“Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth…”
Images from article ‘Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study’ in the Guardian.
See previous Guardian graphics on the decimation of wildlife ‘The Last Legs’. (posted 3 years ago- and, where I understand we are now down from 5 to 2 Northern White Rhinos in that period…)
25 years after an initial notification in 1992 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, over 15,000 scientists have signed an updated ‘warning to humanity’ on the impact we are having on our planetary system. This top image, from the paper, shows some of trajectories of specific trends, extending them from the 1992 work. Notably, these observations highlight significant continued cause for concern- though some optimism can be taken from the positive impact that has been achieved on ozone depletion levels over the period.
These trends reflect and compare with the wider work by Steffen et al (2015) The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration- from which the second image above is based on- and that shows a number of social-economic and earth system trends going back to the year 1750 (the onset of the Industrial Revolution), and pointing towards the significant shift that appears to have occurred around 1950 (the onset of the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’).
👏 Kate Orff finds a solution from nature.
Hurricane Sandy laid bare the city's inherent vulnerabilities in the face of natural disaster. At the local level, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg created the Strategic Initiative for Rebuilding and Resilience. Also, President Obama appointed a Hurricane Sandy Task Force headed by Shaun Donovan, Director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The bottom line then and still is this: how do we make New York safer to withstand a big storm? President Obama's own task force launched a design competition in support called Rebuild by Design, which awarded money to government officials to implement six innovative plans from architects and engineers selected from detailed proposals.
Among those proposals was Living Breakwaters: the placement of oyster beds and reefs off Staten Island's shore to subdue the brunt force of oncoming waves. Tottenville, Staten Island was one of the hardest hit areas during Hurricane Sandy, and, the $60 million dollar project being implemented by the New York State Governor's Office of Storm Recovery set to conclude in 2019 aims to prevent further erosion and lost acreage.
Kate Orff, the founder of the project's landscape architecture firm SCAPE, and one of Bloomberg's original task force advisors presented a Ted Talk a year before Hurricane Sandy where she lauded the unsung heroism of oysters. If you didn't already know, oysters played a starring role as a native keystone species in the waterways of New York before industry wiped them out. In a 2011 TED Talk, Orff explains just how important oyster reefs in the New York Harbor were for filtering water. What makes them such an attractive component of the breakwater - which just means any offshore structure meant to protect a harbor from weather extremes - is that they significantly curb water pollution, plus strengthen biodiversity.
To this end, Living Breakwaters partnered with The Billion Dollar Oyster Project (BOP), a nonprofit established in 2014 as an ecological restoration and education program. The BOP endeavors to return the abundance of oysters to the waters that surround the city and claims to have added more than 11.5 million oysters throughout New York's harbors which collectively filter trillions of gallons of water. The future may resemble the past as it relearns to coexist with wildlife.
"There won't be any single engineering masterstroke that is going to change the course of climate change and warming," Orff said. "Rather than sit around, geoengineer our way out of it -- that's a fantasy -- what we need is to change behavior on multiple scales." To sit back and have faith in a catch all tech-save or a form of "geoengineering," is increasingly regarded by scientists as delusion, denial, or both.
Interrelationship of biodiversity and human health via Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) twitter feed.
The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) has a lifespan of at least 272 years, and might live as long as 500 years1. That is older than the 211-year lifespan of the bowhead whale(Balaena mysticetus), the previous record-holder in the scientific literature2. It also beats the popular — but unconfirmed — tale of a famous female Koi carp called Hanako, who supposedly lived to 226 years old.
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The study also shows that Greenland shark females don’t reach sexual maturity until around 150 years old — suggesting that a century of heavy fishing could wipe out the entire species, says Bushnell.
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The shark's longevity probably arises because it expends very little energy, owing to its cold body temperature and enormous size, Bushnell says. Not all cold, large species live to such an exceptional age, so it would be intriguing to know whether the shark has any particular quirks or molecular tricks that contribute to its long lifespan, says Mario Baumgart, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Jena, Germany.
The crucial factor in the life and death of species is the amount of suitable habitat left to them. When, for example, 90 per cent of the area is removed, the number that can persist sustainably will descend to about a half. Such is the actual condition of many of the most species-rich localities around the world, including Madagascar, the Mediterranean perimeter, parts of continental southwestern Asia, Polynesia, and many of the islands of the Philippines and the West Indies. If 10 per cent of the remaining natural habitat were then also removed – a team of lumbermen might do it in a month – most or all of the surviving resident species would disappear.
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The only hope for the species still living is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself. To those who feel content to let the Anthropocene evolve toward whatever destiny it mindlessly drifts, I say please take time to reconsider. To those who are steering the growth of reserves worldwide, let me make an earnest request: don’t stop, just aim a lot higher.
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I see just one way to make this 11th-hour save: committing half of the planet’s surface to nature to save the immensity of life-forms that compose it. Why one-half? Why not one-quarter or one-third? Because large plots, whether they already stand or can be created from corridors connecting smaller plots, harbour many more ecosystems and the species composing them at a sustainable level. As reserves grow in size, the diversity of life surviving within them also grows. As reserves are reduced in area, the diversity within them declines to a mathematically predictable degree swiftly – often immediately and, for a large fraction, forever. A biogeographic scan of Earth’s principal habitats shows that a full representation of its ecosystems and the vast majority of its species can be saved within half the planet’s surface. At one-half and above, life on Earth enters the safe zone. Within half, existing calculations from existing ecosystems indicate that more than 80 per cent of the species would be stabilised.
There is a second, psychological argument for protecting half of Earth. The current conservation movement has not been able to go the distance because it is a process. It targets the most endangered habitats and species and works forward from there. Knowing that the conservation window is closing fast, it strives to add increasing amounts of protected space, faster and faster, saving as much as time and opportunity will allow.
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Half-Earth is different. It is a goal. People understand and prefer goals. They need a victory, not just news that progress is being made. It is human nature to yearn for finality, something achieved by which their anxieties and fears are put to rest.
The Half-Earth solution does not mean dividing the planet into hemispheric halves or any other large pieces the size of continents or nation-states. Nor does it require changing ownership of any of the pieces, but instead only the stipulation that they be allowed to exist unharmed. It does, on the other hand, mean setting aside the largest reserves possible for nature, hence for the millions of other species still alive.
We’ve long known that human actions—cutting down forests, building cities and using up natural resources—puts animals in danger, and can even drive them out of existence. Now, a new study has found that vertebrates—or creatures with a backbone—are dying much, much faster than they should be.
A group of researches from Mexico and the US wanted to compare the rate of extinctions in the last century to what is known as the “background rate”—the rate at which species have died off in previous centuries. They found that vertebrates, or animals with a backbone, were dying at a rate 114 times faster than the overall background rate for vertebrates, based on a conservative estimate.
Using the background rate as a guide, researchers said that only nine vertebrate extinctions should have occurred since 1900. In fact, 477 vertebrates became extinct during that time period, including 69 mammal species, 80 bird species, 24 reptiles, 146 amphibians, and 158 fish.
“These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way,” the paper states.
