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Thought you were extinct!

In Reply to: 99% Extinct, huh? posted by Cynic on April 17, 1999 at 10:14:35:

Missed you, C.

I don't know about 99%, but I do know that the other mass extinctions which have occurred throughout Life's time on this planet did so over a period of tens and hundreds of thousands of years. (This is a very brief period of time in geological terms.) The current mass extinction is occurring at a rate perhaps 100 or 1000 times more rapidly than previous extinctions. Sound healthy? On a graph, it would look like an instantaneous drop compared to the other extinctions which might appear to have a discernable slope. The extinctions are occurring because of humans. Global warming is one factor which is killing species, but not so fast as habitat loss due to the destruction of tropical rain forests, where more than half of all species live(d). Why is this happening? Humans are cutting down forests to make room for (inefficient) cattle farms to feed north american fast food industries. The other major reason forests are cut down is to make room for cash crops to pay off debts to exploitative countries such as the usa. You can be cynical, but to deny that humans are the cause of an alarming mass extinction is simply being willfully blind. It's happening and we all know why.

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