The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, (IUCN) a British and European organization I admit to never having heard of before, is saying today that species are now becoming extinct faster than they can evolve into new ones.

“In its last biodiversity report in 2004, the body warned that Earth was losing species at a rate comparable to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

Extinctions, it said, were happening up to 1,000 times faster than the natural “background” rate.

Nearly 16,000 species were listed as under threat or disappearing, with more than 200 of already described as “possibly extinct” and almost 3,000 “critically endangered”. ”

This would be the sixth great extinction of species our Earth has gone through, only this time instead of meteors, volcanoes and ice ages, it’s being driven by habitat destruction, hunting, increasing number of alien predators, disease and climate change.

I would personally have to class illegal migrants into fertile areas as the worst of the “alien predators”, considering the enormous damage they’re causing, and I note that neither the IUCN or any other conservation or ecological group specifically targets our massively increased population as being virtually the sole cause of this huge wipeout of Earths other creatures.

On a related note, the endless bickering continues over Federal funding for abortions. I agree that we shouldn’t worry about funding abortions. Instead we should be developing anti-fertility drugs, forcing them down the throat of every mother of one child on the planet, and throwing those who refuse to take it off a cliff. Or something else equally drastic, before the only creatures left on this planet are us, dogs, cats, rats, mice, fleas and cockroaches, and they’ll all be on our menus. Because the more species we lose, the faster we lose them.

Right now, no one cares if the Polka-dotted Marsh Lizard and the Knobby-Toed Grackle die out. (They don’t exist anyway.) But what about the nasty little bugs they eat that carry Bubonic Plague or Dengue Fever or some such? Then the bugs can flourish, about the time we take over the extinct critters habitat and catch and spread the disease ourselves. Our constant heavy fishing of the ocean is putting a big strain on sea lions, seals, sharks and whales and the competition for food is increasing among them.

Salmon used to practically choke our rivers with their massive numbers. Now we have to raise them in sea pens and capture and move sea lions that try to feed on the wild ones so they don’t wipe out those that remain. Just for example. Most states have thick books of regulations and rules for catching fish, and most of those rules say that you can’t. 50 years ago all the rules were on one page.

When you have to set up restricted animal preserves, and make it a crime to catch almost any creature because they’re all rare and protected now, what more proof is needed that the problem isn’t that there’s too few of them, the problem is that there’s too many of us.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 8:44 am and is filed under Bleats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.