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Tuesday, April 23, 2019

'Inheritors of the Earth' Quotations

The subtitle to 'Inheritors of the Earth', by Chris D Thomas (2018), is 'How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction'. This is a really interesting piece of work. One of the essential points is that biological diversity is increasing regionally even while it is declining globally. This is due to the massively increased migration of species between regions as a result of human migration and trade. And in the longer term - if we preserve a mix of habitats, and assist species endangered in their current habitat to migrate to places where they can thrive - the outlook is for global biodiversity to increase markedly due to greatly increased evolutionary activity, activity that has already started as a result of our far more interconnected, and warmer, world. Here are some salient quotes:

"There is no correct state of nature." p19

"Huge numbers of species are thriving in the human-altered world, and we may even be stimulating a mass diversification of new species." p25

"Is biological diversity going up or down? If we count the number of species on Earth, the answer is undoubtedly down. The 'extinction crisis' is real." p30

"However, it is not so obvious that diversity is declining in any particular district, county, province or nation. Animals and plants are still being extirpated from them, for sure, but fresh immigration provides a counterbalance, introducing new species to each region." p30

"Soon, the total weight of big land mammals will be ten times greater than it was in the pre-human world, as the human population continues to expand and meat becomes an increasing component of the global diet." p47

"...it is time to stop yearning for a pristine, wild world. We are living on a fundamentally human-altered planet, and there is no longer any such thing as human-free nature. That stopped millions of years ago in Africa as hominids evolved, over a million years ago in southern Asia once Homo erectus arrived, hundreds of thousands of years ago in Europe and the remainder of Asia, where Neanderthals and Denisovans roamed, ten thousand to fifty thousand years ago on most of the rest of the continents with the spread of our own species, and many hundreds of years to several millennia ago on most of the world's islands." p53

"'What happens to the total number of species present when uninterrupted forest is converted into a mixed landscape that contains a patchwork of forest remnants and various human-created habitats?', the answer is that the number of species increases." p67

"Climate-change casualties are set to become the next phase of humanity's mass extinction - at least 10 percent of all species that live on the land are expected to perish, and possibly double this number." p78

"species need to be able to reach the new locations where they will be able to thrive." p93

"the climate is changing, and the basic expectation of a warmer and slightly wetter world is that the diversity of many - and perhaps most - regions in the world will increase." p94

"it will be species from the most biologically rich parts of the world (for each particular type of environment) that are most likely to thrive." p140

"Given how much and how fast humans have changed the world, it is entirely credible that we are now living through the most rapid period of evolution since the aftermath of the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago." p151

"Everything we are doing to the world is forcing evolution into overdrive." p158

"With increasing transport, each continent, island or sea is likely to hold more species in total, each with the potential to evolve into a new form." p168

"the biological processes of evolutionary divergence and speciation have not been broken in the Anthropocene. They have gone into overdrive. We have created a global archipelago, a species generator, which will give rise to considerably more species on Earth than existed before humans started to spill out of Africa." p179

"The idea of a tree of life should be replaced by the image of a more tangled mosaic of interacting lives in which closely related species, in particular, may continue to exchange some genes for millions of years after they first separate." p191

"The exchange of genetic information between organisms that we usually think of as distinct - hybridisation - is one of the ways in which new genetic forms come into existence and genetic fitness can potentially be increased." p195

"More new plant species have come into hybrid existence in Britain in the last three hundred years than are listed as having died out in the whole of Europe" p196

"In the end, the Anthropocene biological revolution will almost certainly represent the sixth mass genesis of new biological diversity. It could be the fastest acceleration of evolutionary diversification in the last half-billion years." p197

"Life is the product of evolution, and evolution is how life meets each new challenge. When the world is altered, as it has been by the rise of humans, it is met by evolutionary change." p202

"We need to encourage, not resist, dynamism if we are concerned about enabling nature to accommodate to the human world. That is how our planet's species have survived past change." p218

"Moving threatened species to places where they will prosper could save them from extinction" p235

"Having turned the whole world into a global archipelago, we have set in train processes that will increase rather than decrease the long-term diversity of the Earth." p250

Ben Wallace
Author The Common Purpose
LinkedIn - http://nz.linkedin.com/in/benwallace13
Twitter - http://twitter.com/BenDWallace

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