My plans to take the regular ferry service back to the mainland were thwarted with the news of its sinking. Most locals living on the islands suspected it would be at least five years before the ferry was fixed. Everyone would now need to rely on either Luke or the local fishermen to get transport across the lake. I was hoping to avoid another excursion on the castaway raft courtesy of the Dutch gimp. But an afternoon spent in conversation with ol’ Luke wasn’t such a bad idea. He picked me up in a predictably good mood, since he was about to get a flood of new passengers left stranded by the drowned ferry.
The boat was full on our ride back to Entebbe and my thoughts drifted to the impending manmade extinction as Luke skippered our drift across Lake Victoria. The following is an alarmist digression of my literary diarrhea on the subject of mass extinction (for hardcore hippies only):
Apparently, five mass extinctions have been identified in the four billion year history of life, in each of which the majority of creatures living at that time have been wiped out by some overwhelming catastrophy, like the impact of a meteorite, the sudden lowering of the sea level, global warming, and ice ages. After some digging into our evolutionary history, I unearthed some fascinating and relevant literature written by famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey (and former Kenya Wildlife Dept Director) in his publication, The Sixth Extinction. The following has been lifted from his enlightening book.
The first major extinction, 450 million years ago, occurred shortly after the evolution of the first land-based plants and 100 million years after the Cambrian Explosion of animal life beneath the seas. The second extinction spasm came 350 million years ago, causing the formation of coal forests. Then the Earth experienced two mass extinctions during the Triassic period, between 250 and 200 million years ago. The fifth mass extinction, probably caused by a giant meteor collision, occurred 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, sent up clouds of dust which blanketed the sun causing plant life to die out which in turn depleted all food sources for the species on the planet at that time. This effectively ended the reptilian dominance of the earth and led to the current mammalian domination of the earth.
Many species die out, both plant & animal, without ever being discovered. The first five extinctions have been natural causes but this might be the first in history to be manmade. What a proud accomplishment for us! It seems inevitable that there will be a sixth extinction one day, whether as a result of man's insensitivity in regards to the needs of his planet or whether the planet will be hit by an asteroid. Dr. Leakey suggests that the sixth extinction is underway right now and that we, the human race, are its cause. According to his numbers, at least 17,000 species vanish from our planet every year. The statistics he has assembled are staggering. Fifty per cent of the earth's species will have vanished inside the next 100 years; mankind is using almost half the energy available to sustain life on the planet, and this figure will only grow as our population leaps from 5.7 billion to ten billion inside the next fifty years. Such a dramatic and overwhelming mass extinction threatens the entire complex fabric of life on earth, including the species responsible for it: Homo Sapiens. We are slowly annihilating everything around us and ultimately, we too will become victims of our own destruction.
{More of Leakey’s text}: An accident of history we may be, but there is no question that Homo sapiens are the single most dominant species on earth today. We arrived late on the evolutionary scene and at a time when the diversity of life on the planet was near its all-time high. We arrived equipped with the capacity to devastate that diversity wherever human populations traveled. Blessed with reason and insight, we move toward the twenty-first century in a world of our own creation, an essentially artificial world in which (for some, at least) technology brings material comfort and leisure brings unprecedented artistic creation. So far, unfortunately, our reason and insight have not prevented us from collectively exploiting earth's resources-biological and physical-in unprecedented ways.
Humans endanger the existence of species in three principal ways. The first is through direct exploitation (consumption), such as hunting. From butterflies, to song birds, to elephants, the human appetite for collecting or eating parts of wild creatures puts many species at risk of extinction. Second is the biological havoc that is occasionally wreaked following the introduction of alien species to new ecosystems, whether deliberately or accidentally. Prime example is the biological convulsion experienced by the Hawaiian archipelago through countless species of birds and plants taken there by the early Polynesians and later by European settlers. The third, and by far the most critical, mode of human-driven extinction is the destruction and fragmentation of habitat, especially the inexorable cutting of tropical rainforests. The forests, which cover just 7 percent of the world's land surface, are a cauldron of evolutionary innovation and are home to half of the world's species. The continued growth of human populations in all parts of the world daily encroaches on wild habitats, whether through the expansion of agricultural land, the building of towns and cities, or the transport infrastructure that joins them. As the habitats shrink, so too does the earth's capacity to sustain its biological heritage.
Human population has expanded dramatically in recent history, as everyone is aware. From half a billion in 1600 to a billion in 1800; by 1940 it had reached almost 3 billion; in the past fifty years it doubled, to 5.7 billion; and it is set to double again in the next half century, to more than 10 billion. If all these people are to enjoy a standard of living above the poverty level that prevails in many of the less developed regions of the world today, the global economic activity will have to rise at least tenfold. At what cost?!
The reason and insight that emerged during our evolutionary history bestowed a behavioral flexibility on our species that allows us to multiply bounteously in virtually every environment on earth. The evolution of human intelligence therefore opened a vast potential for population expansion and growth, so that collectively the almost six billion humans alive today represent the greatest proportion of protoplasm on our planet. We suck our sustenance from the rest of nature in a way never before seen in the world, reducing its bounty as ours grows. We are, as Edward Wilson has put it, "an environmental abnormality." Abnormalities cannot persist forever; they eventually disappear. "It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere," ventures Wilson. "Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself"'.
The method by which ecologists calculate the fate of species in habitats that are reduced in size is based on island biogeography theory, which the Harvard biologists Robert MacArthur and Edward Wilson developed in 1963. Partly the outcome of empirical observation, partly mathematical treatment, the theory is the foundation of much of modern ecological thinking. The rapid disappearance of species was ranked (behind thermonuclear war) as one of the planet's gravest environmental worries, surpassing pollution, global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, according to the survey of 400 scientists commissioned by New York's American Museum of Natural History.
All of this apocalyptic doom & gloom had me pissed off so I decided (actually my prostate forced me) to manifest the anger by pissing off the side of our boat. I sheepishly approached Luke and informed him of my minor medical emergency. He just laughed and told me to whip it out and let her drip off the port side. The others on the boat looked on and did a fine job of hiding their disdain. I don’t think I’ve ever concentrated so deeply than that moment when I was balancing on that precarious rail as we cut through choppy waters. A leftward overlean and I would be swimming, a rightward lean and my johnson would be sliced by the outboard motor and require immediate Johnson & Johnson products to repair. Steady her, Luke!
The tragic irony is that many of these environmental problems could be rectified if governments actually implemented the treaties and conventions passed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. And, as the leading waste producer and energy consumer, the United States of America is still not a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol nor the Convention on Biodiversity.
All planetary fatalism aside, the trail of biotic destruction humans have left in their wake is ever-widening, including my urine left in our wake on the lake.
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