MONDAY is World Environment Day and it’s sad that I have to report that the world’s environment is in a sorry state.
The latest research coming out of Oxford University in England shows that no less than 59 percent of the world’s large carnivores, a group that includes lions and tigers, and 60 percent of the world’s largest herbivores, including elephants and rhinos, are facing extinction.
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A survey of 152 countries – conducted by the Oxford University Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and the NGO Panthera – indicates that far from doing their best to rectify this situation, many countries around the world are apparently remarkably unconcerned.
Surprisingly, the survey showed that the world’s poorer countries were doing more for conservation that the world’s richest nations.
Some 70 percent of countries in Africa are apparently above average when it comes to nature conservation, while 25 percent of Asian countries and 21 percent of those in Europe are below average.
Four of the five top performing countries were in Africa (they were not named). The researchers believe that the world’s sixth mass extinction event, the first caused by man, is firmly upon us.*
I’ve mentioned this before, but just as a refresher, there have been five major mass extinction events of the past 440-million years of the Earth’s history.
The first was, naturally, 440-million years ago and the last, or fifth, 65-million years ago, the one that among other species wiped out the dinosaurs.
So, we are now firmly in the sixth mass extinction event and the first caused by human beings. The main problem is that it’s really a numbers game.
All was well while man was a hunter-gatherer, for the simple reason that there was no point in wasting time, effort and energy killing or collecting more than you could eat.
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The problem began when we gradually became agriculturalists, planting crops and keeping animals, starting about 15,000 years ago.
We settled in one place, forming larger and larger communities, and sometimes there was even a surplus of food, so the communities became even larger.
At that time the population of the entire earth was estimated to be perhaps five million.
Human society was changing, there was leisure time, pastimes like hunting for sport happened – the sixth extinction was on its way.
The Romans speeded things up with their popular circuses, up to 11,000 animals at a time were butchered for the crowds, large carnivores and herbivores disappeared from throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.
And the population was growing, 250-million in AD550. The next wave of population expansion, starting in the 1400s, saw man in his little wooden ships setting sail and spreading out.
The next wave was steam powered in the 1700s and significantly, we hit the first billion in about 1830, then 1.6-billion by the end of that century.
Today it’s over seven billion and growing.
Seven billion mouths to feed and to do that vast stretches of nature are being cleared for agriculture, and the oceans too are being stripped.
For these and other reasons we are losing at least 100 species of flora and fauna a day, one every 15 minutes.
Welcome to the sixth extinction.
*Save the Elephants News Service.
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