"Faster than Dinosaurs"

I'm stepping into slightly unfamiliar territory here, and I don't have the breadth of knowledge on the subject as, say, this guy. (boy, is that an important diary)

But as a citizen of the Earth, when I see a headline that says Mass extinction rate 'faster than dinosaurs' I tend to sit up and take notice. From The Guardian:

Polar bears and hippos have joined the ranks of threatened species, along with a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals and coniferous plants, according to the World Conservation Union.

The conservation group's Red List of endangered species found that 16,119 species are at the highest levels of extinction threat, equivalent to nearly 40% of all species in its survey.

Fish are in particular danger, with more than half of freshwater species in the Mediterranean basin facing threats and formerly common ocean fish such as skate disappearing.

The World Conservation Union, known by the acronym IUCN, found that more than 500 species had been added to the ranks of those classified as endangered, critically endangered or vulnerable since 2004 - a rise of 3%.

[...]

At present, animals are believed to be going extinct at 100 to 1,000 times the usual rate, leading many researchers to claim that we are in the midst of a mass extinction event faster than that which wiped out the dinosaurs.

There isn't any one reason for this. The major decline in the hippo population is linked to civil unrest in the Congo, leading to poaching and hunting. Loss of habitat through development or degradation or destruction is another reason. And of course there's climate change, pollution, and global warming.

But the one constant in all of this is humans and their relationship to the planet. We're killing it in stages, in a variety of ways, and taking all the biodiversity with us. This is a shocking sentence:

A 2004 report by the University of Leeds found that a quarter of land animals and plants could be driven to extinction by global warming.

Just as a primer (and I needed it too), biodiversity is important because:

Biologists have argued that one of the best values for measuring biodiversity is likely to be associated with the variety of different genes that can be expressed by organisms as potentially useful phenotypic traits or different chemical, morphological, functional or behavioral characters. Because we do not (and likely cannot) know which genes or characters will be of value in the future, they are all considered of equal importance. The assumption is that the greatest value for conservation will come from ensuring the persistence of as many different genes or characteristics as possible.

The survival of genes, species and natural communities requires the preservation of biodiversity at the genetic, species, community, and landscape levels. Each level is dependent on and inextricably linked to the other levels. For example, the continued existence of ecosystems in their present form may be dependent on the ability of 'keystone' species to compensate for changes in the environment, which in turn is a function of their genetic variability and their ability to mutate. Humans are also linked at all levels of this hierarchy.

We're arguably at one of the lower ebbs for biodiversity in Earth history. I've heard the statistic that current living organisms make up only 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Whatever the causes of that (Ice Ages, geological disasters, meteorites), the current extinction rate is unquestionably on our hands.

The environment is always the lonely stepchild when it comes to electoral issues, even if its most vociferous champion is the national candidate. I don't even know if it's possible to get enough people to listen about the effects of climate change. I hope that An Inconvenient Truth will help. But regardless, we can't wait for government to figure this one out, it is everyone's responsibility.

"Biodiversity loss is increasing, not slowing down," (the IUCN) said. "Reversing this trend is possible [but] biodiversity cannot be saved by environmentalists alone - it must become the responsibility of everyone with the power and resources to act."

I'd love to give a great big action item here at the end but, with the Sierra Club busy endorsing Lincoln Chafee, I won't be endorsing that kind of approach. Grist has some great stuff, and I try to stay educated.