The summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, where the highest concentration of CO2 was recently measured
Image: Reuters
Colonialism is no longer a territorial enterprise, but a temporal one. And it forces us to take special responsibility for species extinction and climate change. A guest post.
An the end of my words, it is estimated that three to four other species will be extinct. A tropical salamander, a shiny beetle, some lichen or a fungus – it could be anything. Having existed for perhaps millions of years, they will not survive the next thirty minutes and will disappear irrevocably from the face of the earth. A few hours later it could already be 35. By the same time tomorrow we will have lost about 150 species, and in a year we will be talking about a total of 55,000 species extinct during this time. And it won’t stop there. The number will continue to rise as we are in the midst of the sixth great wave of extinction our planet has experienced. The first, however, caused by human activity. (The last wave happened 65 million years ago when a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs.)
Up to 55,000 species per year: The figure is not the apocalyptic vision of some eco-radicals, but an estimate of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral agreement between 196 countries. The United Nations Biodiversity Platform has calculated that of the eight million species currently alive, one million are threatened with extinction within one or more generations. And that’s a conservative estimate.
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