Word: speciesism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Not all doomed species disappear immediately. Most first suffer loss of their ranges and gene pool to dangerously low levels, eventually descending to join what biologists call the "living dead." Throughout the world, 976 tree species, for example, are classified as critically endangered. Two are down to three or four...
Paleontologists recognize six previous mass-extinction events during the past half-billion years (the number was until recently believed to be five, but now another, from early Cambrian times, has been added). The last and most famous, which occurred 65 million years ago and was caused by a giant meteorite...
Researchers of biodiversity agree that we are in the midst of the seventh mass extinction. Even if the current rate of habitat destruction were to continue in forests and coral reefs alone, half the species of plants and animals would be gone by the end of the 21st century. Our...
In the long term, I am convinced, the quenching of life's exuberance will be more consequential to humanity than all of present-day global warming, ozone depletion and pollution combined. Why? For practical reasons, if nothing else. Humanity's food supply comes from a dangerously narrow sliver of biodiversity...
Natural pharmaceuticals offered by biodiversity are also underutilized. Only a few hundred wild species have served to stock our antibiotics, anticancer agents, pain killers and blood thinners. The biochemistry of the vast majority--millions--of other species is an unfathomed reservoir of new and potentially more effective substances. The reason...