Ecology

"SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction. Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals. In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of. Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?"

"Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many [if not all] species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid."

"The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark."

"Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology."

"The elephant bird and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1.500 years ago - precisely when the first humans set foot on the island."

"At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about one hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools."

"The extinction of the Australian Megafauna was probably the first significant mark Homo sapiens left on our planet."

"Since 1970, overall numbers are down by 69%. Livestock and the human beings who farm them now account for 96% of all the mammals on Earth. The Sumatran tiger, the Bornean orangutan and the hellbender salamander are among the million animal and plant species judged perilously close to extinction."

"The introduction of a new alpha predator can have dramatic effects, even causing cascades of extinction. This is not necessarily because the alpha predators overhunt or are even in the least bit maladaptive; this is simply the nature of alpha predators and how they relate in any given ecology. When humans came to Australia and the Americas, they were as harmless as wolves, lions, or any other big mammalian predator. Their presence caused cascades of changes throughout the ecosystem. Given that it was also a period of major climate change, a great number of species that were already under stress adapting to the new climate were tipped over the edge into extinction by the further ecological changes created by the adaptation of a new alpha predator. Our ancestors were hardly noble savages; but neither were they bloodthirsty killers bent on the destruction of all life on earth. They were animals, like any other."

"The human race currently consumes some 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. This monopoly on the earth’s resources is having a devastating effect. We are seeing the extinction of some 140 species every day, some thousands of times higher than the normal background rate. Today, right now, we are seeing extinction rates unparalleled in the history of the earth. We are undeniably in the midst of the seventh mass extinction event in the history of the earth — the Holocene Extinction. Unlikely previous extinction events, however, this one is driven by a single species. This is the true danger of overpopulation, not our inability to feed a growing population. As much as we would deny it, we depend on the earth to live. Dwindling biodiversity threatens the very survival of our species. We are literally cutting the ground out from under our feet. Increasing food production only increases the population; our current attitudes about food security has locked us into what Daniel Quinn called a “Food Race,” by comparison to the Arms Race of the Cold War."

"It's no wonder that we react so nonchalantly to the ever-mounting statistics about the crisis of mass extinction. We have a habit of taking this information with surprising calm. We don't weep. We don't get worked up. Why? Because we see humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living community. Those species are out there, in the environment. They aren't in here; they aren't part of us. It is not surprising that we behave this way. After all, this is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is certainly not our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself."

"Humans have caused extinctions since leaving Africa 60,000+ years ago; in the last twelve millennia post-foraging societies have systematically increased their exploitation and control of the Earth. Humans groups rearrange the natural world in their own image, taking the homes and food of other species for their own."

"Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct."

"Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing does—but it has the capacity to name things. As with any young species, this one’s position is precarious. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again—some would claim nearly fatally—to just a few thousand pairs. The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. They are, however, singularly resourceful. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges. In coastal regions, they gather shellfish; farther inland, they hunt mammals. Everywhere they settle, they adapt and innovate. On reaching Europe, they encounter creatures very much like themselves, but stockier and probably brawnier, who have been living on the continent far longer. They interbreed with these creatures and then, by one means or another, kill them off. The end of this affair will turn out to be exemplary. As the species expands its range, it crosses paths with animals twice, ten, and even twenty times its size: huge cats, towering bears, turtles as big as elephants, sloths that stand fifteen feet tall. These species are more powerful and often fiercer. But they are slow to breed and are wiped out. Although a land animal, our species—ever inventive—crosses the sea. It reaches islands inhabited by evolution’s outliers: birds that lay footlong eggs, pig-sized hippos, giant skinks. Accustomed to isolation, these creatures are ill-equipped to deal with the newcomers or their fellow travelers (mostly rats). Many of them, too, succumb. The process continues, in fits and starts, for thousands of years, until the species, no longer so new, has spread to practically every corner of the globe. At this point, several things happen more or less at once to allow Homo sapiens, as it has come to call itself, to reproduce at an unprecedented rate. In a single century the population doubles; the doubles again, and then again. Vast forests are razed. Humans do this deliberately, in order to feed themselves. Less deliberately, they shift organisms from one continent to another, reassembling the biosphere."

