The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself!

[Guest guest]

http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF085AD-Lumberjack.jpg#154

 

From page three:

 

" These life-forms and their life strategies compose what we might think

of as the " body " of the desert, with some species acting the role of the

lungs and others the liver, the blood, the skin. The trend in scientific

investigation in recent decades has been toward understanding the

interconnectedness of the bodily components, i.e., the effect one

species has on the others. The loss of even one species irrevocably

changes the desert (or the tundra, rainforest, prairie, coastal estuary,

kelp forest, coral reef, and so on) /as we know it/, just as the loss of

each human being changes his or her family forever. "

 

Here are the first three pages of a fascinating article from MotherJones

Magazine regarding species extinction. You can read the entire seven

page story posted at

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/gone.html.

 

I thought it was an interesting follow up to the discussion we had

recently on the mysterious disappearance of the honey bees! Here is

another quote from page three:

 

/* " An European study finds steep declines in honeybee diversity in the

last 25 years but also significant attendant declines in plants that

depend on bees for pollination---a job estimated to be worth $92 billion

worldwide. Meanwhile, beekeepers in 24 American states report that up to

70 percent of their colonies have recently died off, threatening $14

billion in U.S. agriculture. And bees are only a small part of the

pollinator crisis. " */

 

 

Gone (By the end of the century half of all species will be gone.

Who will survive?)

 

By Julia Whitty

 

April 25, 2007

 

 

We awake in our tents in the moonlight to what sounds like a dance

troupe in wooden clogs practicing on rock under stunted juniper trees.

It's a half-dozen Carmen mountain white-tailed deer, scraping at the

ground with bootlike hooves, bending gracile necks to chew on wet soil

and lick it dry. They're harvesting the minerals and moisture from our

urine soaked into the parched earth of the high desert, the herd toiling

through the night and into the morning in a pursuit tenacious enough to

enlighten us to the wastefulness of our own bodies. Clearly, the three

of us have squandered most of what we drank hiking to 7,400 feet on the

south rim of Texas' Chisos Mountains. From the deer's point of view, our

arrival here is the next best thing to rain.

 

Come morning, we pack camp and loiter on the precipice, staring across

wracked ranges and sunburnt country to the Rio Grande thousands of feet

below, and to the even higher country of Mexico's Sierra Madre. Here, in

Big Bend National Park, one of America's truly wild places, there's

barely a sign of human impact, and not a sound of it---not planes, cars,

or human voices. The silence is so thick that our ears feel congested,

and we jump when the quiet is pierced by the whistle of a peregrine

falcon on its glide path through thin air.

 

We spend a couple of hours here with binoculars, map, and compass,

scanning 100-mile visibility, scrutinizing the area below the rim and

trying to find a trail we might travel another day. Although we don't

know it, we're peering down into the place where a lost hiker is

desperately trying to find the same trail and a freshwater spring midway

along it. At this point he has been without water for three days. We

don't see him stumbling through cholla and nopales cactus and writing

farewell notes to loved ones---though he is likely staring up at the

mirage of us silhouetted against the sky.

 

Ironically, this corner of the Chihuahuan Desert is lush at the moment,

watered by rains two months ago that are still working their way through

soils and roots and cells, so that many plants are blooming and an

explosion of butterflies jams the breezes. The cacti are swollen with

hoarded water. The Chisos oaks are dropping so many acorns that park

rangers have closed trails where black bears are fattening on them.

Countless millions of walking-stick insects are coupled in such dense

mating congregations in the canopies of mesquites that entire trees

appear to be walking through the sky. Everything is haloed in the golds,

yellows, and greens of desert grasses, some taller than us, all bowed

under heavy seed heads destined to feed and water kangaroo rats.

 

It is these same tall grasses that have woven closed the trail below and

launched the lost hiker on his final wayward odyssey. Tomorrow, on his

fourth day without water, he will be located by search-and-rescue

personnel who find him alert and oriented, but too weak to stand. They

administer oral and IV fluids, but he dies anyway. Like many before him,

he succumbs to the peculiar capabilities of Homo sapiens that allowed

him to enter Eden but not to survive its vicissitudes.

 

In the final stages of dehydration the body shrinks, robbing youth from

the young as the skin puckers, eyes recede into orbits, the tongue

swells and cracks. Brain cells shrivel and muscles seize. The kidneys

shut down. Blood volume drops, triggering hypovolemic shock, with its

attendant respiratory and cardiac failures. These combined assaults

disrupt the chemical and electrical pathways of the body until all

systems cascade toward death.

