Do You Know What We Are Losing?

This is a blog on what I consider to be the most important environmental problem of our time, perhaps of all time. I refer to what has been called the Sixth Great Extinction, or the Anthropozoic, or the Catastrophozoic. Humans are erasing the work of millions of years of evolution, sending thousands of species into an early oblivion, and unraveling the Web of Life. In doing so, humans are imperiling their own future, and making certain a bleaker, darker, leaden, sterile, lonely existence for subsequent members of their species.

This is no “feel good”, “touch-feely” enterprise I am about. This is about the cold, hard, sobering, unattractive, depressing facts that entail what we are doing to this planet and its tapestry of life. Don’t come here if you can’t look reality in the face. I always thought that Stephen Jay Gould chose the perfect name for one of his books when he harked back to the earlier movie with Jimmy Stewart and named it “Wonderful Life.” I cannot fathom that this Wonderful Life is slip sliding away through our fingers. Yet we as a species do not so much as acknowledge it, much less forcibly act to stop the hemorrhage.

The last Thylacine Wolf or Tasmanian
 Tiger died on 7 September 1936

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Why are we blind to this crisis?

Perhaps it is as suggested by my friend Michael Soulé:
“We are wired for bombshells, not decay...We are like the proverbial frog in the beaker of gradually warming water that passively boils before jumping.”

But he also acknowledges:
“We have many other neural anachronisms, and a lot of them have been mapped in the last decade or so by functional magnetic resonance brain scans. Some of these primitive patterns of thought have been recognized by sages for millennia. They include spontaneous, reactive thoughts that cram our consciousness with self-centered, distorted thinking. The Greeks and early Christians categorized them as the seven deadly sins or vices; the Buddha called them the unwholesome roots. These ancient impulses morbidly undermine our inclinations to be kind, cooperative, patient, and persevering.”

Eastern Elk - last one shot in Pa. in 1877.

My mission here is not to change human wiring– or human nature. Outside of an imposed, draconian, totalitarian solution, that problem lies with the individual. I instead appeal to the unwholesome roots (vide supra) dimension; namely, obvious personal and societal benefit. I want to relate my perspective on the contribution of the natural world to medicine. I argue that for our own benefit and for the benefit of those who bear our genes, we should take care to preserve this fountain of well-being. I’m by no means the first to try to accomplish this, nor the first to make the foregoing argument for preservation of species. I believe that the message needs repeating. Furthermore, I hope to show that the drug discovery process, as it occurs from natural products, is deeply entwined with our (Western) culture. On this path, I’ll also review the scientific basis for this Sixth Great Extinction. From time to time, I'll digress somewhat to threads that seem distant, but in fact bear mightily on our mistreatment of Pachamama.

This is a work in progress. Time will tell…