The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Creatures United | Frankly #9

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

This week's Frankly is a reflection in response to (and support of) Gerardo Ceballos' new project Creatures United, launching this week at Stanford University..  The Earth is in the middle of a massive biodiversity and population loss - on the verge of a 6th Mass Extinction. Though most conversations and actions will revolve around the economy, poverty, finance, and geopolitics, the other creatures we share the planet with do not have a voice.   This short video reflection is a reminder that the natural world is a passenger on the human roller coaster ride.  It is my hope that (some, many?) humans can unite on behalf of our fellow creatures to preserve and support the amazing variety of life inhabiting the planet. From the great Blue Whale to the humble bumble bee, each animal is a part of our family - and what makes this planet home.  For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/frankly-09-creatures-united To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgoD9q3A5RU

Hello. Today, September 24th is the global launch of Creatures United, a campaign organized by my Stanford colleague, Herardo Sabios, intended to raise global awareness of the ongoing extinction of Earth's wildlife populations. Humans are biological organisms. We are animals. We are mammals. We are primates. Humans are related to every other creature on Earth. We share almost 99% of our DNA with our close cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos. 90% with cows, 80% with cats, 70% with mice, 60% with fruit flies. Humans even share 50% of our genetic DNA with bananas and mushrooms. It is a profound truism that humans share a common ancestry with all other living things on earth.

As we're becoming aware, the continued growth of the energy-hungry superorganism, the web of the human enterprise is now taking a great toll on the natural world. In addition to the expansion of human habitat into once wild places and the pollution from the rapid release of ancient carbon into the atmosphere, we are now also directing around 40% of the net primary productivity Earth gets from the sun towards the rapid release the human system, leaving only 60% or so for the other 8 million species. There are 1.5 million known species of insects. In total, they function as tens of trillions of tiny robots doing tasks for which there is no replacement, even with, especially with human

technology. They are variously pollinators, decomposers, and food sources for birds and animals in Earth's trophic pyramid. It is now estimated that we're losing insect biomass between 1 and 2% a year, which is 8 times faster than the rate of decline for mammals, birds, or reptiles. Slow motion insect Armageddon. Habitat loss from expanding agriculture plus pesticides going beyond their intended purpose are among the major causes. There are around 54,000 known vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. Since I've been alive on the planet, we have lost 70% of the populations of these creatures. Let me say that again. Since 1970, we have lost 70% of the populations of these creatures. Let me say that again. Since

1970, we have lost 70% of Earth's populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. In the Triassic mass extinction event, 210 million years ago, 50% of species were lost. In the Cretaceous, the demise of the dinosaurs, 76% of species were lost. What we face now is not yet a massive. extinction, but it is a massive population extinction. And by all estimates, it is accelerating since the research of that 70% figure is now a decade old. In any case, the current biodiversity loss is a globally historic extinction event. There are now 6,000 species of mammals. You might by now be aware that humans account for 36% of the biomass of all global mammals. And our domesticated

livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60%, leaving wild mammals as only 4% or only 2% if we include only land mammals. Somehow we have culturally anesthetized ourselves to this grim trend. Or worse, we don't think of it as grim. rim at all. It's similar with birds. They're surviving descendants of the dinosaurs. Chickens and turkeys are but two species out of 11,000 bird species, but these domestic poultry by weight are 70% of all birds on Earth. Fifteen years ago, I did an Earthwatch volunteer project in the cloud forests of Ecuador, where we trapped birds in mist nets for scientific census. Ecuador, a little bit bigger than the state of Minnesota, has about 15% of the world's

bird species and over half of the world's 350 hummingbird species. This was such a profoundly beautiful experience to reach into the net and pull out a living creature I'd never heard of or visualized before, each one more beautiful than the last. These regions of great biological diversity on Earth need to be protected at all costs. But I fear that will take a change in consciousness because the benefit that would accompany any such cost is still not culturally recognized, let alone valued. Though we now know there are 32,000 species of fish in the world, we are already 30 years past peak fish. Most North Atlantic commercial fish populations, cod, hay, Haddock flounder have now been reduced to less than 10% of their peak numbers. The species

collapse now taking place in the oceans represents the greatest decline in ocean diversity since a meteorite struck our planet 65 million years ago. We've heard that soon plastic will outweigh fish in the ocean. A recent study found that over 9% of sampled ocean fish had eaten plastic and were dying from blocked digestive tracks. But for most people, the oceans are out of sight, out of mind. Today looks much like yesterday, even if yesterday's reality is a tiny shadow of the size, scale, and wonder of just 50 years ago.