 

Such is also the path of a dying species. Beyond a critical point, the

collective body of a unique kind of mammal or bird or amphibian or tree

cannot be salvaged, no matter the first aid rendered. Too few

individuals spread too far apart or too genetically weakened are

susceptible to even small natural disasters. A passing thunderstorm. An

unexpected freeze. Drought. At fewer than 50 members, populations

experience increasingly random fluctuations until a kind of fatal

arrhythmia takes hold. Eventually, an entire genetic legacy, born in the

beginnings of life on Earth, is smote from the future.

 

Scientists recognize that species continually disappear at a background

extinction rate estimated at about one species per million species per

year, with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion.

Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly norm, followed by

excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining

gene pool until the world is once again repopulated by a different

catalog of flora and fauna. From what we understand so far, five great

extinction events have reshaped Earth in cataclysmic ways in the past

439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 percent of the

life of the day, including the dominant lifeforms, the most recent event

killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed, but an

analysis published in /Nature/ showed that it takes 10 million years

before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before

a die-off.

 

Today we're living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known

as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000

years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and

harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever

by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times,

including, perhaps, the saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the

ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch

sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest

weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, pigs.

 

But as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to

what's under way today. Throughout the 20th century the causes of

extinction---habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural

monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate

change---amplified exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate

is nothing short of explosive. The World Conservation Union's Red

List---a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million

scientifically named species---tells a haunting tale of unchecked,

unaddressed, and accelerating biocide.

 

When we hear of extinction, most of us think of the plight of the rhino,

tiger, panda, or blue whale. But these sad sagas are only small pieces

of the extinction puzzle. The overall numbers are terrifying. Of the

40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation

Union have assessed, 1 in 4 mammals, 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 3 amphibians, 1

in 3 conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril

faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analyzed, but

fully 40 percent of the examined species of planet Earth are in danger,

including up to 51 percent of reptiles, 52 percent of insects, and 73

percent of flowering plants.

 

By the most conservative measure---based on the last century's recorded

extinctions---the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background

rate. But eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson and other

scientists estimate that the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000

times the background rate. The actual annual sum is only an educated

guess, because no scientist believes the tally of life ends at the 1.5

million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100

million species on Earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed

between best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and

270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.

 

We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never

been---and will never be---known to us. In a staggering forecast, Wilson

predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of

all plant and animal species by the year 2100.

 

You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of

Natural History finds that 7 in 10 biologists believe that mass

extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious

environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming, and

that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by most

everyone outside of science. In the 200 years since French naturalist

Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining

fossil bones and concluding " the existence of a world previous to ours,

destroyed by some sort of catastrophe, " we have only slowly recognized

and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behavior.

 

Some nations move more slowly than others. In 1992, an international

summit produced a treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity

that was subsequently ratified by 190 nations---all except the unlikely

coalition of the United States, Iraq, the Vatican, Somalia, Andorra, and

Brunei. The European Union later called on the world to arrest the

decline of species and ecosystems by 2010. Last year, worried

biodiversity experts called for establishing a scientific body akin to

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide a united voice

on the extinction crisis and urge governments to action.

 

Yet despite these efforts, the Red List, updated every two years,

continues to show metastatic growth. There are a few heartening examples

of so-called Lazarus species lost and then found: the Wollemi pine and

the mahogany glider in Australia, the Jerdon's courser in India, the

takahe in New Zealand, and, maybe, the ivory-billed woodpecker in the

United States. But for virtually all others, the Red List is a dry

country with little hope of rain, as species ratchet down the listings

from secure to vulnerable to endangered to critically endangered to extinct.

 

All these disappearing species are part of a fragile membrane of

organisms wrapped around Earth so thin, writes E.O. Wilson, that it

" cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex

that most species composing it remain undiscovered. " We owe everything

to this membrane of life. Literally everything. The air we breathe. The

food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers,

medicines. Goods and services that we can't even imagine we'll someday

need will come from species we have yet to identify. The proverbial cure

for cancer. The genetic fountain of youth. Immortality. /Mortality/.

 

The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself.

