Something else to concern us

Apparently we don't have enough to worry about with a war that eats our soldiers and costs a mint and a climate change that can wreak havoc worldwide. Now the Doomsday Clock, maintained by the atomic scientists at the University of Chicago, has been advanced two minutes. It now stands at five minutes to midnight as of 1/17/2007. This symbolic warning about possible nuclear holocaust was changed because the atomic scientists have become concerned with the nuclear activities of North Korea and Iran as well as the increasing threat of global warming.

OK. Here is another scientist who is concerned with another colossal threat. His name is Edward O. Wilson and he is a world class biologist. I just finished reading his latest book entitled "The Creation: An Appeal To Save Life On Earth" It's a slim book that really held my attention. His message is a shock to the system. After having read the book I embarked on some research and found that other biological scientists have been giving the same warning for several years.

There have been five great "die offs" that have been found in the fossil record. The following is a quote from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. "Since the early years of the twentieth century, absolute dating methods, such as radiometric dating (including potassium/argon, argon/argon, uranium series, and carbon-14 dating) have been used to verify the relative ages obtained by fossils and to provide absolute ages for many fossils. Radiometric dating has shown that the earliest known fossils are over 3.5 billion years old. Various dating methods have been used and are used today depending on local geology and context, and while there is some variance in the results from these dating methods, nearly all of them provide evidence for a very old Earth, approximately 4.6 billion years."

That's a bit more than 4004 B.C.E.!

These die offs include the biggie of 250 million years ago when 70-80 percent of life departed from the oceans and land because of calamitous volcanic activity and space junk pelting the planet, and the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago from the asteroid strike in what is now Yucatan.

Now there is today.

Peter Raven is past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has stated in the foreword to their publication Atlas of Population and Environment : "We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century."

Oy vey!

Scientists are beginning to call this the Sixth Mass Extinction. It is proceeding faster than the great extinctions of the past. The reasons for the current mass extinction include:

- habitat destruction
- deforestation
- hunting and poaching
- the introduction of non-native species
- pollution
- climate change

All of which are human related!

In the January issue of National Geographic the vast Amazon forest was discussed as becoming only half-vast. There appears to be a concentrated effort to turn that area of Brazil into farmland. To raise soybeans, no less. This loss of CO2 breathing trees can't help but exacerbate the world's turning into a hot house but it also destroys habitat for an inestimable number of creatures.

Not a pretty picture. So what if the planet loses a bunch of animals, won't that give humans more room?

I subscribe to the biblical role assigned to humanity. We are caretakers, not rulers of the Earth. We are responsible for the well being of our world, not its destruction. If we allow the destruction of our nonhuman neighbors we may be the last of our species as well.