There have always been extinctions of species occurring at a background rate of approximately one species disappearing every seven hundred years. A mass extinction event occurs when many species disappear within a short period of time, causing a considerable loss of global biodiversity, well above the background extinction rate. Today, Earth is experiencing, or is close to experiencing, a mass extinction event, the sixth such event identified by science. The sixth mass extinction is differentiated from the previous five, which are attributed to dramatic changes in the Earth’s climate due to such things as volcanic activity and asteroid collisions, by the presence of human activity and its contribution to an escalating loss of species. Whether the present crisis of biodiversity loss continues is, therefore, contingent on the choices made by us, individually and collectively as the human species. If we humans continue as is, maintaining social, economic, and political systems that exacerbate the loss of species, or transform those systems such that they affirm rather than destroy life, depends, I believe, on our ability to recognize our ecological relationships and the value of biodiversity.
Biodiversity includes variances between local ecosystems, genetic diversity within one species, and, most relevant to mass extinction crisis, the variety of species within an ecosystem. Ecology, the science that studies the relationships between organisms and between organisms and their environment, generally supports the view that substantial biodiversity is more beneficial than species homogeneity. Biodiverse ecosystems provide more essential services to planetary life, such as cycling nutrients, sequestering carbon, and providing living matter to be consumed by other beings in the ecosystem, than those deficient in variety. The human species, with abilities and technologies beyond those available to other animals, has had a significant negative impact on biodiversity and, in turn, the functioning of the ecosystems upon whose services we depend. Our technologies could be applied to protecting rather than destroying the Earth’s biodiversity, but technology, and the science that created it, cannot motivate itself in new directions, especially since science, along with religion and other cultural influences, bears responsibility for the worldview that perpetuated today’s biodiversity crisis.