Question for Discussion: What is the relationship
between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the
global environmental crisis?

Readings: Wilson, " Is Humanity Suicidal?";
Chase, "Two Competing Visions of Species Extinction" ;
Birch, "As Humans Send Earth towards Extinction" ;
Wilson, "A Global Conservation Strategy"

Video: Comet Collision with Jupiter;
The Extinction of the Dinosaurs; Asteroids Deadly
Impact

Quiz: According to E.O. Wilson, what is the major
cause of species extinction?

The Comet Collision with Jupiter

• Comet Shoemaker-Levy Collision with Jupiter
  
  
• Picture of Comet Hits on Jupiter (in-class)
  
  
• Comet Shoemaker-Levy Background
  
  
• The Probability of Comet Collisions with Earth
  (in-class)
  

The Extinction of the Dinosaurs

• What Killed the Dinosaurs?
  
  
• The Impact Theory of Mass Extinction (in-class)
  
  
• Mass Extinction Events in Earth History (in-class)
  
  
• The K-T Event: Comet hits Earth 65
  million years ago (in-class)
  
  
• TOP 10 MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT DINOSAURS
  
  
• The Mystery of the Chicxulub Crater (in-class)
  
  
• Survival in the First Hours of the Cenozoic (in-class)
  
  
• Dinosaur Era ended Instantly (in-class)
  
  
• Space Rock caused Great Dying
  

Mass Extinction in Earth history

• Introduction to Mass Extinctions Events
  
  
• The Five Worst Extinctions in Earth's History
  (in-class)
  
  
• The Sixth Extinction: Humanity as the
  cause of the latest Mass Extinction (in-class)
  
  
• Mass Extinctions Underway (in-class)
  
  
• Scientists Agree: World Faces Mass Extinction
  
  
• 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (in-class)
  
  
• 2007 IUCN: Fact sheet on Threatened Species
  (in-class)

Humans and Mass Extinction

• Species Struggle as Humans Grab Resources
  (in-class)
  
  
• Humans Moving Closer to Extinction (in-class)
  
  
• HUMAN POPULATION GROWTH AND THE
  ACCELERATING RATE OF SPECIES EXTINCTION
  
  
• Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management
  
  
• Population and the Environment:
  The Global Challenge
  
  
• WWF: The Living Planet Report 2004
  

Worries about the New CERN Particle Collider

• Time Machine: CERN's new Hadron Collider
  
  
• New Particle Collider Spawns Bizarre Doomsday Scenarios
  
  
• BBC: Earth not at Risk from new Paricle Collider
  
  
• Scientists Activate Collider
  

The Dinosaurs and Human Extinction

• Worries about the CERN Particle Collider
  
  
• Wilson, Humans as Global Force
  
  
• Wilson, Two Competing Views of Species
  Extinction
  
  
• Birch, As Humans Send Earth Towards Extinction
  
  
• Chase, Two Competing Visions of Extinction
  
  
• Wilson, A Global Conservation Strategy
  
  
• The Extinction of the Dinosaurs
  
  
• The Comet Collision with Jupiter
  
  
• Mass Extinctions in Earth History
  
  
• Humans and Mass Extinctions

Global Map (1997)

Quotes from Wilson's "Is Humanity Suicidal":

"Unlike any creature that lived before, we have become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the composition of the world's fauna and flora. Now in the midst of a population explosion, the human species has doubled to 5.5 billion during the past 50 years. It is scheduled to double again in the next 50 years. No other single entity in evolutionary history has even remotely approached the sheer mass in protoplasm generated by humanity."

"The human species is in a word, an environmental abnormality. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was fore-ordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself."

---

Wilson, Two Competing Views of Species Extinction

"The first, exemptionalism, holds that since humankind is transcendent in intelligence and spirit, so must our species have been released from the iron laws of ecology that binds all other species. No matter how serious the problem, civilized human beings, by ingenuity, force of will and--who knows--divine dispensation, will find a solution . "

"The opposing idea of reality is environmentalism, which sees humanity as a biological species tightly dependent on the natural world. As formidable as our intellect may be and as fierce our spirit, the argument goes, those qualities are not enough to free us from the constraints of the natural environment in which our human ancestors evolved. We cannot draw confidence from successful solutions to the smaller problems of the past."

"When we debase the global environment and
extinguish the variety of life, we are dismantling a support system that is too complex to understand, let alone replace, in the foreseeable future. "

"The human hand, however, is not steady upon the biological homeostat. There is no way in sight to micro-manage the natural ecosystems and the millions of species they contain. That feat might be accomplished by generations to come, but then it will be too late for the ecosystems - and perhaps for us."

