The Sixth Great Extinction
Mar. 21st, 2004 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4life"The Sixth Great Extinction" is not just the way anarcho-primitivists like Derrick Jensen and the folks at eces.org describe what's happening to our planet. Many scientists also believe that's what's happening.*
The reasoning is simple: about 70 more species go extinct every day.** (There is very little doubt that this would not be happening if human civilization did not exist.) This rate could increase or (hopefully) decrease, but let's assume it remains roughly constant for a while. Then 25,550 species will die out in the next year; over the next century, the number is 2.5 million.
Now, I don't know how many species of multicellular life there are, but it's not a bad bet that at this rate, within a geologically very short timespan, a large fraction of them will be gone. How large a fraction depends on how long this can go on before civilization falls, and what lingering aftereffects might continue to cause extinctions after that fall. But it's clearly not a pretty picture.
*From a question at the Quiz Bowl college trivia tournament at UCLA. Some pretty smart people go to these, so the question writers have to check their facts pretty carefully.
**From a t-shirt sold by Northern Sun. Will try to find a better source later.
(originally posted October 15, 2003)
The reasoning is simple: about 70 more species go extinct every day.** (There is very little doubt that this would not be happening if human civilization did not exist.) This rate could increase or (hopefully) decrease, but let's assume it remains roughly constant for a while. Then 25,550 species will die out in the next year; over the next century, the number is 2.5 million.
Now, I don't know how many species of multicellular life there are, but it's not a bad bet that at this rate, within a geologically very short timespan, a large fraction of them will be gone. How large a fraction depends on how long this can go on before civilization falls, and what lingering aftereffects might continue to cause extinctions after that fall. But it's clearly not a pretty picture.
*From a question at the Quiz Bowl college trivia tournament at UCLA. Some pretty smart people go to these, so the question writers have to check their facts pretty carefully.
**From a t-shirt sold by Northern Sun. Will try to find a better source later.
(originally posted October 15, 2003)
