The trending holocene extinction

I would like to address the recently trending holocene extinction publication co-written by 6 university faculty from the US and Mexico, and the social media reaction to it (on Facebook and Twitter).  The first draft of this in my head was laden with profanity, anger, mockery, etc.  I hope what actually materialized to keystrokes is more informative and exhortative than that.  Here goes...

Is this actually news to us? Did we not believe the obvious signs until new math and pretty colored charts joined the discussion? Must we scrutinize fossil records to clear the fog from our glasses? Did we really need the authoritative voice of several professors to reveal man's relationship to nature?  How is this new information? Come on everyone; we're all rational thinking beings. You don't need to channel your inner Radagast the Brown to see this. Let's not pretend we don't know mankind has been pushing species to extinction for centuries. In the 1900s it was worldwide news that we should Save the Whales. Us in the United States need look no further than our country's rear view mirror to see the decimation of historical populations of wolves, mountain lions, beaver, and buffalo.



We don't even have to go that far; take a peek at the California state flag and the grizzly bear on it.  Ultimately grizzlies were considered pests and so a bounty was offered for their heads and they were all killed.

If you haven’t seen Vanishing of the Bees (recommended), maybe you have heard of or seen Dances With Wolves (only won 7 Oscars...).  The sentiments in Avatar were not new in 2009.  Book sales and box office stats clearly show The Lorax has been a familiar tale for decades. We know population decimation and we know we're responsible.  There was no tragic scientific mystery wiping out the beaver - we liked to wear their skin and so we killed them.

This study doesn't solve ignorance.  Instead it reveals apathy.

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not." - The Lorax

It is quite simple; people don't recognize the enormous wealth of nature. We don't value it so we trash it. We exclude the commons from economics so nature appears to have no material worth. Salaries for creating effective marketing campaigns and writing software for tracking email clicks are far higher than for saving an endangered species, so that's how we are motivated to spend our time. Cattle ranchers don't want to share "their" grazing land with value-less buffalo in Montana so when they cross into Montana from Yellowstone, they are slaughtered. We prefer commuting by car over walking/biking, and don't mind paying for gasoline in exchange for the convenience, so Rwanda's mountain gorilla habitat is incinerated.

Mankind doesn't value nature. It values other things. Therein lies the cause of a holocene extinction.

Look at what makes headline news.  People are more concerned with what Tom Brady knew of deflated footballs, how much Wall Street went up or down, or the length of Jennifer Aniston's hair than the survival of those Rwandan mountain gorilla. Despite all the religious texts and ethical norms, people worship material wealth, financial gain, retweet counts and social accolades. Don't kid yourself; mankind worships money. More often than not it is the Dollar our God that we love with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength. We lust after GDP and shiny treasure, and so we mine the mountains and pollute the rivers in search of gold. We have convinced ourselves that plastic bags are ostensibly cheaper than cloth or paper bags to carry groceries in, and as a result whales and turtles starve to death with bellies full of plastic. Without question we are surrounded by the Garden of Eden yet we prefer an iPhone over a Redwood grove.  Alligator alley is just the land between Naples and Lauderdale rather than a prized sanctuary for the Florida panther.  The Everglades aren't a view to Florida's natural state... it's where we dump our pet pythons when they get too big to keep. We enjoy our morning caffeine fix and 3-ply toilet paper, so Sumatra's forests become timber lots and monoculture coffee farms instead of remaining precious wildlife habitat.

Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

Cree Indian Prophecy

I believe the mass extinction of domesticated animals would be treated very differently.  Imagine the reaction if dogs, cats, cows or pigs (no more bacon cheeseburgers?!?!) were on the chopping block.  Regardless of humor actual sentiment, this speaks volumes:

- https://twitter.com/WillHinsa/status/612659246300139520

In addition to apathy on the part of the masses, I believe the study also calls out socioeconomic problems of exploitation and global economics. Many people in Uganda, Brazil and Indonesia struggle to feed their children, so when a French man with a blank check offers a short-sighted solution to hunger, the rainforests fall (and so do family bonds, among other things). When the Chinese dangle prosperity on a string to Nicaragua or Ecuador by building a new canal to rival Panama's or exchanging irreplaceable jungle for oil, the temptation appears to be too great to resist.  Additional food may land in stomachs but Latin America is robbed of her greatest treasure forever, and so are the rest of us.

Ok, so we don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.  What of the social media reaction?  All I see in the social media is people either accepting the doom and gloom inevitable or fishing for likes and retweets. This is ridiculous.

What should be done instead of liking or favoriting or tweeting?

