Saving the Creation part 3

" Now, the longest lasting effect of the bottleneck that we have traveled into and the subject of my presentation of this afternoon is the accelerating destruction, of course, of the natural environment leading to the undoubted, ongoing process of mass extinctions of ecosystems and species. The damage already done can’t be repaired in any period of time that
has meaning to the human mind. The average extinction rate -- background extinction rate before we came along was about, paleontologist have shown us, one species going extinct per
million species per year.

The number of new species on average coming into existence by evolution was about the same, one per million per year, and now we have increased that by orders of magnitude. The more this is allowed to grow, and it is accelerating, the more future generations are going to suffer for it in ways that we understand already, but also in ways that remain unimagined. “Why?” future generations are going to ask us. By needlessly, stupidly extinguishing the lives of other species, you diminish our own.

A radical reduction of the world’s biodiversity as the folly of our descendants is least likely to -- are least likely to forgive us. And that’s not what we want to do to them. Banish the thought that has entered your head that extinction has always occurred. Extinction will always be filled back with new evolution. In past times, there have been five massive distinctions. Probably all due -- although that is not certain, but probably all due to a large bull-eyed strike, a meteor or a comet, the last one being 65 million years ago, of course.

And at that time, we had severe depression of biological diversity in each of those times, and it took somewhere between 5 and 10 million years of evolution, natural evolution to finally restore the original amount and then continue on slowly rising. Now if descendants, our descendants, well, I think, you know, people in this generation becoming fully aware of this are told that now we have to wait five million years, you know, to undo the damage that we are doing right now, they will be peeved.


http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/the_aspen_ideas.php