“Humanity versus Earth”

Response to UPI article May 10, 2005

On May 10, 2005 an article was published on the Internet by Dan Whipple,of UPI.

The following letter is D.H. Gottlieb’s response.

As we are of this planet, I find it laughable that you and others have chosen to suggest that our actions are in some way unnatural. I hear often of humanity's war against nature. How ignorance rises to dogma in our society befuddles me sometimes. We could not possibly be at war or destructive to our planet. We are part of it. To claim otherwise is a misaligned vanity that takes us out of our rightful place as members of an ecosystem and in doing so makes us foreign to our home, this planet. It is as if one were to say that maggots are destructive creatures because they help recycle carrion.

The sooner you and your sources remove themselves from 1960's dogmas that continue to cripple clarity--and the environmental movement--the sooner we can make lasting progress in awareness of our place on this blue planet. We are self-aware members of this ecosystem with the capacity to suggest and consciously modify as a species. We are quite beautiful in that. Do we make mistakes? Of course, we are not deities.

The actions of our species are provocative to change. This is neither good nor bad--it is merely the way we were created (the way we evolved). That shortsighted members of our species find it advantageous to claim our actions are detrimental to our planet and our ecosystem seem foolish. They might also be seen as taking a stand that is self-serving. These actions are in our nature.

It is also in our nature to claim clear sight as our birthright. I suggest here that our sight is only clear when we remember that our sight was provided to us through our creation (a series of mutations).It is as imperfect or splendid as it need be. It is natural.

The responsibility of our gift of cognition is balance.

Balance suggests we may also choose to take on the burden of decency and ethical responsibility to the other members of our species because of our many gifts. Of course, if one does not, then I wonder: Is the result of that decision a sense that one is part of a species that does damage to their environment?

Peace

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May 10 (UPI) -- One can fret about global warming, nuclear proliferation, asteroid impacts or tsunamis, but for an ecosystem the worst thing that can happen is to have human beings move to the neighborhood.

For the past 50,000 years, the arrival of humans on continents that had large animals has resulted in megafaunal collapse, according to David Burney, director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii

Mass extinctions, especially of large animals, begin in the places reached first by colonizing humans, ending with those remote islands that were apparently not colonized until recent centuries, such as Mauritius and the Galapagos Islands. This pattern is without exception for biotas that included larger animals," Burney said. Among the more recent of these extinctions -- one that, it can be argued, continues up to this very day -- occurred abut 12,000 years ago when humans armed with advanced hunting technology followed the retreating glaciers across the Bering Strait into North America. Not much later on a geologic scale, 2,000 or 3,000 years, a vast cohort of North American wildlife was gone: mammoths, horses, camels, saber-tooth cats, giant ground sloths, and many others.There has been considerable debate in scientific circles about whether these extinctions were the result of climate change or human intervention. Russell Graham, curator of the Earth Mineral Sciences Museum and Art Gallery at Penn State University is a leading advocate of the climate change theory. Graham told UPI's Blue Planet last year: The model I've developed looks at climate warming. It is not just warming that causes the extinctions. Climate oscillations have caused mammals to reduce their geographic distribution.Graham said once the range of a mammal is restricted, it becomes vulnerable to many other ecological factors -- fire, famine, drought, perhaps overhunting -- that can make it vulnerable to extinction.

Paul Martin of the University Arizona said human hunters could have made short work of the mammoths, at least. Noting the extinction is suspiciously coincident with the arrival of humans, he calculated that a growing and expanding human population could have wiped out the mammoths in as little as 300 years.A paper in the October 2004 issue of Science pioneered a middle ground that humans contributed to extinction on some continents, but human hunting was not solely responsible for the pattern of extinction everywhere. Instead, evidence suggests that the intersection of human impacts with pronounced climatic change drove the precise timing and geography of extinction in the northern hemisphere.Humans certainly played an important role in these extinctions, though, and David Burney told Blue Planet that as a philosophical question, we ought to try to recreate the Pleistocene ecosystem in areas of the United States. Instead of a fictional dinosaur-filled Jurassic Park, we should create an actual Pleistocene Park filled with the animals surviving today from that period, or with their closest living relatives. I think now we can make a good case that humans should be trying to set things right, because we were the cause of these extinctions in the first place, Burney said.

Burney, Martin and other scientists attended a symposium, sponsored by media mogul Ted Turner, on establishing a Pleistocene type of ecosystem on one of Turner's large ranches in New Mexico. We're doing this as a kind of thematic approach to land management, where the goal is to try to replicate late Pleistocene ecosystems, Burney said.If an animal is extinct, we would try to find the closest living relative.This is a forward thinking approach to conservation, where instead of managing extinction ... this is a proactive thing where we can bring closest living relative back to the wild, he added.In Siberia, Sergey Zimov, director of the Northeast Science Station in the Republic (Yakutia), is attempting to set up a Pleistocene Parkon 160 square kilometers (61.8 square miles) of lowlands.

In an essay in the May 6 edition of the journal Science, Zimov wrote: One-third of the territory is meadow, one-third is forest, and one-third is willow shrubland. Today, many of the animals of the mammoth ecosystem live in northern Yakutia. Zimov plans to reintroduce bison, imported from Canada, and to acclimate Siberian tigers, which are critically endangered throughout their range.From a scientific perspective, Pleistocene is important because it directly tests the role of large herbivores in creating and maintaining grassland ecosystems, something that can only be surmised but not proven from the paleorecord. As the earth warms in the current changing climate, maintaining these grasslands could be critical. Warming temperatures will melt permafrost, which currently stores vast amounts of organic carbon, which could be released into the atmosphere either as carbon or methane, further exacerbating the greenhouse. Burney cautioned that in the United States this still is just an idea, with no funding behind it or location to inhabit.I know this sounds farfetched,Burney added, but all new ideas do initially, and then everybody says they knew all along.Blue Planet is a weekly series examining the relationship of humans to the natural world, by veteran environmental reporter Dan Whipple. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International