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I stumbled upon this while researching a report and noticed Leakey's name. Educate yourself with caution as the results may startle u...
peace
Written by Richard Leakey
[http://www.well.com/user/davidu/sixthextinction.html]
Our planet has been shaken by five major extinctions in the four billion year
history of life. The first, 450 million years ago, occurred shortly after the evolution
of the first land-based plants and 100 million years after the Cambrian Explosion of
animal life beneath the seas.
The second extinction spasm came 350 million years ago, causing the formation of
coal forests. Then the Earth experienced two mass extinctions during the Triassic
period, between 250 and 200 million years ago. The fifth mass extinction, probably
caused by a giant meteor collision, occurred 65 million years ago, at the end of the
Cretaceous period, and ended the reptilian dominance of the Earth. This led to the
current mammalian domination of the Earth.
So what is the Sixth Extinction? When is it coming? And what is its cause? "It's the
next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the
human race, are its cause," explains Dr. Richard Leakey, the world's most famous
paleoanthropologist. Every year, between 17,000 and 100,000 species vanish from
our planet, he says. "For the sake of argument, let's assume the number is 50,000
a year. Whatever way you look at it, we're destroying the Earth at a rate
comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a
shower of vast heavenly bodies." The statistics he has assembled are staggering.
Fifty per cent of the Earth's species will have vanished inside the next 100 years;
mankind is using almost half the energy available to sustain life on the planet, and
this figure will only grow as our population leaps from 5.7 billion to ten billion
inside the next half-century. Such a dramatic and overwhelming mass extinction
threatens the entire complex fabric of life on Earth, including the species
responsible for it: Homo sapiens.
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