The Sixth One By: Michelle Delemarre
From species long extinct to species which have yet to be discovered, countless organisms have called this beautiful planet home. The earth is over four billion years old, and became the host of life about three billion years ago. It now holds an estimated 8.7 million species, according to a report done in 2011 by Camilo Mora and colleagues. But it turns out that 99% of the four billion species which once roamed this earth have unfortunately bitten the dust. (Barnosky, 2011). A lot of them met their untimely demise as a result of a mass extinction event. There have been five over the course of hundreds of millions of years. They are defined “as about 75% of the world's species being lost in a 'short' amount of geological time - less than 2.8 million years.” (Begum, 2021).
reference to the Ice Age movies). It is being caused by humans. We’ve only been around for some hundred thousand years, yet to say humanity is destructive would be an understatement. Edward O. Wilson, an entomologist from Harvard, speculated “that the human presence in the last 12 millennia produced an average extinction of one species every 20 minutes.” (Pievani, 2013). And that doesn't even cover the species we don’t know about yet.
Through habitat fragmentation, the overexploitation of resources, and the pollution of our atmosphere, humans have created a “perfect storm,” in which multiple drivers converge and amplify one another. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform There is no way of sugarcoating this: we are on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, “Threeheaded towards the sixth one. The sixth mass quarters of the land-based environment and extinction event. And it isn’t being caused by an about 66% of the marine environment have asteroid. It isn’t been significantly altered by human actions.” being caused by a Humans are further responsible for the volcanic eruption. It degradation and contamination of ecosystems isn’t being caused through our overuse of resources on which by a small rodent animals depend. We have also hunted many who desperately species to extinction, or to the brink of wants an acorn (for extinction. The cherry on top: climate change. those who may be The mass emissions of greenhouse gasses into confused, this is a the atmosphere has caused sea levels to rise, droughts, wildfires, ocean acidification, and
The Trail│8
Michelle Delemarre, 10-06-19
