Nothing compares to what’s under way today
Gone
Mother Jones
by Julia Whitty
04/25/07
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 catalog 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 …. Today we’re living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, perhaps, the saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, pigs. But as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to what’s under way today...
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/gone.html
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
--------
Animal Extinction: The Greatest Threat To Mankind
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2494659.ece
Informant: NHNE
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Julia+Whitty
Mother Jones
by Julia Whitty
04/25/07
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 catalog 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 …. Today we’re living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, perhaps, the saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, pigs. But as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to what’s under way today...
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/gone.html
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
--------
Animal Extinction: The Greatest Threat To Mankind
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2494659.ece
Informant: NHNE
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Julia+Whitty
rudkla - 1. Mai, 18:00
