essay about biodiversity and species extinction

 / 

Conservation

In defense of biodiversity: why protecting species from extinction matters.

By Carl Safina • February 12, 2018

A number of biologists have recently made the argument that extinction is part of evolution and that saving species need not be a conservation priority. But this revisionist thinking shows a lack of understanding of evolution and an ignorance of the natural world. 

A few years ago, I helped lead a ship-based expedition along south Alaska during which several scientists and noted artists documented and made art from the voluminous plastic trash that washes ashore even there. At Katmai National Park, we packed off several tons of trash from as distant as South Asia. But what made Katmai most memorable was: huge brown bears. Mothers and cubs were out on the flats digging clams. Others were snoozing on dunes. Others were patrolling.

During a rest, several of us were sitting on an enormous drift-log, watching one mother who’d been clamming with three cubs. As the tide flooded the flat, we watched in disbelief as she brought her cubs up to where we were sitting — and stepped up on the log we were on. There was no aggression, no tension; she was relaxed. We gave her some room as she paused on the log, and then she took her cubs past us into a sedge meadow. Because she was so calm, I felt no fear. I felt the gift.

In this protected refuge, bears could afford a generous view of humans. Whoever protected this land certainly had my gratitude.

In the early 20th century, a botanist named Robert F. Griggs discovered Katmai’s volcanic “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.” In love with the area, he spearheaded efforts to preserve the region’s wonders and wildlife. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson established Katmai National Monument (now Katmai National Park and Preserve ), protecting 1,700 square miles, thus ensuring a home for bear cubs born a century later, and making possible my indelible experience that day. As a legacy for Griggs’ proclivity to share his love of living things, George Washington University later established the Robert F. Griggs Chair in Biology.

That chair is now occupied by a young professor whose recent writing probably has Griggs spinning in his grave. He is R. Alexander Pyron . A few months ago,  The Washington Post published a “ Perspective” piece by Pyron that is an extreme example of a growing minority opinion in the conservation community, one that might be summarized as, “Humans are profoundly altering the planet, so let’s just make peace with the degradation of the natural world.” 

No biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron’s essay – with lines such as, “The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings” and “[T]he impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency” – left the impression that it was written in a conservative think tank, perhaps by one of the anti-regulatory zealots now filling posts throughout the Trump administration. Pyron’s sentiments weren’t merely oddly out of keeping with the legacy of the man whose name graces his job title. Much of what Pyron wrote is scientifically inaccurate. And where he stepped out of his field into ethics, what he wrote was conceptually confused.

Pyron has since posted, on his website and Facebook page, 1,100 words of frantic backpedaling that land somewhere between apology and retraction, including mea culpas that he “sensationalized” parts of his own argument and “cavalierly glossed over several complex issues.” But Pyron’s original essay and his muddled apology do not change the fact that the beliefs he expressed reflect a disturbing trend that has taken hold among segments of the conservation community. And his article comes at a time when conservation is being assailed from other quarters, with a half-century of federal protections of land being rolled back, the Endangered Species Act now more endangered than ever, and the relationship between extinction and evolution being subjected to confused, book-length mistreatment.

Pyron’s original opinion piece, so clear and unequivocal in its assertions, is a good place to unpack and disentangle accelerating misconceptions about the “desirability” of extinction that are starting to pop up like hallucinogenic mushrooms.

In recent years, some biologists and writers have been distancing themselves from conservation’s bedrock idea that in an increasingly human-dominated world we must find ways to protect and perpetuate natural beauty, wild places, and the living endowment of the planet. In their stead, we are offered visions of human-dominated landscapes in which the stresses of destruction and fragmentation spur evolution. 

White rhinoceros ( Ceratotherium simum ). Source: Herman Pijpers/ Flickr

Conservation International ditched its exuberant tropical forest graphic for  a new corporate logo  whose circle and line were designed to suggest a human head and outstretched arms. A few years ago, Peter Kareiva, then chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy,  said , “conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness,” for  “a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.” Human annihilation of the passenger pigeon, he wrote, caused “no catastrophic or even measurable effects,” characterizing the total extinction of the hemisphere’s most abundant bird — whose population went from billions to zero inside a century (certainly a “measurable effect” in itself) — as an example of nature’s “resilience.”

British ecologist Chris Thomas’s recent book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, argues that the destruction of nature creates opportunities for evolution of new lifeforms that counterbalance any losses we create, an idea that is certainly optimistic considering the burgeoning lists of endangered species. Are we really ready to consider that disappearing rhinos are somehow counterbalanced by a new subspecies of daisy in a railroad track? Maybe it would be simpler if Thomas and his comrades just said, “We don’t care about nature.’’

Enter Pyron, who — at least in his initial essay — basically said he doesn’t. He’s entitled to his apathy, but no biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron began with a resonant story about his nocturnal rediscovery of a South American frog that had been thought recently extinct. He and colleagues collected several that, he reassured us, “are now breeding safely in captivity.” As we breathed a sigh of relief, Pyron added, “But they will go extinct one day, and the world will be none the poorer for it.” 

The conviction that today’s slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable spurred the founding of the conservation movement.

I happen to be writing this in the Peruvian Amazon, having just returned from a night walk to a light-trap where I helped a biologist collect moths. No one yet knows how many species live here. Moths are important pollinators. Knowing them helps detangle a little bit of how this rainforest works. So it’s a good night to mention that the number of species in an area carries the technical term “species richness.” More is richer, and fewer is, indeed, poorer. Pyron’s view lies outside scientific consensus and societal values. 

Pyron wasn’t concerned about his frogs going extinct, because, “Eventually, they will be replaced by a dozen or a hundred new species that evolve later.” But the timescale would be millennia at best — meaningless in human terms — and perhaps never; hundreds of amphibians worldwide are suffering declines and extinctions, raising the possibility that major lineages and whole groups of species will vanish. Pyron seemed to have no concerns about that possibility, writing, “Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years.”

But that’s misleading. “Periodically” implies regularity. There’s no regularity to mass extinctions. Not in their timing, nor in their causes. The mass extinctions are not related. Three causes of mass extinctions — prolonged worldwide atmosphere-altering volcanic eruptions; a dinosaur-snuffing asteroid hit; and the spreading agriculture, settlement, and sheer human appetite driving extinctions today — are unrelated.

Rio Pescado stubfoot toad ( Atelopus balios ). Source: De Investigación y Conservación de Anfibios/ Flickr

The conviction that today’s slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable, and could be lessened or avoided, spurred the founding of the conservation movement and created the discipline of conservation biology.

But Pyron seems unmoved. “Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish,” he declared. “Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an ‘endangered species,’ except for all species.”

Let us unpack. Extinction is not evolution’s driver; survival is. The engine of evolution is survival amidst competition. It’s a little like what drives innovation in business. To see this, let’s simply compare the species diversity of the Northern Hemisphere, where periodic ice sheets largely wiped the slate clean, with those of the tropics, where the evolutionary time clock continued running throughout. A couple of acres in eastern temperate North America might have a dozen tree species or fewer. In the Amazon a similar area can have 300 tree species. All of North American has 1,400 species of trees; Brazil has 8,800. All of North America has just over 900 birds; Colombia has 1,900 species. All of North America has 722 butterfly species. Where I am right now, along the Tambopata River in Peru, biologists have tallied around 1,200 butterfly species.

Competition among living species drives proliferation into diversified specialties. Specialists increasingly exploit narrowing niches. We can think of this as a marketplace of life, where little competition necessitates little specialization, thus little proliferation. An area with many types of trees, for instance, directly causes the evolution of many types of highly specialized pollinating insects, hummingbirds, and pollinating bats, who visit only the “right” trees. Many flowering plants are pollinated by just one specialized species.

Pyron muddles several kinds of extinctions, then serves up further misunderstanding of how evolution works. So let’s clarify. Mass extinctions are global; they involve the whole planet. There have been five mass extinctions and we’ve created a sixth . Past mass extinctions happened when the entire planet became more hostile. Regional wipeouts, as occurred during the ice ages, are not considered mass extinctions, even though many species can go extinct. Even without these major upheavals there are always a few species blinking out due to environmental changes or new competitors. And there are pseudo-extinctions where old forms no longer exist, but only because their descendants have changed through time. 

New species do not suddenly “arise,” nor are they really new. They evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change.

Crucially for understanding the relationship between extinction and evolution is this: New species do not suddenly “arise,” nor are they really new. New species evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change. Many “extinct” species never really died out; they just changed into what lives now. Not all the dinosaurs went extinct; theropod dinosaurs survived. They no longer exist because they evolved into what we call birds. Australopithecines no longer exist, but they did not all go extinct. Their children morphed into the genus Homo, and the tool- and fire-making Homo erectus may well have survived to become us. If they indeed are our direct ancestor — as some species was — they are gone now, but no more “extinct” than our own childhood. All species come from ancestors, in lineages that have survived.

Pyron’s contention that the “hardiest” flourish is a common misconception. A sloth needs to be slow; a faster sloth is going to wind up as dinner in a harpy eagle nest. A white bear is not “hardier” than a brown one; the same white fur that provides camouflage in a snowy place will scare away prey in green meadow. Bears with genes for white fur flourished in the Arctic, while brown bears did well amidst tundra and forests. Polar bears evolved from brown bears of the tundra; they got so specialized that they separated, then specialized further. Becoming a species is a process, not an event. “New” species are simply specialized descendants of old species.

True extinctions beget nothing. Humans have recently sped the extinction rate by about a thousand times compared to the fossil record. The fact that the extinction of dinosaurs was followed, over tens of millions of years, by a proliferation of mammals, is irrelevant to present-day decisions about rhinos, elephant populations, or monarch butterflies. Pyron’s statement, “There is no such thing as an ‘endangered species,’ except for all species,” is like saying there are no endangered children except for all children. It’s like answering “Black lives matter” with “All lives matter.” It’s a way of intentionally missing the point. 

Chestnut-sided warbler ( Setophaga pensylvanica ). Source: Francesco Veronesi/ Wikimedia

Here’s the point: All life today represents non-extinctions; each species, every living individual, is part of a lineage that has not gone extinct in a billion years.

Pyron also expressed the opinion that “the only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves …” I don’t know of another biologist who shares this opinion. Pyron’s statement makes little practical sense, because reducing the diversity and abundance of the living world will rob human generations of choices, as values change. Save the passenger pigeon? Too late for that. Whales? A few people acted in time to keep most of them. Elephants? Our descendants will either revile or revere us for what we do while we have the planet’s reins in our hands for a few minutes. We are each newly arrived and temporary tourists on this planet, yet we find ourselves custodians of the world for all people yet unborn. A little humility, and forbearance, might comport.

Thus Pyron’s most jarring assertion: “Extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it.” That statement is a stranger to thousands of years of philosophy on moral agency and reveals an ignorance of human moral thinking. Moral agency issues from an ability to consider consequences. Humans are the species most capable of such consideration. Thus many philosophers consider humans the only creatures capable of acting as moral agents. An asteroid strike, despite its consequences, has no moral significance. Protecting bears by declaring Katmai National Monument, or un-protecting Bears Ears National Monument, are acts of moral agency. Ending genetic lineages millions of years old, either actively or by the willful neglect that Pyron advocates, certainly qualifies as morally significant.

Do we really wish a world with only what we “rely on for food and shelter?” Do animals have no value if we don’t eat them?

How can we even decide which species we “directly depend’’ upon? We don’t directly depend on peacocks or housecats, leopards or leopard frogs, humpback whales or hummingbirds or chestnut-sided warblers or millions of others. Do we really wish a world with only what we “rely on for food and shelter,” as Pyron seemed to advocate? Do animals have no value if we don’t eat them? I happen not to view my dogs as food, for instance. Things we “rely on” make life possible, sure, but the things we don’t need make life worthwhile.

When Pyron wrote, “Conservation is needed for ourselves and only ourselves… If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it,” he expressed a dereliction of the love, fascination, and perspective that motivates the practice of biology.

