Update on World's Vertebrate Loss

My sense that we are in trouble - big trouble - solidified when I read a report in 2014 that since 1970, humans had wiped out just over 50 percent of all of Earth's non-human vertebrate creatures. 

Intuition tells me (and I am confident I am not wrong) that humans cannot survive on Earth once we have lost all (or virtually all) other vertebrate life, because the life-sustaining functions of our biosphere depend upon ecosystems mostly intact, even if not healthful.

We (some humans) might be able to survive that loss, but it would be just that: survival. My sense is that most will question whether there remains any value in living in a world in that condition. Aside from the sheer physical and health challenges that would result, we would also be reckoning with the moral dilemma of having destroyed so large an amount of living beings. When we consider that all Life is truly One, we will find ourselves living out the final breaths of global suicide.

My "Doomsday Dharma" (my proposal that we ought to begin to stop trying to "save" the world and begin to learn to love and care for one another as we find ourselves in this hospice situation together) was predicated on this group’s 2014 report about the loss of 1/2 of the earth’s vertebrates. Today's update predicts a much more rapid die-off than I had envisioned just two years ago. 

This October 2016 report suggests that we will lose fully 2/3 of all vertebrate life as soon as only 3 years from now! That is much more rapid than even my own most dismal assessments, where I had calculated maybe 30 to 40 years for total vertebrate loss. Based upon this new report (assuming current trend in rate of loss), the most generous projection for a habitable Earth may be down to 25 or fewer years.

Shocking. Sad. 

And a wake-up call to begin learning to love and care for one another now more than at any other time in human history.

May all beings be well and free of suffering and the causes of suffering.