Rethinking extinction and being less sanguine about climate change

(‘There is no reason to be sanguine about climate change. It is the most serious problem currently facing humanity and nature. It might lead to the loss of some species that we lament greatly, but it will also usher in new species, and unless there is extremely ‘abrupt’ climate change, net biodiversity is unlikely to decrease dramatically’)

The fossil record shows that biodiversity
 in the world has been increasing dramatically
 for 200 million years and is likely
 to continue. The two mass extinctions
 in that period (at 201 million and 66
million years ago) slowed the trend only
 temporarily.
 Genera are the text taxanomic level up from 
species and are easier to detect in fossils.
 The Phanerozoic is the 540-million-year period
 in which animal life has
proliferated. Chart courtesy of Wikimedia.

The way the public hears about conservation issues is nearly always in the mode of ‘[Beloved Animal] Threatened With Extinction’. That makes for electrifying headlines, but it misdirects concern. The loss of whole species is not the leading problem in conservation. The leading problem is the decline in wild animal populations, sometimes to a radical degree, often diminishing the health of whole ecosystems.

Viewing every conservation issue through the lens of extinction threat is simplistic and usually irrelevant. Worse, it introduces an emotional charge that makes the problem seem cosmic and overwhelming rather than local and solvable. It’s as if the entire field of human medicine were treated solely as a matter of death prevention. Every session with a doctor would begin: ‘Well, you’re dying. Let’s see if we can do anything to slow that down a little.’

Medicine is about health. So is conservation. And as with medicine, the trends for conservation in this century are looking bright. We are re-enriching some ecosystems we once depleted and slowing the depletion of others. Before I explain how we are doing that, let me spell out how exaggerated the focus on extinction has become and how it distorts the public perception of conservation.

Many now assume that we are in the midst of a human-caused ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ to rival the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But we’re not. The five historic mass extinctions eliminated 70 per cent or more of all species in a relatively short time. That is not going on now. ‘If all currently threatened species were to go extinct in a few centuries and that rate continued,’ began a recent Nature magazine introduction to a survey of wildlife losses, ‘the sixth mass extinction could come in a couple of centuries or a few millennia.’

Read the Aeon article by Stewart Brand - “Rethinking extinction.”