Yes, we will survive. Human’s always find a way to survive, I am very positive! But this time it will be interesting „how“ and for what costs ! All is in change, everything will be different in the future and we have to be flexible, positive against changes and open for chances !!

Pandemic, climate change, species extinction:
The earth is suffering from at least three diseases.

„We are witnessing the greatest extinction of species on Earth since the extinction of the dinosaurs. The difference is, this time, humans are the meteorite.“

Last week I read the book „The End Of Evolution“. A book written by Prof. Dr. Matthias Glaubrecht. He is an evolutionary biologist, professor of biodiversity, and director of the Center for Natural History at the University of Hamburg. In his book „The End of Evolution“ he deals with the extinction of species and explains why man endangers the existence of all living beings with his behavior.

Man kind causes great damage wherever he appears.
It destroys vegetation and wipes out animal species.

Evolutionary biologist Matthias Glaubrecht explains very clear why species extinction is a bigger problem than climate change and what we can expect in the future.

Animal species are dying out, landscapes are changing. Man has had a major impact on his environment for thousands of years. For a long time, they didn’t even realize how great this impact actually is.

At the same time, climate change is not even the biggest problem at the moment. According to evolutionary biologist Matthias Glaubrecht, the earth is suffering from at least three diseases. He explains what this means for our future and what hopes he has for humanity. I will use his explanations and answering problems based on questions that arised when I was reading the book. And as always, I added explaining pictures.

How has humanity’s impact on the environment evolved ?

Roughly speaking, ever since man learned to walk upright, he has been a gatherer for 99 percent of human history. He has wandered around, looking for food in forested areas. His influence on his environment was still comparatively small. At some point, he moved in larger circles, learned to hunt. Moved with the herds of animals he fed on. And this behavior we have resolved only 10,000 years ago. Not in one fell swoop, not everywhere at once. But slowly man has become sedentary, has learned to raise livestock and to farm. This change in behavior was an incredibly important cultural step in the evolution of man.

What followed immediately ?

One immediate consequence was population densification – and with it the spread of infectious diseases, some of which we still have today as childhood diseases. For example, measles first appeared 2.500 years ago, as the closest relative of „Rinderpest“ (cattle plague). We have changed the vegetation as well as the earth’s surface first with fire and then with our agriculture. Humans as hunter-gatherers have already caused great damage wherever they have appeared outside Africa, and in many places have demonstrably destroyed mega-fauna, for example.

Are there concrete examples of this ?

Man kind wiped out the great Pleistocene fauna in North America and then in South America. When he showed up in Australia, the large giant marsupials and birds disappeared. When it appeared in the islands of Polynesia all the way to New Zealand, the large mega-fauna elements disappeared there. When these are missing, it also affects the vegetation, whose composition is different than when large herbivores live there. So we have shaped whole landscapes. We needed land to do agriculture. We needed the wood to do mining, for example, to support the tunnels with it; or for sailing ships. Then people got worried that the forests wouldn’t grow back as fast, and you wouldn’t have enough building material for the mining industry. So the principle of sustainability was developed in the 18th century. Not for ecological reasons, but for economic interest.

Glaubrecht: „We will lose a million species in the near future“.

In contrast, what has changed today ?

In the past, we changed the vegetation, changed the animal world. Today, we are interfering with the geosphere. We pumped chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere, then an ozone hole appeared. As a result, we quickly banned these CFCs. Now we’re sending greenhouse gases up. Most importantly, we continue to alter the biosphere to the point where we are wiping out entire animal populations. We will lose a million species of animals in the near future.

Is climate change to blame for species extinction ?

That’s the misconception. If we do everything right with climate change, we will still have this loss regardless. Climate change has little to do with the extinction of species. At best, it aggravates it, but it is not the cause. I would put the order of magnitude at ten to 20 percent at the most. Climate change and species extinction have about as much to do with each other as kidney failure has to do with heart disease.

Our patient Earth is suffering from at least three diseases: Species extinction, climate change, pandemics. And they have primarily nothing to do with each other, but they complicate the treatment of the patient. We have the problem of pandemics, which we tease out through our way of life. That’s sort of our cirrhosis of the liver. Then we have the kidney damage, which is climate change. For me, the species extinction, the heart failure, so, is the very big problem. If we treat the kidney and the liver, you still have the difficulty of cardiac death.

Why is species extinction progressing so rapidly at the moment ?

We are manipulating the habitats. We use two thirds of the earth’s surface for our interests alone. For our settlements, cities, traffic routes and above all for our agriculture. We have the problem that it took us a very long time to become very many. But now there are so many of us that we can no longer get a grip on it. 80 million people are added every year, even though the birth rate per woman has been declining for years. But those who are just being born now have an increasingly high life expectancy.

In developing countries, too, people are getting older. As a result, mortality is declining. By the end of the century, we must reckon with eleven billion people. So we need even more living space for more and more agriculture and our food production worldwide. Yet we have already destroyed about half of the earth’s natural forest cover in the last 10,000 years. So there is an insane transformation of the earth’s surface taking place. And in doing so, we are destroying the treasure troves of biodiversity.

Glaubrecht: „We are losing species long, long before we discovered them“.

But that’s why we have Red Lists, right ?

The problem is that with Red Lists, we’re only looking at a fraction, not even ten percent, of the species that have been described let alone all the species that actually live on Earth. That is, the 800 species that have been shown to have gone extinct in the last 500 years, and the ones that we are even looking at, do not represent the mass of animals and species that have disappeared or are currently disappearing. So we are losing species in the rain forests long, long before we even discovered them and described them scientifically. We didn’t notice that for a very long time.

And why ?

The experts call this phenomenon „shifting baseline“. It’s the change in the baseline. The grandfather who still went fishing had 1.000 fish in his net, his son 100, and the grandson only ten. But for everyone, the respective number is quite normal as a baseline. And a change is always measured against one’s own baseline. So you don’t even notice that once there were more fish and then there were fewer and fewer. Every generation creates a new basis for evaluation.

                  
The difference: A car windscreen in the 1950’s-1970’s, left and in the 2020’s, right.

Isn’t it a bit like the lack of insects on the windshield ?

Exactly, we knew that anecdotally for a long time. Today, we can also prove it quantitatively with a study, the Krefeld (German city) Insect Study. We can say that 78 percent of flying insects have declined in 40 years. But when this study came out, all the experts were surprised. They could hardly believe it at first.

Similarly, in other cases, we have only noticed in recent years how dramatically we have actually already changed many other animal populations. Strictly speaking, we’ve been operating this process for millennia, just to varying degrees. But now it’s cumulative. Now habitats have become more crowded. Now more and more people are being born. Now we need more and more land for ourselves. Now we are living less and less sustainably.