses the rest of life through successive denials. The first says, Why worry?”
“With the global species extinction rate now exceeding the global species birthrate at least a hundredfold, and soon to increase to ten times that much, and with the birthrate falling thought the loss of sites where evolution can occur, the number of species is plummeting. The original level of biodiversity is not likely to be regained in any period of time that has meaning for the human mind.”
“The second stage of denial takes form in a question, Why do we need so many species anyway?”
“…the third stage of denial predictably emerges: Why rush to save all of biodiversity now?”
“Successful recoveries of critically endangered species will of necessity continue to be rare exceptions. So we come back to the Lazarus dream. The sobering truth is that all the zoos in the world can sustain breeding populations of a maximum of only two thousand mammal species, out of about five thousand known to exist. A similar limitation exists for birds. Botanical gardens and arboreta are more capacious, but would be overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of plant species needing protection. The same is true of fishes that might be saved in aquaria.”
“There is no solution available, I assure you, to save Earth’s biodiversity other than the preservation of natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably.”
“All that human beings can imagine, all the fantasies we can conjure, all our games, simulations, epics, myths, and histories, and, yes, all our science dwindle to little beside the full productions of the biosphere.”
10. End Game
“The human hammer having fallen, the sixth mass extinction has begun. This spasm of permanent loss is expected, if it is not abated, to reach the end-of-Mesozoic level by the end do of the century. We will then enter what poets and scientists alike may choose to call the Eremozoic Era – the Age of Loneliness. We will have done it all on our own, and conscious of what has happened.”
“The first five spasms took ten million years on average to repair by natural evolution.”
“…some quixotic writers have toyed with the idea of last-ditch measures. They say, Let’s conserve the millions of surviving species and rave by deep-freezing fertilized eggs or tissue samples for later resurrection. Or, let’s record the genetic codes of all the species and try to recreate organisms from them later. Either solution would be high-risk, enormously expensive, and, in the end, futile. […] Biologists haven’t the slightest idea of how to build a complex autonomous ecosystem from scratch. By the time they find out, they may discover that conditions on the humanized planet make such a reconstruction impossible.”
“Passing beyond these options leaves a final one for the exemptionalists to pose: go ahead and pauperize the biosphere, in the hope that scientists may someday be able to create artificial organisms and species and put them together in synthetic ecosystems. […] There are words appropriate for artifactual biodiversity, even where it exists only in fantasy: desecration, corruption, abomination.”
“Humanity is in a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption that can open out by the end of the century, when the global population is expected to peak at around nine billion, 50 percent more than what it was in 2000, then commence to recede. During the remainder of the bottleneck period, per capita consumption will also rise, increasing pressure on the environment.”
“By 2002, 188 had signed the Convention on Biodiversity initiated ten years earlier at the Rio Summit (the United States […] remains a nonsignatory; the others holding back, at this writing in 2006, are Andorra, Brunei, Iraq, Somalia, East Timor, and the Vatican). […] the signatories pledged cooperative action to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss significantly by 2010. At the same time, 130 of the 191 UN members, again not including the United States, have amended their constitutions to protect their national environment, in most cases directly or implicitly including biodiversity.”
“The hottest of hot spots [high concentrations of species], those in most critical need of immediate attention, are scattered around the world, sometimes in surprising locations. Those on the land identified by Conservation International include the following:
• California’s coastal and foothill sage
• The tropical forests of southern Mexico and Central America
• The forests and dryland habitats of the Caribbean islands, especially Cuba and Hispaniola
• The tropical lowland and midlevel forests of the Andes
• The cerrado (savanna) of Brazil
• Brazil’s Atlantic forest
• The forests and dryland habitats of the Mediterranean Basin
• The forests of the Caucasus Mountains
• The Guinean forests of West Africa
• Multiple habitats of the Cape region, southern Africa
• Multiple habitats, especially the forests, of Madagascar
• The rainforests of India’s Western Ghats
• The rainforests of Sri Lanka
• The forests of the Himalayas
• The forests of Southwest China
• Most of the forests of Indonesia
• The rainforests of the Philippines
• The heathland of Southwest Australia
• The forests of New Caledonia
• The forests of Hawaii and many other eastern and central Pacific archipelagoes
Twenty-five of the hottest spots, or more precisely the intact biologically rich habitats within them, cover a mere 2.3 percent of Earth’s land surface, yet they are the exclusive homes of 42 percent of the planet’s vertebrate species […] and 50 percent of its flowering plants.
The hot spots are not merely points of concentration of biodiversity. They are by virtue of their limited are the location of many of the planet’s most vulnerable species.”
“Species are the preferred unit of measurement of biodiversity because they are by and large natural units in evolution. They can be more precisely delimited than ecosystems, and they are easier to identify than the complex ensembles of genes that distinguish them from other species.”
“When that is done [the use of genera], do the hot spots change? The answer is yes but not much; they remain mostly the same as those based on species alone. However, their rank order shifts, and in the following manner. The hottest of the hot spots on Earth, far out front with 478 genera of plants and vertebrates all its own, is Madagascar […], the Caribbean islands (269), the Atlantic Forest of Brazil (210), the Sundra archipelago of Indonesia (199), the mountains of East Africa (178), the South African Cape (162), and southern Mexico plus Central America (138).”
“Hot-spot studies […] applied to marine environments. Three of the four major zones, namely estuaries, coral reefs and other shallow-water habitats, and the floor of the deep sea, are fragmented into small and often threatened places in a manner similar to the hot spots on the land. The fourth marine zone, the high seas, also varies in biological richness from one part of the globe to another, but its patterns are hard to pin down, because of the readiness with which so many oceanic fish and other open-water organisms travel long distances.”
“It may be feared that saving biodiversity will be so expensive as to endanger the economy, that is, the market economy. This assumption is a mistake.”
“In 2000 Conservation International sponsored a conference of biologists and economists, entitled ‘Defying Nature’s End,’ to address this matter [economic cost]. […] They concluded that in order to put a protective umbrella over the twenty-five hottest spots on the land then recognized (nine more have since been added to total the aforementioned thirty-four), plus core areas within the remaining tropical wilderness […] would require one payment of about $30 billion. The benefit […] would be substantial protection for 70 percent of Earth’s land-dwelling fauna and flora. […] …approximately one part in a thousand of the annual gross world product, that is, gross domestic products of all countries combined. By coincidence the latter amount, roughly $30 trillion, also happens to be the estimated rate of the ecosystems services given free by Earth’s remaining natural environment.”
“Existing marine reserves within the 370-kilometer exclusive economic zones of the coastal nations cover only 0.5 percent of the ocean surface, and except for restrictions on whaling, there is no protection at all for life on the high seas.”
“To regulate a reserve network covering 20-30 percent of the ocean surface would cost between $5 billion and $19 billion annually. That outlay could be met by eliminating the current perverse subsidies given to the fishing industry, which fall between $15 and $30 billion annually – and are responsible in the first place for the overharvesting and falling yield of preferred species.”
“…conserving biodiversity is the best economic deal humanity has ever had placed d before it since the invention of agriculture.”
“Those living today will either win the race against extinction or lose it, the latter for all time. They will earn either everlasting honor or everlasting contempt.”
* ibid