Here is a real biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection:

I thought of the long ages of the past during which the successive generations of these things of beauty had run their course … with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness, to all appearances such a wanton waste of beauty… . This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man… . Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone. —The Malay Archipelago, 1869

At the opposite pole of Wallace’s human insight and wonder, Pyron asked us to become complicit in extinction. “The goals of species conservation have to be aligned with the acceptance that large numbers of animals will go extinct,” he asserted. “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be  threatened  with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species … The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”

African elephant ( Loxodonta africana ). Source: Flowcomm/ Flickr

Right now, in the Amazon as I type, listening to nocturnal birds and bugs and frogs in this towering emerald cathedral of life, thinking such as Pyron’s strikes me as failing to grasp both the living world and the human spirit. 

The massive destruction that Pyron seems to so cavalierly accept isn’t necessary. When I was a kid, there were no ospreys, no bald eagles, no peregrine falcons left around New York City and Long Island where I lived. DDT and other hard pesticides were erasing them from the world. A small handful of passionate people sued to get those pesticides banned, others began breeding captive falcons for later release, and one biologist brought osprey eggs to nests of toxically infertile parents to keep faltering populations on life support. These projects succeeded. All three of these species have recovered spectacularly and now again nest near my Long Island home. Extinction wasn’t a cost of progress; it was an unnecessary cost of carelessness. Humans could work around the needs of these birds, and these creatures could exist around development. But it took some thinking, some hard work, and some tinkering.

It’s not that anyone thinks humans have not greatly changed the world, or will stop changing it. Rather, as the great wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote in his 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac , “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Related Articles

Tracking illicit brazilian beef from the amazon to your burger, in a dammed and diked mekong, a push to restore the flow.

By Stefan Lovgren

How One South African Community Stopped Shell Oil in Its Tracks

More from e360, will new leader end progress in saving indonesia’s forests, dire straits: can a fishing ban save the elusive european eel, scientists are trying to coax the ocean to absorb more co2, marina silva on brazil’s fight to turn the tide on deforestation, solomon islands tribes sell carbon credits, not their trees, with sea turtles in peril, a call for new strategies to save them, jared kushner has big plans for delta of europe’s last wild river, a nuclear power revival is sparking a surge in uranium mining, despite official vote, the evidence of the anthropocene is clear.

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons

Margin Size

• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

12: Biodiversity and The Extinction Crisis

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 103396

\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\)

\( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\)

\( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\)

\( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} \)

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Shark fins in Hong Kong. by Cloneofsnake, CC-BY-SA 2.0

Sharks are declining rapidly on a global scale because humans have replaced them as the ocean's top predators. One way that humans hunt sharks is by using a practice called  shark finning . This is the process of slicing off a shark’s fin and discarding the rest of the still-living body, often by dumping it back into the ocean. Shark fins are tempting targets for fishermen because they have high monetary and cultural value. They are used in a popular dish called shark fin soup, which is a symbol of status in Chinese culture. Approximately 100 million sharks are killed globally each year, and one of the major incentives for this is the shark fin trade. With their slow growth and low reproductive rates, sharks are highly susceptible to extinction, and it is difficult for many shark species to replenish their populations as quickly as they are being diminished.

Biodiversity loss refers to the reduction of biodiversity due to displacement or extinction of species. The loss of a particular individual species may seem unimportant to some, especially if it is not a charismatic species like the Bengal tiger or the bottlenose dolphin. However, biologists estimate that species extinctions are currently many times higher the normal, or background, rate seen previously in Earth’s history. This translates to the loss of tens of thousands of species within our lifetimes. This is likely to have dramatic effects on human welfare through the collapse of ecosystems. Loss of biodiversity may have reverberating consequences on ecosystems because of the complex interrelations among species. For example, the extinction of one species may cause the extinction of another. To measure biodiversity loss, scientists assess which species are at risk of extinction as well as survey ecosystem decline.

Learning Objectives

• Define biodiversity
• Describe types and patterns of biodiversity. 
• List reasons why biodiversity is important.
• Explain how biodiversity has changed over Earth's history. 
• Compare the current rate of global extinctions to the average rate observed in the geological record.
• Discuss how species are classified into categories based on their extinction risk.
• 12.1: Value of Biodiversity Biodiversity is important to the survival and welfare of human populations because it has impacts on our health and our ability to feed ourselves through agriculture and harvesting populations of wild animals. Measuring biodiversity on a large scale involves measuring ecosystem diversity (the number of different ecosystems on Earth), Species diversity (the number of different species in a particular area and their relative abundance), and genetic diversity (a measure of the variability among ind
• 12.2: Patterns of Biodiversity Biogeography, the study of the past and present distribution of species around the world, reveals high species richness in the tropics. Most of the world's biodiversity hotspots, which have high species richness and risk of species loss, are concentrated in the tropics. These regions also have many endemic species, which are occur occur locally.
• 12.3: Extinction Extinction is the global loss of a species. Five mass extinctions have occurred in geological history, and extinction rates were particular high during these events. Earth is currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, which is driven by human activities. When mass extinctions are not occurring, extinction still occurs at a low rate, the background extinction rate. The local elimination of a species (extirpation) is also of conservation concern.
• 12.4: Measures of Biodiversity Loss A common means of assessing biodiversity loss involves classifying species based on extinction risk. The Red List includes nine such categories. The species at greatest risk of extinction are called critically endangered, followed by endangered, vulnerable, and near threatened species. Biodiversity can also be gauged at the ecosystem level, both in terms of area and ecosystem diversity.

• ENVIRONMENT

One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns

A landmark global assessment warns that the window is closing to safeguard biodiversity and a healthy planet. Yet solutions are in sight.

The bonds that hold nature together may be at risk of unraveling from deforestation, overfishing, development, and other human activities, a landmark United Nations report warns. Thanks to human pressures, one million species may be pushed to extinction in the next few years, with serious consequences for human beings as well as the rest of life on Earth.

“The evidence is crystal clear: Nature is in trouble. Therefore we are in trouble,” said Sandra Díaz, one of the co-chairs of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. A 40-page “Summary for Policy Makers” of the forthcoming full report (expected to exceed 1,500 pages) was released May 6 in Paris.

Related: Iconic Endangered Species

Based on a review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources and compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries, the global report is the first comprehensive look in 15 years at the state of the planet’s biodiversity. This report includes, for the first time, indigenous and local knowledge as well as scientific studies. The authors say they found overwhelming evidence that human activities are behind nature’s decline. They ranked the major drivers of species decline as land conversion, including deforestation ; overfishing ; bush meat hunting and poaching; climate change; pollution; and invasive alien species.

The tremendous variety of living species—at least 8.7 million , but possibly many more —that make up our “life-supporting safety net” provide our food, clean water, air, energy, and more, said Díaz, an ecologist at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina, in an interview. “Not only is our safety net shrinking, it’s becoming more threadbare and holes are appearing.”

A world of green slime?

In parts of the ocean, little life remains but green slime. Some remote tropical forests are nearly silent as insects have vanished , and grasslands are increasingly becoming deserts. Human activity has resulted in the severe alteration of more than 75 percent of Earth’s land areas, the Global Assessment found. And 66 percent of the oceans, which cover most of our blue planet, have suffered significant human impacts. This includes more than 400 dead zones —where scant life can survive—that collectively would cover the state of Oregon or Wyoming.

The new report paints “an ominous picture” of the health of ecosystems rapidly deteriorating, said Sir Robert Watson, Chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which conducted the global assessment. IPBES is often described as the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change for biodiversity and does scientific assessments on the status of the non-human life that makes up the Earth’s life-support system.

For Hungry Minds

“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life worldwide,” Watson said in a statement.

“My biggest personal concern is the state of the oceans,” Watson told National Geographic. “ Plastics , dead zones, overfishing, acidification... We’re really screwing up the oceans in a big way.”

Saving more species

Protecting nature and saving species is all about securing the land and water plants and animals need to survive, said Jonathan Baillie , executive vice president and chief scientist of the National Geographic Society. Protecting half of the planet by 2050, with an interim target of 30 percent by 2030 , is the only way to meet the Paris climate targets or achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for the world, Baillie said.

Forests, oceans, and other parts of nature soak up 60 percent of global fossil fuel emissions every year, the report found. “We need to secure the biosphere to protect the climate and help buffer us from extreme weather events,” Baillie said.

Coral reefs and mangroves protect coastal areas from storms such as hurricanes. Wetlands reduce flooding by absorbing heavy rainfall. Yet each of these ecosystems has declined dramatically, with wetlands down to less than 15 percent of what they were 300 years ago and coral reefs facing a global bleaching crisis .

Nearly 100 groups around the world (including the National Geographic Society and the Wyss Campaign for Nature) have endorsed the goal of protecting half of the planet by 2050. Recently, 19 of the world’s leading scientists published a study to make a science-backed plan for an interim step that would protect 30 percent by 2030 under what’s called a Global Deal for Nature . The proposed protection does not mean “no go” areas, but rather areas protected from resource extraction and land conversion. Sustainable uses would be permitted in all but the most sensitive areas, the groups wrote.

“The international community has both the time and the tools to safeguard nature and slow the ongoing wildlife extinction crisis,” Brian O’Donnell, director of the Wyss Campaign for Nature, said in a statement.

You May Also Like

Arabian cobra becomes 12,000th animal added to ark of at-risk species

Behold the surreal magic and mystery of slime molds

14 bison came to Catalina for a movie. 100 years later, what’s next?

National Geographic Society and the Wyss Campaign for Nature are working together to inspire the protection of 30 percent of the planet by 2030 .

Such tools were under discussion during the week-long negotiations by IPBES country members who debated the key messages and policy options to be published in the “Summary for Policymakers.” The full Global Assessment report will be published later this year.

“The main message of our report is that transformative change is urgently needed. There are no other options” said David Obura, a marine biologist at the Coastal Oceans Research and Development – Indian Ocean in Mombasa, Kenya. “There’s so little time left to save corals. If we can save corals we could save everything.”

Value nature not stuff

In order to safeguard a healthy planet, society needs to shift from a sole focus on chasing economic growth, the summary report concludes. That won’t be easy, the report acknowledges. But it could get easier if countries begin to base their economies on an understanding that nature is the foundation for development. Shifting to nature-based planning can help provide a better quality of life with far less impact.

Putting that concept into practical terms, the report says countries need to reform hundreds of billions in dollars in subsidies and incentives that are currently given to the energy, fishing, agricultural, and forestry sectors. Instead of driving additional exploitation of the world’s natural resources, those monies should be shifted to incentivize protection and restoration of nature—such as underwriting new reserves or reforestation programs, the report said.

“We need to change what we value: nature, ecosystems, social equity, not growing the GDP,” Obura said.

The other evidence gathered by IPBES shows that nature managed by indigenous peoples and local communities is in generally better health than nature managed by national or corporate institutions, despite increasing pressures, said Joji Cariño, a senior policy advisor at the Forest Peoples Programme , a human rights organization.

At least a quarter of the global land area is traditionally owned, managed, used, or occupied by indigenous peoples. However, their land tenure and other rights are not always protected or recognized by all countries. Nor is their deep knowledge of the land and their values often considered in policies and decisions by governments. That needs to change, the Global Assessment noted.

“Indigenous peoples are key partners in the global transformation that’s needed,” said Cariño.

Yet countries still are slow to recognize this, she adds. As an example, she points to the Philippines. Forty years ago, indigenous people there stopped construction of dams on the Chico River because they were concerned about impacts on their land. Yet those dams are now being built by China under their trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure initiative .

China has an important role to play in global discussions around biodiversity, because the country will host a major United Nations conference called the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in late 2020. Scientists hope a new, ambitious international agreement to protect the planet could happen there, akin to the Paris agreement around climate.

