Ever get the feeling that you are helpless? I’m going to exacerbate that briefly before offering some minor relief.
You know how you like variety? How you get bored with the same-old-same-old easily? Well, all life is unconsciously like that in a sense, what with ecological diversity and what-not. The variety-thing has an ironic side. Life as a driving force, teleologically speaking, seems to want diversity, at least until the current era, the one we have been, are now, and will be continuously shaping. And that irony? As much as we personally like a diverse environment to keep us from reaching the flatline of boredom, we also, for whatever reasons—very diverse—seem to want an Earth with a single species: Homo sapiens sapiens. To that effect, we kill to the point of extinction our fellow earthlings, Dodo birds among some hundreds of others just during the past half millennium. Yeah, we spread death around; and before we learned to record what we killed, we were in the business of ecological reduction. And don’t say, “Don’t blame me; I wasn’t around to kill the Dodo.” Collectively, we’re still in the business of extinction; we’re doing exactly the opposite of diversification.
When we look around and try to add up the number of life-forms on the planet, we have to estimate because every once in a while, someone discovers a previously unknown species: Life really is both diverse and plentiful as evidenced, for example, by bacteria found by drilling in rock miles below the surface. Life’s life style is making more kinds of life and finding new places to inhabit, like the hypothermophilic enchytraeid annelids, the ice-worms that spend their entire lives in glacial ice at and below the freezing point and the hyperthermophilic archaeans that live in hot springs at and above the boiling point. Extinctions quash that diversity, obviously.
We’ve had the Big Five, including the Great Dying 252 million years ago and that more famous one that made the dinosaurs kick the bucket 65 million years ago. We can label all extinction events before the rise of humans as “natural,” but that’s a bit of cheat. Humans are in the process of killing off species, and though we might label our actions as “anthropogenic extinction,” the reality is that we are one of the planet’s life-forms, making us, regardless of our hubris, “natural agents.” Our hubris can’t be disregarded, however, because we have invented new ways to kill off those less technologically capable than we are. I don’t know how elephants or whales could shoot guns even if they invented them, and certainly chainsaws are more efficient than beavers’ teeth just as cement dams blocking the flow of big rivers are more efficient than beavers’ piles of felled trees.
Two recent studies, one of current extinction and the other of past extinction, focus attention on the long road to ecological recovery after mass death events. A study of life before and after the Great Dying indicates that life took its time regaining diversity it lost during the extinction. Apparently, it took about five million years to reach an ecological diversity that matched pre-extinction life.* And almost fifty million years after the Great Dying there was still an imbalance in the trophic levels compared with those prior to the event. Simply put, recovery can be a slow process. The organisms lost are lost, and the ecological niches emptied by an extinction have to be filled with entirely new groups.
So, what would you expect to find with regard to recovery from an extinction event? Here’s a finding from the study of Permian and Triassic life: The trophic levels seemed to form an upside-down food pyramid with relatively short food chains. The nekton, the swimmers, seemed to recover, diversify, and multiply faster than the benthos, the bottom dwellers. I don’t know about you, but I would have guessed the opposite, that the lowliest (there’s my hubris) critters would multiply and diversify faster than the higher life-forms, such as the predators.
So, for example, in today’s extinction event, which some have termed the Sixth Mass Extinction, we see the elimination of giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and many other large mammals and the endangerment of many others. But what if we wipe all large mammals and reptiles off the face of the planet? Wouldn’t those “lower” life-forms dominate? Wouldn’t they diversity and multiply in the absence of larger organisms? Should we see a “bottom-up” recovery of life? Maybe the slow progression of some sea life to land?
Right about now you’re asking, “So, what do you want me to do about it?” Or, “What am I supposed to do about it? I can’t roam the Serengeti looking for poachers who care little for wildlife or human life.” You’re right. You can’t do anything about it with regard to saving elephants if you don’t have the financial or physical means to protect them from poachers. You don’t have the ability to control whatever stresses people in some foreign land place on wildlife or ecological diversity. And you probably don’t even have the wherewithal to change much in the ecologically damaging lifestyle of your neighbors. Sorry to be pessimistic, but I have to say that even if you were to convince your entire community to preserve a local ecology, you have no guarantee that the next generation will do the same. You and your contemporaries are the continuation of human conquest of the planet, one that has been going on irregularly for more than 200,000 years with some interruptions.
