Michael Novacek - Provost, American Museum Of Natural History - The Sixth Extinction - WP

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Assuming that we survive the current mass extinction event, won't we do okay? The disappearance of more than a few species is regrettable, but we can't compromise an ever-expanding population and a global economy whose collapse would leave billions to starve. This dismissal, however, ignores an essential fact about all those species: They live together in tightly networked ecosystems responsible for providing the habitats in which even we humans thrive. Pollination of flowers by diverse species of wild bees, wasps, butterflies and other insects, not just managed honeybees, accounts for more than 30 percent of all food production that humans depend upon.

What will the quality of life be like in this transformed new world? Science doesn't paint a pretty picture. The tropics and coral reefs, major sources of the planet's biological diversity, will be hugely debilitated. The 21st century may mark the end of the line for the evolution of large mammals and other animals that are now either on the verge of extinction, such as the Yangtze River dolphin, or, like the African black rhinoceros, confined to small, inadequately supportive habitats. And devastated ecosystems will provide warm welcome to all those opportunistic invader species that have already demonstrated their capacity to wipe out native plants and animals. We, and certainly our children, will find ourselves largely embraced by a pest and weed ecology ideal for the flourishing of invasive species and new, potentially dangerous microbes to which we haven't build up a biological resistance.

Of course people care about this. Recent surveys show a sharp increase in concern over the environmental changes taking place. But much of this spike in interest is due to the marked shift in attention to climate change and global warming away from other environmental problems such as deforestation, water pollution, overpopulation and biodiversity loss. Global warming is of course a hugely important issue. But it is the double whammy of climate change combined with fragmented, degraded natural habitats -- not climate change alone -- that is the real threat to many populations, species and ecosystems, including human populations marginalized and displaced by those combined forces.

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The first step in dealing with the problem is recognizing it for what it is. Ecologists point out that the image of Earth still harboring unspoiled, pristine wild places is a myth. We live in a human-dominated world, they say, and virtually no habitat is untouched by our presence. Yet we are hardly the infallible masters of that universe. Instead, we are rather uneasy regents, a fragile and dysfunctional royal family holding back a revolution. The sixth extinction event is under way. Can humanity muster the leadership and international collaboration necessary to stop eating itself from the inside?

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011101994.html

And we are the chief pest. We say we care, but we don't change our behaviour.

Don't mind the facts though, by all means keep breeding our species into oblivion!

The first is that we are in the middle of the greatest mass extinction event in 65 million years. That is due to human population growth and human mis-management of resources and human destruction of habitat and ecosystems. This is an extinction "event" that is ocurring very rapidly, and is not related to global warming. Global warming is the looming hammer poised to pound the last nails in the coffin that we have been building for a long time...

The second point is to dispute the statement that "the image of Earth still harboring unspoiled, pristine wild places is a myth." The earth does still harbor unspoiled wild places-- lots of them, in fact. And those last wild places must be protected. Any hope for rejuvenation of this world must come from those last wild places. It's essential for future generations of humans to have intact ecosystems to serve as a reference point, or even just a refuge... We can't let our last wild places be destroyed.

I really think that it is dangerous to state that there aren't any unspoiled places left. There are, and it is vitally important to protect them. I also think that it's dangerous for people to project everything onto global warming-- not that that's the intent of this article, but it's a prevalent and growing mindset out there. We're fucking this planet up for real without global warming. To blame everything on global warming is to absolve ourselves from responsibility for our own actions and inactions. And limiting carbon emissions is not going to save this planet. It's just one of the things that we have to do...

I go around and around with this concept myself, working as I do with resource protection, and I usually don't like my answers. Generally, I don't believe what we're talking about exists. Whether you think so or not will depend on your definitions of "pristine" and "wild," and the bounds you put on "places."

I consider pristine to mean that the place being described is in its original condition, original in this case meaning before any anthropogenic impacts. In the modern world, with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels greatly elevated over pre-industrial levels, and bioaccumulative synthetic toxins showing up in organisms from pole to pole, it's hard to think of a place that hasn't already been impacted to some degree. That liberated carbon does affect competition between C3, C4, and CAM plants, and those changes ripple out through every aspect of the ecosystems in which those plants live. Those synthesized chemicals do alter survivorship rates in organisms, which also causes changes rippling through ecosystems. To the extent that there are no places (with the possible exception of thermal vents along oceanic ridges) not already altered by these two impacts, I would say that there are no pristine places left.

Those two items out of the way, consider the known impacts of human settlement on landscapes. Often, there is a loss of large vertebrates, loss of virgin vegetation structure, conversion of large areas to agriculture, alteration of hydrologic systems to serve a growing population, introduction of exotic species, and shipping of items grown in one locale to distant locales. Ignoring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and synthetic chemicals all over the place, name a locale that hasn't felt these impacts at human hands. I can't think of one. What you see in the Americas, even in what you may well consider wild places, is a landscape that has been shaped by at least 15,000 years of human use. That timeframe is shorter for some Pacific islands, longer for Australia, and much longer for Asia, Africa, and Europe. Maybe if you pick a certain point in social development associated with civilizations, and say that before humans in a given area reached that point, their impact on or within ecosystems doesn't count, you can wash away the problem with the word pristine, but I don't see where to draw the line. Even in hunter-gatherer societies, species distributions changed, extinctions occurred, and that inevitably altered evolutionary paths and nutrient cycling across the affected landscapes forever.

