Humans and the 5th extinction
“Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America,” the book by Dan Flores (WW Norton, 2022) provides the history of the interaction between fauna and Homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere. Flores is a Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana.
We are undergoing the 6th Mass Extinction of living things on Earth due to the spread of humans and their forebearers. This is called the Holocene era. The past 200,000 years involved the extinction of around 1,000 species. Around 1 million animal and plant species are currently threatened with extinction. This could include humans!
Near Folsom, New Mexico, the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison were uncovered in 1908. There were flint points rooted in the carcasses. A band of humans had slaughtered and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This unveiled the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s fauna.
Humans from Asia, Africa, and Europe came over the centuries and changed the Western World’s ecology. They did and are disrupting the environment. The first group discovered were located near Clovis at the border between Texas and New Mexico border. These Clovis people hunted the large bison, elephants, ground sloths and others, taking choice cuts with their sharp stone tools and leaving the rest for predators and microbes. They then spread in many directions when their game became scarce. After a century or two the mammoths and mastodons became extinct by the efforts of these omnivorous hunters. Gatherers collected eggs, fruit, and other edibles to round out their diets.
Having never encountered humans, prey animals initially did not comprehend the danger to them from these new animals come to kill them. As they learned, it became more difficult to find them. Some hunters began to herd a group of smaller prey toward cliffs over which they fell. The gatherers would harvest the twisted bodies at the base of the precipice.
More from Asia came to settle America, initially establishing a coast-tocoast culture. Then the Europeans began to colonize, with four centuries of market-driven slaughter shattering many American species.
Recent efforts to reverse this damage to our ecosystem are beginning to be effective. When wolves were nearly destroyed, grazing wildlife started to destroy meadows and trees. Bringing wolves back to natural habitats will retore balance.
Unfortunately Flores writes on Pg. 379: “(…) privileging economics over every other value remains our present. It defines the political battles we’re waging over animal rights now. Conservative forces running the Federal government between 2017 and 2021 employed every possible stratagem to undo to protect wild animals in the name of freeing the American economy. The ‘businessman’s administration of Donald Trump thus modified the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 by striking ‘accidental avian losses’ from the law. Under that provision from the law. Under that revision British Petroleum would have suffered no consequences for the tens of thousands of birds by the Gulf Oil Spill, an accident that resulted in a fine of $100 million. For decades conservatives have wanted to drill for oil in the country’s crown jewel for wildlife, Artic National Wildlife Refuge. Trump tried to make those dreams come true by opening ANWR to leasing. Chafing that the Endangered Species Act lists species solely on best science, his administration issued a statutory rule inserting economic impacts into listings. And it instructed Fish and Wildlife to remove climate change as a factor in endangered listings and recovery.”
This provides another reason Donnyt and those like him must not gain power again.