If you want to actually do something that might slow this extinction, do not merely retweet or share the work of a consortium of professors.  Instead, change your value system to place value on the wild things around you. Re-learn the definition of enough. Visit a zoo and make a mental note of all the times you see Deforestation or Habitat Loss listed as the reason for status of Endangered (pro tip: it should nearly match the count of animals seen). Tell those oil explorers to get out of the Amazon by riding your bike to work. Give your money and time to conservation efforts.  Swap that Vegas bender for an ecotour in Borneo. Teach your children that nature matters. Consider where the things you buy come from and how they're made. Don't buy things you don't need. Know what need actually means. At the risk of saying something overtly pious and from the perspective of the wealthy, don't buy cheaply made things, as inexpensive things are often made inexpensive at the expense of nature (again, we exclude the commons from economics). Maybe read some or all of these books on the topic (I recommend them all, and there are many others which these should lead you to):

1. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
2. The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered
3. An Ecology of Happiness
4. Rewilding Our Hearts

The solution is difficult and painful, and I don't pretend to be immune. It will require a kind of restraint which mankind rarely reveals. It will require a change to the value system of billions of people. We will have to care about monkeys and trees as much as we care about 401(k)s and the World Cup and the World Series and Tiger Woods. It will require "poor" people to recognize the value of the natural world surrounding them and to decide that the preservation of it (at the cost of their short term financial gain) is better than an act of irreversible plunder which would make all of us poorer. It will require the politicians in nations with indigenous peoples to uphold the land and mineral rights of those first nations. We will have to value keeping the rivers of Chile in their natural state more than the electricity and the wifi offered by damming them (http://www.sinrepresas.com).  Et cetera.

On this Father's Day, take a minute to consider how the collective We should explain to our children and grandchildren why there are no more rhinos or tigers or orangutans.  If we don't change our behavior right now, then any answer other than, "because we didn't care to keep them around for you to see" would be a blatant lie. I personally never want to have to explain what the main character in JAWS is/was, and why there is no longer any such thing as a great white shark in the ocean. I don't have children or grandchildren. I may never. But I believe the quality of the legacy of the current generations and what we leave to the future of mankind hinges on our ability to change our value system and drastically change our view of nature. Life on this planet is unique and precious.  There are trillions of Earth-like planets in the universe, and so far we know of life on none of them except this one. Any species is therefore worth more than its weight in gold then, isn't it?  Let's act like we know how unique and precious life is instead of knowingly and idly sacrificing it for money and convenience.

That's enough writing.  I'm going outside to spend some time in nature.  I for one value it greatly.

Thanks Dad

Tonight on my way home from work I felt like it had been too long since I had run on a dirt trail or walked in a forest (I've been skiing and cycling more than trail running lately).  Instead of resigning to my usual commute, I turned and headed to the Bobolink trail.  After a short walk I sat down on a bench next to Boulder creek and simply listened.  I saw and heard frogs, cows with their new spring calves, the creek, and the recognizable birds such as woodpeckers, geese, ducks and seasonal songbirds.  I sat in silence and recognized how special this bit of open space was.  I noticed that even though it has been unseasonably warm of late, only the very first of the trees have begun to bud along the trail.  (Mostly cottonwoods in that area, which are all still bare.)  The grass is starting to green up nicely, but no flowers have come up yet.  Then I noticed what I was noticing... that might sound odd, but I wondered how many other people notice the things I was noticing.

I think one of the most valuable things my father gave me was a view to a person who knew the natural world around him.  He knew the various kinds of birds and trees in the yard.  At night after work he would sit (very much like his mother, although in a different house and on a different porch) and watch the deer and squirrels and birds and rabbits.  I grew up in several homes, and all that I can remember backed up to or contained woods.  Having grown up pretty much in the 'burbs, that isn't exactly a common thing to say, but it was true in my case.  Before I came into the equation, he hunted, and probably knew the woods even better.

We never went on grand backpacking trips or banged out 10 mile hikes through the Smokies on a Saturday per se, and yet I still feel like I grew up with a fairly close relationship with the natural world around me.  I never was far from a squirrel's nest, a bird feeder, a deer salt lick, a corn field, or a marshy woods... always juxtaposed with a million-person city less than an hour's drive down the road. I think that simple connection helped shape my view of nature today.  There's a big tree outside my balcony with several kinds of songbirds in it through the summer.  (The finches just returned this week and have nested a few feet from my bed.)  I am recharged when I see a deer or a bear on a trail run.  I try to recognize which types of trees are changing colors first in the fall or which types of flowers are in bloom while on my bike or running through Boulder, be it on a cement path, on an arid desert trail, or in a wooded open space park.

I was lucky to have that implanted in me; so many kids got a steady diet of cartoons instead, with only a small dosage of dandelions in the outfield.  To be fair, I got my fare share of Saved by the Bell and You Can't Do That on Television, but I also had a pile of leaves in the fall, cardinals and blue jays on a nearby branch, sycamore bark to peel and acorns or walnuts falling from above.  I strongly believe that without a resurgence of kids feeling a connection to the natural world around them, we face a growing panoply of problems.  After all, as Dr. M. Sanjayan's recent series, Earth | A new Wild conveys, man is not separate from nature but a part of it, and we must all realize this or tempt fate.

Teach your children well.