The Holocene extinction, or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event caused by humans during the Holocene epoch. These extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, and affecting not just terrestrial species but also large sectors of marine life. With widespread degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, which goes unrecorded. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so. As such, after the "Big Five" mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction event has also been referred to as the sixth mass extinction or sixth extinction; given the recent recognition of the Capitanian mass extinction, the term seventh mass extinction has also been proposed for the Holocene extinction event.
Overconsumption describes a situation where a consumer overuses their available goods and services to where they can't, or don't want to, replenish or reuse them. In microeconomics, this may be described as the point where the marginal cost of a consumer is greater than their marginal utility. The term overconsumption is quite controversial in use and does not necessarily have a single unifying definition. When used to refer to natural resources to the point where the environment is negatively affected, is it synonymous with the term overexploitation. However, when used in the broader economic sense, overconsumption can refer to all types of goods and services, including manmade ones, e.g. "the overconsumption of alcohol can lead to alcohol poisoning". Overconsumption is driven by several factors of the current global economy, including forces like consumerism, planned obsolescence, economic materialism, and other unsustainable business models and can be contrasted with sustainable consumption.
An ecological or environmental crises occurs when changes to the environment of a species or population destabilizes its continued survival. Some of the important causes include:
Richard William Heinberg is an American journalist and educator who has written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion. He is the author of 14 books, and presently serves as the senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.
Doomer and, by extension, doomerism are terms which arose primarily on the Internet to describe people who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about global problems such as overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, pollution, nuclear weapons, and runaway artificial intelligence. Some doomers assert that there is a possibility these problems will bring about human extinction.
Peter Douglas Ward is an American paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Sprigg Institute of Geobiology at the University of Adelaide. He has written numerous popular science works for a general audience and is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum. In 2000, along with his co-author Donald E. Brownlee, he co-originated the term Rare Earth and developed the Medea hypothesis alleging that multicellular life is ultimately self-destructive.
Human overpopulation describes a concern that human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term. The topic is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may concern individual nations, regions, and cities.
Deforestation during the Roman period was a result of the geographical expansion of the Roman Empire, with its increased population, large-scale agriculture, and unprecedented economic development. Roman expansion marks the transition in the Mediterranean from prehistory to the historical period beginning around 500 BC. Earth sustained a few million people 8,000 years ago and was still fundamentally pristine, but Rome drove human development in Western Europe and was a leading contributor of the deforestation around the Mediterranean.
References to climate change in popular culture have existed since the late 20th century and increased in the 21st century. Climate change, its impacts, and related human-environment interactions have been featured in nonfiction books and documentaries, but also literature, film, music, television shows and video games.
Background extinction rate, also known as the normal extinction rate, refers to the standard rate of extinction in Earth's geological and biological history before humans became a primary contributor to extinctions. This is primarily the pre-human extinction rates during periods in between major extinction events. Currently there have been five mass extinctions that have happened since the beginning of time all resulting from a variety of reasons.
Rupert Read is an academic and a Green Party campaigner, a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, and the current director of the Climate Majority Project. He is the author of several books on Wittgenstein, philosophy, and/or climate change, most recently Why Climate Breakdown Matters, Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, and Do You Want to Know the Truth? Until 2023, Read was a reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia where he was awarded – as Principal Investigator – Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding for two projects on "natural capital". His other major recent academic focus has been on the precautionary principle, having contributed substantially to work co-authored with Nassim Nicholas Taleb on applying the principle to questions of genetic modification of organisms. In further work, Read has theorised the utility of the precautionary principle in a wide range of areas, including: climate change, the environment, as well as financial and technology sectors.
William Robert Catton, Jr. was an American sociologist known for his scholarly work in environmental sociology and human ecology. More broadly, Catton is known for his 1980 book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, which is credited by younger generations of environmental scholars and activists as foundational for their own works.
In environmental science, a population "overshoots" its local carrying capacity — the capacity of the biome to feed and sustain that population — when that population has not only begun to outstrip its food supply in excess of regeneration, but actually shot past that point, setting up a potentially catastrophic crash of that feeder population once its food populations have been consumed completely. Overshoot can apply to human overpopulation as well as other animal populations: any life-form that consumes others to sustain itself.
Louis (Louie) Psihoyos is an American photographer and documentary film director known for his still photography and contributions to National Geographic. Psihoyos, a certified SCUBA diver, has become increasingly concerned with bringing awareness to underwater life. In 2009, he directed and appeared in the feature-length documentary The Cove, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream is a 2007 Canadian documentary film written and directed by Gregory Greene, as a sequel to Greene's film The End of Suburbia, and set to address what is termed "the upcoming energy crisis". Through interviews with individuals, Gregory Greene outlines potential solutions to the coming energy crisis.
Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret is a 2014 American documentary film produced and directed by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn. The film explores the impact of animal agriculture on the environment—examining such environmental concerns as climate change, water use, deforestation, and ocean dead zones—and investigates the policies of several environmental organizations on the issue.
Guy R. McPherson is an American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He is known for inventing and promoting doomer fringe theories such as Near-Term Human Extinction (NTHE), which predicts human extinction by 2026.
Extinction Rebellion is a UK-founded global environmental movement, with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. Extinction Rebellion was established in Stroud in May 2018 by Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and Roger Hallam, along with eight other co-founders from the campaign group Rising Up!
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet is a 2020 British documentary film narrated by David Attenborough and produced and directed by Jonnie Hughes. The film acts as a "witness statement", through which Attenborough shares first-hand his concern for the current state of the planet due to humanity's impact on nature and his hopes for the future. It was released on Netflix on 4 October 2020, along with a companion book A Life on Our Planet.
Extinction: The Facts is a 2020 documentary film by the natural historian David Attenborough which aired on the BBC. It depicts the continuing sixth mass extinction, caused by humans, and the consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change. It also suggests positive action which can be taken to halt or reverse these effects. With a peak viewership of roughly 4.5 million on its premiere, the programme received positive critical reception.