"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the form of environmental devastation. Of the earth’s estimated 10 million species, 300,000 have vanished in the past fifty years. Each year, 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct, an all-time high for the last 65 million years. Within one hundred years, between one-third and two-thirds of all birds, animals, plants, and other species will be lost. Nearly 25 percent of the 4,630 known mammal species are now threatened with extinction, along with 34 percent of fish, 25 percent of amphibians, 20 percent of reptiles, and 11 percent of birds. Even more, species are having population declines. Environmental scientists speak of an “omega point” at which the vast interconnected networks of Earth’s ecologies are so weakened that human existence is no longer possible."

"We already have a planet -- Earth! Right here! And it's going to be here for at least another twenty years! Fifteen, if you use a plastic straw!"

"We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings."

"There are no known complex organisms from other epochs that could throw long-range weapons they had fashioned. It allowed our ancestors to kill animals without touching them or they themselves being touched. To kill something, other organisms must catch them with their feet, claws, or teeth. Spiders could be considered an exception because of catching prey with webs. However, they still must kill their prey manually. The necessity of dispatching prey at close quarters levels the predator-prey playing field. The inability of any other known organism to throw was likely pivotal in providing relatively stable ecosystems for millions of years, before humans developed the throwing ability, only interrupted by geological or astrological events. While at first it was throwing rocks and spears, over the millennia we’ve gradually learned how to separate ourselves further and further from both predators and prey. The first improvement was the atlatl, or woomera, an implement allowing more energy and greater velocity to be applied to the throwing of a spear. The throwing arm together with the atlatl acts to increase the length of a lever. The premise is the same with fishing poles. Although challenging, it is possible to catch fish simply by hand-throwing a fishing line with a lure or bait. Native fishermen have been doing it for decades. However, much more line speed and distance can be attained using a fishing rod because it increases the length of the lever. Or look no further than your local park: ball throwers with those relatively new but already ubiquitous plastic grabbing sticks use the exact same principle for tossing balls for dogs to retrieve. The atlatl is believed to have been in use by early hominids in some parts of the world 30,000 years ago. The next significant step in weaponry was the bow and arrow. The oldest known evidence of arrows comes from the Sibudu Cave in South Africa. The bone-and-stone arrowheads found there are approximately 60,000–70,000 years old. Despite the early time frame, archery doesn’t appear to have been in widespread use until after the planet had lost most of its large mammals. The bow was an important weapon for both hunting and warfare from about 8,000 years ago to the mid-17th century. Bow-and-arrow use was almost certainly contributory to the uptick in animal and bird extinctions during that time frame. More recently, guns, bombs, and weaponized drones kill with limited or no interaction between the aggressor and victim. Humans have essentially turned killing into an enhanced video game."

"For the last 2.6 million years, the planet has experienced severe climatic fluctuations, during which the Earth waxed and waned between frigid ice ages and warm interglacial periods. Until approximately 60,000 years ago, there were few apparent extinctions. Suddenly, hundreds of species of mammals, flightless birds, and reptiles went extinct largely over the course of 50,000 years. These extinctions marked the beginning of a tidal wave of disappearing species that is cresting today. Because large body size is correlated with slow breeding, the largest animals are more susceptible to extinction."

"The numerous insults on the planet that humanity has created over the last 100 thousand years have achieved the capacity to greatly exacerbate any natural or human-caused event. We’re seeing this around the planet with more and more frequency. Global warming didn’t start the wildfires in Spain, Portugal, the United States, Canada, and Australia, but thanks to climate change, instead of inconsequential wildfires, they became roaring infernos. Hurricanes have always happened, but climate change is making their effect much more significant. Most people don’t understand that human population density, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity were the likely drivers of coronavirus becoming a pandemic. A loss in biodiversity usually results in a few species replacing many. These few species tend to be the ones hosting pathogens that can spread to humans and remaining animals. Rather than a loss of biodiversity, the problem is a highly contagious virus and a lack of commitment to wearing masks and social distancing. For most people […] those were wildfire, hurricane, and virus problems. When peering through the small keyhole of their existence, climate change, biodiversity loss, or population density is nowhere in sight."

