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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What is more important, rainforests or electric cars?

Hardi Baktiantoro

You really must read this Mongabay interview with the leader of a group of "orangutan guerrillas" who use satellite imagery, GPS, and video cameras to document destruction of rainforests for palm oil plantations. Assuming carbon credits are eventually used to buy up rainforests, the need to physically protect them will still exist.

For every article on rainforest destruction, you will find a few thousand articles about new car technology. A piece over on Huffington Post by Levi Novey sums it up nicely:

Deforestation, on the other hand, is depressing. We feel less powerful in our abilities to stop it. We can imagine ourselves driving electric cars in five years, or even visualize what wind turbines would look like in fields near to where we live. Getting a poor family in rural Peru to stop chopping down the Amazon as they make way for more coffee crops -- it seems like an impossible task to achieve given how many other factors are at play.

The comment field below that article contains your usual collection of yammering cowboys but two commenters did point out (rudely) that the author was way wrong in his assessment of Peru's ability to protect its forests. In a nutshell, without a mechanism that will direct the power of the free market to make the protection of rainforests more lucrative than their destruction, our children and grand children are going to witness terrible times. These ecosystems represent vast carbon sinks and also impact weather patterns, never mind the loss of biodiversity. Most Americans don't even know what that word means.

It has yet to be proven that carbon trading can work, but it is also yet to be proven that anything works to slow the destruction of the biosphere in our never ending quest for ever greater wealth and status. We owe it to future generations to at least try it. If only there were a way to magically make our politicians intelligent and informed, carbon trading could save the rainforests. Pundits of the environmental bent seem incapable of understanding that both carbon trading and a carbon tax can be used simultaneously where each would be most effective. It's like arguing over which tastes better, peanut butter or chocolate.

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