WHAT ANIMAL EXTINCTION MEANS FOR OUR OWN EXTINCTION

Whenever extinction events are brought up, they are always talked about in the past tense. As events that happened millions to billions of years ago to species humanity has never known. But what many don’t know is that there is currently an extinction event happening – and it has been going on for hundreds of years.

Our extinction event, known as the Holocene extinction, is one that is rarely talked about, but it’s fast-burning and very real. We’ve already begun to see signs of it, from animal extinction to biodiversity loss within our oceans. This alone is scary enough, but the actual situation is far more serious that it appears.

A record number of species are going extinct and, with things like increased agriculture and overhunting, human beings are the cause of it. Food for our ever increasing necessity for our survival, but at what cost?

Much of the world’s natural land is being destroyed to make way for farming, which in turn destroys the habitat for the species that reside there. It’s estimated that 60 percent of mammalian life is now livestock, with only 4 percent wild mammals.

But mammals aren’t the only creatures being affected by human activity. Along with the increased need for food is an increased need for water, causing humans to build dams that can have harsh effects on aquatic life in rivers. Birds have also seen a rapid decline as loss of habitat plays a part, as well as being captured by people who collect them.

According to the University of Michigan, loss of biodiversity can have severe consequences for the environment and can be even more devastating for the planet than climate change. Lack of biodiversity can have a list of cascading effects, such as an increasing loss of food production and undrinkable water as the natural species are unable to maintain these fragile ecosystems.

One stark example of this danger is the fast-dying coral reefs, which are home to hundreds of species of fish. In 2017, more than half of the Great Barrier Reef went through a bleaching event due to humancaused climate change, which killed off coral that had existed for hundreds of years. The fish that once resided in the Great Barrier Reef will soon no longer have a home. This specific loss of biodiversity will have catastrophic consequences if it continues. According to World Economic Forum, 80 percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. If our ocean becomes unhealthy due to dead coral reefs and the extinction of fish living in them, we will lose a large source of the air we breathe.