"During the, past 500 million years, there have been five great extinction spasms comparable to the one now. The latest, evidently caused by the strike of an asteroid, ended the Age of Reptiles 65 million years ago. In each case, it took more than 10 million years for the Earth to replenish the biodiversity lost. "

"But the world is too complicated to be turned into a garden There is no homeostat that can be worked by humanity, to believe otherwise is to risk making the Earth a wasteland. The environmentalist vision, prudential and less exuberant than exemptionalism, is closer to reality. I see humanity entering a bottleneck unique in history, constricted by population and economic pressures...".

"...[O]nly by halting population growth and devising a wiser use of resources than has been accomplished to date. And wise use for the living world in particular means preserving the surviving systems, micro-manaigng them only enough to save the biodiversity they contain, until such time as they can be
understood and employed in the fullest sense for human benefit.


Alston Chase, "Two Competing Visions of Species Extinction"

Alston Chase in a conservative journalist, who writes about the environment. Chase and Julian Simon, among others, argue that there is no crisis of species extinction. This article is a direct response to biologist E.O. Wilson's article, "Is Humanity Suicidal?" In response to Wilson, Chase asks: How bad are extinctions really? While biologists like Wilson argue that increasing extinctions and species loss "is triggering global catastrophe, Chase argues that extinctions are natural; in fact, 99 percent of all things that ever lived are extinct. So who is right? Should we worry about increasing species loss? Let's look at Chase's argument a little more closely.

Challenging Wilson, Chase argues that there is no real scientific evidence that increasing numbers of species are becoming extinct. Simon and Wildavsky argue that "the scare about species extinction has been manufactured in complete contradiction to the scientific data. Chase cites a International Union for the Conservation of Nature study which concludes that "the current rate of extinction is about one species a year." Now, first of all, if as Chase argues, extinction is natural, and is always going on, then this figure of one extinction per year, given at least 30 million species on Earth, just simply doesn't make sense on the face of it. One extinction out of 30 million species a year is atronomically low if extinction is a natural occuring process.

Chase charges that biologists like Wilson don't have any real data and scientific evidence for arguing that we are witnessing increasing rates of extinction. Without this data, Chase charges that Wilson's arguments are unscientific and unproven. But Wilson concedes that "the great majority of extinctions are never observed." Does this mean he is accepting Chase's argument that there is no hard evidence for increasing species loss? Not at all.

It is at this point that Chase's not being a scientist and a biologist most hurts his argument. Just because we don't know whether thousands and thousands of species are becoming extinct does that mean that they are not becoming extinct? This goes back to the old philosophical problem: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound. Just because we haven't catalogued all the species on Earth and know where they live and breed does not mean that thousands and thousands of species aren't becoming extinct. In fact, scientific studies in the Rain Forests give us some real good clues to what the extinction rates are. A number of scientists have gone out and sprayed poison gases under Rain Forest trees, and in small selected areas, killing all the species that live in that small sample environment. These scientists then count the number of species that lived in this small sample. They were surprised to find thousands of species of plants and animals even in the small, sample environments that they studied.On the basis of the large numbers of species found in such small, isolated plots, these scientists concluded that for every acre of Rain Forest cut down thousands and thousands of species of plants and animals die. Thus, if thousands and thousands of acres of Rain Forest land is deforested and destroyed, thousands of species, who live only in those forests and those tropical environments become extinct.

But even with this new evidence supporting biologists' arguments for increasing species loss, Chase would argue that extinction is not something that should concern us. He argues that there are two points of view on this: the evolutionary perspective and the ecological perspective. From an evolutionary perspective, which is Chase's perspective, extinction is occurring all the time in nature, and it is a natural process. He concludes that "vanishing species are a part of a natural process, making room for new life forms." So even if Wilson is right about growing rates of extinction, humanity shouldn't worry about it.

Chase dismisses Wilson's concern as simply being caused by his ecological perspective on extinction. Chase argues that at the heart of the "environmentalist world view is the conviction that human physical and spiritual health depends on sustaining the planet in a relatively unaltered state." But Chase argues that from an evolutionary perspective the Earth and the environment are always changing, constantly evolving. Chase concludes that the extinction of the dinosaurs, for example, was a good thing for human beings because they made room for our evolution. He even suggests, without any real argument or evidence, that the dinosaurs evolved into the beautiful birds and finches he sees. Should we accept his argument that
T-Rex evolved into a bird? This argument, I believe, should demonstrate how little Chase knows about biology, evolution, and extinction.



