“No one knows how many species of organisms have existed since life began. Thirty billion is a commonly cited figure, but the number has been put as high as 4000 billion. Whatever the actual total, 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us…. For complex organisms the average lifespan of a species is 4 million years – roughly about where we are now”. (quoted in “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, Bill Bryson).
There have been several extinctions, great and small. The Permian extinction obliterated 95% of all living species, especially sea creatures, and it took 80 million years before their number recovered. We humans are here today because, as Stephen Jay Gould commented, “Our particular line never fractured – never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history”.
Nobody knows what the current rate of extinction of plants, insects and animals is. In the 1990s Norman Myers said it was 600 a week. The United Nations, in 1995, put it at about 500 for animals and 650 for plants over 400 years, while admitting that this was almost certainly an underestimate. Whatever the figure is, human beings have caused most of them; indeed, the peak was in the 19th Century, with rich people gleefully shooting everything in sight. The idiot who recently shot the lion is hopefully the last of a breed of gun- slinging oafs with neither decency or imagination. We are the poorer for their activities. Human beings possess great ability and genius, but can also be blindly destructive. Let us hope we are not in the process of extinguishing ourselves in our myopia and greed .