Bill McKibben published a book in 1989 that has raised the specter that we are killing off our natural world by our own unwise actions. See: www.newyorker.com/… for McKibben’s summary. I was convinced at least by 1990 that McKibben was correct. Human beings were blindly accepting the idea of endless growth under the banner of extreme Capitalism (to be fair, industrial Communism is not at all better) and thus sowing the seeds of our own species’ destruction, starting with the depauperation of the planet as we took possession of a huge proportion of the available resources.
Even before the recognition of Global Climate Change, several scientists and naturalists had noted the replacement of the natural world by human agency. Even John James Audubon noted the great slaughter of Passenger Pigeons in his journal
“As the young birds grow up, their enemies, armed with axes, reach the spot, to seize and destroy all they can. The trees are felled, and made to fall in such a way that the cutting of one causes the overthrow of another, or shakes the neighbouring trees so much, that the young Pigeons, or squabs, as they are named, are violently hurried to the ground. In this manner also, immense quantities are destroyed.” — Audubon
As McKibben notes the physical chemist and Nobel laureate, Svante August Arrhenius, described Global Climate Change in 1902, but thought it would take 3000 years for Carbon Dioxide to increase by 50%. However, we made a 30% increase in a hundred years!
Even before the warning published by Arrhenius, other scientists predicted a destruction of the natural world that would be eventually regretted. W.H. Hudson, for example, in the start of his classic book A Naturalist in La Plata, points out how the increase and invasive tactics of humans were destroying the fauna of the Pampas of Argentina.
”During recent years we have heard much about the great and rapid changes now going on in the plants and animals of all the temperate regions of the globe colonized by Europeans. These changes, if taken merely as evidence of material progress, must be a matter of rejoicing to those who are satisfied, and more than satisfied, with our system of civilization, or method of outwitting Nature by the removal of all checks on the undue increase of our own species.” W. H. Hudson 1895, A Naturalist in La Plata.
Even earlier, Von Humboldt in the early 19th Century noted that everything in the living world on earth was interconnected, and himself speculated that climate could be altered by human activity.See: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/…
Change is inevitable, even without humans, but humans are accelerating changes at a very rapid rate, exceeded in nature only by catastrophic events like volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes. Otherwise changes are slower, often taking millions of years.
What are we to do? We are now baked into a series of future events that we have no ability to control. The best that we can do is to mitigate the effects in the more distant future and maybe protect some of what we have now. This is not some fanatic on a street corner carrying a sign saying “The End is Near!” This is very real, and yet we argue over whether it is really happening and waste our precious moments on earth in bickering on moot political advantage points. I often think that many in our species are ranting, like Kipling’s Banderlog, that we are great, just before Ka, the great python, takes them down!
This is our current burden and it is not going away, no matter how many people wish it would. It is immensely frustrating, as a scientist, to listen to totally uninformed opinions countermanding those of us who have studied various aspects of the natural world and have years of experience in the field. It is one thing to be accused of being elitist (I don’t doubt that some of us are), and then offering proof of their ignorance of the whole huge collection of data that has piled up, not only vindicating our position, but showing that we have consistently underestimated the rapidity of the changes.
If we go down, our epitaph will surely read:
“Here lies Homo sapiens, a victim of their own arrogance!”
Still, while we certainly will lose many species and some ecosystems, we might yet keep absolute calamity at bay. But it has to be an international effort and we would have to stop the current tendency for expansionism and war, as well as political chaos.
At least everybody has been warned! See: academic.oup.com/...
I have appended a series of my photos of various places in the Americas, mostly North America, that show what we have to lose.