Charles Birch, "As Humans Send Earth Toward Extinction"

Unlike Alston Chase, Charles Birch is a noted biologist and scientist. Birch argues that the growing human destruction of the Earth and the global environment threatens our future. He argues that our growing impact on the "life-support systems of the planet" threaten our extinction. Just as the dinosaurs became extinct because they couldn't adapt to their changing environment, humanity faces extinction if it can't adapt to a rapidly changing environment caused by our global industrial civilization. Like Wilson, Birch argues that "the sort of society we are building with the aid of science and technology has self-destructive features built into it."

So how is our industrial civilization threatening its future? Birch argues that the increasing demands placed on the "limited resources of the Earth and the capacity of the planet to cope with air and water pollution" weaken the ability of the Earth to support our global industrial civilization. He argues that the rich nations--the developed nations--"high rate of consumption and pollution" have led scientists to develop the "impossibility theorem," which states that this level of consumption and pollution for rich nations is not possible for all the peoples of the world. Birch warns that "it is now widely believed that the industrialization of the whole world would be lethal to the planet." In fact, 20 percent of the global human population now consumes 80 percent of the resources and wealth, while the remaining 80 percent of the people consume only 20 percent of the resources and wealth. If we continue to try to bring up the underdeveloped peoples' standard of living to our level, Birch argues, we will destroy the ability of the Earth to support our industrial civilization.

Birch concludes that we must reduce our impact on the global environment, reduce our levels of consumption and pollution, and try to preserve endangered environments and threatened species. But in order to do so we must undergo "a revolution in values, in lifestyles, in economic and political goals, and even in the nature of the science and technology we practice." But Birch leaves it open whether we can do this before our industrial civilization destroys the planet that supports and nourishes it. Like Wilson, and unlike Chase, Birch believes that human health and well-being depends on the existence of a healthy environment.

Unlike Chase, Wilson is worried about species extinction. He warns: "If Homo Sapiens goes the way of the Dinosaurs, we have only ourselves to blame." Like Chase, Wilson recognizes that the environment evolves and changes and that species become extinct. Where he disagrees with Chase is over the rate of this evolution and species loss. Like Birch, Wilson argues that the scale of the increasing impact of industrial civilization on the Earth and the rate of change that this impact is having on the global environment is way beyond the natural levels of evolution. Wilson concludes that humanity has "become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the composition of the world's fauna and flora." He even declares that "the human species is an environmental
abnormality," because our growing impact on the Earth is threatening to cause the collapse of our global industrial civilization and threaten our survival as a species.

However, Wilson now pauses to assess the overall nature of the human impact on the Earth. He now asks: "Who can safely measure the human capacity to overcome the perceived limits of the Earth?....Are we racing to the brink of an abyss, or are we just gathering speed for a takeoff to a wonderful future." It is in how they answer these questions that Wilson and Chase and Julian Simon really differ. Recognizing critics like Chase and Simon, Wilson argues that there are two different perspectives on the human future: exemptionalism and environmentalism.

The exemptionalists believe that humanity's intelligence and spirit allows it to transcend nature and the iron laws of ecology and life. They believe that "no matter now serious the problem, civilized human beings by ingenuity, force of will and--who knows--divine dispensation will find a solution."Instead of worrying about pollution, limited resources, species extinction, population growth, and the human future, exemptionalists argue that human intelligence, work, creativity, and determination will allow us to create a better, safer, more abundant future. Exemptionalists believe if there are current environmental problems they are minor, mainly the result of growing pain and ignorance, and with continued economic growth and advances in science and technology we will solve these problems.

The environmentalists believe that "humanity is a biological species tightly dependent on the natural world....As formidable as our intellect may be and as fierce as our spirit, ...these qualities are not enough to free us from the constraints of the natural environment in which our human ancestry evolved." For environmentalists, human health depends on "sustaining the planet in a relatively unaltered state." They are not arguing that we have to keep the environment in a steady-state, constant and unchanging. What they mean is that humanity can't remake the Earth in its own image, replacing forests, grasslands, wetlands, and fisheries with human development, because we depend on these environments to support us. In the end, unlike the exemptionalists who believe that humanity can understand and control the global environment and nature, environmentalists argue that the Earth and the global environment is "too complex to understand, let alone replace, in the foreseeable future." The increasing human efforts to remake the Earth and control the global environment for human use, environmentalists argue, is causing such rapid, complex, and global changes in the environment that we cannot predict whether the Earth will be able to continue to support our global civilization, or even support the continued survival of the human race.

