Joseph Clark37 said:Poor Dodo 😢
How many species have gone extinct in the last 200 years? Maybe 30 to 40%?
In the next 200 years, because of our expansion, we will likely cause the extinction of the other half. It makes me lose respect for the human race. We deserve to be put in our place by Mother Nature one day...
The book mentions that 900 animal species have disappeared over the last 500 years—if you crunch those numbers, what does that percentage look like? It also notes that over 40% of today's mammals, amphibians, and birds are facing extinction.
Humans have had such a massive impact on ecosystems and the global climate that we could actually define a new geological epoch based on us. Some argue this era kicked off with the Industrial Revolution, while others point to the dawn of agriculture about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. This supports the common idea that environmental destruction is a relatively recent phenomenon.
However, extinctions aren't anything new. They are a natural part of the planet's evolutionary history. About 99% of the four billion species that ever evolved on Earth are now gone. For every ten species that die out, new ones emerge. That's just how life works. There is a natural background rate for how often extinctions occur: roughly 10% of species are lost every million years; 30% every 10 million years; and 65% every 100 million years. What keeps ecologists up at night is that modern extinctions are happening much faster than nature intended. This has happened five times before in history—what we call the "Big Five" mass extinction events. In each of those instances, the world lost more than 75% of its species in a relatively short window (and by "short," I mean in geological terms—less than two million years).
So, the real question is: what can be done to mitigate this? How do we slow it down when there are so many global crises that this isn't even the first thing on people's minds? It's a long process, and frankly, I fear it might be too long.
