

Stewart Brand: Rethinking Extinction - benbreen
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-extinction-is-not-the-problem/

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headShrinker
There are 7.3 billion people on the planet, all consuming, reproducing,
driving and expelling, burning, cutting, killing, clearing, digging, and
searching for the American dream. The very existence of humankind is now
completely outside of the natural food cycle. Most everything humans eat is
farmed in numbers by weight that you or I simply can not imagine. Our economy
is based on the processing and consumption of planetary resources multiplied
by a rate of exponential growth. There are over 1 billion cars on the planet,
and 2,300 coal power plants. 1.3 billion cows bred almost solely for human
consumption, each cow eats about 4 tons of food per year. Humans are killing
all the animals, burning all the fossil fuels, and toxifying all the potable
water. We give back to the natural cycle; plastic garbage, VOCs, heavy metals,
radioactive waste, trillions of tons of carbon bonded to oxygen. The only
other organism that functions with such destruction and haste is a virus.

There is no mistake and scientists are not confused. This is the 6 major
extinction the planet has ever seen in its 4.5 billion years of existence.
This extinction is occurring faster than the dinosaur extinction 65 million
years ago. If humans all disappeared today, it would take the planet 12
million years to repair the damage we have done. In human terms, that 12
million years longer than human existence itself.

This guy wants to reshape the discussion but he can't remove the fact that
extreme irreversible damage is being done. The damage we see is only a canary
in the coal mine for the damage we don't see. There is a reason no one
celibrates Earth day. It's a reminder of our failure to recognize the facts of
our current situation.

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GotAnyMegadeth
For anyone too lazy to Google: Judas Goat -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat)

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andyjohnson0
Talk by Steward Brand on "Reviving Extinct Species" (May 2013)
[http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/may/21/reviving-extinct-
sp...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/may/21/reviving-extinct-species/)

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blacksmith_tb
I think it would fair to summarize Brand's thesis as "worry about ecosystem
degradation and climate change, extinctions are a symptom of these, not
something to be addressed in isolation."

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bantunes
I wonder which industrial lobby has this guy on its payroll.