Assessment co-chair Díaz doesn’t yet know if a global agreement will arise as bold as protecting 30 percent by 2030. “If it were easy it would have already happened,” Diaz said.

“However, the evidence is clear: the future will be bad for us if we don’t act now. There is no future for us without nature.”

Related Topics

• BIODIVERSITY
• ENDANGERED SPECIES
• ENVIRONMENT AND CONSERVATION

In the heart of the Amazon, this pristine wilderness shows nature’s resilience

Fireflies are vanishing—but you can help protect them

Is this paradise—or a parking lot? This Florida ecosystem is a battleground.

500 baby sharks to be released: An exclusive look at an unprecedented mission

These tortoises are in jeopardy as good luck charms. Here's what we know.

• Environment
• Perpetual Planet

History & Culture

• History & Culture
• History Magazine
• Mind, Body, Wonder
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• 06 May 2019
• Update 06 May 2019

Humans are driving one million species to extinction

• Jeff Tollefson

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Up to one million plant and animal species face extinction, many within decades, because of human activities, says the most comprehensive report yet on the state of global ecosystems.

Access options

Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals

Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription

24,99 € / 30 days

cancel any time

Subscribe to this journal

Receive 51 print issues and online access

185,98 € per year

only 3,65 € per issue

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 569 , 171 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01448-4

Updates & Corrections

Update 06 May 2019 : This story has been updated with comment from Anne Larigauderie, IPBES executive secretary.

Reprints and permissions

Related Articles

The battle for the soul of biodiversity

Top UN panel paints bleak picture of world’s ecosystems

Global biodiversity report warns pollinators are under threat

• Biodiversity
• Environmental sciences

Forestry social science is failing the needs of the people who need it most

Editorial 15 MAY 24

Hybrid speciation driven by multilocus introgression of ecological traits

Article 17 APR 24

FSC-certified forest management benefits large mammals compared to non-FSC

Article 10 APR 24

Real-world plastic-waste success stories can help to boost global treaty

Correspondence 14 MAY 24

A DARPA-like agency could boost EU innovation — but cannot come at the expense of existing schemes

Editorial 14 MAY 24

Japan can embrace open science — but flexible approaches are key

Correspondence 07 MAY 24

Diana Wall obituary: ecologist who foresaw the importance of soil biodiversity

Obituary 10 MAY 24

Reinvent oil refineries for a net-zero future

Editorial 08 MAY 24

Global Talent Recruitment of Xinjiang University in 2024

Recruitment involves disciplines that can contact the person in charge by phone.

Wulumuqi city, Ürümqi, Xinjiang Province, China

Xinjiang University

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor

Westlake Center for Genome Editing seeks exceptional scholars in the many areas.

Westlake Center for Genome Editing, Westlake University

Faculty Positions at SUSTech School of Medicine

SUSTech School of Medicine offers equal opportunities and welcome applicants from the world with all ethnic backgrounds.

Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

Southern University of Science and Technology, School of Medicine

Assistant/Associate Professor in Sustainable Biobased Products Manufacturing

Lubbock, Texas

Texas Tech University

Professor and Center for Vector-borne and Zoonotic Diseases Director

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Extinction is the dying out of a species. Extinction plays an important role in the evolution of life because it opens up opportunities for new species to emerge.

Biology, Ecology, Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Conservation

Dinogorgon Skull

A dinogorgon skull protrudes from a rock with the South African scrubland in the background.

Photograph by Jonathan Blair

When a species disappears, biologists say that the species has become extinct. By making room for new species, extinction helps drive the evolution of life. Over long periods of time, the number of species becoming extinct can remain fairly constant, meaning that an average number of species go extinct each year, century, or millennium. However, during the history of life on Earth, there have been periods of mass extinction , when large percentages of the planet’s species became extinct in a relatively short amount of time. These extinctions have had widely different causes.

About 541 million years ago, a great expansion occurred in the diversity of multicellular organisms. Paleo biologists , scientists who study the fossils of plants and animals to learn how life evolved, call this event the Cambrian Explosion. Since the Cambrian Explosion, there have been five mass extinctions , each of which is named for the geological period in which it occurred, or for the periods that immediately preceded and followed it.

The first mass extinction is called the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction . It occurred about 440 million years ago, at the end of the period that paleontologists and geologists call the Ordovician, and followed by the start of the Silurian period. In this extinction event, many small organisms of the sea became extinct. The next mass extinction is called Devonian extinction , occurring 365 million years ago during the Devonian period. This extinction also saw the end of numerous sea organisms.

The largest extinction took place around 250 million years ago. Known as the Permian - Triassic extinction, or the Great Dying, this event saw the end of more than 90 percent of Earth’s species. Although life on Earth was nearly wiped out, the Great Dying made room for new organisms, including the first dinosaurs. About 210 million years ago, between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, came another mass extinction. By eliminating many large animals, this extinction event cleared the way for dinosaurs to flourish. Finally, about 65.5 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period came the fifth mass extinction. This is the famous extinction event that brought the age of the dinosaurs to an end.

In each of these cases, the mass extinction created niches or openings in the Earth’s ecosystems. Those niches allowed for new groups of organisms to thrive and diversify, which produced a range of new species. In the case of the Cretaceous extinction , the demise of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to thrive and grow larger.

Scientists refer to the current time as the Anthropocene period, meaning the period of humanity. They warn that, because of human activities such as pollution, overfishing, and the cutting down of forests, the Earth might be on the verge of—or already in—a sixth mass extinction. If that is true, what new life would rise up to fill the niche that we currently occupy?

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Production Managers

Program specialists, last updated.

October 19, 2023

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

Biodiversity: What is it and how can we protect it?

Facebook Twitter Print Email

The UN and its global partners will grapple with the massive loss of animal and plant species and how to avoid further extinction at a major conference beginning 23 January. Here’s a primer on what exactly biodiversity is and how the UN can help support efforts to enable nature to survive and thrive.

What does 'biodiversity' mean and why is it important?

In simple terms, biodiversity refers to all types of life on Earth. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity ( CBD ) describes it as “the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems, including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi”. These three levels work together to create life on Earth, in all its complexity.

The diversity of species keep the global ecosystem in balance, providing everything in nature that we, as humans, need to survive, including food, clean water, medicine and shelter.  Over  half of global GDP  is strongly dependent on nature. More than one billion people  rely on forests  for their livelihoods.

Biodiversity is also our strongest natural defence against  climate change . Land and ocean ecosystems act as “carbon sinks”, absorbing more than half of all carbon emissions.

Why are we talking about it now?

Because the first big push of the year to put the UN’s bold plan to protect biodiversity into practice  takes place in the Swiss capital, Bern , between 23 and 25 January. 

Introducing the conference, Patricia Kameri-Mbote, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme ( UNEP ) Law Division,  warned that the lack of coordination between the various organizations trying to protect biodiversity is a “critical challenge” that needs to be urgently overcome “as we strive for a world living in harmony with nature by 2050”. A key aim of the conference will be to solve that problem by pulling together the various initiatives taking place across the world.

Is there a crisis?

Yes. It’s very serious, and it needs to be urgently tackled. 

Starting with the natural and land sea carbon sinks mentioned above. They are being degraded, with examples including the deforestation of the Amazon and the disappearance of salt marshes and mangrove swamps, which remove large amounts of carbon. The way we use the land and sea is one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss. Since 1990, around 420 million hectares of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses. Agricultural expansion continues to be the main driver of deforestation, forest degradation and forest biodiversity loss.

Other major drivers of species decline include overfishing and the introduction of invasive alien species (species that have entered and established themselves in the environment outside their natural habitat, causing the decline or even extinction of native species and negatively affecting ecosystems).

These activities, UNEP has shown , are pushing around a million species of plants and animals towards extinction. They range from the critically endangered South China tiger and Indonesian orangutans to supposedly “ common” animals and plants, such as giraffes and parrots as well as oak trees, cacti and seaweed.  This is the largest loss of life since the dinosaurs.  

Combined with skyrocketing levels of pollution, the degradation of the natural habitat and biodiversity loss are having serious impacts on communities around the world. As global temperatures rise, once fertile grasslands turn to desert, and in the ocean, there are hundreds of so-called “dead zones”, where scarcely any aquatic life remains.

The loss of biodiversity affects the way an ecosystem functions, leading to species being less able to respond to changes in the environment and making them increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters. If an ecosystem has a wide diversity of organisms, it is likely that they will not all be affected in the same way. For instance, if one species is killed off then a similar species can take its place. 

What is the Biodiversity Plan?

The Plan, officially called the Kunming-Montreal  Global Biodiversity Framework , is a UN-driven landmark agreement adopted by 196 countries to guide global action on nature through to 2030, which was hashed out at meetings in Kunming, China and Montreal, Canada, in 2022.

The aim is to address biodiversity loss, restore ecosystems and protect indigenous rights. Indigenous peoples  suffer disproportionately from loss of biological diversity and environmental degradation. Their lives, survival, development chances, knowledge, environment and health conditions are threatened by environmental degradation, large scale industrial activities, toxic waste, conflicts and forced migration as well as by land-use and land-cover changes such as deforestation for agriculture and extractives.

There are concrete measures to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30 per cent of the planet and 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030. Currently 17 per cent of land and around eight per cent of marine areas are protected. The plan also contains proposals to increase financing to developing countries – a major sticking point during talks – and indigenous peoples.

Countries have to come up with national biodiversity strategies and action plans as well as set or revise national targets to match the ambition of global goals.

What else will the UN do to protect biodiversity this year?

Next month the UN Environment Assembly ( UNEA ), otherwise known as the   “World’s Environment Parliament” will meet at the UN office in Nairobi . The event   brings together governments, civil society groups, the scientific community and the private sector to highlight the most pressing issues and improve global governance of the environment. UNEA 2024 will focus on climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

However, the main event will be the  UN Biodiversity Conference , which will take place in Colombia in October. Delegates will discuss how to restore lands and seas in a way that protects the planet and respects the rights of local communities.

• biodiversity

November 1, 2023

20 min read

Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?

The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis

By Robert Kunzig

Snail Darter Percina tanasi. Listed as Endangered: 1975. Status: Delisted in 2022.

© Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

A Bald Eagle disappeared into the trees on the far bank of the Tennessee River just as the two researchers at the bow of our modest motorboat began hauling in the trawl net. Eagles have rebounded so well that it's unusual not to see one here these days, Warren Stiles of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told me as the net got closer. On an almost cloudless spring morning in the 50th year of the Endangered Species Act, only a third of a mile downstream from the Tennessee Valley Authority's big Nickajack Dam, we were searching for one of the ESA's more notorious beneficiaries: the Snail Darter. A few months earlier Stiles and the FWS had decided that, like the Bald Eagle, the little fish no longer belonged on the ESA's endangered species list. We were hoping to catch the first nonendangered specimen.

Dave Matthews, a TVA biologist, helped Stiles empty the trawl. Bits of wood and rock spilled onto the deck, along with a Common Logperch maybe six inches long. So did an even smaller fish; a hair over two inches, it had alternating vertical bands of dark and light brown, each flecked with the other color, a pattern that would have made it hard to see against the gravelly river bottom. It was a Snail Darter in its second year, Matthews said, not yet full-grown.

Everybody loves a Bald Eagle. There is much less consensus about the Snail Darter. Yet it epitomizes the main controversy still swirling around the ESA, signed into law on December 28, 1973, by President Richard Nixon: Can we save all the obscure species of this world, and should we even try, if they get in the way of human imperatives? The TVA didn't think so in the 1970s, when the plight of the Snail Darter—an early entry on the endangered species list—temporarily stopped the agency from completing a huge dam. When the U.S. attorney general argued the TVA's case before the Supreme Court with the aim of sidestepping the law, he waved a jar that held a dead, preserved Snail Darter in front of the nine judges in black robes, seeking to convey its insignificance.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Now I was looking at a living specimen. It darted around the bottom of a white bucket, bonking its nose against the side and delicately fluttering the translucent fins that swept back toward its tail.

