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Thursday, April 15, 2010

Finally, a Handy-dandy Species Extinction Calculator


Pile of bison skulls collected from prairies to be used for dye and fertilizer

...to go with your Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter.

An article over on Mongabay titled, Turning to the matrix: a more accurate way to predict extinction, discusses a new computer model to help biologists predict extinction rates based on how badly a bipedal carnivorous predatory ape species has devastated a given area of the planet.

You can use your mouse to twiddle the various dials to predict how many species your children and grandchildren will never hope to see alive thanks to us.

Click here for single landscape.

Click here for multiple landscapes.



I'm sure you've seen Avatar, but did you catch the film Call of Life (not to be confused with Call for Life) by The Species Alliance?

Follow the YouTube link to the film's trailer and you will find a single comment:

"What a bunch of delusional crap!"

How poignant. It comes with a link (not provided by me) to an anti-wolf film by a stereotypical Homo sapiens male. His preferred form of recreation is hunting and he hates wolves (because they compete with him for for his status symbols--trophy kills). He also loves to hunt them, which is icing on his cake.

Click here to see the most popular feature films released so far this year. They are almost exclusively focused on two things: sex and violence.

This is what we are. We won't find solutions pretending the world is populated by women. The only thing that keeps you and your family safe at night is the threat of violent force by our sanctioned and regulated police force.

You could safely bet your first born that the person in your backyard wearing that ski mask is not a female. Without a police force to protect the planet's biosphere, it will continue to be destroyed, eventually taking billions of people with it.

The world needs the equivalent of a UN peace keeping force--heavily armed Ranger Ricks--to protect designated nature preserves. Let's call it Ecosystem Protection International (EPI).

See Depopulation may be harming the Amazon rainforest for evidnece that the only thing standing in the way of other groups who want to profit from resources are other groups.

I have a hypothesis. Most people are not particularly concerned when told that billions are going to perish because the thought brings them a measure of anxiety relief (subconscious pleasure). If so it would be a relic from our pliesticine evolution when elimination of another group would free up resources for your own group's use.

Of course, everyone assumes that they won't be among those who will perish. The fact that we are also driving much of the rest of the life that we share this planet with to extinction does not even register with most people. In the past we were only capable of driving isolated ecosystems to extinction (with the attendant human population crashes). What we are witnessing is just the same old, same old on a planetary scale.

Update [5/6/2010] Check out this TED talk found on Treehugger.

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1 comment:

  1. Russ, very good blog! Why didn't you link to this from RR's blog ages ago? I can't add much to your discussion here about the extinction debate, except that you are right about people not really caring about other people dying. I actually care (wish) that many had never been born in the first place, in those overpopulated countries. They are the"cause" of the problem, but it is not their fault!

    Loved your article about nuclear.

    Cheers,
    Paul Nash
    Sechelt, BC

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