Wild is a little easier to define, I suppose, if you use the fairly standard definition of "areas within which natural processes operate without ongoing human influence." In that sense, nothing in the Appalachians could be considered pristine, but some areas therein could be considered wilderness. My problem here is that if you take a hard look at what we usually label wilderness, it is influenced by humans. First examples of this would be anthropogenic climate change and synthetic compounds functioning within the area, which do fundamentally influence natural processes, causing extinctions, tipping the balance in competetive relationships, and altering evolutionary trajectories. Again, ignoring these issues still leaves you with problems. Suppose you have an area you consider wild, but that area is missing a characteristic species? Natural processes may be ongoing, and humans may not be on the landscape, but by previously removing a native organism, those natural processes are still being impacted by an affirmative action (the removal of the species). Think wolves or grizzly bears from most of the American west, whales from most oceans, moas from New Zealand, the list goes on.

I think what we're down to is defining both pristine and wild relatively, as part of the scope of the particular place about which we are speaking. An example would be something like defining ANWR using the political boundary, calling it mostly pristine (CO2, petro production impacts, etc.), and mostly wild (nutrient cycling generally untouched, although migratory birds impacted elsewhere alter things here). And that, as you say, is dangerous, because it opens the door to "Well, we can allow just one more impact and still have something relatively pristine, and relatively wild." Stopping that would require a deep understanding of the terms involved, objective definitions of those terms, and a desire on the part of individuals and the electorate as a whole to value those things above financial interests, short term as well as long. We lose on all three counts, always have, and I'm afraid we always will.

Does this all mean we should throw up our hands and go along with the crowd that uses simple terms like "pro-growth," "growing economy," "pro-business," "streamline regulations," and so on, as they lie their way into money at the expense of everyone else? Not at all. What it means is we need to be a little more honest with ourselves about what it is we are trying to achieve. If we can come up with a way to put it simply, such as "destroying public property," "paid vandalism," or "robbing taxpayers," such that those simple terms used by unethical types are not effective or at least less effective in the public eye, then maybe we can slow or stop the incremental loss of what is left.

They're "pristine" and "wild," and certainly "places."

Of course, they are also totally lifeless...

They are connected to the atmosphere. Unless they are cold enough to drop the partial pressures of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, CFCs, and so forth to zero, then they aren't in a state untouched by man.

They would certainly be wild. It probably helps immensely that they are essentially lifeless, so that there hasn't been anything to draw people there. That might hurt a bit in the future as things warm up, I know I've heard Kay Bailey Hutchinson argue on the Senate floor that since there are no trees in ANWR, it's essentially a wasteland, and therefore fit for oil exploration. If there is no compelling argument favoring preservation over exploitation, those valleys will eventually not be wild.

of a gigantic and neverending belching volcano.

Think about it. In the Middle Ages, cookfires and campfires and primitive blacksmith forgres...

Let's do a "thought-experiment" and convert those into a hypothetical volcano. Even back in 1400, prior to the industrial revolution, it must have been a pretty big "volcano" and it never stopped, the energy effluvium of 500 million people or so.

(somewhere on the web, I would wager, it is a statistical certainty that someone has done the numbers on this)

Fast forward to the 1800s and the end of the First Industrial Revolution. That neverending volcano of human endeavor and progress is now MUCH larger. Cookfires and campfires are now forges and foundries. 500 million is now 1.2 billion or so. That's one big volcano, and now it has been erupting without letup for 5000 years, from when it was probably the equivalent of a small, smouldering crater, easily absorbed.

Enter oil and more increases of magnitude. Today, that "volcano" includes massivesmokestacks and more than a billion cars, each themselves belching out more smoke and soot and CO2 than probably a dozen humans could produced in 1800.

Think about it. In 1800, 1.2 billion people, today 1.2 billion AUTOMOBILES and 6.6 billion people. If we are to convert that into a neverending belching volcano, the thing is probably equivalent to a smoking, spitting crater five miles in diameter, and now that crater is belching all manner of complex chemicals that were not part of the "eruption" before.

We produce 130 times as much CO2 as all the volcanoes now active on Earth. Even if you go back to the Deccan or Siberian traps you may not find an equivalent. According to this page a flood basalt eruption of 2000 km^3 emits as much CO2 as we do from one year's worth of fossil fuels. The Deccan traps were up to 1000 times that big, but the various duration estimates I've seen point to the highest rate of vulcanism happening over at least 10,000 years, out of a total duration of perhaps a million years.

So we are emitting CO2 at least ten times faster than the Deccan traps, an eruption that is implicated in the K/T extinction.

'The Hellish Vision of Life on a Hotter Planet '
http://www.apeuk.org/article_ml2.html