Talking Like a Crazy Person
Crazy
I'm crazy for feeling so lonely
I'm crazy
Crazy for feeling so blue
I'm crazy for feeling so lonely
I'm crazy
Crazy for feeling so blue
-Patsy Kline
I'm going off the rails
on a crazy train
-Ozzy Osbourne
Greetings
Here's an interesting interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction. (see below) One point she makes is that no one bothers to deny that we're in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Species are going at a rate 1000 times faster than normal. And no one bothers to deny that it's human caused.
Why not? Perhaps, unlike Climate Change, there's not much of a groundswell to take any action to address it. Killing off everything else on the planet isn't worth stopping. (As if nature, the biosphere, was something "out there" , whose demise, although sad, is of no real concern).
For those of you interested in the details, the World Wildife Fund publishes the Living Planet Report. The 2014 issue is now out. Here's the highlights:
"The report writers, based on data kept by the Zoological Society of London, studied 10,380 populations of 3,038 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles from 1970 to 2010. Over these four decades, the average decline of these vertebrate species was 52 per cent – all in less than two human generations."
How does this happen? Here's one way of looking at it , from Paul Chefurka - We think the only species that matter are us, and our "resources" - i.e. livestock. Everything else is expendable.
"Human societies, which have now coalesced into the global super-organism of techno-industrial civilization, are complex adaptive systems. As such they can be described in terms of their feedback loops: negative, stabilizing loops that keep the system from disintegrating; and positive, amplifying loops that keep it growing.
As the system grows, its primary positive feedback loop requires more energy, more energy efficiency, more resources,...."Resources" in this assessment are all the things that can be used to promote system growth, whether those things are animal, vegetable or mineral, human or non-human. Anything that can't be used to facilitate growth is not a resource, and is either ignored or eliminated by the system. Domestic animals and other humans are understood to be resources, wild animals are not.
And here's a nice chart which shows the results of this program:
"I used three data sources to develop the chart: a paper by world-respected ecological scientist Vaclav Smil, called “Harvesting the Biosphere”, linked below; world population estimates from the Wikipedia article of the same name; and the UN’s Medium Fertility variant for the human population in 2050 (9.6 billion). "...I estimated the carrying capacity in this case as being about the same as the world’s wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE, with the assumption that the unassisted carrying capacity of the world would have been fully utilized at that point. I estimated the wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE as being somewhat less than the combined wild and domestic animal biomass in 1900, per Smil. I made it lower in order to account for the technological intensification of farming already well under way by that time.
Kolbert is often asked what her prescription would be to improve things. She says
"My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work. Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don’t do that. I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing.
------
Exploring another extinction
New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s upcoming lecture at UW-Madison, “The Sixth Extinction: The Legacy of the Anthropocene?” is billed in a rather apocalyptic way:
“Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinction events. We are currently bringing about the sixth. This will be the legacy of the Anthropocene, and it will determine the future of life on this planet, for all intents and purposes, forever.”
Kolbert’s book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” released earlier this year, explores the recent disappearances of species in the context of a larger extinction, one triggered by humankind. Her talk is part of a larger event at UW-Madison, “The Anthropocene Slam: A Cabinet of Curiosities,” a three-day event sponsored by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Kolbert was reached by Skype at her home in Rome, where she explained the meaning of Anthropocene (a geological term with a questionable start date of sometime between the inception of farming about 8,000 years ago and the 1950s), among other things.
Q: What’s the evidence that we’re in the middle of another extinction?
A: The obvious evidence is that extinction rates are very high. Paleontologists have this concept of “background extinction rate,” and there are different ways to measure it. Literally you measure it by going to the fossil record and seeing how long a species tends to last. If you look at our extinction rates in our own moment, and there was just a paper on this, they’re about 1,000 times higher than they should be. So that’s a very elevated rate of extinction. Now, whether that brings us to a mass extinction, which is defined by a very, very significant proportion of the world’s species dying off, that depends obviously on how long you have those elevated extinction rates.
Q: Is there any chance that evolution will save the day? That the world will adapt and adjust to us?
A: I think there are two time frames in which to answer that. The first is, if you have very elevated extinction rates, evolution is just not fast enough. You would not assume that because things are dying out faster than normal that they’re speciating faster than normal. We don’t have any evidence of that. Evolution has its own time scale, which is dependent on reproductive rates. If you’re an animal that reproduces only every 20 or 30 years, there’s a limit to how fast you can evolve. In the short term or the medium term, I don’t think there’s much chance of evolution keeping up.
