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The article points out that most extinctions happen on islands which are tiny compared to the world, and that it's mostly over because we've finished importing
by lopmotr 7y ago
The article points out that most extinctions happen on islands which are tiny compared to the world, and that it's mostly over because we've finished importing rats/etc to those islands and started protecting them. It might be a large number of species recently gone extinct but it's a small number of individuals and they're the least important ones because they're not part of the global ecosystem so nothing in the rest of the world depends on them.
- ncmncm 7y agoI guess you could consider North and South America, together, an island. Eliminating all the megafauna there (leaving only bears and, depending on how you count, moose and bison) should count for something. The article is correct that these extinctions and near-extinctions are not themselves a disaster for the natural world, which after a million years would hardly differ, so much as indicators of criminal mismanagement of our own behavior.