Environmental Ethics: The Sixth Extinction

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

The Sixth Extinction

Friday January 30, 2019

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Do You Agree or Disagree?

As I was reading "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert, I found it really hard for me to stop reading the book. I was so intrigued on her research that I finished the book in two days.

Throughout her book, Kolbert researched and studied the effects that humans have on extinction. She believes that humans are on the brink of causing "the sixth extinction". Different species are going extinct due to the decline in availability of land and a rise in temperatures.

Kolbert took a trip to Panama in pursuits of discovering why the golden frog , once impossible to avoid, was dwindling down to a few dozen. This discovery inspired her to learn more about extinction.

Kolbert argues that we are living in the Anthropocene period of planetary history—an epoch defined by human beings’ attempts to manipulate their environments, resulting in the extinction or near-extinction of many different species. Kolbert feels as if the Sixth Extinction will be unique because it will be the result of human behavior. By burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, human beings have drastically increased the temperature and acidity of ocean water meaning that sea creatures will have to adapt to the changing environment, or die out.

Kolbert goes on another adventure to the Great Barrier Reef, where she learns from other scientists the impact that increased temperature and acidity has had on the coral reefs. She also visits the tropical rain forests of South America, where she sees the phenomenal diversity of life there.

It's obvious that Kolbert thinks that humans are playing the biggest role in the Sixth Extinction. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with her? Well here's my take, I think that humans need to keep in mind that they have the power to change the environment, preserve, and protect. They need to realize that no matter what they do in the future, their actions have a big impact on the Sixth Extinction that will shape the world.

But I also have to be opposed to this because Humans destroy habitats and build certain things in order to survive. The world is becoming overpopulated and humans are doing what is necessary to survive. So can you really blame them?

Who's side are you on?

2 comments:

PhilFebruary 13, 2019 at 3:12 PM
Welcome, Madison!

Whose side? Well, ultimately all life on earth needs to be on the same side, that's what makes it a potentially healthy and functional ecosystem.

But, between the extremists (who consider humanity a scourge and a pox that deserves to be expunged) and the pragmatists who acknowledge our impact and now wonder what we can do to fix the mess we've made, I'm with the latter. I want us to make the planet great (as in, hospitable to human life and in symbiotic harmony with it) again.
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Madison SmithApril 30, 2019 at 4:32 PM
I agree! If everyone could work together, everything could be much simpler.
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First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

The Sixth Extinction

2 comments:

Peripatetics