 

biodiversity is defined as the sum of an area's genes (the building

blocks of inheritance), species (organisms that can interbreed), and

ecosystems (amalgamations of species in their geological and chemical

landscapes). The richer an area's biodiversity, the tougher its immune

system, since biodiversity includes not only the number of species but

also the number of individuals within that species, and all the inherent

genetic variation---life's only army against the diseases of oblivion.

 

Yet it's a mistake to think that critical genetic pools exist only in

the gaudy show of the coral reefs, or the cacophony of the rainforest.

Although a hallmark of the desert is the sparseness of its garden, the

orderly progression of plants, the understated camouflage of its

animals, this is only an illusion. Turn the desert inside out and upside

down and you'll discover its true nature. Escaping drought and heat,

life goes underground in a tangled overexuberance of roots and burrows

reminiscent of a rainforest canopy, competing for moisture, not light.

Animal trails crisscross this subterranean realm in private burrows

engineered, inhabited, stolen, shared, and fought over by ants, beetles,

wasps, cicadas, tarantulas, spiders, lizards, snakes, mice, squirrels,

rats, foxes, tortoises, badgers, and coyotes.

 

To survive the heat and drought that killed the lost hiker, desert life

pioneers ingenious solutions. Coyotes dig and maintain coyote wells in

arroyos, probing deep for water. White-winged doves use their bodies as

canteens, drinking enough when the opportunity arises to increase their

body weight by more than 15 percent. Black-tailed jackrabbits tolerate

internal temperatures of 111 degrees. Western box turtles store water in

their oversized bladders and urinate on themselves to stay cool.

Mesquite grows taproots more than 160 feet deep in search of perennial

moisture.

 

These life-forms and their life strategies compose what we might think

of as the " body " of the desert, with some species acting the role of the

lungs and others the liver, the blood, the skin. The trend in scientific

investigation in recent decades has been toward understanding the

interconnectedness of the bodily components, i.e., the effect one

species has on the others. The loss of even one species irrevocably

changes the desert (or the tundra, rainforest, prairie, coastal estuary,

kelp forest, coral reef, and so on) as we know it, just as the loss of

each human being changes his or her family forever.

 

Nowhere is this better proven than in a 12-year study conducted in the

Chihuahuan Desert by James H. Brown and Edward Heske of the University

of New Mexico. When a kangaroo rat guild composed of three closely

related species was removed, shrublands quickly converted to grasslands,

which supported fewer annual plants, which in turn supported fewer

birds. Even humble players mediate stability. So when you and I hear of

this year's extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin, and think, how sad,

we're not calculating the deepest cost: that extinctions lead to

co-extinctions because most every living thing on Earth supports a few

symbionts and hitchhikers, while keystone species influence and support

a myriad of plants and animals. Army ants, for example, are known to

support 100 known species, from beetles to birds. /*A European study

finds steep declines in honeybee diversity in the last 25 years but also

significant attendant declines in plants that depend on bees for

pollination---a job estimated to be worth $92 billion worldwide.

Meanwhile, beekeepers in 24 American states report that up to 70 percent

of their colonies have recently died off, threatening $14 billion in

U.S. agriculture. And bees are only a small part of the pollinator crisis.*/

 

One of the most alarming developments is the rapid decline not just of

species but of higher taxa, such as the class Amphibia, the

300-million-year-old group of frogs, salamanders, newts, and toads hardy

enough to have preceded and then outlived most dinosaurs. Biologists

first noticed die-offs two decades ago, and since have watched as

seemingly robust amphibian species vanished in as little as six months.

The causes cover the spectrum of human environmental assaults, including

rising ultraviolet radiation from a thinning ozone layer, increases in

pollutants and pesticides, habitat loss from agriculture and

urbanization, invasions of exotic species, the wildlife trade, light

pollution, and fungal diseases. Sometimes stressors merge to form an

unwholesome synergy; an African frog brought to the West in the 1950s

for use in human pregnancy tests likely introduced a fungus deadly to

native frogs. Meanwhile, a recent analysis in Nature estimates that in

the last 20 years at least 70 species of South American frogs have gone

extinct as a result of climate change.

 

In a 2004 analysis published in Science, author Lian Pin Koh and

colleagues predict that an initially modest co-extinction rate will

climb alarmingly as host extinctions rise in the near future. Graphed

out, the forecast mirrors the rising curve of an infectious disease,

with the human species acting all the parts: the pathogen, the vector,

the Typhoid Mary who refuses culpability, and, ultimately, one of up to

100 million victims.