Because Wilson, like Birch, holds the environmentalist perspective, he is worried that humanity is threatening to destroy the global environment that supports it. Wilson now asks the critical question: Does the drive to global environmental conquest, population growth, and human control over the environment demonstrate that "humanity is suicidal?" He argues that we aren't suicidal, we aren't doomed to destroy ourselves by destroying the ability of the global environment to support human life. Wilson argues that we "are smart enough and have time enough to avoid an environmental catastrophe of civilization-threatening dimensions." But if we are to save the environment, Wilson argues, we must recognize that "we have only a poor grasp of the ecosystem services by which other organisms cleanse the water, turn soil into a fertile living cover, and manufacture the very air we breathe." Challenging the exemptionalists, Wilson argues that the "world is too complicated to be turned into a garden....[And] to believe otherwise is to risk reducing a large part of the Earth to a wasteland."

Wilson concludes that we have "perhaps 50 to 100 years" to stabilize the global environment and transform our values, our political and economic systems, and our development and use of science and technology. If we continue on the path of ever-accelerating human impacts on the global environment, we will probably cause the collapse of our global, industrial civilization. But what will it take to finally cause our global industrial civilization to recognize that it is facing a global environmental crisis that demands fundamental changes in our attitudes towards and our use of the environment? Wilson doesn't really answer this question. For it is such a daunting challenge because the stakes are so huge. We know that like the dinosaurs who dominated the earth for 165 million years and became extinct in a biological instant 65 million years ago, humanity could also fail to adapt to a rapidly changing Earth and become extinct too.

Wilson, A Global Conservation Strategy

1. Salvage immediately the world’s hotspots,
those habitats that are both at the greatest risk
and shelter the largest concentrations of
species found nowhere else....Twenty-five of
these special ecosystems cover only
1.4 percent of Earth’s land surface, about the same as Texas and Alaska combined.

2. Keep intact the five remaining frontier forests, which are the last true wildernesses on the and and home to an additional large fraction of Earth’s biological diversity.

3. Cease all logging of old-growth forest everywhere. For every bit of this habitat lost, Earth pays a price in biodiversity. The cost is especially steep in tropical forests, and it is potentially catastrophic in the forested hotspots. At the same time, let secondary native forests recover.

4. Everywhere, not just in the hotspots and wildernesses, concentrate on the lakes and river systems, which are the most threatened ecosystems of all. Those in tropical and warm­ regions in particular possess the highest ratio
of endangered species to area of any kind of habitat.

5. Define precisely the marine hotspots of the world, and assign them the same action priority as for those on the land. Foremost are the coral reefs, which in their extremely high biological diversity rank as the rainforests of the sea.

6. In order to render the conservation effort exact and cost­effective, complete the mapping of the world's biological diversity. Scientists have estimated that 10 percent or more of flowering plants, a majority of animals,
and a huge majority of microorganisms remain
undiscovered and unnamed....

7. Using recent advances in mapping the planet’s terrestrial, fresh-water, and marine ecosystems, ensure that the full range of the world's ecosystems are included in a global conservation strategy.

8. Make conservation profitable. Find ways to raise the income for those who live in and near the reserves. Give them a proprietary interest in the natural environment and engage them professionally in its protection.

9. Use biodversity more effectively to benefit the world economy as a whole. Broaden field research and laboratory biotechnology to develop new crops, livestock, cultivated
food fish, farmed timber, pharmaceuticals, and bio-remedial bacteria.

10. Initiate restoration projects to increase the share of Earth allotted to nature. Today about 10 percent of the land surface is protected on paper. Even if rigorously conserved, this amount is not enough to save more than a modest
fraction of wild species.

11. Increase the capacity of zoos and botanical gardens to breed endangered species. Most are already working to fill that role. Prepare to clone species when all other preservation methods fail. Enlarge the existing seed and spore banks and create reserves of frozen embryos and tissue.

12. Support population planning. Help guide humanity's every footstep and a more secure and enjoyable future with biodiversity flourishing around it.

For global conservation, only one-thousandth of the current annual world domestic product, or $30 billion out of approximately $30 trillion, would accomplish most of the task. One key element, the protection and management of the world’s existing natural reserves, could be financed by a one-cent-per-cup tax on coffee.