“It's kind of cute,” I said.

Matthews laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “I like this guy!” he said. “Most people are like, ‘Really? That's it?’ ” He took a picture of the fish and clipped a sliver off its tail fin for DNA analysis but left it otherwise unharmed. Then he had me pour it back into the river. The next trawl, a few miles downstream, brought up seven more specimens.

In the late 1970s the Snail Darter seemed confined to a single stretch of a single tributary of the Tennessee River, the Little Tennessee, and to be doomed by the TVA's ill-considered Tellico Dam, which was being built on the tributary. The first step on its twisting path to recovery came in 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, surprisingly, that the ESA gave the darter priority even over an almost finished dam. “It was when the government stood up and said, ‘Every species matters, and we meant it when we said we're going to protect every species under the Endangered Species Act,’” says Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus. Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Delisted in 2007. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Today the Snail Darter can be found along 400 miles of the river's main stem and multiple tributaries. ESA enforcement has saved dozens of other species from extinction. Bald Eagles, American Alligators and Peregrine Falcons are just a few of the roughly 60 species that had recovered enough to be “delisted” by late 2023.

And yet the U.S., like the planet as a whole, faces a growing biodiversity crisis. Less than 6 percent of the animals and plants ever placed on the list have been delisted; many of the rest have made scant progress toward recovery. What's more, the list is far from complete: roughly a third of all vertebrates and vascular plants in the U.S. are vulnerable to extinction, says Bruce Stein, chief scientist at the National Wildlife Federation. Populations are falling even for species that aren't yet in danger. “There are a third fewer birds flying around now than in the 1970s,” Stein says. We're much less likely to see a White-throated Sparrow or a Red-winged Blackbird, for example, even though neither species is yet endangered.

The U.S. is far emptier of wildlife sights and sounds than it was 50 years ago, primarily because habitat—forests, grasslands, rivers—has been relentlessly appropriated for human purposes. The ESA was never designed to stop that trend, any more than it is equipped to deal with the next massive threat to wildlife: climate change. Nevertheless, its many proponents say, it is a powerful, foresightful law that we could implement more wisely and effectively, perhaps especially to foster stewardship among private landowners. And modest new measures, such as the Recovering America's Wildlife Act—a bill with bipartisan support—could further protect flora and fauna.

That is, if special interests don't flout the law. After the 1978 Supreme Court decision, Congress passed a special exemption to the ESA allowing the TVA to complete the Tellico Dam. The Snail Darter managed to survive because the TVA transplanted some of the fish from the Little Tennessee, because remnant populations turned up elsewhere in the Tennessee Valley, and because local rivers and streams slowly became less polluted following the 1972 Clean Water Act, which helped fish rebound.

Under pressure from people enforcing the ESA, the TVA also changed the way it managed its dams throughout the valley. It started aerating the depths of its reservoirs, in some places by injecting oxygen. It began releasing water from the dams more regularly to maintain a minimum flow that sweeps silt off the river bottom, exposing the clean gravel that Snail Darters need to lay their eggs and feed on snails. The river system “is acting more like a real river,” Matthews says. Basically, the TVA started considering the needs of wildlife, which is really what the ESA requires. “The Endangered Species Act works,” Matthews says. “With just a little bit of help, [wildlife] can recover.”

The trouble is that many animals and plants aren't getting that help—because government resources are too limited, because private landowners are alienated by the ESA instead of engaged with it, and because as a nation the U.S. has never fully committed to the ESA's essence. Instead, for half a century, the law has been one more thing that polarizes people's thinking.

I t may seem impossible today to imagine the political consensus that prevailed on environmental matters in 1973. The U.S. Senate approved the ESA unanimously, and the House passed it by a vote of 390 to 12. “Some people have referred to it as almost a statement of religion coming out of the Congress,” says Gary Frazer, who as assistant director for ecological services at the FWS has been overseeing the act's implementation for nearly 25 years.

Gopher Tortoise Gopherus polyphemus . Listed as Threatened: 1987. Status: Still threatened. Credit: ©Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

But loss of faith began five years later with the Snail Darter case. Congresspeople who had been thinking of eagles, bears and Whooping Cranes when they passed the ESA, and had not fully appreciated the reach of the sweeping language they had approved, were disabused by the Supreme Court. It found that the legislation had created, “wisely or not ... an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species,” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said after the Snail Darter case concluded. Even a recently discovered tiny fish had to be saved, “whatever the cost,” he wrote in the decision.

Was that wise? For both environmentalists such as Curry and many nonenvironmentalists, the answer has always been absolutely. The ESA “is the basic Bill of Rights for species other than ourselves,” says National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, who is building a “photo ark” of every animal visible to the naked eye as a record against extinction. (He has taken studio portraits of 15,000 species so far.) But to critics, the Snail Darter decision always defied common sense. They thought it was “crazy,” says Michael Bean, a leading ESA expert, now retired from the Environmental Defense Fund. “That dichotomy of view has remained with us for the past 45 years.”

According to veteran Washington, D.C., environmental attorney Lowell E. Baier, author of a new history called The Codex of the Endangered Species Act, both the act itself and its early implementation reflected a top-down, federal “command-and-control mentality” that still breeds resentment. FWS field agents in the early days often saw themselves as combat biologists enforcing the act's prohibitions. After the Northern Spotted Owl's listing got tangled up in a bitter 1990s conflict over logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, the FWS became more flexible in working out arrangements. “But the dark mythology of the first 20 years continues in the minds of much of America,” Baier says.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( map ); Source: David Matthews, Tennessee Valley Authority ( reference )

The law can impose real burdens on landowners. Before doing anything that might “harass” or “harm” an endangered species, including modifying its habitat, they need to get a permit from the FWS and present a “habitat conservation plan.” Prosecutions aren't common, because evidence can be elusive, but what Bean calls “the cloud of uncertainty” surrounding what landowners can and cannot do can be distressing.

Requirements the ESA places on federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management—or on the TVA—can have large economic impacts. Section 7 of the act prohibits agencies from taking, permitting or funding any action that is likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of a listed species. If jeopardy seems possible, the agency must consult with the FWS first (or the National Marine Fisheries Service for marine species) and seek alternative plans.

“When people talk about how the ESA stops projects, they've been talking about section 7,” says conservation biologist Jacob Malcom. The Northern Spotted Owl is a strong example: an economic analysis suggests the logging restrictions eliminated thousands of timber-industry jobs, fueling conservative arguments that the ESA harms humans and economic growth.

In recent decades, however, that view has been based “on anecdote, not evidence,” Malcom claims. At Defenders of Wildlife, where he worked until 2022 (he's now at the U.S. Department of the Interior), he and his colleagues analyzed 88,290 consultations between the FWS and other agencies from 2008 to 2015. “Zero projects were stopped,” Malcom says. His group also found that federal agencies were only rarely taking the active measures to recover a species that section 7 requires—like what the TVA did for the Snail Darter. For many listed species, the FWS does not even have recovery plans.

Endangered species also might not recover because “most species are not receiving protection until they have reached dangerously low population sizes,” according to a 2022 study by Erich K. Eberhard of Columbia University and his colleagues. Most listings occur only after the FWS has been petitioned or sued by an environmental group—often the Center for Biological Diversity, which claims credit for 742 listings. Years may go by between petition and listing, during which time the species' population dwindles. Noah Greenwald, the center's endangered species director, thinks the FWS avoids listings to avoid controversy—that it has internalized opposition to the ESA.

He and other experts also say that work regarding endangered species is drastically underfunded. As more species are listed, the funding per species declines. “Congress hasn't come to grips with the biodiversity crisis,” says Baier, who lobbies lawmakers regularly. “When you talk to them about biodiversity, their eyes glaze over.” Just this year federal lawmakers enacted a special provision exempting the Mountain Valley Pipeline from the ESA and other challenges, much as Congress had exempted the Tellico Dam. Environmentalists say the gas pipeline, running from West Virginia to Virginia, threatens the Candy Darter, a colorful small fish. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided a rare bit of good news: it granted the FWS $62.5 million to hire more biologists to prepare recovery plans.

The ESA is often likened to an emergency room for species: overcrowded and understaffed, it has somehow managed to keep patients alive, but it doesn't do much more. The law contains no mandate to restore ecosystems to health even though it recognizes such work as essential for thriving wildlife. “Its goal is to make things better, but its tools are designed to keep things from getting worse,” Bean says. Its ability to do even that will be severely tested in coming decades by threats it was never designed to confront.

T he ESA requires a species to be listed as “threatened” if it might be in danger of extinction in the “foreseeable future.” The foreseeable future will be warmer. Rising average temperatures are a problem, but higher heat extremes are a bigger threat, according to a 2020 study.

Scientists have named climate change as the main cause of only a few extinctions worldwide. But experts expect that number to surge. Climate change has been “a factor in almost every species we've listed in at least the past 15 years,” Frazer says. Yet scientists struggle to forecast whether individual species can “persist in place or shift in space”—as Stein and his co-authors put it in a recent paper—or will be unable to adapt at all and will go extinct. On June 30 the FWS issued a new rule that will make it easier to move species outside their historical range—a practice it once forbade except in extreme circumstances.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( graphic ); Brown Bird Design ( illustrations ); Sources: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Environmental Conservation Online System; U.S. Federal Endangered and Threatened Species by Calendar Year https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-listings-by-year-totals ( annual data through 2022 ); Listed Species Summary (Boxscore) https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/boxscore ( cumulative data up to September 18, 2023, and annual data for coral ); Delisted Species https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-delisted ( delisted data through 2022 )

Eventually, though, “climate change is going to swamp the ESA,” says J. B. Ruhl, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been writing about the problem for decades. “As more and more species are threatened, I don't know what the agency does with that.” To offer a practical answer, in a 2008 paper he urged the FWS to aggressively identify the species most at risk and not waste resources on ones that seem sure to expire.

Yet when I asked Frazer which urgent issues were commanding his attention right now, his first thought wasn't climate; it was renewable energy. “Renewable energy is going to leave a big footprint on the planet and on our country,” he says, some of it threatening plants and animals if not implemented well. “The Inflation Reduction Act is going to lead to an explosion of more wind and solar across the landscape.

Long before President Joe Biden signed that landmark law, conflicts were proliferating: Desert Tortoise versus solar farms in the Mojave Desert, Golden Eagles versus wind farms in Wyoming, Tiehm's Buckwheat (a little desert flower) versus lithium mining in Nevada. The mine case is a close parallel to that of Snail Darters versus the Tellico Dam. The flower, listed as endangered just last year, grows on only a few acres of mountainside in western Nevada, right where a mining company wants to extract lithium. The Center for Biological Diversity has led the fight to save it. Elsewhere in Nevada people have used the ESA to stop, for the moment, a proposed geothermal plant that might threaten the two-inch Dixie Valley Toad, discovered in 2017 and also declared endangered last year.

Does an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species make sense in such places? In a recent essay entitled “A Time for Triage,” Columbia law professor Michael Gerrard argues that “the environmental community has trade-off denial. We don't recognize that it's too late to preserve everything we consider precious.” In his view, given the urgency of building the infrastructure to fight climate change, we need to be willing to let a species go after we've done our best to save it. Environmental lawyers adept at challenging fossil-fuel projects, using the ESA and other statutes, should consider holding their fire against renewable installations. “Just because you have bullets doesn't mean you shoot them in every direction,” Gerrard says. “You pick your targets.” In the long run, he and others argue, climate change poses a bigger threat to wildlife than wind turbines and solar farms do.

For now habitat loss remains the overwhelming threat. What's truly needed to preserve the U.S.'s wondrous biodiversity, both Stein and Ruhl say, is a national network of conserved ecosystems. That won't be built with our present politics. But two more practical initiatives might help.

The first is the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, which narrowly missed passage in 2022 and has been reintroduced this year. It builds on the success of the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act, which funds state wildlife agencies through a federal excise tax on guns and ammunition. That law was adopted to address a decline in game species that had hunters alarmed. The state refuges and other programs it funded are why deer, ducks and Wild Turkeys are no longer scarce.

