The Great Simplification #25 - Gerardo Ceballos
Will the Ongoing Population Extinctions lead to a 6th Mass Extinction?
This week…
Over the past few decades, awareness of human impact on the natural world has increased.. From climate change, to vegetation loss, to pollution, the encroachment seems to be global. But most of these environmental impacts are still framed from the human sphere/perspective - still too few people are aware of the ongoing disappearance of the once-abundant and diverse wildlife that we share the planet with.
Todays episode is a conversation with ecologist and conservationist Dr. Gerardo Ceballos, who’s career work has been instrumental in demonstrating the current rapid rate of population losses in vertebrates (animals with a backbone). This topic is of particular personal interest to me, and is one of the few topics where I find I can become emotional, without warning. I intended on grilling Gerardo with a long list of population ecology questions to highlight facts and figures on various animal/bird/fish populations but it turned into more of a wide reflection of our care for animals and the natural world. Among other things, we discuss how the various ways human impact has contributed to ongoing large population losses of animals. On a more hopeful note, Gerardo shares his many successes as a conservationist and the new project he is working on - Creatures United.
There are many issues central to our coming future that I could be discussing - perhaps even ones that will be more relevant to our lives and possible interventions. But the topic of wildlife decline is one that hits me at my core, so listeners on this platform will probably be exposed to more than a fair share of conversations like this one. I learned some things from Gerardo in this conversation - but mostly I was psychologically buoyed by talking about this central issue with another human who is fighting on behalf of other species. I hope you feel something similar - and play some role in your own local/global way.
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The Great Simplification #25 - Gerardo Ceballos
On the question of civilisation collapse, even without nuclear war, there is the issue of who maintains or manages the orderly shutdown of nuclear plants. If the grid shuts down, there is only a few weeks worth of diesel to give an uninterrupted power supply to the cooling of spent material. I don't really understand why we still think of nuclear as a viable option for this reason, there has never been an adequate answer to what we do with the waste. Maybe I'm 'energy blind'!