Now that is a pretty big title, and I sure don’t have all the answers. Yet it is a pretty big topic to come to grips with and this essay is rather long, so bear with if you can.
In the 19th Century the solemn and bewhiskered German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Arthur Schopenhaur, big whiskers and big intellect
This is a prescription for science: a theory is advanced as hypothesis, and then reviewed and criticised. It is then examined, and tested, and the evidence assessed. Usually the original idea undergoes modification as the evidence is added to the picture and our understanding becomes a little clearer. Finally, as the facts come to light, we see a bigger picture, a well illustrated portrait in which all the disparate information which has been gathered – and debated – forms a picture which can reasonably be interpreted one way. The picture, as it were, has become clear.
Climate change. There; the two words are out of the bag, to be considered in light of Schopenhauer’s dictum.
‘You cannot make link such a broad claim to an idea as scientifically vague as climate change!’ shout the many who cannot grasp the nature of the argument. I believe I can, with just a few solid examples.
When I was growing up in Australia through the 1960s and 1970s it seemed acceptable to mock the hippies and the fringe dwellers of society, especially when they advanced weird notions about climate change, water conservation, alternative energy sources and building houses out of straw bales. Hippies were smelly long-haired, and had odd ideas. And yet, over the intervening fifty years they’ve been proven right time and again.
In 1961 James Lovelock published his groundbreaking treatise ‘On Gaia’, the first time since the ancient Greeks that someone had seriously suggested our world was a complex and dynamic ecosystem, an entity rather than merely a collection of parts. We are now some way toward understanding what he meant: we cannot overwhelm or destroy any one part of our planet without the effects being felt globally. As small rise in air temperature can affect seasonal variations, which in turn affects shallow ocean currents, which has its effect upon biotic communities (eg the Great Barrier Reef) and so on.
Planet earth, a Gaian perspective
One year later in 1962 the American scholar Rachel Carson published her treatise on pesticides and the poisoning of the environment through groundwater contamination, ‘Silent Spring’. The books impact upon farming practises and the widespread use of chemicals cannot be overstated. When we consider the current debates over the dangers of coal seam gas in the Hunter Valley, can we afford to not believe?
Silent Spring, 1962
It used to be understood that dinosaurs were sluggish and dim ancestors of our current reptiles, big and menacing, to be sure. A nod of the sweat-stained cowboy hat to Robert T Bakker, yet another of those long-haired smelly idealists, for his tireless quest for truth. These days, you’d be hard pressed to find a serious scientist who does not understand the dinosaurs were warm blooded and active, populating a world which they dominated for 140 million years, and a great deal more in control of their environment than was thought: they didn’t simply eat their way into extinction.
Extinction, there’s the word we were rushing towards all along. Five massive extinction events in earth’s history so far and the sixth is on the way. Actually, wind back on that idea, we are in the midst of it right now, we just cannot calculate the scope and scale. That’s correct, the sixth major extinction event in earth’s history is here and now.
The sheer enormity of the issue dwarfs the senses; and it seems certain that is the major reason for inactivity. Our leaders in whom we invest a degree of trust are bound by inertia, so a call for change is doomed. Politicians think of the next election, they think in terms of a 20c rise in the price of fuel, or the provision of roads, of foodstuffs etc. They do not – generally thinking – consider the future, their use-by date has long passed by the time their descendants have a chance to vote or to judge their performance.
As a sentient species we have an obligation to our world and the other species upon it. I realise this is an emotive and wishy-washy argument, so let’s look at it from a more pragmatic viewpoint. Every species we plunge into extinction might have held the key to our survival. Medical science spends millions of dollars every years seeking a cure for cancer; they test and synthesise chemicals from plants, the greatest concentration and diversity being in the equatorial rainforests (quinine, aspirin, vinblastine).
This we know. What should concern us it what we don’t know, and will never discover. An extinct species is a chance lost, a lost chance to discover a miracle cure or a food source which might alleviate suffering and starvation.
It’s a curious fact, but we do not know to within an order of magnitude how many species we share the planet with. It might be five million, it might be fifty million, we simply do not know. Therefore, to extend the point, we do not know what we are wiping out. Yet we are wiping them out. Even in recorded history and looking at the bigger vertebrates – thus more visible and – to us – more interesting species – we note the passing of the Moa, the Passenger Pigeon, the Dodo (hence of course the sobriquet ‘as dead as the Dodo’), the Thylacine, the Irish Elk, the Lesser Stick Nest Rat, the Bali Tiger, the Javan Tiger, the Caspian Tiger and many hundreds of others.
Now link this destruction to the issue of time: most of these extinctions have been in the last 1000 years. If we concede this massacre rate we might have pretty much cleaned the planet’s surface in 10,000 years, providing we’re here to see it. And the point is that 10,000 years is a mere blink of the eye, an absolute deluge of destruction in terms of life’s cycle. Remember that the earth is roughly 4.6 billion years old and the earliest life forms we know of date back to about 3.5 billion years. The numbers are inconceivable to us, but they are scientifically accurate. More to the point, we cannot know the full consequences of our actions, we can but guess.
So it’s more than feasible to suggest that within that blink of an eye we – the most intelligent species of them all – might have made our home uninhabitable. We will have quite literally shit in our own nest.
Will we be here to see it? Statistically speaking it’s highly unlikely; it is calculated that 99.9% of all species which ever existed have passed into extinction in that 3.5 billion year span. So, speaking as an interested observer, it’s just the nature of things and there’s nothing to fear, it’s just that as a species we seem to be doing everything in our power to hasten our end. But take heart, it’s not going to happen next year.
Cecil, the black maned lion
As I was preparing this essay I began following news of the horrifically compelling case of Cecil the lion, killed by a ‘game’ hunter from the US who paid $50,000 for his pleasure and got a lot more than he bargained for. Public opinion has passed sentence on the Minnesotan dentist, so let this observation try to add a little understanding. Cecil was lured from the Hwange National Park to where he could be legally ‘hunted’ (spotlighted and staged for execution) by professional hunters who cared more for the fee and return business than they cared for the lion or for the illegality of their act. Their ‘crime’ was in getting caught, in part by the GPS collar that the animal wore, and which they attempted to destroy.
Cecil the black-maned lion was worth far more alive than dead. As a much admired drawcard for the game reserve, his earning potential over the next 20 years would have far exceeded the dentist’s blood money. The argument that controlled (and paid for) big game hunting is a legitimate and reasonable husbanding of resources for the greater ecological good is laid bare as the lie it always was; in a welter of blood, a severed trophy head and a discarded body. The idea of responsible killing for profit and for the greater good overlooks the sheer stupidity and greed of the act which is completely antithetical to the concept of ‘responsible’.
It is estimated that there are less than 30,000 lions left across Africa; whole subspecies such as the Barbary Lion have been wiped out, and this most iconic of predators stands at the gate of extinction. It is conceivable that in the next 20 years the wild lion will be completely extirpated from Africa.
And for Homo sapiens sapiens? How can a species as successful at adaptation and as numerous as we become extinct? Simply by destroying all around us and changing the environment into an uninhabitable wasteland. Our seconds-to-midnight clock is already ticking.
Want to read a little more? Though it was published very nearly 20 years ago ‘The Sixth Extinction’ by Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin (1996) is an excellent and powerfully reasoned book. Nor is it too long or too complex for the layperson.
rustyalex 