The recovery act would provide $1.3 billion a year to states and nearly $100 million to Native American tribes to conserve nongame species. It has bipartisan support, in part, Stein says, because it would help arrest the decline of a species before the ESA's “regulatory hammer” falls. Although it would be a large boost to state wildlife budgets, the funding would be a rounding error in federal spending. But last year Congress couldn't agree on how to pay for the measure. Passage “would be a really big deal for nature,” Curry says.

Oyster Mussel. Epioblasma capsaeformis.  Listed as Endangered: 1997. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The second initiative that could promote species conservation is already underway: bringing landowners into the fold. Most wildlife habitat east of the Rocky Mountains is on private land. That's also where habitat loss is happening fastest. Some experts say conservation isn't likely to succeed unless the FWS works more collaboratively with landowners, adding carrots to the ESA's regulatory stick. Bean has long promoted the idea, including when he worked at the Interior Department from 2009 to early 2017. The approach started, he says, with the Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

When the ESA was passed, there were fewer than 10,000 Red-cockaded Woodpeckers left of the millions that had once lived in the Southeast. Humans had cut down the old pine trees, chiefly Longleaf Pine, that the birds excavate cavities in for roosting and nesting. An appropriate tree has to be large, at least 60 to 80 years old, and there aren't many like that left. The longleaf forest, which once carpeted up to 90 million acres from Virginia to Texas, has been reduced to less than three million acres of fragments.

In the 1980s the ESA wasn't helping because it provided little incentive to preserve forest on private land. In fact, Bean says, it did the opposite: landowners would sometimes clear-cut potential woodpecker habitat just to avoid the law's constraints. The woodpecker population continued to drop until the 1990s. That's when Bean and his Environmental Defense Fund colleagues persuaded the FWS to adopt “safe-harbor agreements” as a simple solution. An agreement promised landowners that if they let pines grow older or took other woodpecker-friendly measures, they wouldn't be punished; they remained free to decide later to cut the forest back to the baseline condition it had been in when the agreement was signed.

That modest carrot was inducement enough to quiet the chainsaws in some places. “The downward trends have been reversed,” Bean says. “In places like South Carolina, where they have literally hundreds of thousands of acres of privately owned forest enrolled, Red-cockaded Woodpecker numbers have shot up dramatically.”

The woodpecker is still endangered. It still needs help. Because there aren't enough old pines, land managers are inserting lined, artificial cavities into younger trees and sometimes moving birds into them to expand the population. They are also using prescribed fires or power tools to keep the longleaf understory open and grassy, the way fires set by lightning or Indigenous people once kept it and the way the woodpeckers like it. Most of this work is taking place, and most Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are still living, on state or federal land such as military bases. But a lot more longleaf must be restored to get the birds delisted, which means collaborating with private landowners, who own 80 percent of the habitat.

Leo Miranda-Castro, who retired last December as director of the FWS's southeast region, says the collaborative approach took hold at regional headquarters in Atlanta in 2010. The Center for Biological Diversity had dropped a “mega petition” demanding that the FWS consider 404 new species for listing. The volume would have been “overwhelming,” Miranda-Castro says. “That's when we decided, ‘Hey, we cannot do this in the traditional way.’ The fear of listing so many species was a catalyst” to look for cases where conservation work might make a listing unnecessary.

An agreement affecting the Gopher Tortoise shows what is possible. Like the woodpeckers, it is adapted to open-canopied longleaf forests, where it basks in the sun, feeds on herbaceous plants and digs deep burrows in the sandy soil. The tortoise is a keystone species: more than 300 other animals, including snakes, foxes and skunks, shelter in its burrows. But its numbers have been declining for decades.

Urbanization is the main threat to the tortoises, but timberland can be managed in a way that leaves room for them. Eager to keep the species off the list, timber companies, which own 20 million acres in its range, agreed to figure out how to do that—above all by returning fire to the landscape and keeping the canopy open. One timber company, Resource Management Service, said it would restore Longleaf Pine on about 3,700 acres in the Florida panhandle, perhaps expanding to 200,000 acres eventually. It even offered to bring other endangered species onto its land, which delighted Miranda-Castro: “I had never heard about that happening before.” Last fall the FWS announced that the tortoise didn't need to be listed in most of its range.

Miranda-Castro now directs Conservation Without Conflict, an organization that seeks to foster conversation and negotiation in settings where the ESA has more often generated litigation. “For the first 50 years the stick has been used the most,” Miranda-Castro says. “For the next 50 years we're going to be using the carrots way more.” On his own farm outside Fort Moore, Ga., he grows Longleaf Pine—and Gopher Tortoises are benefiting.

Whooping Crane. Grus americana.  Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The Center for Biological Diversity doubts that carrots alone will save the reptile. It points out that the FWS's own models show small subpopulations vanishing over the next few decades and the total population falling by nearly a third. In August 2023 it filed suit against the FWS, demanding the Gopher Tortoise be listed.

The FWS itself resorted to the stick this year when it listed the Lesser Prairie-Chicken, a bird whose grassland home in the Southern Plains has long been encroached on by agriculture and the energy industry. The Senate promptly voted to overturn that listing, but President Biden promised to veto that measure if it passes the House.

B ehind the debates over strategy lurks the vexing question: Can we save all species? The answer is no. Extinctions will keep happening. In 2021 the FWS proposed to delist 23 more species—not because they had recovered but because they hadn't been seen in decades and were presumed gone. There is a difference, though, between acknowledging the reality of extinction and deliberately deciding to let a species go. Some people are willing to do the latter; others are not. Bean thinks a person's view has a lot to do with how much they've been exposed to wildlife, especially as a child.

Zygmunt Plater, a professor emeritus at Boston College Law School, was the attorney in the 1978 Snail Darter case, fighting for hundreds of farmers whose land would be submerged by the Tellico Dam. At one point in the proceedings Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., asked him, “What purpose is served, if any, by these little darters? Are they used for food?” Plater thinks creatures such as the darter alert us to the threat our actions pose to them and to ourselves. They prompt us to consider alternatives.

The ESA aims to save species, but for that to happen, ecosystems have to be preserved. Protecting the Northern Spotted Owl has saved at least a small fraction of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. Concern about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and the Gopher Tortoise is aiding the preservation of longleaf forests in the Southeast. The Snail Darter wasn't enough to stop the Tellico Dam, which drowned historic Cherokee sites and 300 farms, mostly for real estate development. But after the controversy, the presence of a couple of endangered mussels did help dissuade the TVA from completing yet another dam, on the Duck River in central Tennessee. That river is now recognized as one of the most biodiverse in North America.

The ESA forced states to take stock of the wildlife they harbored, says Jim Williams, who as a young biologist with the FWS was responsible for listing both the Snail Darter and mussels in the Duck River. Williams grew up in Alabama, where I live. “We didn't know what the hell we had,” he says. “People started looking around and found all sorts of new species.” Many were mussels and little fish. In a 2002 survey, Stein found that Alabama ranked fifth among U.S. states in species diversity. It also ranks second-highest for extinctions; of the 23 extinct species the FWS recently proposed for delisting, eight were mussels, and seven of those were found in Alabama.

One morning this past spring, at a cabin on the banks of Shoal Creek in northern Alabama, I attended a kind of jamboree of local freshwater biologists. At the center of the action, in the shade of a second-floor deck, sat Sartore. He had come to board more species onto his photo ark, and the biologists—most of them from the TVA—were only too glad to help, fanning out to collect critters to be decanted into Sartore's narrow, flood-lit aquarium. He sat hunched before it, a black cloth draped over his head and camera, snapping away like a fashion photographer, occasionally directing whoever was available to prod whatever animal was in the tank into a more artful pose.

As I watched, he photographed a striated darter that didn't yet have a name, a Yellow Bass, an Orangefin Shiner and a giant crayfish discovered in 2011 in the very creek we were at. Sartore's goal is to help people who never meet such creatures feel the weight of extinction—and to have a worthy remembrance of the animals if they do vanish from Earth.

With TVA biologist Todd Amacker, I walked down to the creek and sat on the bank. Amacker is a mussel specialist, following in Williams's footsteps. As his colleagues waded in the shoals with nets, he gave me a quick primer on mussel reproduction. Their peculiar antics made me care even more about their survival.

There are hundreds of freshwater mussel species, Amacker explained, and almost every one tricks a particular species of fish into raising its larvae. The Wavy-rayed Lampmussel, for example, extrudes part of its flesh in the shape of a minnow to lure black bass—and then squirts larvae into the bass's open mouth so they can latch on to its gills and fatten on its blood. Another mussel dangles its larvae at the end of a yard-long fishing line of mucus. The Duck River Darter Snapper—a member of a genus that has already lost most of its species to extinction—lures and then clamps its shell shut on the head of a hapless fish, inoculating it with larvae. “You can't make this up,” Amacker said. Each relationship has evolved over the ages in a particular place.

The small band of biologists who are trying to cultivate the endangered mussels in labs must figure out which fish a particular mussel needs. It's the type of tedious trial-and-error work conservation biologists call “heroic,” the kind that helped to save California Condors and Whooping Cranes. Except these mussels are eyeless, brainless, little brown creatures that few people have ever heard of.

For most mussels, conditions are better now than half a century ago, Amacker said. But some are so rare it's hard to imagine they can be saved. I asked Amacker whether it was worth the effort or whether we just need to accept that we must let some species go. The catch in his voice almost made me regret the question.

“I'm not going to tell you it's not worth the effort,” he said. “It's more that there's no hope for them.” He paused, then collected himself. “Who are we to be the ones responsible for letting a species die?” he went on. “They've been around so long. That's not my answer as a biologist; that's my answer as a human. Who are we to make it happen?”

Robert Kunzig is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala., and a former senior editor at National Geographic, Discover and Scientific American .

Biodiversity Loss Increases the Risk of Disease Outbreaks, Analysis Suggests

Researchers found that human-caused environmental changes are driving the severity and prevalence of disease, putting people, animals and plants at risk

Christian Thorsberg

Daily Correspondent

Human-driven changes to the planet are bringing widespread and sometimes surprising effects—including shifting the Earth’s rotation , hiding meteorites in Antarctic ice and, potentially, supporting locust swarms .

Now, a large-scale analysis of nearly 1,000 scientific studies has shown just how closely human activity is tied to public health. Published last week in the journal Nature ,   the findings suggest anthropogenic environmental changes are making the risk of infectious disease outbreaks all the more likely.

The biodiversity crisis—which has left some one million plant and animal species at risk of extinction —is a leading driver of disease spread, the researchers found.

“It could mean that by modifying the environment, we increase the risks of future pandemics,” Jason Rohr , a co-author of the study and a biologist at the University of Notre Dame, tells the Washington Post ’s Scott Dance.

The analysis centered on earlier studies that investigated at least one of five “global change drivers” affecting wildlife and landscapes on Earth: biodiversity change, climate change, habitat change or loss, chemical pollution and the introduction of non-native species to new areas. Based on the previous studies’ findings, they collected nearly 3,000 data points related to how each of these factors might impact the severity or prevalence of infectious disease outbreaks.

Researchers aimed to avoid a human-centric approach to their analysis, considering also how plants and animals would be at risk from pathogens. Their conclusions showed that four of the examined factors—climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of non-native species to new areas and biodiversity loss—all increased the likelihood of spreading disease, with the latter having the most significant impact.

Disease and mortality were nearly nine times higher in areas of the world where human activity has decreased biodiversity, compared to the levels expected by Earth’s natural variation in biodiversity, per the Washington Post .

Scientists hypothesize this finding could be explained by the “dilution effect”: the idea that pathogens and parasites evolve to thrive in the most common species, so the loss of rarer creatures makes infection more likely.

“That means that the species that remain are the competent ones, the ones that are really good at transmitting disease,” Rohr tells the New York Times ’   Emily Anthes.

