With several important issues on deck to blog about, the spring winds blew a tree over our power lines and we spent the afternoon back in the relative Stone Age, huddled next to an outside window, straining to read printed pages by what natural light the stormy day had to offer. I decided to do some spring cleaning and throw out anything I hadn’t read or in some other way utilized in the last decade or so. Just as the power came back on I came upon the following letter I wrote after reading Richard Leakey’s book, The Sixth Extinction. This letter, which is as relevant today as when I wrote it (except that there are now 7 billion people instead of 6), was published on January 10, 2000 in the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
Ina fit of arrogant optimism bolstered by surviving the Y2K non-crisis, many are asking, “Where will we be in Y3K?” Perhaps a more pressing question is,” Which species would be able to survive another 1,000 years of mankind’s reign of terror?”
Forget computer malfunctions, power outages or other inconveniences. The new millennium finds us in the midst of a mass extinction unrivaled since a giant asteroid struck Earth 65 million years ago. Unfortunately, Bruce Willis can’t bail us out of the impending Armageddon by simply blasting a menacing death-rock to smithereens.
Our species, one in 1,413,000, is out to prove that it doesn’t take an asteroid strike to unravel life’s intricate diversity. In doing so, humans are on a collision course with destiny. We are eradicating 30,000 species per year—120,000 times the natural extinction rate of one every four years.
A recent annual survey by the Chinese government found so few of their nationally celebrated, freshwater white dolphins remaining in the Yangtze River that on Dec. 29 they were written off as living relics of an extinct species. China and India now boast more than 1 billion each of a human population that is 6 billion strong and growing. Comparing those figures with the billion inhabitants on the entire planet in 1600, any game manager would clearly see a species out of balance.
As Richard Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist warns, “Dominant as no other species has been in the history of life on Earth, Homo sapiens is in the throes of causing a major biological crisis, a mass extinction…And we may also be among the living dead.”
Where will we be in another millennium? Will a future Bruce Willis save us from ourselves? Or will we have gone the way of the dinosaur and the Yangtze white dolphin?
Exposing the Big Game 
No question that homo sapien, sapien activity is causing much of the climate change, but the earth has started its magnetic pole reversal. It takes a long time to happen and could be linked to mass extinctions.
Good post, as relevant today as when you wrote it. Only, has anything changed in the last 13 years to indicate that mankind recognizes you cannot just keep popping rivets (species going extinct) on Spaceship Earth and not suffer a frightful fate in the end? If anything, we seem determined to undermine our life-support systems at an ever more frenetic pace. And that just speaks to the practical side of existence. What does it say about the (im)morality of a species that dispenses suffering and death on a global scale, often for the scantiest of reasons, to the other sentient beings that co-inhabit the planet with us? We go about our daily business like the law abiding, “I-see-nothing” citizens of the Third Reich circa 1944, keepers of a crumbling empire with mounting evidence all around of its impending collapse, clinging to the hope of a technological or providential miracle, and utterly deserving of the apocalypse that’s coming.
“…utterly deserving of the apocalypse that’s coming.”
Humans deserve to be culled out of the equation because we have no known ecological or biological niche. We’re completely superfluous and useless in that regard.
The real shame, however, is that we will force other species to suffer and go extinct with and because of us.
Yep, one way or another, it’s coming, and all people will care about is how it might effect the stock market or the price of gas.
Oh Jim, you already know the answer to the question, my friend.
The only species left will be a few plant crops to provide oxygen and feed either us or the unfortunate “meat” animals the rich will keep alive for their personal consumption. The rest will be wall to wall humans. We will have sucked up every other living thing and driven everything else to extinction both from destroying and monopolizing habitat (via human overpopulation) and due to the insatiable selfishness of those who insist they “have to have” flesh because they can wave money around and demand it.
The morlocks will then start eating each other, either secretly or openly, at some point. I don’t want to live on a planet that is merely full to brim with other humans – that would be hell incarnate.
Personally, unless it drastically changes its ways, I highly doubt the human species will be here in another 1,000 years.
We can only hope we won’t be.
For the Earth’s sake.
Reblogged this on saveamericaswolves.
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“I’d like to share with you a revelation I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.” Agent Smith, The Matrix (1999)
Which I found from The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire (http://drstevebest.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-human-empire/)
Reblogged this on The Extinction Chronicles.