I find this one of the most depressing articles I've read for a long time.<p>If the upper rate values are true, we're headed for an extinction event <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event</a> on the level of the Triassic-Jurassic transition in within centuries (75% species loss)<p>Already 41% of amphibians face extinction.
I think it's important to ask two questions:<p>1. Is this a bad thing for humanity?<p>2. If it is, how can we stop it?<p>I'm not sure the answer to 1 is, "Yes." If an organism is useful to us, we domesticate it. The rest of nature (while sometimes pretty) doesn't affect our survival, actively harms us, or is too hardy to unintentionally destroy (cyanobacteria). Nature is an extremely complex system, but let's not pretend it was a precariously-balanced eden before we came along. Most of nature is animals suffering; starving, dying of disease, or being eaten alive by others. Nature visits unnecessary suffering upon animals on a scale that we cannot imagine. When humans do the same, it's animal cruelty. I see no reason why we should try to prevent one but not the other.<p>But let's say nature is worth preserving, at least until we understand it better. How can we preserve it? I know of no civilization that has voluntarily reduced its resource consumption. It seems the only solution is to invent our way out of the problem. That means advances in agriculture, biotech, and energy.
There is a tremendously conservative impulse inherent in the way people look at the natural world. The basic assumption for near all discussions is that all change is bad, the exact present situation absent the touch of humanity is good, and that the natural state is good.<p>All of these positions should be challenged.<p>The natural world changes constantly, even absent humanity. The natural state of predator-prey relationships is not stasis, the natural state of bacterial evolution and disease is definitely not stasis, and neither is the natural population or experience of individuals of a species in any given geographical area.<p>Further, and more importantly, the natural world is a state of constant, terrible suffering. Everything that can suffer does. Things that would make you flinch if they happened to your pets happen to animals everywhere, constantly. Pain, death, disease. The ethical future is one in which all of that suffering is removed, and the entire natural world replaced in order to enable that removal. Where naturally evolved machines without capacity to suffer cause suffering they should be removed, replaced, or altered: plants, fungi, viruses, bacteria, other free-roaming cellular organisms. Where higher organisms suffer they should be placed into managed environments where they can be protected while living as they would in the natural world, and where that life involved inflicting pain, they can inflict it on machine simulations that cannot feel.<p>We should not be looking to let things remain the same, or create areas where the horrors of nature continue unmolested. That is a repulsive and unethical position: requiring countless living beings capable of pain and suffering to undergo terrible experiences just because it makes you feel good.<p>The sooner we live in a completely unnatural world, the better. But I think a culture that is fine with the mass farming of animals for food and materials is a culture that is unlikely to buy the concept of eliminating nature in order to eliminate suffering. As a species we still have a lot of growing up to do in order to reach a bare minimum state of ethics worthy of the name.
This makes me feel better about giving up my car a few years back and mostly walking everywhere.<p>Which is to say I don't think it's completely hopeless. I think there are things we can do.