"On a finite planet where a great number of organisms share the same space and depend on the same finite products of photosynthesis, the continuous expansion of one species results in the contraction of others. There is nothing more sacred to humans than our pets. While human overpopulation is occasionally mentioned in passing, pets always receive a free pass."

"The Brontosaurus had a brain no bigger than a crisp. The Dodo had a stammer, and the Mammoth had a lisp. The Auk was just too awkward. Now they're none of them alive; Each one, like Man, had shown himself unfitted to survive. Their story points a moral; now it's we who wear the pants. The extinction of these species holds a lesson for us ants."

"It is clear that only a giant change in human culture can significantly limit the extinction crisis. Humanity must face the need to reduce birth rates further, especially among the overconsuming wealthy and middle classes. In addition, a reduction of wasteful consumption will be necessary, accompanied by a transition away from environmentally malign technological choices such as private automobiles, plastic everything, and treating billionaires to space tourism. Otherwise growthmania will win; the human enterprise will not undergo the needed shrinkage, but will continue to expand, destroying most of biodiversity and further wrecking the life-support systems of humanity until global civilization collapses"

"Capitalism is not necessarily more immoral than previous social systems with regard to cruelty to humans and the gratuitous destruction of nature. As a mode of production and a social system, however, capitalism requires people to be destructive of the environment. Three destructive aspects of the capitalist system stand out when we view this system in relation to the extinction crisis: 1) capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production; 2) it must expand ceaselessly in order to survive; 3) it generates a chaotic world system, which in turn intensifies the extinction crisis."

"Let's not be too quick to blame the human race for everything. We must remember that a great many species of animals became extinct before man ever appeared on earth. At the same time it is probably true that when two husky representatives of Homo sapiens, with clubs, corner the last two birds of a species, no matter how far they have or have not evolved, both the phylogeny and the ontogeny of those birds are, to all intents and purposes, over."

"…we are fighting to leave as much biological heritage as we can for nature to do whatever it will do when we fall on our own sword and stop being the worst plague that ever existed—which is sadly what we are, collectively, in spite of the good and beautiful things that humans are also capable of."

"Life has now entered a sixth mass extinction. This is probably the most serious environmental problem, because the loss of a species is permanent, each of them playing a greater or lesser role in the living systems on which we all depend . The species extinctions that define the current crisis are, in turn, based on the massive disappearance of their component populations, mostly since the 1800s. The massive losses that we are experiencing are being caused, directly or indirectly, by the activities of Homo sapiens. They have almost all occurred since our ancestors developed agriculture, some 11,000 y ago. At that time, we numbered about 1 million people worldwide; now there are 7.7 billion of us, and our numbers are still rapidly growing. As our numbers have grown, humanity has come to pose an unprecedented threat to the vast majority of its living companions."

"Much less frequently mentioned are, however, the ultimate drivers of those immediate causes of biotic destruction, namely, human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich. These drivers, all of which trace to the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet, are themselves increasing rapidly."

"Global biodiversity decline is best understood as growing numbers of people and their rapidly expanding economic support systems crowding out other species. Conservation biologists standardly list five main direct drivers of biodiversity loss: habitat loss, of species, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. The ' found that in recent decades habitat loss was the leading cause of terrestrial , while overexploitation () was the most important cause of marine losses. All five direct drivers are important, on land and at sea, and all are made worse by larger and denser human populations."

"EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state."

"We have since built museums to celebrate the past, and spent decades studying prehistoric lives. And if all this has taught us anything, it is this: no species lasts forever."