For example, white-footed mice, the main carriers of Lyme disease, have become one of the most dominant species in their habitat as other, rarer animals have disappeared—a change that might have played a role, among other factors, in driving rising rates of Lyme disease in the United States.

One global change factor, however, actually decreased the likelihood of disease outbreaks: habitat loss and change. But here, context is key. Most habitat loss is linked to creating a single type of environment—urban ecosystems—which generally have good sanitation systems and less wildlife, reducing opportunities for disease spillover.

“In urban areas with lots of concrete, there is a much smaller number of species that can thrive in that environment,” Rohr tells the Guardian ’s Phoebe Weston. “From a human disease perspective, there is often greater sanitation and health infrastructure than in rural environments.”

Deforestation, another type of habitat loss, has been shown to increase the likelihood of disease. The incidence of malaria and Ebola , for example, worsens in such instances.

The new work adds to past research on how human activity can prompt the spread of disease. For instance, climate change-induced permafrost melt may release pathogens from the Arctic , a concern that’s been well-documented in recent years. And both habitat loss and climate change may force some animals to move closer together—and closer to humans — increasing the potential for transmitting disease .

Additionally, the research signals the need for public health officials to remain vigilant as the effects of human-caused climate change play out, experts say.

“It’s a big step forward in the science,” Colin Carlson , a global change biologist at Georgetown University who was not an author of the new analysis, tells the New York Times. “This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss.”

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue , Sierra  magazine, Discover  magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal .

Our Once-Abundant Earth

Protecting species from extinction is not nearly enough.

When Otis Parrish was a kid in the 1940s, abalone were abundant. Each abalone grows in a single, beautiful opalescent shell, which can get as big as a dinner plate. Parrish’s father showed him how to pry the abalone off the rocky shoreline at low tide with an oak stick or the end of a sharpened leaf spring. Or, best of all, how to take the abalone unawares and grab them with his bare hands before they had time to fasten tight to the rocks. His mother’s village was called Dukašal, or “Abaloneville” in the Kashaya Pomo tribe’s language, notwithstanding its location five miles and two steep ridges inland from Stewarts Point on the California coast. The ocean gave the Kashaya people protein and ceremonial food. “We call [abalone] ‘Champion of the Sea,’” Parrish told me over coffee in nearby Windsor, California, one recent morning.

Newcomers to the state started eating abalone in far greater quantities in the mid-1800s. They went into deeper water with skiffs and long poles, and began free diving and subsequently diving from boats with air hoses to harvest the shellfish. Commercial capture passed 1 million pounds a year around 1920. Apart from a dip during World War II, abalone hauls totaled several million pounds a year for decades. When the pink-abalone population crashed in the early 1970s, people fished for more red abalone, whose decline, in turn, was compensated by increased pursuit of the green, white, and black species. They were all flatlining by the mid-1980s. In 1997, California banned commercial abalone fishing.

For years, red abalone was the only species sufficiently abundant to support even a limited recreational fishery. Tens of thousands of divers plucked nearly a quarter million abalone a year in Northern California. Then came 2017. Divers would pull abalone off the rocks only to find mostly empty shells. Scientists concluded that the abalone were starving because a record marine heat wave had weakened the kelp forest, and an epidemic, exacerbated by the hot water, killed more than 90 percent of sunflower sea stars from 2013 to 2017. Abalone and sunflower sea stars don’t have anything to do with each other directly, but the latter eat purple sea urchins, which eat kelp, which abalone also eat. When the sea-star population crashed, urchin numbers exploded, and a spiny purple horde clear-cut the remaining kelp. Biologists presumed that the abalone scooted around the rocks looking for their staple seaweed, found none, and perished. California’s last abalone fishery closed.

This story doesn’t involve extinction. Both abalone and sea stars still exist on this Earth. If we measure biodiversity as the number of species, nothing has changed. But red abalone, a species at least a few million years old that, during Otis Parrish’s youth and for at least eight millennia prior, required next to zero effort to gather, are now extraordinarily scarce. One California species, the pinto abalone, is “endangered,” according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The remaining six species in the state are “critically endangered.” Sunflower sea stars, kelp forests, and many other species that live in the rocky coves along the California coast are in similar straits. They’ve been displaced by hyperabundant purple urchins, which biologists are desperately trying to persuade humans, the predator of last resort, to eat.

Read: How long should a species stay on life support?

Globally, 1.2 million species of organisms have been scientifically identified. Scientists have extrapolated from the number of species and higher-level taxonomic categories (genera, families, etc.) in extensively studied groups, such as birds, to estimate the diversity of under-researched groups, such as fungi. They put the global species total at about 8.7 millio n, of which roughly 7.7 million are animals . Some 157,000 species have been systematically evaluated by scientists to determine whether they are threatened with extinction; just more than 44,000 have qualified for the IUCN’s three most severe categories of peril. The registry shows only 2,354 confirmed or probable extinctions in modern times, though the actual number is surely far higher. That’s roughly 0.03 percent of species—an enormous number in a very short time, geologically speaking. But it dramatically understates the global crisis of crashing wild populations. That’s because what is happening more or less across the board isn’t extinction but collapse. On average, wild populations monitored by biologists over the past 50 years lost 69 percent of their members, according to the Living Planet Index . North American bird populations have declined by nearly one-third since 1970; in absolute numbers, that’s 3 billion fewer birds. The scientists who delivered that news said, “Population loss is not restricted to rare and threatened species, but includes many widespread and common species that may be disproportionately influential components of food webs and ecosystem function.” Particularly worrying for those food webs: In North America and Europe, terrestrial insects have been shedding about 10 percent of their populations every decade.

Our immediate biodiversity crisis isn’t one of species loss; it’s the lost abundance of wild things. The problem has become pervasive and systemic in recent decades because humans have added a new way of subtracting wildlife from our land and waters: pollution. Where once we were limited to hunting and clearing habitat, now we disorient night-traveling birds with light, starve manatees by smothering the sea grass they feed on with sewage and farm runoff, and continue to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The impacts cascade through the kelp forests and every other ecosystem on the planet, tipping some wild populations, like those of the 131 species of outrageously costumed harlequin toads , into free fall. Long before they’re entirely gone, these organisms are functionally omitted from their ecosystems and from the human experience.

I asked Parrish what the scarcity of abalone has meant for the Kashaya Pomo tribe. “Most families have forgotten the songs and the prayers that go with it,” he said, “and forgotten the taste.” Then, pointing at his head, he said, “It’s a loss of something up here.”

Human colonization of land, rivers, and sea, and use of the sky as storage space for soot, methane, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, and other excess gases, have corresponded, on paper, to a golden age for the naked ape. More than twice as many people exist now than in 1970, and our average income has more than doubled in inflation-adjusted terms. Many experts and policy makers accept the collateral damage as a cost of doing business on this planet. That’s because their economic scorecards count what’s measurably good for human beings. Something that’s good for two people is twice as good as something that’s good for one person. From this point of view, a world drained of wildlife with a lot of people making increasing amounts of money is heading in the right direction. The losses of joy, wonder, and ethical interspecific relations are real, but, in contrast to our material gains, resist measurement.

Economics is nicknamed the “dismal science,” but many of its practitioners are far more optimistic than biologists about our species’ future. They propose that economic growth can continue forever on a planet that is staying the same size, because scarcity isn’t the sad opposite of abundance; it’s the mother of invention. When goods—such as abalone, wood, water, oil, or bison—become scarce, substitutes become valuable. So people produce canned tuna, plastic, flushless urinals, solar power, and beef. If ready substitutes aren’t available, people innovate and tame scarcity. Over and over.

Substitution is seen as a remedy both for the shortage of production’s inputs and, nowadays, for the menacing excess of its emissions. But substitution won’t save us indefinitely, and typically leads to another round of unforeseen damage. When fossil fuels supplanted firewood, temperate forests recovered, and we embarked on our global-warming journey. Now green tech is driving a mining boom, including in the Congo rainforest, which is a crucial carbon sink . We’ll face countless other challenges ahead that we can’t now foresee. Events such as forest die-off, drought, deluge, record heat waves, and glacier melt, which have massive ecological and economic costs, are becoming common while remaining unpredictable.

John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy: Save the forests–especially the five biggest ones

It’s not too late for an abundant Earth. Recovery starts with making wild abundance an explicit objective and letting our economic and social lives coalesce around it. Buried in that paper on bird loss, for instance, is a story of spectacular recovery that made few headlines. Waterfowl populations have risen by 56 percent over the past 50 years, despite including the birds most routinely shot by people. Hunters joined other environmentalists to lobby for wetlands conservation. They recruited farmers to preserve migration pathways with “pop-up” wetlands made by flooding rice fields in California’s Central Valley. This success exemplifies the most important thing people can do for wild populations: Give them space, starting with the spaces that aren’t yet fragmented. Twenty percent of Earth’s forests, for instance, are still big and unfragmented, “ intact forest landscapes ” (IFLs). According to Peter Potapov, who leads research on IFLs at the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab, only 16 percent of those unfragmented forests is strictly protected. Another 20 percent is within more permissive protected areas, such as our national forests, that allow resource extraction. The remaining 64 percent has no protection at all. Securing these forests now is a bargain compared with the cost of removing roads and industry to regrow them later.

The United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity is the global agreement to protect wild species. In late 2022, its parties ratcheted up the ambition for conserved space to 30 percent of the planet by 2030, which represents a rough doubling for terrestrial protection and more than triple for the oceans. Nearly every country on the planet signed on (or, in the case of the U.S., made its own 30-by-30 commitment). Brazil has already hit its terrestrial target and set aside nearly half of its Amazon lands in parks, reserves, and Indigenous territories. Chile has protected more than 40 percent of its ocean and more than 50 percent of its Patagonian territory, and has kept all of that southern region’s rivers free-flowing. In Canada, cultures are peacefully reoccupying tens of millions of acres of their ancestral lands in Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas , fusing traditional law and “modern” conservation practice.

Protected spaces will change as the climate does. That doesn’t make them futile. They are “stages” on which an evolutionary drama unfolds. This has been the case as long as there’s been life, as new species have emerged over incomprehensibly lengthy time spans, thousands of human forevers. Now life forms are being challenged to adapt far too fast. The more we slow climate change, the more evolutionary storylines can reach into the future. In other words, climate policy is biodiversity policy.

The current U.S. administration promotes its “ all-of-government ” approach to biodiversity (and climate) action. These executive-branch programs are encouragingly holistic but can revert quickly to an all-of-government approach to destruction under a future president. The Endangered Species Act, the landmark 1973 law that has succeeded in preventing extinctions, wasn’t built for today’s biggest biodiversity challenge, the loss of abundance. Those hunters who restored abundant game birds took little comfort from a law that guaranteed habitat bubbles in which a few fowl might persist; they wanted enough to catch and eat. They wanted to see the sky darkened by birds. We need laws that go beyond sustaining scarcity and regrow biological plenty—call it an Abundant Life Act. Rather than attempting to codify abundance on a species-by-species basis, as the ESA does for extinction risk, such a law must consider life at the ecosystem level and reduce the causes of wildlife depletion without knowing precisely how much natural abundance will return. Rather than keeping a few abalone in an ESA lifeboat, let’s bring back enough to feed a venerable culture and draw awestruck divers once again into the filtered sunlight of a restored kelp forest. Let’s nurture enough of the Earth so that people once again can know they are part of a wild world disposed—and able—to host abundant life.

96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for extinction essay topics? One of the most severe ecological problems is worth exploring.

🏆 A+ Extinction Essay Examples

📌 best extinction essay topics, 🔝 top ideas for an essay about extinction, 👍 endangered species essay topics & title ideas, ❓ research questions about extinction.

Extinction is the termination of a certain living form, usually a species, or a language. The death of the last individual of the species (or the last speaker) is considered to be the moment of extinction. This phenomenon of animal extinction s considered to be the world’s largest threat to wildlife. In the last 50 years, the wildlife population sizes have dropped by 60%. That’s why animal extinction is one of the major ecological issues.