Here’s the pessimistic view from the study of current extinction in the context of ecological recovery: “An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3 to 5 million years to recover.”** The study’s suggestion: Figure out what’s endangered and concentrate conservation efforts. Sure, that’ll do. Well, at least you’ll get to “pick and choose.”
Ever get the feeling that you are helpless? You realize that the feeling comes from your perception of the world as you think it should be. You have a concept: I understand how the world’s components should work and even what components should belong to the system. Maybe you are like many people who have little concern for the survival of rats, spiders, and snakes. If you live in India, you live where conservation efforts have been directed to save tigers. However, almost 100 people a year die in tiger attacks. Basically, all tiger victims are Indians. So, if you are a villager living in tiger country, you probably aren’t too concerned about saving tigers from extinction. You’re probably more concerned about saving humans, especially you, from death by tiger. And that’s probably the same kind of feeling that humans have had for hundreds of thousands of years to the detriment of wildlife.
Given the dangers posed by some wildlife, what do you choose? The world that you believe should exist or the world that actually does exist? Sorry, I said at the outset that I would offer some relief to the feeling of helplessness. I guess I didn’t do a very good job because I believe I would probably opt for extinction of many life-forms and a five-million-year recovery over my own extinction. Both extinctions are forever, but I would choose a world in which I exist, regardless of how it impacts an ecological balance.
Is there some lesson other than one about my innate selfish desire to live? Yes, and it rests in the word should. In our hubris, we believe we know the shoulds that apply not only to all aspects of life of any kind, but also to the universe at large. We’re largely motivated by shoulds. Adult feelings of helpless derive from adult dependence on a world of shoulds.
*Jaijun Song, Paul B. Wignall, and Alexander M. Dunhill.Decoupled taxonomic and ecological recoveries from the Permo-Triassic extinction.Science Advances . 10 Oct 2018:
Vol. 4, no. 10, eaat5091 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat5091 . See also the article on the article:
Miles, Matt. Extinction is forever—and ecosystem recovery takes a long time. Phys.org, October 17, 2018, Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-extinction-foreverand-ecosystem-recovery.html
**Aarhus University. Mammals can’t evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis. Phys.org. October 15, 2018, Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-mammals-evolve-fast-current-extinction.htmlSee also, Matt Davis, Søren Faurby, and Jens-Christian Svenning PNAS published ahead of print October 15, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804906115, Online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1804906115
You know how you like variety? How you get bored with the same-old-same-old easily? Well, all life is unconsciously like that in a sense, what with ecological diversity and what-not. The variety-thing has an ironic side. Life as a driving force, teleologically speaking, seems to want diversity, at least until the current era, the one we have been, are now, and will be continuously shaping. And that irony? As much as we personally like a diverse environment to keep us from reaching the flatline of boredom, we also, for whatever reasons—very diverse—seem to want an Earth with a single species: Homo sapiens sapiens. To that effect, we kill to the point of extinction our fellow earthlings, Dodo birds among some hundreds of others just during the past half millennium. Yeah, we spread death around; and before we learned to record what we killed, we were in the business of ecological reduction. And don’t say, “Don’t blame me; I wasn’t around to kill the Dodo.” Collectively, we’re still in the business of extinction; we’re doing exactly the opposite of diversification.
When we look around and try to add up the number of life-forms on the planet, we have to estimate because every once in a while, someone discovers a previously unknown species: Life really is both diverse and plentiful as evidenced, for example, by bacteria found by drilling in rock miles below the surface. Life’s life style is making more kinds of life and finding new places to inhabit, like the hypothermophilic enchytraeid annelids, the ice-worms that spend their entire lives in glacial ice at and below the freezing point and the hyperthermophilic archaeans that live in hot springs at and above the boiling point. Extinctions quash that diversity, obviously.
We’ve had the Big Five, including the Great Dying 252 million years ago and that more famous one that made the dinosaurs kick the bucket 65 million years ago. We can label all extinction events before the rise of humans as “natural,” but that’s a bit of cheat. Humans are in the process of killing off species, and though we might label our actions as “anthropogenic extinction,” the reality is that we are one of the planet’s life-forms, making us, regardless of our hubris, “natural agents.” Our hubris can’t be disregarded, however, because we have invented new ways to kill off those less technologically capable than we are. I don’t know how elephants or whales could shoot guns even if they invented them, and certainly chainsaws are more efficient than beavers’ teeth just as cement dams blocking the flow of big rivers are more efficient than beavers’ piles of felled trees.
