Despite what scientists are saying and thinking, we are not in a sixth mass extinction. Though signs may point that direction, we aren’t there yet. It is possible that in the very near future we will enter a mass extinction, but we haven’t reached that point. Five mass extinctions have been recorded in Earth’s history, each wiping out 70% of life on the planet or more. However, as stated by the 22nd paragraph in AEON’s article We are not edging up to a mass extinction by Stewart Brand, “There were soon many more species alive after each catastrophe than there were before it.” Even if we were in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, it would take decades, maybe even centuries to the see the results, and if anything was still alive, it would find a way to adapt to the new environment, or it would die. Eric Worrall states in his article Paleo Expert: Earth is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction that “...this is because by the time a mass extinction starts, the world would already be over.” It would take a long time to see if we were in a mass extinction, and by the time we had entered it, everything would already be gone. As has been noted, scientists are saying that a mass extinction might be coming in the very near future, but it won’t begin for a while. Still, scientists are not denying that humans are the reason this might happen.
Even though some might argue that climate change is the reason more and more species are going extinct, there are quite a few that are actually adapting to the circumstances around them and finding new ways to survive. It might not be easy, but it is possible. Stewart Brand’s AEON article brings up a good point in saying, “Move, adapt or die. When organisms challenged by climate change respond by adapting, they evolve. When they move, they often encounter distant cousins and hybridise with them, sometimes evolving new species. When they die, they leave a niche open for other species to migrate or adapt into, and a warming climate tends to open the way for more species rather than fewer.” Take the Galapagos islands for example. They started out as nothing but a barren wasteland of volcanic rock and ash, and when organisms moved to them or were swept out to sea and were stranded, they either had no way to get back to where they were or they didn’t want to. Lizards that ate leaves were moved to an arid island free of vegetation and had to evolve to dive deep and reach the nearest plant: seaweed. Over hundreds of years, the lizards that used to be living in trees were diving into the ocean to reach seaweed to survive. Animals and other organisms are able to adapt to their circumstances and help each other, no matter what may happen. Climate change could be affecting animals and organisms, like marine life or organisms that inhabit rainforests. When we destroy habitats for our own gain, that can deplete entire species that were once proliferating. As mentioned earlier, most organisms can adapt, but there are some that are unable to and die off completely. Just because some species are going extinct doesn’t mean that we’re in the midst of a mass extinction, but it does mean that if we keep it up, we could be.
Even though another mass extinction event seems to be coming, we still won’t be around to see it. If another does occur because of human activity, it will happen within the next few decades or even centuries. That doesn’t seem so close, but most mass extinctions in the past took hundred to thousands of years to physically begin destroying the world.
“Nothing we have done to the climate or the world in general comes anywhere close to the unimaginable circumstances of previous mass extinctions.”, says Eric Worrall in his article Paleo Expert: Earth is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction. “Erwin does not rule out the possibility we might somehow trigger a mass extinction in the future. But killing off a few photogenic species simply doesn’t qualify.” Being the cause of several extinctions isn’t wonderful, but it also isn’t triggering the end of the world. Although some people may think that the extinction will wipe out all life and humanity within the next decade or so, a devastating event is several centuries away. AEON states that “Many now assume that we are in the midst of a human-caused ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ to rival the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But we’re not. The five historic mass extinctions eliminated 70 per cent or more of all species in a relatively short time. That is not going on now. ‘If all currently threatened species were to go extinct in a few centuries and that rate continued,’ began a recent Nature magazine introduction to a survey of wildlife losses, ‘the sixth mass extinction could come in a couple of centuries or a few millennia.’” Just because seem like they’re looming closer doesn’t mean they actually are, and our generation isn’t in any danger from any mass extinctions any time soon.
Some people might argue that we are in a sixth mass extinction. Some scientists believe the same things, but there is no solid proof that we are. Still, there are people who are arguing for this position, and there are many reasons why. In CNN’s article Sixth mass extinction: The era of 'biological annihilation' by John D. Sutter, it states that “‘We've got this stuff going on that we can't really see because we're not constantly counting numbers of individuals,’ he said. ‘But when you realize that we've wiped out 50% of the Earth's wildlife in the last 40 years, it doesn't take complicated math to figure out that, if we keep cutting by half every 40 years, pretty soon there's going to be nothing left.’” More people argue for this because studies show that species are depleting faster and faster. “In a 2015 study, biologist Paul Ehrlich and his team argued Earth is in an era of mass extinction rivaling the one that killed the dinosaurs. They estimated Earth is losing mammal species 20 to 100 times the rate of past such extinctions and that the rate is only expected to speed up.”, says Newsy’s article Scientists Can’t agree if we are really in a mass extinction by Sarah Schlieder. However, people have been trying to help the environment by recycling, using eco-friendly cars and solar panels to power things instead of using pollutants. This rate of extinction has probably lowered since the time this study took place, three years ago.This argument is not enough to change the fact that we aren’t in a mass extinction. Eric Worrall’s Paleo Expert: Earth is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction article just about sums it up, saying, “Picture previous mass extinctions; the sky darkened for months, maybe years by gigantic impacts or vast volcanic eruptions which lasted for thousands, even millions of years; Poisonous fumes spreading across the entire world, choking the life out of entire continents; A handful of animals and plants somehow scrounging warmth and food from an almost lifeless wasteland.Compare this nightmarish hellscape to the slight wobble we may have helped introduce to global temperatures, a wobble so small it cannot be reliably differentiated from previous natural wobbles which occurred in the last few centuries.” What we are doing may not be good, but it isn’t ending the world either.
Even though many amazing species are going extinct faster and faster, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a mass extinction is in the near future. Mass extinctions wiped out over 70% of all life on Earth, and the eradication of a few species, beloved as they are, doesn’t really count.
Newsy’s article Scientists Can’t agree if we are really in a mass extinction says, “Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation, says current rates don't signal a mass extinction because the past five wiped out at least 70 percent of all species in a relatively short time. He says current rates are too slow for us to be in the middle of one.” This means that, even though the extinction of several species is bad, it isn’t a massive destructive event that’s going to destroy the world.Eric Worrall’s Paleo Expert: Earth is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction article goes on by saying, “‘Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,’ he wrote me in an email. ‘It is absolutely critical to recognize that I am NOT claiming that humans haven’t done great damage to marine and terrestrial [ecosystems], nor that many extinctions have not occurred and more will certainly occur in the near future. But I do think that as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons.’”
People may think that extinctions are coming to destroy the world, but they need to make sure that they’re getting accurate information. Some people only glance at a headline instead of reading the article below it, which may have a very different perspective than a single line of text. All in all, some people are assuming things that aren’t true or isn’t the proper information.
The Earth is not in a sixth mass extinction, no matter what things seem like. They might be coming up soon, sometime within the next few centuries, but we’ll all be gone, so there’s nothing really to worry about. Even though several beloved species, like the African elephant and the Black Rhino, are going extinct, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is going to die. Like the Galapagos example, organisms are fully able to adapt to their new surroundings and even evolve into an entirely different organism if they need to to survive barren wasteland, underground, in the forest or in a desert. People that just scan for headlines don’t know the full picture. If you don’t read the articles below, you’ll never really know some ideas and information that could change your entire perspective. Even though headlines may read, ‘BLACK RHINO, NEARING EXTINCTION’, that doesn’t mean that we’re all in danger. Next time someone tells you something that may seem questionable, check to make sure that you can see the full picture and both sides of the argument. Once again, even though many people argue against it, we are not in a mass extinction.
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