This is the mental anesthesia of shifting baselines. Primates are our closest cousins, as I mentioned before, separated by only about 1% with respect to human DNA. The good news is biologists continue to find new primate species every year or two in isolated small population. But the bad news is that the other great ape populations continue to dwindle. In fact, we are now adding 385,000 new human babies to the earth every single day. This number is more than the total population of all the other extant great apes,

gorillas, bonobos, chimps, and orangutans combined. This dynamic of wildlife decimation has been in motion for 10,000 years since our ancestors left hunter-gathering for agriculture. The human encroachment on wild nature is nothing new. What is new is the global scale of it, and our awareness of it. What is happening to wild creatures is not our fault. Evolution taught us to reproduce and to consume voraciously.

Nature never taught us when to slow down or stop. We have no off switch except for perhaps cultural transmission, which is a reason I'm making this video. We were born into an energy dissipating machine. We are alive during the verge of only the sixth mass extinction in the last 500 million years, and most people are as yet unaware of it. Becoming aware of it and caring about it is the first step of breaking with this trend. Modern culture has a bizarre relationship with the natural world.

There is widespread love for dogs and cats and cute megafauna, but a distaste and fear of insects and general ecology blindness other than perhaps climate change. Oftentimes our cultural relationship with other species is either linked with profit or with novelty and cuteness instead of the profound and sacred cousins we share the earth with. It is common today to hear proud and grandiose plans for human futures. There are many popular narratives about the moral imperative to enable trillions of human lives in the future. These analyses are often energy blind. They extrapolate the last century of human progress forward in time without recognizing that most of this progress has been subsidized by cheap, accessible, flammable fossils at scale that will soon be going away.

But equally missing in the abundance narrative is that these stories are all about human abundance and they leave out the ongoing collapse of the millions of other populations of creatures with whom we share the planet. Even greatly diminished, life still remains on Earth in glorious profusion, in the great migrations of herbivores, in the dance of starling murmurations, and the fractal complexity of the world's remote rainforests. There are still gigatons of schooling fish which react with the speed and cohesion of a single organism like a living cloud of blue and silver, drawing their sustenance from still cold, oxygenated oceans, which, surprised to most, comprise over 96% of Earth's

living habitat. There are brains far larger and far older than our own, thinking in entirely non-human thoughts and echoing each other with songs in the darkness beneath our polar ice caps. Do we ever wonder what they're saying? We are now obsessed with finding life on other planets when we've just barely begun to recognize and know the life on our own. Sending missions to outer space is good for profits and confidence. Trying to talk to the ancient minds and the 250-year-old bowhead whales swimming the Arctic. is priceless. The reality is that Earth is not ours. In a lonely universe, the species we share this planet with are treasures. Our descendants will miss them when they're gone. But with an eye to

the future, we might bring our cousins, nieces, nephews, friends in nature along with us. In coming weeks and months on this podcast, I will be often highlighting topics such as energy depletion, finance, currencies, geopolitics, complexity, poverty, etc. Because these things are going to be central to how human events unfold in the coming decade. But what I mostly care about at the end of the day is midwifing, chaperoning, helping biodiversity, wild species and the web of life navigate the upcoming bottlenecks of the 21st of the 21st century on the downslope of the carbon pulse. I've concluded we need to bend, not break as a

human system. And this will help both our species and our nieces, nephews, and cousins in nature. And I think we need to have a systems awareness of how this fits together. On top of that, I believe we need more humans to understand, to love, to extend the boundaries of our empathy beyond our corporate boardrooms and our stock market valuations because the real stock market is crashing. We are not yet at a mass extinction, but we are at risk of massive population extinctions for other species. Creatures united. I hope Herardo Sabio's effort to community communicate the extinction plight of other creatures around the planet to billions of humans is successful because creatures have no voice in our boardrooms, in our Federal Reserve

meetings, at our G7 meetings. There are no elephants or rhinos or insects or chimpanzees on our corporate or advisory boards. But the only way that creatures could unite is through us. through using our technology, our heart, our creativity, in our living rooms, in our town halls, and on the internet to give creatures a voice in the coming decades. This may seem like an inconvenience, but these creatures are our family. Thank you. I'll see you next week.