How We Can Avoid The Next Mass Extinction

The news this week has been full of stories about the startling study showing that we are well on on way to the sixth great extinction of planet Earth. Naturally, there is plenty of gloom and doom about the findings. Worse, there is the natural tendency to just throw our arms up in surrender and assume there is nothing we can do about it. Fortunately, that is not the case.

To prevent the sixth mass extinction, one strategy being considered is moving threatened species of plants and animals into more sustainable environments could help them cope with changing climate…”This will require rapid, greatly intensified efforts to conserve already threatened species and to alleviate pressures on their populations – notably habitat loss, overexploitation for economic gain, and climate change,”  the researchers from the universities of Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley said in a report. But, they note, that this window of opportunity rapidly closing.

In case it’s not obvious that this threatens humans as well the rest of Earth’s inhabitants, the research indicates that we will certainly be susceptible to a mass extinction:

 Scientists in the new extinction study also warn that humans could be among the threatened species because in the aftermath of past mass extinctions, the ecosystem took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to rediversify. “If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on,” wrote the lead author, Gerardo Ceballos.

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