Categorie: "Natuurfilms en boeken"

So far, the Earth has faced five mass extinctions during its long lifespan that covers almost five billion years. What many people don’t always seem to realise, is that we are currently in the middle of the sixth one. The biggest difference if you compare the current wave of mass extinction to the previous ones is the cause: earlier mass extinctions were literally mass extinctions, caused by climatological changes or other natural phenomena. They were part of the eternal cycle of life, at least if you take the geological time scale into account. What we are witnessing today is not a mass extinction triggered by natural factors, but rather a lurking, lingering form of mass genocide, the victims not being specific groups of humans, but animals, plants and vital ecosystems instead. And the pace in which this mass genocide is being executed is – to put it mildly – alarming. At the moment the total human demand on the planet’s natural resources exceeds the Earth’s capacity by about 25 percent, a number that is likely to grow considering the rapid emergence of new economic superpowers like China, India or Brazil. The rate at which humans have multiplied and congregated into vast urban sprawls makes such demands on the delicately balanced environment that in many places it is cracking under the ever tightening strains of material progress and overpopulation. The Atlas of Endangered Species is an interesting book that tries to tackle this problem by presenting the numbers and facts about the man-made disruption of the natural order on a global scale. →