The Anthropocene
Extinction; a world where the entirety of a species is wiped from existence. They don’t exist anymore, the only evidence that they ever did exist is its corpse, its fossils, skeletons, and its pictures. Now imagine that on a mass scale, imagine a world where a majority of the species of the earth are gone, they don’t exist anymore and never will again.
There have in the history of this earth only been 5 mass extinctions, the Ordovician-Silurian, Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and the Cretaceous-tertiary extinction. But now, although it’s hard to believe, we are living in the 6th mass extinction and it is mostly the fault of us humans. But we have a chance to slow this down or maybe even halt this. Before us humans, there hasn’t been an organism to change the environment of the earth as much as we have. The discovery of agriculture is the root of the state in which the world is in right now. With the discovery of agriculture came the domestication of animals and the rise of permanent housing. Then as more people lived in communities of permanent housing, then came city-states which as one became more powerful than the other and decided to take over came empires. It would be a little over 3 millennia after the first empire that ever existed in history that would then come WWII and the industrial revolution that would kick the issue on the climate front to overdrive.
The industrial revolution was a time in which during the 19th century “when agricultural societies became more industrialized and urban.” The increase in the use of machines over humans in the farming industry led to more people moving into cities because fewer farm workers were needed. These cities were in the middle of industrialization as people working towards the goal of getting there. During the industrial revolution, “people found an extra source of energy with an incredible capacity for work. That source was fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas, though coal led the way — formed underground from the remains of plants and animals from much earlier geologic times. When these fuels were burned, they released energy, originally from the Sun, that had been stored for hundreds of millions of years.” The industrial revolution completely changed the look of this earth but at the cost of the environment and health of people especially in urban communities and those who lived near industrial sources. The industrial revolution led to air and water poisoning which in turn led to people catching diseases such as “cholera and typhoid.”
We are living in the 6th extinction or as scientists call the Anthropocene. There are about 7 billion people on this planet and we more often than not tend to destroy habitats where species live, tend to as well be subconsciously heating the planet up, and be very careless when it comes to introducing invasive species from one habitat to another as well. Humans have caused “500 years of species loss … across neotropics” in major part by defaunation. Deforestation as well led to species extinctions, some we don’t even know about, and all for the everyday conveniences that we can probably live without.
Most animals have small ranges where they could survive and when we turn their home into a city, they can’t just leave like can, they will inevitably die off. And although Ocean species that can swim have more options to move around and to better waters, if where they’re at is polluted, the carbon emissions we are emitting are turning our waters more acidic. At “the end of this century the surface waters of the ocean could have a pH around 7.8 The last time the ocean pH was this low was during the middle Miocene, 14–17 million years ago,” so during a major extinction. If the waters do reach 7.8ph, then a third of our sea life can potentially be wiped out.
One person cannot do anything to slow down or stop this mass extinction from happening but as a society, it can happen. Moving from fossil fuels to green energy by 2050 if it can’t be achieved by 2030, moving from cars that run on gas to electric or hybrid cars as an alternative, pressuring lawmakers to pass more environmental regulations to name a few examples. All of these little things add up when everyone in society follows along and is the only way of saving this planet.
Image — https://news.mit.edu/2017/mathematics-predicts-sixth-mass-extinction-0920
