Our planet is over four billion years old, which means that it’s been around longer than any of us, and while we claim to have all the answers, discoveries are made each day. The world is constantly revealing itself in the form of both scientifically logical reasoning, and unexplainable events. Climate change is one of those events that fall in between that exact spot of predictability and variability.
Five Major Extinctions:
Geologically speaking, there has been five major extinction events in history – the first of which occurred 542 million years ago and suggested that 99 per cent of the species that ever lived became extinct. The last major extinction happened over 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period. In general, the number of species on Earth has steadily increased since then.
Questions, Thoughts, Considerations On Sustainability:
You likely didn’t come here to read about Earth and its evolutionary prosperities. They are indeed complex and certainly beyond the ideas presented here. But, in acknowledging that there has been a period of extinction and the subsequent formation of various species, it helps put things into perspective. The survival of the natural world and ultimately human survival are inextricably linked. To suggest that one may flourish while the other diminish would be, well, foolish to say the least.
Sustainability requires biodiversity and that’s less work than we like to admit. Giving up on single-use plastics isn’t as inconvenient to the majority of us. What we’re essentially doing is swapping one invasive item for another less-invasive, perhaps slightly more ecological, for the other.
Among the challenges that are crucial to the continued existence of biodiversity and sustainability is urban development. There are also other human-made impacts like alien species such as weeds, pathogens, and pests that threaten the natural world.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that climate change is on a trajectory to destroy between 20 and 40 per cent of all biodiversity on Earth by the end of this century.
What does biodiversity mean for humans?
Well, in short, all of our good comes directly or indirectly from plants, which are an estimated 425,000 species. Tens of thousands of these have been cultivated for food by some people, but currently 103 of them produce around 90 per cent of our food worldwide. Three types of grain, maize, rice and wheat make up around 60 per cent of the total foods we consume globally.
We have a detailed knowledge of only one fifth of the worlds species and plants, and most of them could be gone by the end of the century. The same can be said about various groups of organisms on which we depend on for our medication, atmospheric purification, carbon storage, and other things that make our living more bearable.
Despite the literature and understanding, we can’t seem to be doing enough because rates are continuous. Does this mean we should stop? Absolutely not. But it doesn’t mean that we should sit around either.
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