Whether you need to write a research paper or an argumentative essay on extinction, this article will be helpful. It contains top endangered species essay topics, titles, extinction essay examples, etc. Write an A+ essay about extinction with us!

• Preventing Animal Extinction in the UAE In essence, the UAE has been at the forefront of protecting endangered species from extinction and promoting an increment in their population, by putting up breeding programmes which help in multiplication of such animals.
• Dodo Bird and Why It Went Extinct One of the extinct species of bird is the dodo bird. Its extinction has made it hard for scholars to classify the bird when it comes to taxonomy of birds.
• Their Benefits Aside, Human Diets Are Polluting the Environment and Sending Animals to Extinction The fact that the environment and the entire ecosystem have been left unstable in the recent times is in no doubt.
• Wildlife Management and Extinction Prevention in Australia This paper investigates the threats to wildlife in Australia and strategies for managing and preventing their extinction. In summary, this paper examines the threats to wildlife in Australia and outlines strategies for managing and preventing […]
• Human Evolution and Animal Extinction The recent scholarly findings prove that invasions of Homo sapiens to the Austronesian and American continents were the major factors that conditioned the extinction of numerous animal species.
• Premature Extinction of Species For thousands of years of geological time, the extinction of some species has been balanced by the emergence of the new ones.
• Animal Extinction and What Is Being Done To Help The affected species, the causes of the change, as well as the possible criterion of arresting the situation, forms the subject of their discussion.
• Reassessing Extinction Projections: Debunking Exaggerated Claims This is because most animals and plants have been projected to be extinct by the end of this century yet the method that is used to forecast this can exaggerate by more than 160%.
• “Extinction Rebellion” News Article by Eells The Extinction Rebellion movement was created in 2018, and, according to the organizers, now it has spread to dozens of countries where there are groups ready to participate in protests.
• Diversity and Extinction of Cyclura Lewisi One of the biggest risks to the population of this species is wild animals. The Grand Cayman blue iguana population is gradually expanding and is predicted to continue to rise as a result of continuing […]
• Extinction of Dinosaurs in North America and Texas It is necessary to identify the reason for the extinction of dinosaurs on the territory of the continent, namely, the state of Texas.
• Seabird Extinction from Invasive Rodent Species This paper will review seabirds’ role in ecosystems, the invasive rodent species and their impact on seabirds, and methods of protecting seabirds from non-native rodents.
• Animal Extinction: Causes and Effects Due to the increased rates of globalization and the rapid development of industries, the effect that the humankind has been producing on the environment has been amplified.
• Mathematical Biology: Explaining Population Extinction Species in settings with soft carrying capacities such as those with non-negative value K create a restricted expectation of a variation, given a full past history, is non-positive when the species surpasses the carrying volume.
• The Importance of Saving a Species From Extinction It leads to a lack of surviving members of some species to reproduce in order create a new generation of the extinct species.
• Language Extinction in East Africa Most of the languages in the world fall under the endangered languages category with UNESCO approximating the percentage of endangered languages to be around 60%-80%.
• Extinction of Music Education Plato quoted: “The decisive importance of education in poetry and music: rhythm and harmony sink deep into the recesses of the soul and take the strongest hold there.
• The Cause of Human Extinction: Nature’s Ferocity or People’s Irresponsibility? The following sections will provide statistical data and projections as well as non-scientific scenarios for the end of the world and the extinction of the human race.
• Is Cannibalism the Reason for Neanderthal’s Extinction? They also found that cuts and fractures on the deer bones that were very similar to the ones that were found in the Neanderthal body.
• Chinese Dialects and Extinction Threats The problem of the reduction and extinction of the local dialects is one of the most sensitive and unresolved issues in China.
• Mass Extinction Theories It can thus be speculated that the species that could not withstand the effects of global warming had to become extinct due to the adverse changes in climate.
• Saving Sharks from the Extinction Thus, it is significant for the marshals to guard and secure the naval areas to uncover the abuse and intervene to discontinue the vicious killing of sharks.
• Comparison of Two Archaeological Papers on the Extinction of Animals Due to the Activities of Human Societies. In this study, the varying trends on the abundance of certain species were used to describe changes observed in the hunting practices and the animal species that were hunted.
• Human Activities and their Impact on Species Extinction in Arctic Unfortunately, what should be taken into consideration is the fact that as human interference continues to escalate within the region such as overfishing, oil drilling, population expansion and the effects of global warming this has […]
• Hazard from Space: Mass Extinction Theory The massive impact of extraterrestrial objects did not cause mass extinction of dinosaurs. Dinosaur basis of mass extinction theory do not give plausible explanation for extraterrestrial bodies since they occurred only once during the period […]
• Extinction of minority languages On the other hand, the extinction of minor languages leads to the extinction of certain cultural groups and their individualities, turning the world into a global grey crowd.
• Population Explosion and the Possible Extinction of Humans
• The Continuous Pollution on Earth Post Human Extinction in The World Without Us, a Book by Alan Weisman
• The Endangerment And Mass Extinction of The Tiger: Can We Stop It
• The Wildlife Biodiversity and its Continuous Extinction
• The Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction And The Earth’s Triassic Period
• Mass Extinction of Biodiversity From The Enhanced Greenhouse Effect
• Profit Maximization and the Extinction of Animal Species
• What Are the Consequences of the Removal/Extinction of an Organism from the Food Web
• The Biological Description of the Dodo and Its Extinction
• The Circumstances that Led to the Extinction of Dinosaurs
• We Must Save The Great White Shark From Extinction
• Problem of the Extinction of Many Rare Species
• The Destruction of Natural Habitats and the Extinction of Plants and Animals
• Why Extinction Does Happen It Is Not Indefinite
• Cascades of Failure and Extinction in Evolving Complex Systems
• The Permian Triassic Extinction Event And It’s Effects On Life On Earth
• Upper Estimates of the Mean Extinction Time of a Population with a Constant Carrying Capacity
• What Could Have Caused The Extinction of Dinosaurs
• The Role of Fungus in the Extinction of Dinosaurs
• Saving the Whales: Lessons from the Extinction of the Eastern Arctic Bowhead
• The Extinction, Endangerment, And Captivity of Endangered
• The Effects of Language Extinction on Cultural Identity in Third World Countries
• Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs by Stephen Jay Gould
• The Ghost of Extinction: Preservation Values and Minimum Viable Population in Wildlife Models
• Recovery After Mass Extinction: Evolutionary Assembly in Large-Scale Biosphere Dynamics
• The Devonian Extinction and the Long Process of Evolution in the Past 300 Million Years
• The Process of De-Extinction And Its Ecological And Moral Consequences
• The Need to Save the Animals from Extinction Using Genetic Engineering
• The Brink Of The Extinction Of America’s Civility And Inclusion
• The Current Extinction Rate Throughout The World: We Must Act Now
• Conservation Biology: Extinction, Habitat Loss, Invasive Species, Overexploitation
• Why Evolution And Extinction Is Essential To Humanity
• The Guam Rail Should Be Saved from Possible Extinction Essay
• The Extinction Event and Life in the Post-Apocalyptic Greenhouse
• Causes of Animal and Plant Extinction, and Its Effects on Humans
• Ultimate Extinction of the Promiscuous Bisexual Galton-Watson Metapopulation
• Saving the Cheetahs of the Serengeti from Extinction
• The Influx of New Languages and Its Dangers to the Extinction of the English Language
• The First Great Whale Extinction: The End of the Bowhead Whale in the Eastern Arctic
• Causes of Canine Extinction and Disappearing Species
• The Themes of Isolation, Extinction and Man’s Limitations in the Poetry of Robert Frost
• The Viability of the Catastrophism Theory in Dinosaur Extinction
• Why The Asian Small-Clawed Otter Is At The Brink Of Extinction
• Species Extinction To Environmental Deterioration
• The Extinction Of Neanderthals And Early Modern Humans
• Did Humans Cause the Mass Extinction of Megafauna During the Late Pleistocene?
• What Are the Consequences of the Extinction of an Organism for the Food Web?
• What Do We Mean by Extinction?
• What Was the Worst Extinction in History?
• What Are the Five Major Extinctions in Earth’s History?
• Are We Overdue for a Mass Extinction?
• What Are the Potential Benefits and Consequences of De-extinction?
• What Could Have Caused the Extinction of Dinosaurs?
• What Events Apparently Triggered the Mass Extinction?
• Why Evolution and Extinction Are Essential to Humanity?
• Why the Asian Small-Clawed Otter Is at the Brink of Extinction?
• Will Global Warming Lead to the Mass Extinction of the Worlds Species?
• What Causes Extinction of Animals?
• What Are the Three Types of Extinction?
• What Is the Cause of Extinction and What Are Its Effects?
• What Causes More Extinction?
• Which Is the Main Cause of the Extinction of Several Species?
• How Are Humans Causing Animal Extinction?
• How Will Extinction Affect Humans?
• What Causes Extinction and What Are Its Impacts?
• Why Is Extinction a Problem?
• How Does Extinction Affect Biodiversity?
• How Does Extinction Affect Evolution?
• What Usually Happens After a Mass Extinction?
• What Is the Advantage of Extinction?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 28). 96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/

"96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 28 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples'. 28 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

• Cruelty to Animals Titles
• Endangered Species Questions
• Invasive Species Titles
• Animal Rights Research Ideas
• Wildlife Ideas
• Zoo Research Ideas
• Cultural Identity Research Topics
• Animal Ethics Research Ideas

Preventing Extinction: Strategies for Protecting Endangered Species

Biodiversity is at a higher risk of extinction than ever before, and there is an urgent need to prevent global extinction. Endangered species are endangered by deforestation, climate change, and human intrusion. There is a need for comprehensive policies that will protect these vulnerable animals and stabilize our ecosystem immediately. By thinking outside the box, we can improve our conservation efforts to address the many risks that life on Earth faces. Let’s discuss strategies that ensure that extinction does not occur.

Climate Change

Everything ranging from climate to the life of different species is affected by global warming. In this respect, endangered species have an extra challenge for survival. Let’s think about how the changing weather hinders attempts to protect and even save them in some instances.

Habitat Disruption

One thing that climate change does is disrupts natural habitats. The living places of endangered species can be greatly altered by increasing temperatures and changing climatic conditions. Consequently, they may lose their homes, which makes it difficult for them to find food, mate, or complete their daily routine. As a result, preserving endangered species becomes much more challenging when they are inhabiting shifting landscapes.

Mismatched Timing

Climate change may alter the timing of certain events critical to species’ survival. For instance, temperature changes and seasonal shifts can affect flowering time for plants or migration periods for some animals. Non-alignment of these shifts with specific requirements of endangered species messes up their cycle of life. This incongruity makes it harder for individuals of such species to hunt and reproduce as well as nurse young ones, which further stresses already strained populations.

Limited Resources

Climate change has far-reaching effects beyond temperature and precipitation; it also affects resource availability. Changing rainfall patterns, water sources, and availability of food can make it hard for any endangered animal to find what they need in order to survive. However, this becomes much more complicated when underpinning climatic factors cease to be uniform or predictable like before, thus making conservation efforts intricate for these creatures that rely on them.

Effective Strategies for Preventing Extinction

To preserve the balance of our planet’s ecosystems, it is crucial that we prevent extinction. When species disappear, this interrupts the natural arrangement and changes everything from food chains to climate control. What is urgent is biodiversity conservation in order to ensure the survival of different species and ultimately ensure a sustainable future for our planet.

Science, Policy, and Public Engagement

Efficient strategies for preventing extinction are multifaceted as they encompass science, policy, and public engagement. Scientists have a central role in studying endangered species and their habitats and developing ways of conserving them. At the same time, strong policies are required to enforce protective measures and regulate human activities that contribute to endangerment. Engaging the public helps create awareness among the people concerning these issues, thus making them a community concern.

