Richard Zurawski

Scientists are telling us that we are having an enormous impact on the ecosystems, that we are creating a huge extinction event that may rival the greatest extinctions in the history of life through the ages. Let me summarize. In the past 545 million years, called the Phanerozoic Eon, life diversified from simple single celled organisms which had dominated life on Earth for more than three billion years. The number of species and the diversity of organisms exploded in these last half billion years. Today there are an estimated ten million different species in existence.

During the the Phanerozoic, the fossil record tells us that five times, great and awful mass extinctions took place. The last, but far from the worst mass extinction event, was 65-million years ago, during what is called the K-T event, an extinction that ended among others the spectacular dinosaurs. It appears that a massive asteroid was the culprit and it struck the Earth with such devastation that soot from unbelievable conflagrations darkened the skies for decades.

The worst mass extinction on Earth happened 251-million years ago, and it is called not inappropriately, the Great Dying. Paleontologists tell us that 95 per cent of all species died out during that distant event, that life on Earth almost came to a shuddering end. What caused it? No one is really sure but indications are that massive climate change, heating of the Earth’s eco-systems precipitated by massive volcanic eruptions. The oceans became acidic and noxious and globally temperatures climbed to some 25-degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. Dante couldn’t have envisioned a less hospitable environment.

It took five-million years for the climate to settle back down and another 100-million years before life was as diversified as it had been before the Great Dying.

Today our species extinction rate rivals that of the five mass extinctions of the past half billion years and our environment is threatened with overheating, all because of humanity’s zeal for consumption. We are growing at the expense of our environment and our fellow inhabitants.

How much longer before our effort create a new Great Dying and the environment kicks back at use and cleanses the Earth with a new Global Fever of warming? What a legacy, to rival the greatest mass killers of in the great tapestry of life.

I listened with interest this past week at the comments of a newer, greener George Bush. It appears that he has changed his mind and that we do indeed have a problem with the changes in the climate and the environment. He is also committed to doing something about the environment. There is a caveat however. He is willing to sanction cutbacks to emissions and climate change gases, as long as the economy is not affected.

When I heard this the hair on the back of my neck rose. I felt the brush of mortality come that much closer to us as a species and a civilization. It wasn’t because he said what he did or whether it was stupid or it was true or even whether it was because he had another agenda. He said what he did because he could count on a majority of people to believe what he had to say. That was the scary part for me. If some schlep had said the environment was important but not at the expense of the economy, I could have dismissed it and felt some modicum of security. But here was the most powerful and influential man in the world saying that the environment was a priority but the economy was a greater one.

You know and I know that if we don’t have an environment, if we don’t do something drastic to change our ways to save the environment then there will be no economy. No matter how hard I want it to be otherwise, this is what the research, the modeling and the studies show.

What baffles me is that there are people who will go on the strength of the opinion of a man who has deceived us so dreadfully before. There are weapons of mass destruction, we have won the war, Saddam is tied to Bin Laden, New Orleans will receive all the help she needs are just a few of the forgotten lies. It terrifies me that he can say this and the other nations of the world still stay in the room, that a majority of the people who hear what he has to say believe it, and, this is the big and, he knows that he can say it and count of being believed.

Big Brother you are truly a master of double speak!

We tend to think of ourselves as a long lived species, with our three score and ten allotment. But it may be this relatively short span that makes us rather oblivious to the changes that are happening around us, especially when things happen on a longer time scale. As long as we compare ourselves to creatures like insects and other animals, we do seems to have a fair amount of time on terra firma. But compared to plants like trees we are spectacularly short lived. There are bristle cone pines that are older than civilization itself. When they budded from their seeds the ice had just retreated and the Sahara Desert was a lush savannah with lakes and grasslands.

Imagine how differently we would treat the Earth if we could remember what the world was like even 200 years ago, never mind 6,000. One hundred years ago, powered flight had just been invented, there were just barely over a billion people in the world and much of what we call technology lay in the future as well as two horrendous wars. In the past hundred years we have travelled to the moon, invented thermonuclear weapons and wired the world with the internet. Time is now measured in nanoseconds, we have become consumers and our children play in a place called cyberspace.

Our memory is too short, our time spans on this planet too small to be able to feel the changes that we have wrought. We have consumed one half of all that there is to consume on this planet in the past ten thousand years, yet we feel that we have enough resources to last, if not another ten thousand years, far into the future.

Changes, it seems happens constantly, and usually not gradually. It appears that there are tipping points, beyond which there is no return. They act like switches, able to bear weight against change, until the pressure becomes too great and the switch flips. Until that pressure is exceeded everything seems to be business as usual. But once that switch is moved there is a point of no return and life changes forever more.

As you know, Andrew Krystal and I have a regular Friday feature which is called, not surprisingly, the Friday Science Files, where we discuss, conjecture and pontificate all things that are science or border on the scientific. And one of the most popular topics that we visit again and again is that of outer space. It has fascinated me since I was a little kid. And it still has me enthralled.

We tend to think that outer space, interplanetary travel et al is the purview of the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency. But an Alberta teacher, Tony Rafat, has shown yet again that big bucks don’t ever come close to innovation and effort. You don’t have to spend gigabucks to touch the outer reaches the Earth and the beginnings of space. With a few students, a camera, a few surplus weather balloons and some helium he has been able to take spectacular pics of what is just beyond the reach of us lesser mortals.

Back in July he and his students launched the balloon with camera in tow, into the upper stratosphere and three hours later, after the balloon exploded and came back down to Earth, they had almost 200 of the most beautiful digital photos of this frail and incredible planet that we call Earth.

I sampled the pics on the internet and I have to say that I was moved. They were above all the life that we know to exist in the entire universe, taking a backward picture of what we call home. And my, it looked small and frail and distant.

Standing here on the ground looking up at the sky, we can be forgiven for thinking that the Earth and its bounty is infinite and limitless and ours for the taking. We are looking through the wrong end of the lens and nowhere is that more evident when lift ourselves off the couch and look back on where we live.

Maybe it is time that we took our leaders, business, government, religious and any others, and hooked a few helium balloons to their britches so they could get a different perspective. Its small and round and limited and so are its resources. Thank you Tony Rafat for again showing that teachers can and do teach…us all.