How would you decide if given the choice between changing your lifestyle or wiping out 25% of the world's species?

I think my choice is pretty obvious. Suck it up, cupcake. It’s that or die.

Obviously I’d change my lifestyle and we have, as much as possible anyway. It’s never enough though.

Kill 25% of the world’s species and risk eternal hellfire.
Polar bears borrow money and never pay it back.
Die you bastards,die.

I can’t be careful enough and neither can you to avoid making a potential misstep that would wipe out a species that’s on the brink of extinction. Any species that is hovering so closely to a go / no-go line that it depends on the individual choices that I make (and the billions that are more or less like me in some way or another), then sayonara. It’s been nice knowing you, but I can’t be that careful. By that I mean “mankind in aggregate” can’t be that careful. (Either that, or the scarcity value of a particular organism would make it so attractive to poachers and collectors that the care taken by the rest of us is more or less moot.)

If you truly understand some of the history of life on earth, then you’ll already know that some 90% or more of the species that have ever lived here have been rendered extinct. The mean survival time for individual species seems to be around 4,000,000 years, give or take.

Aside from whatever effects man has on the planet, and yes, they are extraordinary compared to the actions of most other species (except bacteria, which made life possible for the rest of us, and termites and other insects, who contribute more to climate change than most people comprehend, and some others like that), every hundred million years or so a mass extinction event occurs to wipe out up to 75–80% of what happens to be alive at the time. Link

So take heart. Maybe our mass extinction event is coming soon (2012, anyone?) and you won’t have to worry about this any more.

I’m going to offer @lucillelucillelucille a polar bear steak, while I have some panda chops.

@CWOTUS Great! That goes perfectly with a side dish of bullshit served by Al Gore ;)

It’s gotten a lot better over the years through activists and education. I have changed my lifestyle, and there is still room for improvement. I encourage others to do the same. I can financially support or do volunteer work for the causes that are important to me.

With that said, when it comes down to saving other species, or people for that matter, sometimes it is out of our control.

I should clarify: It’s not my fault (or yours, or any of mankind’s fault) that the 90% extinction has occurred. Mankind is responsible for “quite a few” extinctions. Let’s say 10,000? You want to say 100,000 species have been wiped out by man? Okay. I think that’s overblown, but let’s say that’s true.

If we’ve identified 1.7 million species as of 2010 and if man has wiped out 100,000 of those, that’s less than 6%.

Adapt or die applies to all species. I try to do all I can, which will never be enough, especially considering most people think the world revolves around them.

I would be willing to change my lifestyle.

I already can hardly walk across my yard in the summer with the gazillions of baby tree frogs swarming and thousands of lizards and wild turkeys taking over my space.

Not to mention caring for my geese, predator proof fencing, swimming pools that need to be cleaned daily, oh, and the stray foster cat that has monopolized my time and energy for the last 3 weeks.

I think it’s safe to say I have already changed my life for many species. lol

@marinelife How far would you be willing to go? Would you be willing to pull a Dian Fossey to save a species?

@Coloma What about an endangered species? You are clearly one of our nature-loving Jellies, but would you go even further to prevent the extinction of a dying breed?

I would give up quite a bit if Darwin would add MIL’s to the extinct list!

@Pied_Pfeffer

I’d do what I could short of giving up my house as a sanctuary for endangered lizards. :-)

@Coloma Thanks friend. I didn’t realize that your lizards were endangered. Seriously, I’m putting a visit to you on my bucket list.

@Cruiser I adore my future mum-in-law and would prefer to keep her off of the extinction list, if you don’t mind. And my mother is pretty smitten with my choice of an SO, and vice versa, so I’d like to keep her on the living list as well.

There’s nothing we could do to stop our own species from eliminating other species, our population keep growing and growing, soon, we’ll transfer even the most desolate and harshest desert in to human habitation, all we can do is to delay what’s not stoppable.

Unless a huge asteroid hits our Earth then maybe we could start all over again, allowing us to re-evolve again.

Lifestyle? The choice is obvious to me, that lifestyle and human population levels are far less desirable than the survival of entire species.

I think much of the problem is that the connection is not clear, and that confusion happens because of the moronic media and the corporate interests that rule the media, that interferes in education, etc. There’s an epidemic of guilt-avoiding stupidity.

To me it is a matter of values. I do not accept the idea of animal rights. The question is what type of world we want to live in. Even apart from possible dangers of decreasing biodiversity, it seems to me that the world is greatly impoverished by large scale removal of species. The problem is that there is no large scale debate. People need to be made aware of what is happening and to actively choose what they want.

If changing MY lifestyle would make the difference, I would, but what you are talking about would require 6 billion people to change their life styles, an impossible task.

I do as much as I personally can and by living in Australia where the PM is hell bent on imposing a carbon tax regardless of its effect on individuals and the economy in general, I am actually doing more than most.

But I always get a kick out of the fact that people ask this question on the internet and from a computer that is probably made of plastic and will be sitting in a landfill for the next 2 million light years when it is tossed out. Not to mention the electricity it is using to ask the question and then review the responses. Manufacturing electricity (which I love and do not want to give up) is a dirty process. Making the wind mills for wind farms causes a lot of pollution and they have a finite lifespan. I wonder if the pollution created by their creation is offset by their use over that lifespan. Same with solar panels, batteries for electric cars and the list goes on. Maybe we should all just turn off our lights and computers and go sit outside and look at the stars, I don’t think that pollutes anything unless of course you had beans for supper and are emitting methane gas into the atmosphere like those damned cows!

@rooeytoo

I agree. On the one hand every little helpful thing counts, on the other, we are so deep in devastating our natural resources that not much can be done short of mandatory sterilization, zero population growth for the next 200 years and euthanizing everyone 50 and over, along with a return to horse drawn transportation. lol

@YARNLADY Excellent point. That’s why lifestyle change has never been an effective means for producing change.

I’ve already changes my lifestyle a great deal to contribute what little help I can to liniting the environmental carnage mankind is wreaking on Earth.

I’ll take the 25% and add another 10.