Mass Extinction Underway, Majority of Biologists Say
Washington Post, Tuesday, April 21, 1998
By Joby Warrick -Staff Writer
A majority of the nation's biologists are convinced that a "mass extinction" of plants and animals is underway that poses a major threat to humans in the next century, yet most Americans are only dimly aware of the problem, a poll says.
The rapid disappearance of species was ranked as one of the planet's gravest environmental worries, surpassing pollution, global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, according to the survey of 400 scientists commissioned by New York's American Museum of Natural History.
The poll's release yesterday comes on the heels of a groundbreaking study of plant diversity that concluded than at least one in eight known plant species is threatened with extinction. Although scientists are divided over the specific numbers, many believe that the rate of loss is greater now than at any time in history.
"The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we've seen in the past -- including those [extinctions] related to meteor collisions," said Daniel Simberloff, a University of Tennessee ecologist and prominent expert in biological diversity who participated in the museum's survey. [Note: the last mass extinction caused by a meteor collision was that of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.]
Most of his peers apparently agree. Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a "mass extinction" was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Nearly all attributed the losses to human activity, especially the destruction of plant and animal habitats.
Among the dissenters, some argue that there is not yet enough data to support the view that a mass extinction is occurring. Many of the estimates of species loss are extrapolations based on the global destruction of rain forests and other rich habitats.
Among non-scientists, meanwhile, the subject appears to have made relatively little impression. Sixty percent of the laymen polled professed little or no familiarity with the concept of biological diversity, and barely half ranked species loss as a "major threat."
The scientists interviewed in the Louis Harris poll were members of the Washington-based American Institute of Biological Sciences, a professional society of more than 5,000 scientists.
The Eroding Foundation of Life
National Park Service
Almost unnoticed, the earth's living wealth is slipping away. As human populations expand and intensify their use of the land, species of wild things and their habitats disappear. With them go not only the beauty and variety of life created over millions of years but also environmental stability and untold potential for supplying human needs. Wild plants and animals are the basis of our food, many of our medicines, and countless industrial products. As wildlife vanishes, our own life is impoverished, if not imperiled.
When scientists speak of biological diversity they simply mean variety of life: variety of species and their genetic variation, and variety of communities of plants and
animals. Over billions of years, the earth has been enriched with an abundance of life forms. As different forms of life evolved, others died out--became extinct.
Sometimes cataclysmic events like asteroid strikes, abrupt climate changes, or the advance of ice sheets caused mass extinctions. When this happened, new
species evolved that were adapted to the changed environment.
Today we are witnessing another extinction of unprecedented proportions, this one caused by humans. People are rapidly altering and destroying environments that
have fostered a wondrous diversity of organisms. By early next century, at present rates of loss, a quarter of the world's existing plant and animal species (estimated at
five million but possibly several times that number) may have vanished forever, many before they are identified and described. Some experts think that species are
dying out at the rate of 100 a day. Over-harvesting or direct human exploitation is only partly to blame.
The main reason for this decline is loss of habitat, especially in the tropics, which support perhaps three-fourths of all life forms. Each year in those regions a forested
area the size of Pennsylvania is cleared. The Amazon basin, for example, is the world's single richest region in species diversity. Deforestation threatens the basins
million or more species. Deforestation also threatens the indigenous people and their traditional way of life, which from pre-Columbian times has been compatible
with the sustainable and productive use of the forests. Things are a little better in the industrialized countries, where every year thousands of square miles of natural
habitat are converted to urban and agricultural uses, and pollutants released into the air and water degrade much of the living space that is left.
This destruction of nature is loaded with lasting consequences for our own species. If unchecked, the accelerating extinctions now going on seem likely to transform
the workings of the biosphere, and in ways not beneficial to humans. The complex array of relationships among life forms will be disrupted. The loss of species is
certain to divest us of resources and influence forever the course of evolution. National parks and other protected places are samples of the world's natural variety, often the last bastion of the earth's wild wealth. They are vital to our future well-being.
The Sixth Extinction
Text by Virginia Morell
National Geographic
The first orange rays of the sun are just beginning to touch the saw grass prairie of Everglades National Park in Florida when our helicopter pilot lifts off from a small airport nearby. He turns low over the park, skimming above the gray-green grasses and morning mist. Here and there small stands of pencil-thin native slash pine show dark green against the pale grasslands. But it’s the open marshy prairie that we seek, home to the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow.
