Nicholas P. Money

"Perhaps we would have forestalled [human] extinction if Louis Pasteur had abandoned his studies on the germ theory. What about the plant pathologists who scorned centuries of superstitions and identified the fungi responsible for cereal diseases? They made it possible to combat the rusts and smuts that wasted crops and allowed modern agriculture to feed us in our billions. Science is so central to modern civilization that we will not willingly retreat from the continuing exploration and manipulation of nature."

"Humans and other bipedal apes have pursued our distinctively destructive path for a sliver of the total biotime in this corner of the galaxy. This most recent reshaping of nature began 3.3 million years ago, when an australopithecine made stone tools to butcher animal carcasses on the shores of the Jade Sea, or Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Weapons came later, with the use of stone-tipped thrusting spears by another hominid in South Africa 500,000 years ago, and the development of the bow and arrow by early humans 71,000 years ago. Projectile weapons, like the bow and arrow, allowed us to kill large animals without being excessively brave. Through a combination of these weapons, coupled with traps and fire, humans saw to the extinction of woolly mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed cats and ground sloths as the ice sheets receded and we pursued the animals to their last redoubts. A South American armadillo-like animal called Glyptodon was another victim of the genocide. This slow-moving vegetarian was as big as a Volkswagen Beetle and served as an easy target for hunters who ate its meat and crawled into its enormous shells for shelter. For many years, biologists argued that climate change was the most important factor in these extinctions, but more and more evidence points to the correspondence between the arrival of humans and the disappearance of large mammals. The case was pretty obvious for the spectacular bird life of islands, with a giant turkey called Sylviornis disappearing from New Caledonia soon after the prehistoric Lapita people arrived in their canoes 3,500 years ago, and the elimination of numerous species of flightless moa when the Maori reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Extinction has been reworking nature from its beginnings, but no animal has come close to having the impact that humans have had. With remarkable speed, our evolution walloped life with the power of the asteroid that obliterated the dinosaurs. The average size of mammals increased steadily throughout the Cenozoic Era that followed the crash of the Chicxulub asteroid in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago. Then, around 100,000 years ago, the big animals began to disappear. The extinctions accelerated 50,000 years ago and the total mass of wild mammals has now plunged to a sixth of its pre-human maximum. According to some models, the domestic cow is on track to become the largest remaining mammal. thumb|We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. Scepticism surrounding these doom-laden predictions about the precarious nature of nature is understandable. It takes imagination to escape from the influence of the diminishing expectations of each generation. Nobody has seen a live moa since the fourteenth century and so their absence does not upset New Zealanders today. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in my local zoo in 1914, and the most recent sky-darkening mass migrations of these birds took flight in the nineteenth century. We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. But the destruction is unabated. Despite the publicity given to deforestation, tropical woodlands continue to disappear at an annual rate of 2.7 million hectares in Brazil, 1.3 million hectares in Indonesia and 0.6 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Turning to the direct effects of climate change, one-third of the world’s coral reefs were damaged by high water temperatures in 2016. More than 90 per cent of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was affected by the process called bleaching, which happens when the dinoflagellate algae abandon their animal partners in the exquisite coral symbiosis. When reefs recover from bleaching, the original animals are replaced by sluggish coral species that support impoverished communities of marine life. This is not a normal phenomenon."

"Humans are not the only organisms to have affected the live-ability of Earth. Microbes and plants changed the chemistry of the atmosphere long before we leapt on to the stage. Bacteria initiated a momentous change 2.3 billion years ago when they began flooding the air with a noxious gas called oxygen. Microorganisms that had been happily ‘breathing’ iron, sulphur and nitrogen for the first million millennia of biology were decimated by this highly reactive, DNA-damaging molecule. As oxygen levels rose, the metal-breathers and their kin retreated to marine muds and other oxygen-free quarters. New life forms evolved to take advantage of the peculiar conditions and found a way to use oxygen to rip more energy from their food, which is why we breathe deeply today."

"We live on a Goldilocks planet that has nurtured life as it has sailed through billions of laps around the Sun. Animals evolved from microbes that resembled sperm cells that wriggled in the sea; great apes, or hominids, were born 15 to 20 million years ago; apes like us, called hominins, arose in Africa more recently, and modern humans with fine-boned skeletons have been prancing around for less than 100,000 years. Plants assemble their tissues from carbon dioxide and the power of sunbeams, and we are energized by eating them and the flesh of animals that graze on fruits and vegetables. The digestive system releases small molecules from our food and these are propelled around the body in blood vessels to sustain every cell. The architecture and operation of the body is detailed in a cluttered instruction manual written in 20,000 genes spotted along 2 m of DNA. Construction takes nine months and includes wiring a big brain that endows the owner with a sense of self and the illusion of free will. Ageing of the body is unfaltering; after a few decades, the animal stops working and is decomposed."