A couple years ago it was announced that not a single calf was born to the remaining 366 Northern Atlantic right whales, thereby putting them in jeopardy of almost certain extinction. Similarly, just the year before, the sole remaining male northern white rhino died, all but insuring the end of his subspecies as well. And then there’s the western monarch butterfly whose numbers have plunged 99 percent in just the past four decades.
These three will likely join the ranks of the “nevermore” along with scads of other species lost to extinction just within our generation. And this trend is quickening. In fact, we are currently losing species at a pace somewhere around 1,000 times the natural “background” extinction rate, all of which is projected to bring about the fates of upward of one million of Earth’s 8 million or so species by 2100. All this is happening because of climate change, pesticides, herbicides, oceanic acidification, our one percent annual usurpation of wild habitat, and plain old over-fishing and over-hunting. In other words: all because of us.
Make no mistake: this “Mass Extinction Event” is the greatest challenge we will ever face, and yet the primary driver behind it, as well as most of our woes — be it deforestation, aquifer depletions, desertification, desperate migrations, plastic waste, famine, malnutrition, coral reef die-off, intensifying hurricanes and droughts, historic wildfires, hypoxic dead zones, air and water pollution, thawing polar caps, homelessness, traffic gridlock, civil unrest, pandemics, war, genocide, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam — is a problem so divisive, so taboo it is rarely if ever uttered: human overpopulation and its seemingly inseparable cohort overconsumption.