 

It's one of science's great ironies that many of today's feel-good

nature stories come from researchers scrambling to catalog Earth's

life-forms before they disappear. Breaking through the daily news of war

and politics are the quiet announcements of novel species, including

truly startling finds: a new catlike mammal in Borneo, a new phylum of

wormlike creature, a new songbird in India, a snake that changes colors.

Most astounding are the marine discoveries, including an average of

three new species of fish a week since 2000.

 

The discovery of novel oceanic life-forms comes thanks to the Census of

Marine Life, a network of 2,000 researchers in more than 80 nations

engaged in a 10-year initiative to assess ocean life and its changes

over time. The census is a veritable factory of revelations: life-forms

thriving in 765-degree-Fahrenheit thermal vent waters in the Atlantic;

species surviving below 2,300 feet of ice off Antarctica; a living

shrimp believed extinct for 50 million years; pairs of mated seabirds

flying 44,000-mile, figure-eight loops in the 200 days between nesting

seasons, only occasionally resting on the waves; a fish school 20

million strong, the size of Manhattan, swimming off New Jersey.

 

The quest reveals a startling truth about our planet: that life thrives

even in " lifeless " conditions, harvesting energy from sources we thought

were ours alone---radioactive uranium, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and

methane---in places no one ever thought to look before, including

between the crystals in rock. Some (archaea, bacteria, fungi) live

nearly two miles below the Earth's surface. Some (cyanobacteria) in

Antarctica live inside quartz clear enough to allow them to perform

photosynthesis while escaping the weather. We call these organisms

extremophiles because their worlds are uninhabitable to us, although

many dwell in conditions that mimic what we know of the first life on

Earth---in the eons before photosynthesizing plants freed oxygen from

water to make our atmosphere.

 

On Hydrate Ridge 50 miles off the coast of Oregon, the mud on the bottom

of the sea is more alive than dead. Thousands of feet below the surface,

under pressures that would crush you and me, in temperatures that would

turn our blood to sludge, worms, crustaceans, snails, bacterial

filaments, and other life-forms as yet undescribed thrive in an

environment largely devoid of oxygen and toxic with hydrogen sulfide and

methane. This is the world of a cold seep, a seafloor ecosystem not

discovered until 1984, where hydrocarbon-rich fluids bubble from the

bottom to support unique biological communities fundamentally different

from our own.

 

Seep life is driven not by photosynthesis (where plants use sunlight to

power the food web) but chemosynthesis, whereby single-celled organisms

use methane and hydrogen sulfide to fuel a gas-powered food web. The

process also creates underwater reefs of carbonate rocks, something like

coral reefs, which shelter otherworldly communities, including tubeworms

with minimum life spans of 170 years. Scattered erratically across the

bottom, cold seeps and their cousins, the hydrothermal vents, are the

ocean's deepest, farthest flung, and perhaps most ancient communities.

 

Among their more enduring mysteries are exactly how these ecosystems

become populated with life. There's evidence that whale falls act as

critical steppingstones, or once did. In preindustrialized whaling days,

when millions of behemoths were alive at any given time, their

carcasses---which may endure and produce gases for up to a

century---would have abounded in the deep, providing oases for the

drifting larvae of seep organisms.

 

Most of the extremophile life-forms living at Hydrate Ridge are

invisible to the naked eye---though through the dissecting microscope

they're mind-bendingly huge: translucent worms with blood cells chasing

each other through their vessels; miniature crustaceans like the alien

from Alien. The mud from the seep reeks of sulfur. In fact the whole

ship, the hardworking, far-sailing research vessel Atlantis, is full of

mud that stinks of rotten eggs and flatulence. The goop comes aboard via

the submersible Alvin, which cruises 2,500 feet below in a world so

remote and so unwelcoming that only three people at a time can get to it

in undersea assignments as coveted as space shuttle berths.

 

Read the rest of the story at:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/gone.html.

 

 

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National

Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from

generous readers like you.

 

 

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

 

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[Guest guest]

Shortly before Kurt Vonnegut passed he was writing about psychopathic

personalities that are dominating politics and business. You might look for his

articles as they are well worth reading.

Not only are we losing species to extinction others are being genetically

modified to toxicity etc.

Starlink corn for example.

To me Monsanto is a good example of P.P.

 

Kirk