More clarification on the extinction rate
Apr. 5th, 2004 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4life"If today is a typical day on planet earth . . . [w]e will lose 40 to 250 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 250."
-David Orr, Earth in Mind, 1994
If 40 was a lower limit ten years ago, does that mean we knew of about 40 extinctions per day? Is anyone cataloguing their names? A cursory Web search turns up some fairly extensive lists of animals that have gone extinct in the past millenium, but not nearly enough to account for all the thousands that must have died over the past two decades according to the statistics. There is also a recent extinctions database project getting underway, so I guess we'll see what happens. If a list of 40 more species could be put up every day, it might spur some action. However, I suspect the confirmation process for an extinction takes so long that such a list wouldn't be feasible.
-David Orr, Earth in Mind, 1994
If 40 was a lower limit ten years ago, does that mean we knew of about 40 extinctions per day? Is anyone cataloguing their names? A cursory Web search turns up some fairly extensive lists of animals that have gone extinct in the past millenium, but not nearly enough to account for all the thousands that must have died over the past two decades according to the statistics. There is also a recent extinctions database project getting underway, so I guess we'll see what happens. If a list of 40 more species could be put up every day, it might spur some action. However, I suspect the confirmation process for an extinction takes so long that such a list wouldn't be feasible.
