War on Terra: Time's Up

As verified by this year's Red List, the extinction of many of the great ape species --including chimps, gorillas and orangutans--could happen within the lifetime of people reading these words.

We've known about the great apes, the whales and many other threatened species for decades, and though it's been widely accepted that these extinctions are a Bad Thing and we ought to be preventing them, we aren't preventing them. This may come as a surprise. Apparently commercials and cuddly toys don't do it.

The extinction of animal species follows from the larger war on Terra being conducted by greedy elements of the human species. We have also known for decades and have come to accept that wantonly cutting down forests is a very bad thing--it destroys habitat for thousands of species of animals and plants, robs the soil of nutrients and altogether makes life much more difficult for the human species. We've also known for a few decades that forests are incredibly important to protecting us from the effects of greenhouse gases, and in keeping our climate within livable bounds. Trees are--as the saying went in the 1990s--the lungs of the earth.

But the Worldwatch Institute's latest report tells us (in the words of a Reuters story) "More wood was removed from forests in 2005 than ever before." The report tracked 44 "vital signs" of the planet's health: 28 were designated "bad."

We've known of the potentially critical danger of the phenomenon called the greenhouse effect since the 1960s, and have known enough about it to understand its basic reality and basic threat since the 1980s. But we've done next to nothing, and like the extinctions, time is just about up. We're in the Climate Crisis, and it's going to be with us for the foreseeable future. And the latest signs are, it's going to be worse sooner. Scientists believed that the Arctic sea ice pack could disappear completely in the summer by the year 2070. But the ice has melted away in 2007 to record low levels, and now the estimate is 2030. That means that it is very likely to continue to decline throughout the lifetime of everyone reading this, and disappear when many of the people who could be reading this are still very much alive.

The loss of Arctic ice will change the world's weather and its total climate. By the time it is gone, apes, polar bears and some whales will be the same as dinosaurs to children (as Barbara Kingsolver suggests in a short story), and they will hardly believe these creatures existed in living memory. But that may not be the worst of it. Their world is not going to be the world we know today, and I don't mean they'll have something better than Iphones.

We may well have been able to prevent this but we didn't. Now we're going to have to deal with and live with the consequences. Our only redemption--indeed the possibly final test of the human species--will be to prevent even worse from happening to this lovely, life-filled planet, in the farther future none of us will live to see. But that will require consciously changing many things about our present, without necessarily gaining benefits ourselves. For that test, the time is coming. Fast.