Screwing with our life support system

I don't want to be dismissed as a mooney-eyed naturalist; how can I convey this? Look at a rose- can we manufacture something better or even as good? How about plants and trees? They are more efficient, reliable, sustainable and self-propagating than any machine we could build. They don't need some fuel mined, refined and delivered to them. They get all they need and never move an inch, harvesting the sun's energy and storing it, so that other living things can use the chemical energy later on. They clean the atmosphere and are totally responsible for its breathability, and contribute to the nutrient content of the soil upon their death. They aren't just eye candy for treehuggers. They are absolutely essential for life on earth. We think we’re invincible and can engineer or build our way out of every problem. But even biospheres or any proposed extraterrestrial colonization scheme include plants and animals to provide us with food and a breathable atmosphere. Human life is totally dependent on the health of the ecosystem. We can't build something that does all that. Everything we build takes more than it gives back. So what are we going to do once the balance is thrown off and our life support dies off?

And despite our ability to make things to help us adapt, we’re so frail. Compared with any other living creature, we have a much narrower tolerance for temperature. We have few physical characteristics that help us survive and acquire food- speed, weapons. Is this why we do not feel at home in nature but view it as the enemy? Because we’re defenseless in a natural state?



Excerpts from: “By the End of the Century, Half of All Species Will be Gone. Who Will Survive?”
Julia Whitty, Mother Jones May/ June 2007

“Scientists recognize that species continually disappear at a background extinction rate estimated at about one species per million species per year, with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion. Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly norm, followed by excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining gene pool until the world is once again repopulated by a different catalogue of flora and fauna. From what we understand so far, five great extinction events have reshaped Earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 percent of the life of the day, including the dominant life forms (emphasis added), the most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed, but an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before die-off.

“Today we’re living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event…. Throughout the 20th century the causes of extinction- habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultutal monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate change- amplified exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is nothing short of explosive…. Of the 40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have assessed, 1 in 4 mammals, 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 3 amphibians, 1 in 3 conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analyzed, but fully 40 percent of the examined species of planet Earth are in danger, including up to 51 percent of reptiles, 52 percent of insects, and 73 percent of flowering plants.

“By the most conservative measure- based on the last century’s recorded extinctions- the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background rate. But eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson and other scientists estimate that the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate….

“We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been- and will never be- known to us….

“A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that 7 in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming….

“All these disappearing species are part of a fragile membrane of organisms wrapped around the earth so thin, writes E. O. Wilson, that it ‘cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered.’ We owe everything to this membrane of life. Literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods and services that can’t even imagine we’ll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify. The proverbial cure for cancer. The genetic fountain of youth. Immortality. Mortality.

“The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself.

“Biodiversity is defined as the sum of an area’s genes (the building blocks of inheritance), species (organisms that can interbreed), and ecosystems (amalgamations of species in their geological and chemical landscapes). The richer an area’s biodiversity, the tougher its immune system, since biodiversity includes not only the number of species but also the number of individuals within that species, and all the inherent genetic variation- life’s only army against the diseases of oblivion….

Various “life-forms and their life strategies compose what we might think of as [a] ‘body’…, with some species acting as the role of lungs and others the liver, the blood, the skin. The trend in scientific investigation in recent decades has been toward understanding the interconnectedness of the bodily components, i.e., the effect one species has on others. The loss of even one species irrevocably changes the [ecosystem]….

“Nowhere is this better proven than in a 12 year study conducted in the Chihuahuan Desert by James H. Brown and Edward Heske of the University of New Mexico. When a kangaroo rat guild composed of three closely related species was removed, shrublands quickly converted to grasslands, which supported fewer annual plants, which in turn supported fewer birds. Even humble players mediate stability. So when you and I hear of this year’s extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin, and think, how sad, we’re not calculating the deepest cost: that extinctions lead to co-extinctions because most everything on earth supports a few symbionts and hitchhikers, while keystone species influence and support a myriad of plants and animals. Army ants, for example, are known to support 100 known species, from beetles to birds….

“In a 2004 analysis published in Science, author Lian Pin Koh and colleagues predict that an initially modest co-extinction rate will climb alarmingly as host extinctions rise in the near future. Graphed out, the forecast mirrors the rising curve of an infectious disease, with the human species acting all the parts: the pathogen, the vector, the Typhoid Mary who refuses culpability, and ultimately, one of up to 100 million victims….

“The truth is, wilderness is more dangerous to us caged than free- and has far more value to us wild than consumed. E. O. Wilson suggests that the time has come to rename the ‘environmentalist’ view the ‘real-world’ view, and to replace the gross national product with the more comprehensive genuine progress indicator, estimating the true environmental costs of farming, fishing, grazing, mining, smelting, driving, flying, building, paving, computing, medicating and so on. Until then, it’s like keeping a leger recording income but not expenses. Like us, Earth has a finite budget."