We -- not an asteroid -- may cause next mass extinction
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
There are roughly eight million plant and animal species in the world. One of them — homo sapiens — may soon wipe out a million of the rest. And we’re just getting started.
That’s the depressing bottom line from a comprehensive new United Nations report on biodiversity. Species are going extinct at a rate unmatched in human history; and the die-off is accelerating. It sounds melodramatic to say that we’re killing the planet, but that’s what the scientific evidence tells us. And ignorant, short-sighted leadership makes optimistic scenarios elusive.
Species extinction is one of those problems whose vast scale, in space and time, makes it difficult to comprehend, let alone address globally. As any paleontologist can tell you, species appear and disappear naturally at a gradual rate with no human intervention. And in the 3.5 billion-year history of life on earth, there have been five abrupt mass extinctions when more than three-quarters of all living species were quickly wiped out. The most recent came 66 million years ago, when an asteroid strike is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs.
If there are intelligent observers 66 million years from now, their scientists may conclude that the sixth mass extinction was caused by us; and that we saw what we were doing but lacked the wisdom and courage to stop ourselves.
The next species to go extinct may be some scruffy weed-like plant or weird little insect that you’ve never heard of. But that weed may synthesize a chemical that acts as a magic bullet against certain deadly cancers, or that insect may control the population of some other insect that harbors a plaguelike virus. We’ll never know. They’ll be gone.
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