We tend to forget, even those of us who who are aware of it, that we're in the middle of a great die-off. The fossil record, for scientists operating millions of years from now, will show that there was a sudden huge cataclysm of some sort on earth...

In the past 12 months there have been nearly 200 to the list, which is published by the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), taking the number of threatened species worldwide from 16,118 to 16,306.

This means that one in four of the world's mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70 per cent of the world's assessed plants on the current list are in now in jeopardy. "Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken," the IUCN said yesterday.

The Red List is recognised as the most reliable evaluation of the conservation status of the world's species. It classifies them according to their extinction risk, through the categories extinct, critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable. Once an organism is classified as critically endangered, extinction is very close.

The cause of the mass extinction of other species, is, of course, us. Human. The vast hordes of us living in ways that are massively inefficient. Allowing this to continue is pure foolishness. The ecosystem of plants and animals is vastly complex and we do not understand it well at all. It is entirely possible that the loss of too many plants could lead to unstoppable circular feedback in the system and end in some sort of catastrophic crash of our food crops or livestock animals, or even something like what happened to the honeybees this year when thier population crashed out (though it appears that may be a rare virus). On top of that every species that dies is a species whose dna and body chemistry we lose and in those may well have been the basis for medicines and products which could have been a great help for us.

All of this, of course, before we get to the effect of loss of vegetative cover on global warming.

More After the Jump

After the disasters happen, because they are now inevitable (even if not strictly speaking inevitable physically, they are inevitable sociologically because humans will not act enough to fix the problem until disaster occurs) we will have to reevaluate how we live. The foolishness of suburbia and exurbia, of everyone spreading out horizontally rather than growing vertically will have to end. As much as possible of our needs will have to be put onto a capital basis (ie. making food and energy rather than extracting them) and whatever can't be made into a capital good will have to be vigorously recycled and the sustainability tracked.

This will require a new system of accounting; a new tax system; and a new way of looking at the world which includes a whole set of mores which look at overconsumption and damaging the environment with the same sort of horror we look on someone who sets fires in a crowded city. People who think they an dump pollutants of any sort into the environment; people who take more from the environment than they put back; people who are selfish consumers - will be looked on by our descendents as moral cripples and perverts whom no self respecting human would want anything to do with. And they will look on us as we look on slaveholders, wondering how we could have been so primitive and stupid as to not steward the earth's resources. While there will be a moral element to this (because no functional human system can operate without a basis in mores) the new morality will be based in the realities of what it takes to exist in a world whose sink capacity, more than its resources, are strictly limited.

For our descendents, some of whom are alive today, if young, poverty won't be something you can just ignore, either. They will recognize that poor societies like Brazil and most of Africa do environmental damage as well, and while technologically advanced societies can (we chooose not to, but we could) have a much smaller imprint, those who are on the ragged edge do what they must. As a matter of self-interest they will have to lift up many of the truly poor to at least moderate standards of living, so that they are not required to do things like deforest the Amazon.

But by then the die-off will have already occured. And still, in geological terms, it will have been huge, abrupt and unexpected. And we will be much poorer for it.