A researcher from the University of Tennessee, Dr. Pimm is our guide. Based on his and his colleagues’ calculations, some 50 percent of the world’s flora and fauna could be on a path to extinction within a hundred years. And everything is affected: fish, birds, insects, plants, and mammals.
By Pimm’s count 11 percent of birds, or 1,100 species out of the world’s nearly 10,000, are on the edge of extinction; it’s doubtful that the majority of these 1,100 will live much beyond the end of the next century. The picture is not pretty for plants either. A team of respected botanists recently reported that one in eight plants is at risk of becoming extinct. “It’s not just species on islands or in rain forests or just birds or big charismatic mammals,” says Pimm. “It’s everything and it’s everywhere. It’s here in this national park. It is a worldwide epidemic of extinctions.”
Such a rate of extinction has occurred only five times since complex life, and each time it was caused by a catastrophic natural disaster. For instance, geologists have found evidence that a meteorite crashed into Earth 65 million years ago, leading to the demise of the dinosaurs. That was the most recent major extinction. Today the Earth is again in extinction’s grip—but the cause has changed. The sixth extinction is not happening because of some external force. It is happening because of us, Homo sapiens, an “exterminator species,” as one scientist has characterized humankind.
The collective actions of humans—developing and paving over the landscape, clear-cutting forests, polluting rivers and streams, altering the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer, and populating nearly every place imaginable—are bringing an end to the lives of creatures across the Earth. “I think we must ask ourselves if this is really what we want to do to God’s creation,” says Pimm. “To drive it to extinction? Because extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park. We can’t bring them back.” In Pimm’s eyes people should be stewards of their neighboring species. That’s why he’s here at dawn in the Everglades, fighting to save the life of a little brown-and-white songbird with a smattering of gold feathers above its eyes.
Help Save the Wolves
Just when gray wolves are roaming free again in America, some want to strip federal protections from many of these magnificent animals. This would make it easier to kill wolves throughout most of their historic range in the Lower 48 states. A new federal rule classifying gray wolves in most of the Lower 48 states as merely threatened
rather than endangered has just been announced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It's the first step by Interior Secretary Gale Norton toward putting wolves under the control of states where politicians want to eradicate these magnificent animals.
Wyoming's state wildlife agency has recently gone on record to allow wolves to be killed like skunks or jackrabbits. Idaho's legislature has voted to remove wolves from their state "by any means necessary." And some Montana politicians want to let citizens shoot wolves on sight by the end of this year. Speak up for wolves. Once all but wiped out in the Lower 48 by extermination campaigns, wolves are just now struggling for survival again in the wild. But they need protection for their fragile recovery to continue.
Spotted Owls
James McCabe
Spotted owls are stupid. They can’t live anywhere that isn’t hundreds of years old and untouched by human hands and they breed themselves into extinction by mating with a natural enemy and potential predator, the barred owl. They are simply stupid, and out of all animals, they are quite the ones most deserved of an untimely death.
If we as humans want to preserve animals, we need to do so with animals that actually serve some purpose to us. The spotted owl does nothing for our progression as a species. By saving and preserving the spotted owl, we must save and preserve its habit, which keeps us from logging those forests and puts premium timber at a greater risk for fire and other natural disasters. To me that is a waste just to save a species that, if even observed by humans, it is disturbed by their noise and subsequently dies.
If an animal is going to be naturally extinct, why should humans step in and try to save that animal? The barred owl is not an exotic; it is domestic to the Pacific Northwest just like the Spotted owl. The only difference being that the barred owl is not so picky about what it eats and the surroundings that it lives in. My point? The barred owl can take a few loggers walking around here and there without keeling over and dying. Adaptivity is the key to survival: we as humans must constantly adapt to a changing environment in order to survive. Maladaption, in a human sense, is a sign of mental disorder. Therefore, spotted owls are characteriscally mentally retarded and should be separated from other owls and properly taunted by their peers.
Through all this, one name springs to mind: Darwin. The barred owl is obviously the “fittest” of the two species. So why then are we trying to save an animal that is naturally being killed by a stronger, more adept species? That is like promoting the death of humans to save prehistoric globs of amphibious sludge because in this harsh world those globs just aren’t up to the task. Spotted owls, take note. You serve no purpose, I have a gun, and your feathers make a pretty neat hat.