How The Current Mass Extinction Of Animals Threatens Humans, By Simon Worrall
We seem indifferent to the mass extinction we’re causing, yet we lose a part of ourselves when another animal dies out.
We seem indifferent to the mass extinction we’re causing, yet we lose a part of ourselves when another animal dies out.
However, like goggling tsunami onlookers, the world’s governments and most of its citizens seem oblivious to the magnitude of the risk. People sometimes even complain they “don’t want to hear any more bad news”, as if not hearing it somehow prevents it from happening.
As has been mentioned in these dispatches previously, the planet is now in the early stages of its sixth mass extinction event, and humans are indeed responsible, according to yet another published study, this one in Science. According to the study, large vertebrate animals (megafauna), which include elephants and polar bears, face the steepest decline since they require large habitats and are targeted by human hunters. The loss of megafauna places ecosystems off balance and leads to consequences like massive rodent infestations that proceed to impact the well-being and stability of a large segment of species, including humans. The study highlights how the particularly steep decline of megafauna we are seeing now is characteristic of all the previous mass extinction events.
A number of other environmental scientists such as Dr Stephan Harding, a deep ecologist like myself, see the value in needing to restore our lost connection with Earth and understand that we are all part of one greater consciousness. Deep Ecologists will tell you that there is something wrong with you if you are not profoundly saddened or depressed by the state of things at the moment. We are living in the sixth greatest mass extinction, we are killing off the last of the dolphins, whales, tigers, great apes, elephants, rhinos, insects, bees, amphibians, destroying the oceans, ripping apart the last of the Rainforests and indigenous people, we are seeing the largest scale ecocides and genocides. The amount of torture and abuse that our fellow creatures suffer at our hands is just overwhelming, let alone the killing, torturing, abusing and trafficking of women and children en mass worldwide, innocent victims of insane wars, exploitation and slavery.
The idea of outrageous courage touched me. I could feel this was the invitation that was nested inside of this despair. I/we are being asked to cultivate outrageous courage in the face of outrageous loss. What I came to realize was that nothing had changed; the outer conditions of death and potential collapse are all very present, but something in me had shifted ever so slightly, allowing a new bottom to begin to take shape. I had been deepened by this descent. Despair was my human response to too much death, too many losses—of friends, forests, cultures. My heart, in all its beauty and fragility, was overwhelmed and couldn’t find bottom. Now, the barest inklings were setting in.