Our planet’s resources are very finite; through overpopulation and exploitation, our species has done an excellent job of burning through them at a devastating rate. Clean water is increasingly scarce, our atmosphere is quickly degrading, and our oceans are turning into acid. Many scientists now believe that our species, as well as thousands of others, may be teetering on the precipice of another global mass extinction. Is the collapse of life as we know it now inevitable?
A recent article in Live Science speculates that we may already be en route to another mass extinction:
“Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans — from hunting to climate change — are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and entering the Anthropocene Epoch, marked by major changes to global temperatures and ocean chemistry, increased sediment erosion, and changes in biology that range from altered flowering times to shifts in migration patterns of birds and mammals and potential die-offs of tiny organisms that support the entire marine food chain.
How today’s extinction crisis — species today go extinct at a rate that may range from 10 to 100 times the so-called background extinction rate — may change the face of the planet and its species goes beyond what humans can predict.”
You can read the article by Jeremy Hsu in its entirety here.
About Rhonda Winter
[...] so many species going extinct these days, it is great to see one “coming back to [...]