The threat mass extinction of species poses to humans can well be extinction through failure to cope with challenges like terrorism, conflict over resources like water, climate change
A recent report in The Independent by Ian Johnston, cites scientists writing in a special edition of the magazine, Nature, that humans are causing the sixth mass extinction of life on earth. This is hardly surprising. According to one estimate, over 3,000 species are becoming extinct every year. At this rate, as many as 30 to 50 per cent of all species would be moving toward extinction by the middle of this century.
There is a difference this time from the earlier occasions which were caused by “cataclysmic forces” such as massive meteorite strikes and supervolcano eruptions which wiped out species like dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The one under way is a result of continuing explosive growth in human population and the desire for more affluent lifestyles, which are amplifying pressure on the natural world. This, in turn, is threatening tens and thousands of species, including 25 per cent of all mammals and 19 per cent of birds through over-hunting, poaching, pollution, loss of habitat, the arrival of invasive species — all caused by humans.
Even oceans have not escaped. Fish farms are destroying mangroves. Bottom trawlers, scraping ocean beds with nets, have already affected 20,000 square miles and turned large tracts of continental shelves to rubble, with disastrous results. Continental shelves teem with life because sunlight can penetrate their shallow waters and not the depths of oceans.
Seabed mining threatens to destroy unique ecosystems besides taking pollution to the deep sea. There are also incidental damages. While the continuing ban on whaling is most laudable, a growing number of container ships are killing whales through accidents. According to the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, acidification, caused by excessive carbon absorption and warming, are making oceans increasingly inhospitable to life, as is de-oxygenation, caused by nutrient run-off resulting from agriculture and climate change. According to reports, all this has caused a 40 per cent decline in coral reefs besides leading to the migration of some fish to cooler waters.
A very important cause of such disastrous developments has been the rise in human population which, according to the report in The Independent, has increased 180 per cent during the last 50 years and is set to rise to over 10 billion by 2060. This is hardly surprising. As early as 1967, Desmond Morris had written in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, “At the end of the 17th century the world population of naked apes (humans) was only 500 million. It has now risen to 3,000 million. Every twenty-four hours it increases by another 150,000. ….In 260 years’ time, if the rate increase stays steady — which is unlikely — there will be a seething mass of 400,000 million naked apes crowding the face of the earth.”
Four hundred thousand million means 40 billion if one billion is taken, after the United States’ numerology, as equivalent to a thousand million. According to Morris, such an increase would mean 11,000 humans to every square mile of the earth’s land surface. He adds, “To put it another way, the densities we now experience in our major cities would exist in every corner of the globe. The consequence of this for all forms of wild life is obvious. The effect it would have on our own species is equally depressing.”
To cite one example, severe environmental effects for humans have followed the loss of animal habitats through deforestation to accommodate human colonies, dams, irrigation systems, railway tracks and roads, factories and markets, as well as farming. Besides reducing rainfall, deforestation causes soil erosion by removing the roots of trees, which critically contribute to soil cohesion. Soil erosion, in turn, increases silt content in river waters, which reduces the water-holding capacity of dams by raising their levels through silt deposition. If this reduces the capacity of the dams to contain floods, rise of river beds, again through silt deposition, limits their carrying capacity and conduces to water spilling over embankments and causing floods.
Besides, deforestation, contributes significantly to global warming. large-scale felling of trees, which play an important role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, enhances a country’s carbon emission. Further, a decrease in rainfall, a result of de-forestation, can lead to droughts and cause forest fires like those regularly devastating large parts of Uttarakhand in India and California in the United States.
The most devastating effect will be felt on the human mind which, as Paul Sheppard writes in his seminal book, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence, is at the centre of humanity’s pride in its independence “from animals and animality.” He adds, “We tell ourselves that minds can free us not only from the animal in us but also from the animals around us. In our mortal life this mind is the focus and the means of all we must prize, our hope for making something of ourselves, of rising above mere existence.”
Dismissing this view, Sheppard writes “that the mind and its organ, the brain, are in reality that part of us most dependent on the survival of animals. We are connected to animals not merely in the convenience of figures of speech — a zoological equivalent of ‘flowery speech’ — but by sinews that link speech to rationality, insight, intuition, and consciousness. It is not the same as thinking about animals. The connection is in the act and nature of thought, the working of mind.”
He states that “there is a profound, inescapable need for animals that is in all people everywhere, an urgent requirement for which no substitute exists”, and argues that the need is in “the peculiar way that animals are used in the growth and development of the human person, in those most priceless qualities which we lump together as ‘mind.’ It is the role of animal images and forms in the shaping of personality, identity, and social consciousness. Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind’s eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from a series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming humans in the fullest sense.”
The results of a deceleration in the evolution of the mind will be disastrous. It is the home of both reason and consciousness whose interplay has enabled humans to achieve the remarkable success they have as a species. The result can well be extinction through failure to cope with the entire range of challenges like terrorism, conflict over resources like water, climate change and so on, currently facing the world. As Morris states in The Naked Ape, “Many exciting species have become extinct in the past and we are no exception. Sooner or later we shall go, and make way for something else.”
(The writer is Consultant Editor of The Pioneer and an author)