How To Do Animal Rights. Introduction to Animal Rights: Mass Extinction

How to Do Animal Rights - & Win the War on Animals

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Chapter Sections

1. The Broad Setting

2. Mass Extinction

3. The Animal Holocaust

How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals

Chapter 1

Introduction to Doing Animal Rights

2. Mass Extinction

"Homo sapiens is in the throes of causing a major biological crisis, a mass extinction, the sixth such event, to have occurred in the past half billion years. And we, Homo sapiens, may also be among the living dead." Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin (1)

The Sixth Extinction

We are living in a period of mass extinction of life on Earth. This is the greatest extinction since the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In the 3.5 billion year evolution of life on our planet there have been five mass extinctions - when close to all species were nearly wiped out. The most massive of these extinctions was the Permian Extinction some 250 million years ago: seventy percent of land species and ninety percent of marine species went extinct in less than a million years, close to an instant in Earth's 4.5 billion year evolution.

The common name for the present mass extinction is the Sixth Extinction, popularised in the 1995 book of the same name by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1). The unique characteristic of the Sixth Extinction is that it is caused by a single species - us: Homo sapiens. Scientists calculate that within a hundred years half of Earth's fauna and flora could be treading down the road to mass extinction. Earth, home to millions of species, may be losing some 30,000 species a year and the rate is increasing as humanity accelerates its devastation of the biosphere. The problem is especially grim for rain forests because they harbour the vast majority of land-living species and humanity is clear-felling forests fast. As the forests shrink away the animals have no where to go and die out.

The Mega Devastators

Humanity has fashioned three mega-devastators that are causing the Sixth Extinction and their combined influence is reaching a crisis point:

Global warming - by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Consumption of resources - including habitat change.
Human overpopulation - by which every one of us increases the first two devastators.

The magnitude of what humanity is doing became apparent in the 1970's. But still the mass extinction crisis is invisible to most people, unaware or unconcerned about it. Many scientists are so worried about the lack of concern that in 1992 over 1,500 prominent specialists, among them several Nobel Prize Laureates, endorsed the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity (2). But they have made little progress shaking people awake to the looming cataclysm. Likewise, the Doomsday Clock has similarly fallen short. It was originally started in 1947 during the Cold War by a group of scientists concerned about humanity's potential impending self-destruction and is meant to wake us up to fight for our preservation. Currently the minute hand is set at five minutes to midnight - just five minutes before annihilation.

Biocide?

Biocide, the massive destruction of life on a worldwide scale, is the ultimate of all human practical and moral violations. Sceptics argue that there is not enough data to support the notion of a Sixth Extinction or that this mass extinction is not of human origin so we need do nothing. Some people, who accept the impending catastrophe, argue that humanity can slow the rate of extinction through proper management of human activity and ecosystems. Still others argue that time has expired and there is nothing we can do. But one thing is certain. The potential disaster of mass extinction is so great do we dare risk doing nothing? Animals gave our species food, clothing, shelter and tools and we could not have evolved without them. It is pay-back time. Let us be positive and as Woody Allen says (teh quote at top of previous page) “pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

References

(1) Leakey, Richard & Lewin, Roger. The Sixth Extinction: biodiversity and its survival. Weidenfield and Nicolson: London. 1996.

(2) World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. Union of Concerned Scientists. www.ucsusa.org (accessed January 2007). See Appendix 1.