0.01% of Life on Earth Controls the Fate of it All
Out of all the birds on the entirety of planet Earth, 70% of them are poultry farmed by humans, of which chickens make up the vast majority. At any given time, there are about 26 billion chickens in the world.
Humans and the livestock we raise account for 96% of all mammals on this planet, with only 4% being wild mammals at this point.
Within the relatively short period of time since we first formed civilizations, we’ve destroyed 83% of all wild mammals, 80% of marine mammals, 50% of all the plants, and 15% of fish. Out of the thousands of years it took us to wreak that havoc, we destroyed 50% of all wildlife on Earth in just the 40 years between 1970 and 2010.
Looking at the numbers which show the colossal influence we have on this planet, one might think that humans make up a rather enormous chunk of the overall biomass of this world; one would be wrong in thinking that.
82% of all the biomass on Earth is plants. 13% of it is bacteria. That last 5% represents every other living thing on this entire planet. In spite of their seemingly endless size, only 1% of all of that life is found in our oceans.
Punching well above our weight class with the overwhelming power and destruction we’ve wrought, humans only make up 0.01% of all life on Earth.
0.01%, and look at what we’ve done with that.
We are notoriously bad at tracking exponential curves, like our destruction of that biodiversity, and of our acceleration of the release of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. Of all the greenhouse gas emissions we’ve released since the start of the industrial revolution in 1751, more than 50% of it has been produced since 1988 alone.
Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that humans have too little influence on this planet to make a difference. We are now in near absolute control of the fate of every living thing on Earth. Perhaps we should change course?
