Why I Don't Recycle Part 1: Extinctions aren't that scary once you get to know them.....

I thought it was only appropriate to have my first opinion-based blog post be an elaboration on my last facebook wall post, where I mentioned how I am morally opposed to recycling.  Unfortunately, I soon realized that I had a lot more to say about this subject than I thought, so I'm going to break this post down into four posts to make it easier to read.  You can check back here over the next four days to read it in chunks in order to prevent you, dear reader, from looking at six pages worth of material and saying "fuck that shit".  As always, feel free to comment.

I hope that by now most of you reading this have heard the actual facts about global warming and not just the biased right and left viewpoints.  Scientists that aren’t being paid by a particular political party all agree on three things: 1) Global warming is definitely happening, 2) Global warming is a normal part of the Earth’s life cycle and we’re currently between a cold period (the “Ice Age” that everyone thinks of) and a hot period, and nothing will stop the Earth from eventually cranking up the heat to tropical levels, and 3) while global warming would be happening anyway, human actions are causing it to happen slightly faster than usual.  But before you curse modern humans with all their smokestacks and bottled water, you should know that human-caused ecological damage and extinction is nothing new.  As soon as our ancestors put themselves at the top of the food chain, they started to kill species at a massive rate.  You can actually trace the extinction of many species to just several generations after humans were introduced to the area.  For example, Wooly Mammoths aren’t as ancient as you might think- there was actually a tiny island called Wrangel Island around the Bering Strait with some miniaturized Mammoth relatives still hanging out until just 4000 years ago, until some of the local American Indian tribes finally checked out the island and finished the job.  At this point I probably have you thinking that humans are just natural killers, and might be siding with Agent Smith from the Matrix when he said “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet”.   And while that might be partially true, let me give you some scope on the history of extinctions on this planet.

One great thing that my favorite college class (History of Life with Dr. Lassiter, the only class at Roanoke College with dinosaurs) taught me was just how close the Earth has come to getting royally screwed.  While most of you should know about the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and some of you know that decent sized extinctions happen a lot, I doubt most of you know some of the details.  Some of the most problematic extinctions have been: the aforementioned  K-T Extinction where a combination of a massive volcanic eruption and a meteor strike wiped out 65% of life of earth, dooming the dinosaurs; the Great Oxygenation Event where a population boom of cyanobacteria filled the atmosphere with poisonous free oxygen waste eventually triggering the biggest Snowball Earth ever (our planet literally looked like Hoth, just solid ice with some slushy oceans at the equator); and my favorite,  the Permian-Triassic Extinction (informally known as The Great Dying… holy shit that’s so metal) where a triple shot of a massive volcanic eruption, a meteor strike, AND massive amounts of built up CO₂ gas bubbled up from the oceans wiping out every animal, land and sea, that breathed it in.  That last extinction wiped out 90% of life on earth and ended the reign of our ancestors, the mammal-like reptiles, who were just starting to really get that whole warm-blooded thing worked out.  

Seriously, it was pretty badass.  And starkly depressing.

As you know, each extinction event totally wiped out all life on the planet Earth, the spirit of Mother Nature cried, and no joy was ever spread again.  Oh wait, except that didn’t happen at all.  Instead what occurred was (in order of extinctions I listed): the end of the long reign of the dinosaurs eventually let the mammals flourish by evolving to fit the now empty ecological niches, eventually even giving them the chance to PWN the last of the apex predator dinosaurs, aka the Terror Birds.  With a whole bunch of unused oxygen in the air, all it took is for one bacterium to evolve a way to evolve aerobic respiration, using the poisonous oxygen to create energy.  Boom!   Population explosion of our ancestors, aerobic organisms, which created a balanced system of anaerobic and aerobic organisms breathing each others’ air waste, a system that is still the most important cycle keeping the living world alive today.   And as for the Snowball/Slushball Earth side effect created by all that oxygen waste in the first place, the only livable zone on Earth became a small strip of cold water around the equator where only the strong could survive.  This Darwinian wet dream prompted multi-cellular life to evolve; without this strong natural selection situation, we would be chilling around as bacteria in puddles to this day.   The P-Tr Extinction had the same effect that the K-T Extinction did, except in this earlier situation it was the mammalian ancestors that got rooted out by archosaurs, the ancestors of crocodiles, Pterodactyls, and dinosaurs (didn’t know that the mammalian uprising 65 mya was actually just tit for tat, did you?  This kind of back-and-forth between animal taxa happened a lot throughout the history of life…..).  Also, all that death meant a whoooooole lot of fungi could flourish off of delicious dead matter, resulting in a sort of evolutionary renaissance for fungi (which are totally cool).  What can we learn from this?  That no matter how hard the Earth gets hit by something, it manages to bounce back.  To quote a cheesy but totally true line from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way”.  One might also extrapolate from this history that it seems that extinction, like all death, is a natural occurrence in life and is needed for the life cycle to begin anew.  And finally, that while the current extinction rate has been blowing up 

Well played cyanobacteria.  Well played.

ever since we learned how to use a spear, we are certainly not the only single species to almost single-handedly cause a massive extinction.  We might be worried about man-made atomic bombs causing nuclear winter, but our earliest ancestors already beat us to the punch just by breathing out.