Sometimes we make shit happen

There are dates that really stick in the mind.  Take 1844, in that year the blight that decimated the potato crop in Ireland arrived and one million people would die as a result.  Such times deserve closer inspection because they often signal a sea change.  Just as for all of us there are years that we remember for all sorts of emotional/practical reasons.  Ask anyone and they can usually site their own year to remember, often for catastrophic reasons.  The year everything went pear shaped.  So, I was fascinated to read of the history of the Great Auk.  The original penguin was originally so numerous that Iceland and Newfoundland were packed with these flightless birds.  Then humans got stuck in and used them for meat and mattress stuffing as pointed out in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

“You do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, reported an English sailor, “but lay hold of one and pluck the best …. You then turn the poor penguins adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off to perish at his leisure.”

It was June 1844 when the last of this unfortunate species was strangled by Icelandic hunters.  A sorry end to a once abundant species.  Of course we’ve been here before.  The Dodo’s are portrayed almost as a humorous creature deserving of extinction.  If you are careless enough to forget how to fly – you really deserve everything that comes to you, seems to be the bottom line.

But even those who fly are being wiped out.  Last year the usual millions of monarch butterflies that return to the mountainous fir forests of central Mexico every year for the first time in living memory did not appear on the 1^st November as usual.  Traditionally the butterflies are thought to be the souls of the dead returned and Mexicans celebrate it as a holy Day ‘The Day of the Dead’.  In 2012 there was concern when only 60 million of the butterflies eventually turned up.  By the end of Nov 2013 only three million arrived.  The spectacular migration, many think, could be approaching collapse.

The causes are human ignorance.  We cannot blame Icelandic hunters or cruel mid nineteen century sailors.  No, it is due to the way we choose to farm, ploughing every scrap of earth, the use of Roundup a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except the genetically modified to survive it.  Millions of acres of native species, especially Milkweed have been wiped out.  In one study Iowa was shown to have lost 60% of its milkweed and then another study depressingly claimed 90% was actually gone.  We have sterilized our agriculture landscape.  So what I hear some ask?  Well, 80% of our food crops are pollinated by insects primarily bees.  They like butterflies are in trouble.  The intricate food web that connects life forms on this planet is being ripped apart.  The intricacies of interdependence that we are only beginning to understand and wonder at, is being destroyed at a frighteningly wanton rate.

Some Monarchs finding themselves parasite laden, turn to more toxic types of milkweed which helps kill their unwelcome guests.  Bees have long used resins from aspen and willow trees to line their nests and these anti fungal, anti-microbial and antiviral substances help them fight infection and diseases.  Such wonders of nature are being treated with cavalier indifference and ruthless expediency.  When you insist on a nice green lawn you’ve created an insect desert.  Have a front yard with a wildflower meadow and the same area can accommodate 20/30 species of bees and butterflies.

But unfortunately it doesn’t stop at flightless birds and insects.  By recent estimation one third of reef corals, one third of freshwater molluscs, one third of sharks, a fifth of all reptiles, a quarter of all mammals and a sixth of all birds will be like the Great Auk, extinct this century. 

The last great extinction (the fifth) happened 66 million years ago.  It has been entitled with no exaggeration ‘The worst day ever on planet Earth’ and three quarters of all known species were wiped out. 

However, in truth, an even worse extinction happened 252 million years ago when 96% of all marine species, 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates and the only mass extinction of insects ever to have occurred.  In fact, it took life on our planet 10 million years to recover.  Extinctions do happen, they may be many millenniums apart but they are a feature of our planet.  One 450 million years ago was due to the movement of the earth’s plates into the southern pole region which caused global cooling and mass extinction.  Another extinction was caused by a collision of an asteroid.  I suppose the accurate summary here is, shit happens. 

It is no comfort to note that present extinctions are not something that has happened to us by chance or fate but by our own hands.  I suppose the truthful summary here is – sometimes we make shit happen.