The Sixth Extinction

Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed. Among the many geologic-scale changes people have effected, Crutzen cited the following:
• Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet.
• Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted.
• Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems.
• Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters.
• Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.
Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. “Because of these anthropogenic emissions,” Crutzen wrote, the global climate is likely to “depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come.”

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity, though, of course, modernity is its fullest expression. Indeed, this capacity is probably indistinguishable from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness, our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete complicated tasks. As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world. “In many ways human language is like the genetic code,” the British paleontologist Michael Benton has written. “Information is stored and transmitted, with modifications, down the generations. Communication holds societies together and allows humans to escape evolution.” Were people simply heedless or selfish or violent, there wouldn’t be an Institute for Conservation Research, and there wouldn’t be a need for one. If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.

Сьогодні амфібії мають сумнівне досягнення — статус найбільш вразливого класу в світі тварин; підраховано, що швидкість вимирання групи може бути у 45 тисяч разів більшою, ніж фонова швидкість. Але темпи вимирання серед багатьох інших груп наближаються до рівнів вимирання земноводних. Вважається, що третина всіх коралів, які утворюють рифи, прісноводних молюсків, акул і скатів, чверть ссавців, одна п’ята плазунів й одна шоста птахів прямують до забуття. Втрати відбуваються повсюдно: в південній частині Тихого океану і в Північній Атлантиці, в Арктиці й у Сахелі, в озерах і на островах, на вершинах гір і в долинах. Якщо ви вмієте спостерігати, то зможете знайти ознаки вимирання на своєму власному подвір’ї.