Since the beginning of civilizations, we have made so many animal and plant species disappear that we would remain incredulous at the number. Without counting the domesticated animals, killed for their meat, we have exhausted the vitality and the capacity of perenniality of thousands of wild species. Whether we think of mammals, birds or fish, uncontrolled exploitation, enhanced by increasingly aggressive technology, has upset the balance of several planetary ecosystems of which they were a part. Take the great whales: they have almost all been exterminated by the greed of the oil extracted from them for lighting by lamps, and now by the transformation into feed for domestic animals. The history of the cohabitation of humans and animals is filled with nameless horrors.
In his test The 6e extinction, Elizabeth Colbert quotes the anthropologist Michael Benton, who represents the living, massacred and constantly endangered by a “tree of life” attacked with an ax by mad loggers. And we are those crazy woodcutters.
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