Pretty much everyone is aware that some animals are getting critically close to becoming extinct. Take the last two northern white rhinoceros remaining in the world, Najin and Fatu (both female) who live under constant protection from poachers in Kenya's Ol Pejeta Conservancy. Their last hope for breeding died on March 19th 2018, effectively rendering the entire subspecies extinct in just a matter of years, unless science is able to intervene.

There are various organisations around the world that monitor the state of our planet’s animal inhabitants – the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Fauna & Flora International (FFI) amongst others. They do a worthy job keeping track of those species that need preservation, and sometimes plans are in place to help prevent the loss of a species. Look at the Iberian Lynx for example, which has moved from Endangered to Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Hats off to the five Portuguese and two Spanish organisations collaborating on a captive breeding and release programme.

But what about us?

Will we humans ever go the way of the dinosaurs and die out completely? It’s a good question, and apparently the short answer is yes. It’s perhaps still a long way down the road, but fossil records show that everything goes extinct eventually. It’s said that out of all species that ever lived, 99.9% are extinct.

Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus have all vanished, leaving just Homo sapiens. Us. And it looks like we humans may inevitably be heading for extinction. The question isn’t whether we go extinct, but when. And it looks like we are likely to wipe ourselves out on our own.

Humans are vulnerable and are large, warm-blooded creatures with fast metabolisms. We don’t handle ecological disruptions well, needing refuelling every few hours, unlike cold-blooded creatures who can survive for a good while on a meagre diet. We are endangering ourselves whenever there is a disruption or a shortage of something in our food chain whatever the cause, be it global warming, ice ages, or other catastrophes. For example, what if all the grass in the world died, and the consumers that feed on it – cows, rabbits, insects, etc - would have no food? They would starve and die unless they could move to another diet, which would then interrupt something else’s food chain, and so on. Tyrannosaurus apparently quickly became extinct when the impact of winter made food scarce.

We are everywhere

And we’re not just everywhere, we’re abundant. Currently with over 8 billion people, apparently we’re among the most common animals on Earth, exceeding the numbers of all wild mammals. Even assuming a pandemic or nuclear war eliminating 99% of the population, millions might survive a mass extinction event and rebuild. Given a decade of warning before an asteroid strike, for example, humans could probably stockpile enough stuff to survive years of darkness or cold, perhaps saving much of the population. Long-term disruptions, like ice ages, might cause widespread conflicts and population crashes, but civilisations could probably survive. We are long-lived, with long generation times, and have the largest geographic range of any mammal, inhabiting all continents, remote oceanic islands, and habitats as diverse as deserts, tundra, and rainforests.

But this adaptability sometimes makes us our own worst enemies, too clever for our own good. Changing something in the world sometimes means changing it for the worse, creating new dangers - nuclear weapons, pollution, overpopulation, climate change and pandemics.

In my opinion, we’ve probably been visited by ‘alien’ species already, and Planet Earth has probably already been rejected as a destination. Who would want to take on a species that can’t at the very least stop killing each other, or saving their own food stocks? We must look like ants fighting amongst ourselves, trying to dominate other ‘tribes’ for what seems like selfish reasons.

They say there is no trap so deadly as the trap we have set for ourselves, with a fine line between effective planning and over-planning. Have we got so caught up in the details that we have lost sight of the bigger picture?

Author

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan