Are we really facing the 6th mass extinction?

This article claims we're not.

https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-not-edging-up-to-a-mass-extinction

The fossil record shows that biodiversity in the world has been increasing dramatically for 200 million years and is likely to continue. The two mass extinctions in that period (at 201 million and 66 million years ago) slowed the trend only temporarily.

What do you think?

Sergey Zimov, the creator in 1988 of the ?Pleistocene Park? experiment in northern Siberia, estimates that before humans killed off most of the megafauna of the far north, ?on each square kilometre of pasture there lived one mammoth, five bison, eight horses, and 15 reindeer. Musk ox, elk, woolly rhinoceros, antelope, snow sheep, and moose were also present. Wolves, cave lions, and wolverines occupied the landscape as predators. In total, over 10 tons of animals lived on each square kilometre of pasture ? hundreds of times higher than modern animal densities in the mossy northern landscape.? That?s bioabundance.

Consider the language of these news headlines: ?Fuelling Extinction: Obama Budget Is Killer For Endangered Species? (Huffington Post, February 2015). ??Racing Extinction? Sounds Alarm On Ocean?s Endangered Creatures? (NBC News, January 2015). ??Extinction Crisis?: 21,000 Of World?s Species At Risk Of Disappearing (Common Dreams, July 2013). ?Australian Mammals On Brink Of ?Extinction Calamity?? (BBC, February 2015). ?The Sixth Extinction Is Here ? And It?s Our Fault (Re/code, July 2014). The headlines are not just inaccurate. As they accumulate, they frame our whole relationship with nature as one of unremitting tragedy. The core of tragedy is that it cannot be fixed, and that is a formula for hopelessness and inaction. Lazy romanticism about impending doom becomes the default view.

No end of specific wildlife problems remain to be solved, but describing them too often as extinction crises has led to a general panic that nature is extremely fragile or already hopelessly broken. That is not remotely the case. Nature as a whole is exactly as robust as it ever was ? maybe more so, with humans around to head off ice ages and killer asteroids. Working with that robustness is how conservation?s goals get reached.

We've certainly changed the landscape of the ecosystem. I wish humans would be happier living side-by-side with more types of organisms as opposed to leveling the whole damn environment just so that we can pop out more babies.

Global warming may cause mass extinctions depending on how quickly it occurs and to what magnitude. Evolution may be fast, but it still takes some amount of time. 7 degrees F is the Trump admins estimate and that's pretty damn yuug.

Bump because this publication has some really great articles.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-challenge-of-reclaiming-the-commons-from-capitalism

https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene

I was writing some content for the new wetfish website and it got me thinking about bioabundance, which made me remember this thread :)