Biodiversity, Climate Change, and the 6th Extinction

Over the past day or two I having been roaming the net to try and find interesting or helpful articles for Linda's Conservation Biology class. It's depressing. It's really depressing. To quote Howard Beale "I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad." But what I didn't know was how bad they really are.  

Vertebrate populations have declined almost 60% since 1970, many insect populations (in some areas) down 70-80% in the last 30 years, Ocean dead zones have quadroupled, costal dead zones have increased tenfold since 1950, and ocean ph has dropped 0.05 in 10 years. This is only the tip of the it. There unfortunately isn't a lot of good news. Every step fowards is followed by 20 steps back.  

I believe we are in the 6th great extinction event, even if there is still some debate on it.

It's a grim prognosis.

The ironic part is that there has been a noticeable increase in wild life around Sudbury in my lifetime. I pretty sure I wrote a posting asking whether the return of eagles and sandhills was part of a larger positive trend or just some weird migration.

Does the 6th great extinction event include the mass extinction of mega-fauna when humans invaded North American and Australia? On a geological timescale it happened just a moment ago. Have you come across any sub-divisions in the latest extinction?

Off the top of my head, I'd include:
1) Isolated mega-fauna meet humans (10,000bc)
2) Urbanization spread eliminates lions and wolves from Mediterranean/Europe (500bc+)
3) Industrialization allows mass harvesting and fossil-fuel pollution (1800+)

It is scariest how extinction is natural part of evolution ... but the fact that just one species is causing the current extinction is even scarier.

One of my favorite poems about extinction is by Tennyson. In a poem mourning the death of a good friend, he regrets that Nature seems so careful to preserve species ("the type") but cares little for the individual ("single life").  But then Nature reveals herself in the "scarped cliff and quarried stone" where strata of fossils document extinction after extinction and replies, 'Why think I give a @#$@ about species either? Ha! I don't give a #@&* about anything!' ("'So careful of the type?' but no. She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go.")

It was chilling when I first read it, the idea isn't radical in our scientific age, but when it arrives in the middle of Tennyson's melancholy but noble tribute to a fallen friend, a poem deeply infused with a Christian universal love that is foreign to our secular era, it truly unsettled me.  

Modern nihilist-mongers, like Cormac McCarthy, have nothing on those gothy Victorians. McCarthy was struggling to reconcile nature's indifference with the birth of his young son, but Tennyson was struggling to reconcile nature's indifference with a whole Christian cosmology based on love. Both men are wrestling with "nature, red in tooth and claw" but McCarthy's work is focused on his personal plight, Tennyson is asking what this says about the reality we live in. At the end of The Road luck intervenes and the son is saved by a post-apocalyptic cowboy, Tennyson has no easy solution.

In Memoriam A. H. H. (1849) wrote:
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

'So careful of the type?' but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

'Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.' And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law?
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed?

Weird, I had always assumed that this poem was post-Darwin but looking at the dates I see that Origin of the Species won't be published for another decade.

The only real mention I heard of for a start date of the 6 extinction starts with the loss of mega fauna during the ice age.

Although extinctions seem to be natural events the current one is happening at an extremely fast rate (between 100 to a 1000 times faster due to human activity.

Oddly in some northern countries there will actually be a net gain of biodiversity. Species are moving north due to climate change and northern countries have low biodiversity to begin with. I would suspect that the observed increase in biodiversity around Sudbury is partly due to the reclamation of damaged lands. I believe a lot of the reclamation began km the late 70s and those areas are now reaching maturity. That coupled with the astonishing rate of urbanization and sprawl in southern Ontario is pushing species north.

It is depressing and alarming all at the same time when looking at what mankind has done with its flagrant disregard of our planet's & species needs / balance.  The short sightedness in pursuing immediate & short term gain at the expense of future generations / earth's sustainability is, in my opinion, an unspeakable horror.  

The historical record will reflect an insane cancerous mentality of producing / consuming with an infinite growth paradigm / mentality on a planet with finite resources since the explosive growth of 1800 to current as Hobbs referred to above.

On a side note, the mega fauna extinction event during the younger dryas is being re-visited.  The work of Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson and their hypothesis on the reasons for a global cataclysm is incredibly persuasive.  There is further data / evidence being gathered with their work / studies in N. America during this period.  

GRAHAMHANCOCK.COM

There is fierce disagreement amongst mainstream scientists – a disagreement that also divides alternative researchers – around what happened to the Earth, and to humanity, in the closing millennia of the last Ice Age between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. Marked by intense cold, global floods and extinctions of animal species, this 1200-year interval is known to geologists as the Younger Dryas. Many of the leading investigators are convinced the agent of the mysterious earth changes, and of the extinctions, was a comet that the struck the North American ice cap with globally cataclysmic effects. But their “Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis” is still regarded as controversial by others who have sought, more than once in the scientific literature, to declare it “disproved” only to be confronted by compelling new evidence that further strengthens the case. In this article, Graham Hancock shows how scientists consistently suppress and marginalise new knowledge that conflicts with established positions and argues that a paradigm shift is underway – a shift that will require us to reconsider everything we’ve been taught about the peopling of the Americas and about the very origins of civilization.

Since my teenage years I've been aware that by the time I'm an old man, I'll be reading news about the last rhino, the last wild orangutan, the last gorilla colony, ect.... There was a Clive Barker book where the villain's mission is to murder the last individual of as many endangered species as he can, that concept haunted me.

The hardest part to accept in all this is that there have been many successful conservation efforts, humans are causing this and can change it. From restoring American Bison from less than a 1000 to the global treaties that saved a variety of whales, collective human action can stop this. Even Sudbury is an example of a successful re-greening effort when science and politics align. That's got to be a tricky course to teach because you cannot remove the politics from it and I guess that's true for many environmental courses. Just like teaching courses about war and crime there is a huge pile of corpses hanging just outside the door while your lecturing...

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The question of what exactly happened to kill so much mega-fauna in this period is one of those curious mysteries. Even with a flood of disease-laden, fire-setting, spear-lauching invading North America, it is still difficult to believe that they alone could have completely wiped out so many whole species. Even adding in a big climatic shift driving the migrations still doesn't seem enough...

Reading between the lines in that Hancock graph I'm guessing his hypothesis is that the 'dryas' comet strike created a big gap in the growing human civilizations whose origins stretch back thousands of years earlier, it doesn't signal the start of human civilization.

The earliest cities like Jericho (9000 BC), Catalhoyuk (7500 BC), Gobekli Tepe (10,000 BC) do suggest that a network of civilizations at any early date. The crazy change in sea-levels makes the world looks so different just 10,000 years: Britain is a mountain range, the Bering Strait is a plain, Australia is joined to SE Asia. Consider most human civilizations began at the shore or beside rivers, it isn't hard to imagine that many of the earliest cities are now underwater.