"The human species is driving itself [at] full speed into an evolutionary dead-end. We are destroying the planet and everything we do murders animals and dismantles ecosystems. We have lost our moral compass. We think in terms of profit and power rather than ethics and compassion. We no longer have reverence for life or any sense of connection with the natural world. We see ourselves as conquerors of nature rather than citizens of a vast biocommunity. We are technologically sophisticated and morally stunted. We have no conception of the importance of nonhuman life forms in sustaining ecosystems and no sensitivity to the inherent value of species outside of our exploitative purposes. We fail to realize that what we do to animals and the earth, we do to ourselves. And all the while, we live in a fantasy land of entertainment and distractions whereby we focus more on the sex lives and surgical makeovers of movie stars than the most consequential changes unfolding in this planet in the last sixty-five million years."

"While certainly no cultures, peoples, and social systems have been as devastating to animals and the environment as modern capitalism, there was no Edenic time, no Golden Era, when humans lived in peace and harmony with one another, other species, and their natural surroundings. Problems like species extinction, resource depletion, desertification, and overall mindless destruction of life and ecosystems did not originate in European modernity but rather have deep roots in antiquity and prehistory."

"This time it is we who are the meteor crashing into the earth, and we keep crashing and crashing and crashing, never allowing the planet to recover. We are a meteor storm that continuously, repetitively keeps slamming into the planet, precluding adaptation and blocking recovery. If we cannot learn how to live on this planet and harmonize our existence with other species and the biocommunity as a whole, then, frankly, we have no right to live at all. If we can only exploit, plunder, and destroy, then surely our demise is for the greater good. Whereas worms, pollinators, dung beetles, and countless other species are vital to a flourishing planet, Homo sapiens is the one species the earth could well do without."

"It is noteworthy that human concern about human extinction takes a different form from human concern (where there is any) about the extinction of non-human species. Most humans who are concerned about the extinction of non-human species are not concerned about the individual animals whose lives are cut short in the passage to extinction, even though that is one of the best reasons to be concerned about extinction (at least in its killing form). The popular concern about animal extinction is usually concern for humans –- that we shall live in a world impoverished by the loss of one aspect of faunal diversity, that we shall no longer be able to behold or use that species of animal. In other words, none of the typical concerns about human extinction are applied to non-human species extinction."

"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

"In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology"."

"To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem."

"The biological world is constantly faced with the problem of too many animals (for example, wolves and deer) wanting to occupy a given space with specific resources, such as water, sunlight, and smaller plants and animals to eat."

"Many people are under the illusion that before the meddling of humans, the populations of different types of plants and animals tended to be pretty much constant. This isn’t really the way things work, however, in a finite world. Instead, the populations of many species cycle up and down, depending on particular conditions such as the population of animals that prey on them, the availability of food, the prevalence of disease, and the weather conditions. Even forests exhibit surprising variability. Many undergo regular cycles of burning. In fact, some species of trees, such as the giant sequoias in Yosemite, require fire in order to reproduce. These cycles are simply part of the natural order of self-organizing ecosystems in a finite world."

"A Healthy Ecology is the Basis for a Healthy Economy"

"Even when the pioneer didn't rape Nature, he divorced her a little too easily: he missed the great lesson that both ecology and medicine teach - that Man's great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes."

"If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animals and plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?"

"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 [sic] 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."

"Humans are not the only organisms to have affected the live-ability [sic] of Earth. Microbes and plants changed the chemistry of the atmosphere long before we leapt on to [sic] 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."

"A humbling blow to our arrogant outlook, ecology reveals that humans – who conceive of themselves as the most autonomous and exalted forms of life – are entirely dependent upon the natural world, biodiversity, and in particular, the crucial role nonhuman animals play in maintaining and enriching nature. Indeed, earthworms, dung beetles, butterflies, and bees are far more important to the integrity and diversity of nature than humans are – the latter being the only species one could remove from earth ecosystems with positive effect. From an ecological perspective, humans are an overpopulated, parasitic swarm, living in total ignorance of natural "laws" they foolishly think they can master, but in truth must conform to and harmonize with if they intend to survive."

"If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be."

"If we have been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces."

"Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day."

"We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others—both human and animal."