Q: What’s the evidence that we’re in the middle of another extinction?
A: The obvious evidence is that extinction rates are very high. Paleontologists have this concept of “background extinction rate,” and there are different ways to measure it. Literally you measure it by going to the fossil record and seeing how long a species tends to last. If you look at our extinction rates in our own moment, and there was just a paper on this, they’re about 1,000 times higher than they should be. So that’s a very elevated rate of extinction. Now, whether that brings us to a mass extinction, which is defined by a very, very significant proportion of the world’s species dying off, that depends obviously on how long you have those elevated extinction rates.
Q: Is there any chance that evolution will save the day? That the world will adapt and adjust to us?
A: I think there are two time frames in which to answer that. The first is, if you have very elevated extinction rates, evolution is just not fast enough. You would not assume that because things are dying out faster than normal that they’re speciating faster than normal. We don’t have any evidence of that. Evolution has its own time scale, which is dependent on reproductive rates. If you’re an animal that reproduces only every 20 or 30 years, there’s a limit to how fast you can evolve. In the short term or the medium term, I don’t think there’s much chance of evolution keeping up.
In the very long term, when you look at the mass extinctions of the past, yes, eventually. Those empty ecological niches get filled and diversity ramps back up again. In the fossil record, that tends to take millions of years. We’re talking about a long time. A mass extinction is not something where we can just hope for the best. It doesn’t work that way.
Q: What can we do?
A: My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work. Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don’t do that. I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing. All of these things are very much tied up with the way we live today, with globalization and modernity and industrialization. The idea that we’re going to suddenly undo those things — unfortunately, I don’t think that’s in the cards. How this is going to play out is the question of our time, really.
Q: So what do you say to people who deny this?
A: It’s an interesting thing. You have global warming deniers, but you don’t really have habitat fragmentation deniers, or invasive species deniers. You really don’t have extinction deniers. You can argue that that’s because people don’t really care about other species. They really don’t even get worked up about that. You don’t get a lot of pushback when you say that extinction rates are really high today. I don’t think that’s debatable.
Q: Is there any happy note to end on?
A: People ask me why I wrote this book if I don’t lay out a prescription for what we should do. I make the point that I think it’s quite important that we realize what we’re doing, what’s going on. That’s the only way to even begin to think about how we might ameliorate this situation. I do want to say there are loads of things we could be doing. It’s just that there’s nothing we could do that would be easy. So, there are tons of things to do. The first thing we could do is very dramatically reduce our carbon emissions, which we could do, but we would have to choose to do that.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: The Anthropocene is a really important concept that has a lot of appeal even to people who are not geologists because it brings home that we have become the dominant force on the planet. I think it’s great that Madison is doing this conference because this is an idea that deserves to be very widely discussed. The ramifications of it need to be explored, and not just by a bunch of geologists
Q: What can we do?
A: My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work. Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don’t do that. I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing. All of these things are very much tied up with the way we live today, with globalization and modernity and industrialization. The idea that we’re going to suddenly undo those things — unfortunately, I don’t think that’s in the cards. How this is going to play out is the question of our time, really.
Q: So what do you say to people who deny this?
A: It’s an interesting thing. You have global warming deniers, but you don’t really have habitat fragmentation deniers, or invasive species deniers. You really don’t have extinction deniers. You can argue that that’s because people don’t really care about other species. They really don’t even get worked up about that. You don’t get a lot of pushback when you say that extinction rates are really high today. I don’t think that’s debatable.
Q: Is there any happy note to end on?
A: People ask me why I wrote this book if I don’t lay out a prescription for what we should do. I make the point that I think it’s quite important that we realize what we’re doing, what’s going on. That’s the only way to even begin to think about how we might ameliorate this situation. I do want to say there are loads of things we could be doing. It’s just that there’s nothing we could do that would be easy. So, there are tons of things to do. The first thing we could do is very dramatically reduce our carbon emissions, which we could do, but we would have to choose to do that.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: The Anthropocene is a really important concept that has a lot of appeal even to people who are not geologists because it brings home that we have become the dominant force on the planet. I think it’s great that Madison is doing this conference because this is an idea that deserves to be very widely discussed. The ramifications of it need to be explored, and not just by a bunch of geologists
Labels: Climate Change, Elizabeth Kolbert, paul chefurka, sixth extinction, WWF
posted by Walter @ 12:55 PM
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