Plenticiding the Sixth Extinction : more Hunger Plan than Auschwitz

I do not think some/much/most/all of humanity is setting out to totally eliminate particular non-human species as the Nazis tried to do to the Jews and the Hutus to the Tusis.

Except for the smallpox virus, I don't think Humanity has ever tried to deliberately kill off all of a particular species of life at one go.

So no sins of plenticidal commission here.

But Humanity has always been perfectly willing to turn people out of their homes in dead of winter while burning their villages, bedding, and food stores, killing their animals and poisoning their wells.

We then piously claim that we'd didn't murder any of them - we just left them to forage for their existence.

This basically was the Nazi Hunger Plan for eastern Europe and western USSR.

Plenticide by omission.

Because we have survived drastic evolutionary bottlenecks, we think all species can

Now humans can usually survive and repopulate even when we have been reduced to only about one hundred individuals - we're a flexible species when it comes to what we can eat and where we can live.

We have survived such genetic cum evolutionary bottlenecks in the recent past and here we are seven billion strong --  but we unwisely act as if all other species can do the same.

So when we claim we only want to control - by killing - most of the seals eating our Atlantic Cod, we do not really intend to make them immediately extinct.

But reducing a species to a too small percentage of its historical norm ( a norm based on perhaps millions of years of varied existence when no human scientist was around to compute a baseline for normality)  is usually deadly .

It can mean that when bad environmental conditions roll around again in that species' niche , it doesn't have the absolute numbers to survive the consequences of huge percentages of population loss.

Hubris killed the Atlantic Cod

Atlantic Cod - let us say - can survive long term as a species even if ninety seven percent loss of its total numbers are lost in one season or two due to a sharp change in water temperature.

But only if the remaining three percent is of the huge number of individuals found before Man began catching cod.

That three percentage would represent millions of adult cod, who could still find mates to reproduce in the vastness of the North Atlantic.

But in the 1990s, we had reduced the numbers of cod to perhaps one to five percent of their numbers in pre-European human contact times and then that three percent of five percent means that there are few adult cods left to easily find mates in all that ocean.

Slowly, every mating season would see fewer and fewer young being born and surviving predation by other (newly numerous) predator species .

It becomes a snowball on slippery slope leading to eventual extinction - unless we can protect and breed cod in captivity.

(Good luck !)

Humanity has possibly killed off all chances the Atlantic Cod will ever see big numbers again by one big mistake of hubris.

Yes allowing - even encouraging  - big engine-powered (all weather) boats with fish-finding sonar and onboard frozen fish storage and habitat destroying trawl methods was stupid.

But fisherman only got a chance to kill most of the cod because we as a society trusted fisherman and scientists who demonstrated a total lack of a sense of history.

These fisherman and scientists said "the cod can handle being caught at three times the 1930 cod catching levels - relax".

But every Canadian school child had heard than in 1530 , the cod in the water were thick enough in numbers to walk over - catching them meant simply lowering baskets to scoop them up.

That was the real measure of the natural biomass of the Canadian cod stocks - that was the true scientific baseline.

And let us not forget that between 1930 (when good records of cod began and when the daddies of 1990 fishermen were busy fishing) and 1990 was only sixty years.

Not long enough to see the effect of a real bad downturn in environmental conditions on cod numbers.

So we fished on, until cod were reduced to one percent of their norm and hit a bad couple of years for their environment and then bang ! - game over.

We humans simply refuse to share this Earth - commensally - with the many plenitude of species that make it liveable for us and them.

We refuse to accept that the seals were eating cod before we were and its not "our" cod anyway.

We are willing to acidify the ocean until it kills off the beings that annually give us half of all the newly freed oxygen in the atmosphere.

We are  even willing to risk killing the golden goose that gives us the breath of life.

We practise plenticide - we see the plenitude of life as competitors who must die or be greatly reduced , instead as part of the highly varied biomass that gives us life and reduces the impact of environmental shocks.

We not so secretly yearn for that sci fi fantasy where we live under glass domes on a stony bare planet (win a trip to Mars anyone ?) and eat drink breath substances made from rock by the energy from atomic reactors.

Plenticide means cutting Mother Nature's apron strings at last - a teen boy's dream - not dependent on anyone : I am a Rock - my home is a Rock, my food, water and air is a Rock...