Saving species for our sake as much as theirs

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With the permission of mothers, allow us to turn attention from moms on their special day to a related subject.

Of anyone, however, mothers would be the ones who can most easily empathize with a life-giver who provides everything she can to her children and often does so with too-little appreciation or even realization of the toll that her generosity has taken on her.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mother Nature. We got you a card.

Not a card, really, but an exhaustive 1,500-page report compiled over the past three years from thousands of scientific reports by hundreds of international experts that begins to recognize how human activity now threatens the extinction of a million species, what that could mean for human survival and what we must do to slow the progress of that threat.

Released last week by a United Nations panel of 132 nations, including the United States, which signed off on its findings, the report warns that over the past century as the world’s population has grown past 7.7 billion people, the abundance of plant and animal life has fallen by more than 20 percent. Of an estimated 8 billion species of plants and animals — of which only 1.3 billion have been catalogued by scientists — an estimated 1 billion distinct species could go extinct within decades if current trends are allowed to continue. Among those 1 billion species threatened with extinction are 40 percent of amphibian species, a third of corals and a third of marine life.

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Human-caused climate change, not surprisingly, is a factor in the threat of extinction as it shrinks and shifts habitat that plants and animals had adapted to. But those impacts have been compounded by further loss of habitat, pollution, degradation and deforestation for resource extraction and agriculture, overfishing and related impacts.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-saving-species-for-our-sake-as-much-as-theirs/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=f0c4db68b6-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-f0c4db68b6-228635337