Opinion: We’re killing off our planet, and our enlightenment may come too late
By Eugene Robinson Eugene Robinson Columnist focusing on politics and culture Email Bio Follow Columnist May 6 at 6:10 PM There are roughly 8 million plant and animal species in the world. One of them — homo sapiens — may soon wipe out a million of the rest. And we’re just getting started.
If there are intelligent observers 66 million years from now, their scientists may conclude that the sixth mass extinction was caused by us — and that we saw what we were doing but lacked the wisdom and courage to stop ourselves. A summary of the report by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services was released Monday in Paris, culminating years of work by leading environmental scientists around the globe. Its findings will be widely noted and lamented; its recommendations, I fear, widely ignored.
Malthusian predictions that rapid population growth would lead to scarcity and famine have proved spectacularly wrong. The global middle class has ballooned, while the percentage of humans living in extreme poverty has shrunk to levels never dreamed of. But all that economic growth has put an unprecedented strain on the natural world, and scientists can only sketch the ultimate consequences.
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