Arda Sever
@Saccha
15 okur puanı
Ekim 2019 tarihinde katıldı
But the Anthropocene isn't a novel phenomenon of the last few centuries. Already tens of thousands of years ago, when our Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove the extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet.
Large animals were the main victims because they were relatively few, and they breed slowly. Compare, for example, mammoths to rabbits. A troop of mammoths numbered no more than few dozen individuals, and bred at a rate of perhaps two youngsters per year. Hence if the local human tribe hunted just 3 mammoths a year, it would have been enough for deaths to outstrip births, and within a few generations the mammoths disappeared. Rabbits, in contrast, bred like rabbits. Even if humans hunted hundreds of rabbits each year, it was not enough to drive them to extinction.
Not that our ancestors planned on wiping out the mammoths; they were simply unaware of the consequences of their actions.
With regard to other animals, humans have long since become gods. We don't like to reflect on this too deeply, because we have not been particularly merciful gods. If you watch the National Geographic channel, go to a Disney film or read a book of fairy tales, you might easily get the impression that planet Earth is populated mainly by lions, wolves and tigers who are an equal match for us humans. Simba the lion king holds sway over the forest animals; Little Red Riding Hood tries to evade the Big Bad Wolf; and little Mowgli bravely confronts Shere Khan the tiger. But in reality, they are no longer there. Our televisions, books, fantasies and nightmares are still full of them, but the Simbas, Shere Khans and Big Bad Wolves of our planet are disappearing. The World is populated mainly by humans and their domesticated animals.
How many wolves live today in Germany, the land of the Grimm brothers, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf? Less than a hundred. In contrast, Germany is home to 5 million domesticated dogs. Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs. The world contains 40,000 lions compared to 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 billion domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens. Since 1970, despite growing ecological awareness, wildlife population have halved . In 1980 there were 2 billion wild birds in Europe. In 2009 only 1.6 billion were left. In the same year, Europeans raised 1.9 billion chickens for meat and eggs. At present, more than 90 percent of the large animals of the world are either humans or domesticated animals.
People usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown.
Humanism has dominated the world for 300 years, which is not such a long time. The pharaohs rules Egypt for 3,000 years and the popes dominated Europe for a millennium.
The knowledge that does not change behavior is useless.