Two recent studies, one of current extinction and the other of past extinction, focus attention on the long road to ecological recovery after mass death events. A study of life before and after the Great Dying indicates that life took its time regaining diversity it lost during the extinction. Apparently, it took about five million years to reach an ecological diversity that matched pre-extinction life.* And almost fifty million years after the Great Dying there was still an imbalance in the trophic levels compared with those prior to the event. Simply put, recovery can be a slow process. The organisms lost are lost, and the ecological niches emptied by an extinction have to be filled with entirely new groups.
So, what would you expect to find with regard to recovery from an extinction event? Here’s a finding from the study of Permian and Triassic life: The trophic levels seemed to form an upside-down food pyramid with relatively short food chains. The nekton, the swimmers, seemed to recover, diversify, and multiply faster than the benthos, the bottom dwellers. I don’t know about you, but I would have guessed the opposite, that the lowliest (there’s my hubris) critters would multiply and diversify faster than the higher life-forms, such as the predators.
So, for example, in today’s extinction event, which some have termed the Sixth Mass Extinction, we see the elimination of giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and many other large mammals and the endangerment of many others. But what if we wipe all large mammals and reptiles off the face of the planet? Wouldn’t those “lower” life-forms dominate? Wouldn’t they diversity and multiply in the absence of larger organisms? Should we see a “bottom-up” recovery of life? Maybe the slow progression of some sea life to land?
Right about now you’re asking, “So, what do you want me to do about it?” Or, “What am I supposed to do about it? I can’t roam the Serengeti looking for poachers who care little for wildlife or human life.” You’re right. You can’t do anything about it with regard to saving elephants if you don’t have the financial or physical means to protect them from poachers. You don’t have the ability to control whatever stresses people in some foreign land place on wildlife or ecological diversity. And you probably don’t even have the wherewithal to change much in the ecologically damaging lifestyle of your neighbors. Sorry to be pessimistic, but I have to say that even if you were to convince your entire community to preserve a local ecology, you have no guarantee that the next generation will do the same. You and your contemporaries are the continuation of human conquest of the planet, one that has been going on irregularly for more than 200,000 years with some interruptions.
Here’s the pessimistic view from the study of current extinction in the context of ecological recovery: “An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3 to 5 million years to recover.”** The study’s suggestion: Figure out what’s endangered and concentrate conservation efforts. Sure, that’ll do. Well, at least you’ll get to “pick and choose.”
Ever get the feeling that you are helpless? You realize that the feeling comes from your perception of the world as you think it should be. You have a concept: I understand how the world’s components should work and even what components should belong to the system. Maybe you are like many people who have little concern for the survival of rats, spiders, and snakes. If you live in India, you live where conservation efforts have been directed to save tigers. However, almost 100 people a year die in tiger attacks. Basically, all tiger victims are Indians. So, if you are a villager living in tiger country, you probably aren’t too concerned about saving tigers from extinction. You’re probably more concerned about saving humans, especially you, from death by tiger. And that’s probably the same kind of feeling that humans have had for hundreds of thousands of years to the detriment of wildlife.
Given the dangers posed by some wildlife, what do you choose? The world that you believe should exist or the world that actually does exist? Sorry, I said at the outset that I would offer some relief to the feeling of helplessness. I guess I didn’t do a very good job because I believe I would probably opt for extinction of many life-forms and a five-million-year recovery over my own extinction. Both extinctions are forever, but I would choose a world in which I exist, regardless of how it impacts an ecological balance.
Is there some lesson other than one about my innate selfish desire to live? Yes, and it rests in the word should. In our hubris, we believe we know the shoulds that apply not only to all aspects of life of any kind, but also to the universe at large. We’re largely motivated by shoulds. Adult feelings of helpless derive from adult dependence on a world of shoulds.
*Jaijun Song, Paul B. Wignall, and Alexander M. Dunhill.Decoupled taxonomic and ecological recoveries from the Permo-Triassic extinction.Science Advances . 10 Oct 2018:
Vol. 4, no. 10, eaat5091 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat5091 . See also the article on the article:
Miles, Matt. Extinction is forever—and ecosystem recovery takes a long time. Phys.org, October 17, 2018, Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-extinction-foreverand-ecosystem-recovery.html
**Aarhus University. Mammals can’t evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis. Phys.org. October 15, 2018, Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-mammals-evolve-fast-current-extinction.htmlSee also, Matt Davis, Søren Faurby, and Jens-Christian Svenning PNAS published ahead of print October 15, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804906115, Online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1804906115
RSS Feed