Preserving Habitat

Preventing extinction starts with preserving natural habitats. Many species face severe threats due to habitat destruction and fragmentation. It is important that any efforts geared at conserving these environments prioritize their protection as well as restoration to guarantee that the threatened species can get enough space, resources, and conditions needed for survival. Safeguarding space will become a savior to numerous plants on Earth as well as animals that face imminent risk of extinction.

Collaboration on a Global Scale

Extinction shall be prevented by global collaboration. Many of these endangered animals cross borders, necessitating international cooperation in their preservation. Knowledge sharing on a global scale enhances the impact of conservation initiatives through pooling together resources and expertise from various parts of the world; for global collaboration, actions such as collaborations, agreements, and partnerships are established since all countries should be against extinction, showing how responsibility is shared among nations and communities globally.

Innovative Conservation Technologies

Innovative conservation technologies offer a glimmer of hope in the face of saving the earth’s biodiversity. These front-line solutions channel scientific and technological advancements to address issues that are faced by animals under threat of extinction. Let’s go on and see how these innovations shape the future of conservation.

Drones Revolutionizing Wildlife Monitoring

Drones, which were initially used for aerial photography and delivery purposes, are now changing wildlife monitoring. These unmanned aircraft provide a view from above in remote habitats, making it easier for scientists to follow elusive species. From counting populations to tracking habitats, drones provide a non-invasive and efficient way to acquire important data for conservation purposes.

Preserving Biodiversity through Genetic Conservation

Gene tools are essential to conservationists for biodiversity preservation. These advanced genetic techniques help to safeguard the gene pool of endangered species. By understanding and maintaining unique genetic differences among populations, we can improve the survival chances of threatened species under ever-changing ecological conditions.

Remote Sensing

Satellite remote sensing allows scientists to monitor areas such as inaccessibility or endangered status. This technology helps assess changes in the environment, deforestation, and habitat loss, thereby providing critical information needed for effective planning and timely intervention aimed at protecting vulnerable ecosystems.

Empowering Individuals in Conservation Efforts

Also, innovation has led to citizen science initiatives that enable people to take part in environmental conservation. People can increasingly report observations about rare species and environmental change through mobile apps or websites. Apart from improving data collection, it also creates shared responsibility among people concerning maintaining diverse ecosystems within our planet.

Automated Bioacoustic Monitoring Devices

Nature’s detectives refer to automated bioacoustic monitoring devices that listen to the sounds made by wild animals so as to understand their behaviors. These devices have been improved technologically such that they can detect and analyze animal noises, thereby giving important information on species distribution, abundance, and even welfare. They use these gadgets to “listen” to nature, hence conserving biodiversity.

The Role of Camera Traps

Camera traps are like silent guardians in the wild that capture fleeting glimpses of wildlife without disrupting their natural habitats. Pictures or videos are taken whenever an animal crosses this device with motion detectors. The figures enable scientists to see into the secret lives of animals, thus helping them study behavior and population dynamics or even detect rare or endangered species in human-uninhabited areas.

Challenges and Future Prospects

Nevertheless, there are challenges like accessibility, affordability, and ethical concerns that must be solved if these technologies will ever reach their full potential. Overcoming such challenges while ensuring widespread access with responsible use marks the future of innovative conservation technologies. Constantly improving technology and being ethical in practice is key to enhancing the effects of these innovations on the ongoing fight to save our planet’s rich biodiversity.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: a Turning Point in Earth’s History

This essay about the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event examines one of Earth’s most devastating periods of biodiversity loss, occurring around 443 million years ago. It explores the causes and consequences of this extinction, emphasizing its profound impact on marine ecosystems and the subsequent evolutionary trajectory of life on our planet. By understanding this ancient event, scientists gain insights into the intricate relationship between Earth’s systems and the life it sustains, offering valuable lessons for addressing current environmental challenges and safeguarding biodiversity.

How it works

The Ordovician-Silurian extinction event, occurring approximately 443 million years ago, marks one of the most devastating periods of biodiversity loss in Earth’s history. This event dramatically reshaped the composition of marine ecosystems and had long-lasting effects on the evolutionary trajectory of life on our planet. Understanding this ancient extinction helps scientists appreciate the complex interplay between Earth’s systems and the life it supports.

The Ordovician-Silurian extinction unfolded in two distinct phases, each characterized by massive environmental upheaval and significant biological turnover.

The first phase, which marked the end of the Ordovician Period, saw the extinction of an estimated 85% of marine species. This was followed by a less severe but still substantial second wave during the early Silurian Period. The marine communities that once thrived, including trilobites, brachiopods, and bryozoans, were drastically reduced, paving the way for other groups to rise in prominence.

Several factors contributed to this biotic crisis, with changes in climate and sea levels playing central roles. The end of the Ordovician was marked by a severe ice age that locked much of the planet’s water in ice caps, leading to dramatic drops in sea levels. These changes disrupted marine habitats extensively, particularly affecting the shallow warm-water environments where many organisms thrived. The glaciation likely altered ocean currents, which in turn affected the oxygen and nutrient dynamics critical for marine life.

Furthermore, there is evidence suggesting that volcanic activity might have played a role in triggering some of these environmental changes. The release of volcanic gases could have contributed to an initial greenhouse effect that warmed the planet, only to be followed by rapid cooling as the gases dissipated and dust and aerosols blocked sunlight. This rapid climatic shift would have placed immense stress on ecosystems that were already sensitive to change.

Despite the severity of the extinction, it set the stage for evolutionary innovation and diversification. The post-extinction recovery period saw the emergence and radiation of new species adapted to the altered environments. For instance, fish began to diversify, and new types of coral reefs started to form, indicating a significant shift in marine ecological structures. These changes underscore the dynamic nature of life on Earth and its ability to adapt to even the most challenging conditions.

Studying the Ordovician-Silurian extinction not only informs us about past biological crises but also serves as a poignant reminder of the fragility of ecosystems in the face of rapid environmental changes. Today, as we face our own environmental challenges, including climate change and biodiversity loss, lessons from the distant past can provide valuable insights. Understanding how life on Earth responded to past mass extinctions can help us predict potential outcomes and develop strategies to mitigate the impacts of current environmental stresses.

In summary, the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event was a defining moment in Earth’s history, highlighting the vulnerability and resilience of life. Through the lens of this ancient catastrophe, we gain perspective on the potential long-term impacts of our current ecological footprint and are reminded of the continuous interplay between life and the environmental conditions that sustain it. Such historical insights are crucial as we seek to safeguard biodiversity and ensure the stability of life-supporting systems on our planet.

Cite this page

The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: A Turning Point in Earth's History. (2024, May 12). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-ordovician-silurian-extinction-a-turning-point-in-earths-history/

"The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: A Turning Point in Earth's History." PapersOwl.com , 12 May 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/the-ordovician-silurian-extinction-a-turning-point-in-earths-history/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: A Turning Point in Earth's History . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-ordovician-silurian-extinction-a-turning-point-in-earths-history/ [Accessed: 15 May. 2024]

"The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: A Turning Point in Earth's History." PapersOwl.com, May 12, 2024. Accessed May 15, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-ordovician-silurian-extinction-a-turning-point-in-earths-history/

"The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: A Turning Point in Earth's History," PapersOwl.com , 12-May-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-ordovician-silurian-extinction-a-turning-point-in-earths-history/. [Accessed: 15-May-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: A Turning Point in Earth's History . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-ordovician-silurian-extinction-a-turning-point-in-earths-history/ [Accessed: 15-May-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Environmental Changes Are Fueling Human, Animal and Plant Diseases, Study Finds

Biodiversity loss, global warming, pollution and the spread of invasive species are making infectious diseases more dangerous to organisms around the world.

By Emily Anthes

Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet — including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species — are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study.

Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have focused on specific diseases and ecosystems. For instance, they have found that a warming climate may be helping malaria expand in Africa and that a decline in wildlife diversity may be boosting Lyme disease cases in North America.

But the new research, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 previous studies, suggests that these patterns are relatively consistent around the globe and across the tree of life.

“It’s a big step forward in the science,” said Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, who was not an author of the new analysis. “This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss.”

In what is likely to come as a more surprising finding, the researchers also found that urbanization decreased the risk of infectious disease.

The new analysis, which was published in Nature on Wednesday, focused on five “global change drivers” that are altering ecosystems across the planet: biodiversity change, climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of nonnative species and habitat loss or change.

The researchers compiled data from scientific papers that examined how at least one of these factors affected various infectious-disease outcomes, such as severity or prevalence. The final data set included nearly 3,000 observations on disease risks for humans, animals and plants on every continent except for Antarctica.

The researchers found that, across the board, four of the five trends they studied — biodiversity change, the introduction of new species, climate change and chemical pollution — tended to increase disease risk.

“It means that we’re likely picking up general biological patterns,” said Jason Rohr, an infectious disease ecologist at the University of Notre Dame and senior author of the study. “It suggests that there are similar sorts of mechanisms and processes that are likely occurring in plants, animals and humans.”

The loss of biodiversity played an especially large role in driving up disease risk, the researchers found. Many scientists have posited that biodiversity can protect against disease through a phenomenon known as the dilution effect.

The theory holds that parasites and pathogens, which rely on having abundant hosts in order to survive, will evolve to favor species that are common, rather than those that are rare, Dr. Rohr said. And as biodiversity declines, rare species tend to disappear first. “That means that the species that remain are the competent ones, the ones that are really good at transmitting disease,” he said.

Lyme disease is one oft-cited example. White-footed mice, which are the primary reservoir for the disease, have become more dominant on the landscape, as other rarer mammals have disappeared, Dr. Rohr said. That shift may partly explain why Lyme disease rates have risen in the United States. (The extent to which the dilution effect contributes to Lyme disease risk has been the subject of debate, and other factors, including climate change, are likely to be at play as well.)

Other environmental changes could amplify disease risks in a wide variety of ways. For instance, introduced species can bring new pathogens with them, and chemical pollution can stress organisms’ immune systems. Climate change can alter animal movements and habitats, bringing new species into contact and allowing them to swap pathogens .

Notably, the fifth global environmental change that the researchers studied — habitat loss or change — appeared to reduce disease risk. At first glance, the findings might appear to be at odds with previous studies, which have shown that deforestation can increase the risk of diseases ranging from malaria to Ebola. But the overall trend toward reduced risk was driven by one specific type of habitat change: increasing urbanization.

The reason may be that urban areas often have better sanitation and public health infrastructure than rural ones — or simply because there are fewer plants and animals to serve as disease hosts in urban areas. The lack of plant and animal life is “not a good thing,” Dr. Carlson said. “And it also doesn’t mean that the animals that are in the cities are healthier.”

And the new study does not negate the idea that forest loss can fuel disease; instead, deforestation increases risk in some circumstances and reduces it in others, Dr. Rohr said.

Indeed, although this kind of meta-analysis is valuable for revealing broad patterns, it can obscure some of the nuances and exceptions that are important for managing specific diseases and ecosystems, Dr. Carlson noted.

Moreover, most of the studies included in the analysis examined just a single global change drive. But, in the real world, organisms are contending with many of these stressors simultaneously. “The next step is to better understand the connections among them,” Dr. Rohr said.

Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic. More about Emily Anthes

Explore the Animal Kingdom

A selection of quirky, intriguing and surprising discoveries about animal life..

Scientists say they have found an “alphabet” in the songs of sperm whales , raising the possibility that the animals are communicating in a complex language.

Indigenous rangers in Australia’s Western Desert got a rare close-up with the northern marsupial mole , which is tiny, light-colored and blind, and almost never comes to the surface.

For the first time, scientists observed a primate in the wild treating a wound  with a plant that has medicinal properties.

A new study resets the timing for the emergence of bioluminescence back to millions  of years earlier than previously thought.

Scientists are making computer models to better understand how cicadas  emerge collectively after more than a decade underground .