Michelle Delemarre

The Sixth One

By: Michelle Delemarre

From species long extinct to species which have yet to be discovered, countless organisms have called this beautiful planet home. The earth is over four billion years old, and became the host of life about three billion years ago. It now holds an estimated 8.7 million species, according to a report done in 2011 by Camilo Mora and colleagues. But it turns out that 99% of the four billion species which once roamed this earth have unfortunately bitten the dust. (Barnosky, 2011). A lot of them met their untimely demise as a result of a mass extinction event. There have been five over the course of hundreds of millions of years. They are defined “as about 75% of the world's species being lost in a 'short' amount of geological time - less than 2.8 million years.” (Begum, 2021).

There is no way of sugarcoating this: we are headed towards the sixth one. The sixth mass extinction event. And it isn’t being caused by an asteroid. It isn’t being caused by a volcanic eruption. It isn’t being caused by a small rodent who desperately wants an acorn (for those who may be confused, this is a reference to the Ice Age movies). It is being caused by humans. We’ve only been around for some hundred thousand years, yet to say humanity is destructive would be an understatement. Edward O. Wilson, an entomologist from Harvard, speculated “that the human presence in the last 12 millennia produced an average extinction of one species every 20 minutes.” (Pievani, 2013). And that doesn't even cover the species we don’t know about yet.

Through habitat fragmentation, the overexploitation of resources, and the pollution of our atmosphere, humans have created a “perfect storm,” in which multiple drivers converge and amplify one another. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, “Threequarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions.” Humans are further responsible for the degradation and contamination of ecosystems through our overuse of resources on which animals depend. We have also hunted many species to extinction, or to the brink of extinction. The cherry on top: climate change. The mass emissions of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere has caused sea levels to rise, droughts, wildfires, ocean acidification, and

Works Cited: Arghamanyan. (2020, June 11). Media release: Nature's dangerous decline 'unprecedented'; species extinction rates 'accelerating'. Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://www.ipbes.net/news/MediaRelease-Global-Assessment

Barnosky, A. (2011, March 02). Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived? Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://www.nature.com/ articles/nature09678

Extinction over time. (n.d.). Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/ teaching-resources/paleontology/extinction-overtime#:~:text=Extinction%20Rates&text=Regardless% 2C%20%20scientists%20%20agree%20that% 20today's,one%20million%20species%20per% 20year

Mora, C. (n.d.). How many species are there on Earth and in the ocean? Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article? id=10.1371% 2Fjournal.pbio.1001127&utm_campaign=Au+fil+des +lectures&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue+n ewsletter

Pievani, T. (2013, November 17). The sixth mass extinction: Anthropocene and the human impact on biodiversity. Retrieved February 11, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12210013-0258-9

What is mass extinction and are we facing a sixth one? (n.d.). Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https:// www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-andare-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html#:~:text=This%20is% 20known%20as%20the,less%20than%202.8% 20million%20years.

Michelle Delemarre, 10-18-2020

I’m not just saying this because I’m an environmentalist, I’m a realist. Biodiversity, or the variety of species on earth, is something that is quite literally irreplaceable. We depend on a multitude of species, plants and animals alike, for ecosystem services. Ecosystem services include many things, from little pollinating insects to entire coastal wetlands which act as a natural flood barrier and water filter. Human impact is not just harmful to biodiversity; it is harmful to us humans.

We are in the dawn of the sixth mass extinction. In just a few centuries humanity has caused destruction on par with the catalysts of the previous five mass extinction events, which took millions of years. We have altered our environment, our world, so much that it is becoming more inhospitable with every passing year. It is imperative that we continue in our efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change and conservation of ecosystems, for the sake of all of us.