Recovering From A Mass Extinction
About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, a major extinction event killed over 90 per cent of life on earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left struggling to recover. This was the nearest life ever came to being completely wiped out.
Why bring it up now? Why, to draw the obvious comparison between an extinction event 250 million years ago, and the extinction event we evil humans are conducting right now!
Sahney said: “Our research shows that after a major ecological crisis, recovery takes a very long time. So although we have not yet witnessed anything like the level of the extinction that occurred at the end of the Permian, we should nevertheless bear in mind that ecosystems take a very long time to fully recover.”
So just keep that in mind when you infringe on the habitat of the snail darter, okay?
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I don’t know, according to “Life After People’, which posits a sudden disappearance of humanity(and, of course, Global Warming), about 10,000 will see the Earth looking pretty pristine.
Granted, the show, did, at times, seem like an infomercial describing the benefits of zero population as a panacea for Gaia’s ills, but hey, the History Channel wouldn’t show junk science, right?
We already have an example of how widlife recovers after the removal of humans: Chernobyl. Huge areas were abandoned due to high levels of radiation, and those areas are now teeming with wildlife. Some scientists have been shocked at how quickly the roads, sidewalks and buildings have crumbled and been overgrown, but that’s Russian construction. Environmentalists talk about how fragile the earth is, but forget how tough and relentless life is.