The Terminator (Homo exterminans)
Humanity’s deadly impact on global biodiversity and the biosphere. The sixth extinction, the ‘anthropocene defaunation’ and the risk of ecological collapse: their impact on our own future. Could humans become extinct and, if so, how? How we can avoid it.
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The Lord Krishna said: Doom am I, full-ripe, dealing death to the worlds, intent on devouring mankind —Bhagavad Gita, translation by Mahatma Ghandi.
When Lonesome George passed, alone and in the dead of night, the world Pinta Island tortoise population slipped quietly into oblivion. George was a member of a subspecies, Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, that had for two or three million years inhabited a single island in the Galapagos. Discovered by Hungarian biologist József Vágvölgyi in 1971, George lived out his last years in captivity and solitude, the only one of his tribe left alive. Desperate efforts by conservationists from the Charles Darwin Foundation to mate him with female tortoises of different subspecies from neighbouring Isabella and Española islands came to nothing. Eggs were laid, but no baby tortoises ever hatched. On June 24, 2012, George was found dead by his carer of 40 years, Eduardo Llerena. It appears he died of heart failure aged around 100 years— not great for one of these large, long-lived creatures, which are known to attain 175 or more (Galapagos Conservancy 2014). Perhaps it was simply a broken heart. The humans immediately began to fight over who should have custody of his carcass. A Yale University team asserted that the Pinta tortoises still existed in certain genes discovered in another subspecies on another island (Ingber 2012), but if your immediate family is dead and your distant cousins in another land are alive, it doesn’t
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 J. Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41270-2_2
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seem quite the same, somehow. In the final washup, George was simply the latest victim of Homo sapiens, whose whalers and fishers used for two centuries to stock up on fresh tortoises to eke out their shipboard rations when they called at the Galapagos and whose feral goats—introduced for similar reasons—stripped Pinta Island bare of all the vegetation the tortoises needed to subsist. Nothing we did subsequently could save him. Around the world, the mournful tale of Lonesome George is echoing, time and again, with dismaying frequency. On the same day he passed, as many as a 100 other animals and plants blinked into nothingness, unhymned by the world media, blithely unnoticed by the vast majority of Homo sapiens, the species that has now come to dominate all others and to occupy the lion’s share of the planet’s resources. Like death, extinction—let it be said—is a part of life. Nearly all the plants, animals and organisms that ever lived on Earth are now extinct (Raup 1986). Without extinction, you don’t get evolution, adaptation or major change. New species, such as ourselves, cannot emerge to replace old ones, try out new physical and mental adaptations, explore new niches: without it we’d still all be dwellers in the primordial ooze. Extinction has been going on constantly ever since life began here, 3.8 billion years ago. It isn’t extinction that is the big worry: it’s the rate of extinction. To illu
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