The Second Great Dying: The Earth has lost 4/5s of Fresh Water and 7/10s of
Wildlife Species’ Populations in 50 Years
JUAN COLE
"Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The 2022 Living Planet report is out and it
does not bring good news. link: https://livingplanetindex.org
Since 1970, the scientists find that the population of fresh water species has
plunged by 83%, and the population of wildlife species over all has fallen
69%.
The researchers found a virtual extinction-level loss in Latin America, where
the population abundance of wildlife species plummeted by 94%. That
means that if there were 100,000 golden-eyed tree frogs in 1970, there are
only 6,000 today. I’m just making up the absolute numbers, to give a
concrete indication of the scale of the disaster.
Some of the problem is that humans have changed the climate, heating the
earth up by spewing tens of billions of tons a year of heat-trapping gases like
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Some of the problem comes from
humans who hunt, trap, farm, and participate in urban growth, so that
habitats have been destroyed and concreted over, or from industrial
civilization, which has led many forests to be cut down, as with the
Amazonian rain forest. The population of humans will probably level off by
2050 or so, but there is a danger that we will keep burning coal, fossil gas
and petroleum is such large amounts past 2050 that the climate-related
destruction of wildlife will accelerate.
The report followed 23,271 land-based birds, amphibians and mammals that
are threatened by agriculture, hunting and trapping, logging, pollution,
invasive species and climate change. In some parts of the world, some of
these human activities are more damaging than others. They constructed a
map of the threats to biodiversity:
H/t 2022 Living Planet report
Since the beginning of industrialization, we have made something like one or
two percent of mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish extinct.
The 83% fall in the population of fresh water species is, like all the statistics
in this report, Friday-the-13th scary. And every single one of us is playing the
monster Jason Voorhees. The authors point out that fresh water lakes only
make up 1% of the earth’s area, but one-third of all vertebrates live in them,
and most human beings live near such a body of water. Living near them, we
are flushing fertilizer and industrial chemicals into them. Michigan has 11,000
inland lakes, and I like to swim in some of them in the summer. But I have
discovered that the state health authorities often flag the lakes as dangerous
after a big storm. The storms wash all kinds of industrial and agricultural
toxins into the lakes. Or there are “high bacterial counts” “from an unknown
source.” This is, after all, Michigan. So I guess they are advising you to wait
until the chemicals settle at the bottom, or the bacterial count goes back
down. The whole thing doesn’t sound very healthy to me, and it has sort of
put me off lake swimming. If the lakes aren’t fit for humans to swim in after a
big storm, imagine what is being done to the frogs and fish and other
creatures who live in these lakes.
And that isn’t even counting what the warming of the lake waters is doing to
marine life, which is often adapted to a particular temperature range and can
be endangered if that range changes rapidly. According to the Environmental
Protection Agency, some North American lakes are as much as 4 degrees
Fahrenheit warmer now than in the 1980s!"
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