From Silent Spring to Silent Crisis — How humanity is on the road to wiping out one million species
The devastating impact we have on this planet has been obvious for some decades. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote her seminal work ‘Silent Spring’, which documented the adverse effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides. Along the way we have had a number of other environmental issues: from ozone layer depletion to the devastating impacts of climate change.
Now the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has spent three years of effort, using 15,000 reference materials, to publish a 1500 page document giving us perhaps the most powerful indictment of how humans have treated this planet. And the prognosis is not good. We are consistently contributing to drastic loss of natural resources and because it is not as well known as climate change, it is being termed as a “silent crisis’.
In the last 50 years, increasing population and need for natural resources has led to a level of extraction never before seen in our history; whether on the land or the sea. And the refuse from our activities has impacted land, sea, as well as the sky.
The report tells us that since 1900, the average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20 percent. More than 40 percent of amphibian species, almost 33 percent of corals and more than 33 percent of all marine mammals are threatened. Even for insects, of which there is not a great deal of data, evidence supports an estimated 10 percent as being threatened. By the 16th century we had already driven to extinction at least 680 vertebrate species.
“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed. This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”said Prof. Settele, co-chair of the Assessment.
The report highlights that an estimated three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66 percent of the marine environment have been altered. Furthermore, plastic pollution has increased…
