Slowly, humans are making amends for our past excesses. What’s clear is that nature’s resilience is stronger than we thought.
Joakim Book —
Animals die all the time. Sometimes so much so that entire species go extinct – a terrible loss for biodiversity and our world’s ecologic systems. A National Geographic article last year prefaced a discussion about species going extinct by pointing out that “more than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct.”
Over the millennia that humans have roamed the Earth and impacted our planet, our species has greatly contributed to the process of extinction. In recent years, fears have emerged that industrialization is relegating unique lifeforms to the dustbins of evolutionary history faster than at any time in the past – something like 100 to 1,000 times the so-called “background rates” of natural extinction.
One can quibble over the precise rate at which human activities are causing the extinction of other species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains a list, the Red List of Threatened Species, which assesses and monitors the development of species, and classifies the threat to each of animal according to a six-category scale. Out of the 120,000 species assessed, some 30,000 are deemed “threatened.”
For perspective, estimates suggest that there are some 9 million species on the planet. Most of those species are not even named, let alone threatened with extinction. The IUCN explicitly admits the difficulty of trying to determine how many species are actually going extinct:
Since extinction risk has been evaluated for less than 5% of the world’s described species (see Table 1), IUCN cannot provide a precise estimate for how many of the planet’s species are threatened.
Many species that were wrongly believed to be rapidly sliding towards extinction have seen major improvements to their numbers. For example, the Bengal Tiger is deemed Endangered, with a reported 2,000-3,000 individuals in the wild. However, the government of India, the country with the majority of the world’s tigers, reported in 2018 that there were 2,967 wild tigers in India alone. That was a 33 percent increase over 2014 numbers.
In late 2018, the IUCN reported that the threat to Fin Whales, the second-largest mammal on the planet, and the Mountain Gorilla, that iconic symbol for human predation, had subsided somewhat, and both species were downgraded to a lower risk category. The same is true for the Snow Leopard of central Asia, which was recently downgraded to Vulnerable, and the African Elephant.
