Spaceship Earth and the Sixth Mass Extinction

The heavy human footprint and its solution

Bucky Fuller popularized the geodesic dome and the term Spaceship Earth, which came together in the Disney attraction at Epcot. When I visited it in 1998, I had no idea that Fuller’s work and mine were similar.

I had an environmental awareness from a young age, with an oil spill and the awesome air pollution of Los Angeles among my early events, which helped inspire my free-energy efforts, but during my days of study I began to understand the very heavy environmental footprint that humanity has always had.

It began when the first bipedal apes began making stone tools. Giant tortoises began going extinct, and they quickly went extinct wherever humans arrived for millions of years. Homo erectus became an apex predator, and they were at least partly responsible for the mid-Pleistocene extinction in Africa and Southern Asia, especially members of the elephant family. By 125,000 years ago, African megafauna were half of their expected size. When behaviorally modern humans left Africa and conquered the world, Australia and the Americas quickly lost their megafauna. While Paul S. Martin thought that the giant sloth extinctions were the most spectacular human-caused extinction in the Americas, my vote is for the complete extinction of the elephant family, as five genera roamed the length and breadth of the Americas before human arrival, with a North American tenure of more than 16 million years. All other human species were driven to extinction during the global conquest, and it was likely not a peaceful process. Humans burned forests with abandon at times.

In my studies, I came upon two related camps among scientists, on the megafauna extinctions and how violent prehistoric humans were. Some scientists strenuously denied that humans had anything to do with the megafauna extinctions in Australia, the Americas, and elsewhere. Another camp argued how peaceful prehistoric humans were, and that warfare only began with either agriculture or civilization. That peaceful past was the dogma in anthropology until only a generation or so ago. Not only did both camps defy the mountain of evidence that undermined their positions, I came to see both camps as defenders of humanity, especially the ancestors of the indigenous peoples that Europe wiped out in its conquest of Earth. I eventually named those positions the “Anything But Homo Sapiens” hypothesis. On one hand, those scientists defend their in-group, humanity. That is understandable and a human predilection, but it also shows how shaky science can be when scientists defend ideological positions instead of the evidence. I think that it has done a disservice to science and our understanding of the past to deny human agency like that. In the past millennium, humanity inflicted the aquatic version of the land-based megafauna extinctions during the short-lived whaling industry.

Fortunately, after generations of those kinds of positions, the evidence is finally prevailing. Scientists who deny human agency in the megafauna extinctions are beginning to look pretty silly, after more than 50 years of trying. The same goes for scientists who argue that humanity was peaceful before the invention of agriculture and civilization. Hunter-gatherers were prodigiously violent, and everybody lived with the specter of a violent death each day. What those denying scientists did was help obscure how far we have come. Life in industrial societies is immensely better than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

But the human footprint has become heavier over the millennia. The Fertile Crescent was largely deforested and desertified. When Europeans conquered humanity, they aridified places such as Australia, Mesoamerica, New England, and Atlantic islands.

In my lifetime, human activities have killed off half of Earth’s coral reefs. Since agriculture began, Earth has lost half of its plant biomass, and 96% of mammalian biomass is comprised of humans and their domesticated animals. Human activities have raised the carbon-dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere by 50% in less than two centuries, which is likely the most dramatic rise in the history of life on Earth, but there is a sizeable contingent in the USA that denies human agency in Global Warming, or that Global Warming is even happening. The last time that Earth went from an ice age to greenhouse conditions, the greatest mass extinction in the eon of complex life happened. Do we really want to see how this turns out?

There is likely one and only one solution, to prevent the sixth mass extinction that may take humanity with it. Fuller called our choice Utopia or oblivion. I call it the Fifth Epoch or the sixth mass extinction. Spaceship Earth is not doing well, but I know the way out.

Edward O. Wilson wrote a book that advocated giving half of Earth back to nature. In the Fifth Epoch, humanity will be able to give back nearly 100%, because we will no longer be reliant on the land for our food and other resources.