The human impact on life on Earth has increased sharply since the 1970s, driven by the demands of a growing population with rising average per capita income. Nature is currently supplying more materials than ever before, but this has come at the high cost of unprecedented global declines in the extent and integrity of ecosystems, distinctness of local ecological communities, abundance and number of wild species, and the number of local domesticated varieties. Such changes reduce vital benefits that people receive from nature and threaten the quality of life of future generations. Both the benefits of an expanding economy and the costs of reducing nature's benefits are unequally distributed. The fabric of life on which we all depend-nature and its contributions to people-is unravelling rapidly. Despite the severity of the threats and lack of enough progress in tackling them to date, opportunities exist to change future trajectories through transformative action. Such action must begin immediately, however, and address the root economic, social, and technological causes of nature's deterioration.

There have been five past great mass extinctions during the history of Earth. There is an ever-growing consensus within the scientific community that we have entered a sixth mass extinction. Human activities are associated directly or indirectly with nearly every aspect of this extinction. This article presents an overview of the five past great mass extinctions; an overview of the current Anthropocene mass extinction; past and present human activities associated with the current Anthropocene mass extinction; current and future rates of species extinction; and broad science-curriculum topics associated with the current Anthropocene mass extinction that can be used by science educators. These broad topics are organized around the major global, anthropogenic direct drivers of habitat modification, fragmentation, and destruction; overexploitation of species; the spread of invasive species and genes; pollution; and climate change.

Societal Impact Statement Earth is currently experiencing a mass extinction crisis, predominantly driven by anthropogenic activities, with land use change causing widespread loss and degradation of native ecosystems and indigenous species. There is an urgent need to halt this trend and restore degraded habitat to preserve biodiversity and protect threatened plants and animals. Restoration focuses largely on the vegetation aboveground, with limited attention to soil biology and function, despite soil biodiversity underpinning ecosystem function. We illustrate how soil biological and functional attributes can be implemented to improve restoration outcomes and, under favourable conditions, enhance habitat suitability for threatened plant species. Summary Anthropogenic activities, including land clearing for agriculture and infrastructure, have resulted in considerable loss of native ecosystems and their unique species. Remnant vegetation is often highly fragmented and degraded, and is under continued pressure from multiple global change drivers. Hence, there is an urgent need to improve remnant vegetation and restore habitat to compensate for these losses. Ecological restoration, however, generally focuses on recovering vegetation structure and composition, with limited attention given to soil biological and functional attributes, which are often considered solely as barriers to restoration. This is problematic given that ecosystems' structure and function, and therefore their c

During five previous mass extinction events, many of Earth’s species died out in a relatively short period of time–like the dinosaurs did 66 million years ago. Scientists believe that Earth is currently experiencing another mass extinction, the sixth such event, but the first to be caused by human activities. This is a wake-up call: over a million species could vanish during our lifetimes! But there is hope: we can save many species by protecting their homes, especially in tropical places where many unique animals and plants live. This article will explain how some of the spots that are currently protected fail to capture all of the places where these at-risk species actually live. To complete the safety net of protection, we must focus on other important areas, called Conservation Imperatives sites, which contain many threatened species but only cover a tiny part of the Earth’s surface. Saving these spots is urgent, and luckily it is not as expensive as you might think. Time is running out, and the sooner we start, the better our chances of preventing many animals and plants from disappearing forever.

Purpose We are currently experiencing what is often called the sixth period of mass extinction on planet Earth, caused undoubtedly by the impact of human activities and businesses on nature. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential for accounting and corporate accountability to contribute to extinction prevention. The paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, weaving scientific evidence and theory into organisational disclosure and reporting in order to demonstrate linkages between extinction, business behaviour, accounting and accountability as well as to provide a basis for developing a framework for narrative disclosure on extinction prevention. Design/methodology/approach The paper is theoretical and interdisciplinary in approach, seeking to bring together scientific theories of extinction with a need for corporate and organisational accountability whilst recognising philosophical concerns in the extant environmental accounting literature about accepting any business role and capitalist mechanisms in ecological matters. The overarching framework derives from the concept of emancipatory accounting. Findings The outcome of the writing is to: present an emancipatory “extinction accounting” framework which can be embedded within integrated reports, and a diagrammatic representation, in the form of an “ark”, of accounting and accountability mechanisms which, combined, can assist, the authors argue, in preventing extinction. The authors suggest that the emancipat

What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is–like water–to embrace movement in all its forms. We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on earth and yet few scholars give prolonged attention to how we are to sustainably move our human inheritances forward on this increasingly uninhabitable planet. Reflecting on the work of transnational poets, specifically South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon translated through Korean American poet Don Mee Choi and Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, we are reminded of the myriad ways in which humans can move and survive in a foreign yet familiar world. This paper finds its support in the confluence of transnational contemporary feminist poetics, formalism, environmentalism, and posthumanism. Through the use of various critical discourses, this paper considers how movement and its hybrid capacities offer a new understanding of contemporary North American poetics. In this sense, a poem should be viewed as a dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life.

Holocene or Anthropocene extinction is an ongoing extinction event caused by human activity during the current geological epoch, impacting diverse families The Holocene or Anthropocene extinction is an ongoing extinction event caused by human activity during the current geological epoch, impacting diverse families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, as well as both terrestrial and marine species. It is sometimes also called the sixth extinction (though this can also describe the Capitanian). The description of recent extinction as a mass extinction has been debated among scientists. Stuart Pimm, for example, asserts that the sixth mass extinction "is something that hasn't happened yet—we are on the edge of it." Several studies posit that the Earth has entered a sixth mass extinction event, including a 2015 paper by Barnosky et al. and a November 2017 statement titled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice", led by eight authors and signed by 15,364 scientists from 184 countries which asserted, among other things, that "we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be extirpated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century." The World Wide Fund for Nature's 2020 Living Planet Report says that wildlife populations have declined by 68% since 1970 as a result of overconsumption, population growth, and intensive farming, which is further evidence that humans have unleashed a sixth mass extinction event; however, this finding has been disputed by one 2020 study, which posits that this major decline was primarily driven by a few extreme outlier populations, and that when these outliers are removed, the trend shifts to that of a decline between the 1980s and 2000s, but a roughly positive trend after 2000. The 2020 study has been criticized for methodological flaws and for "downplaying biodiversity loss". A 2021 report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which cites both of the aforementioned studies, says "population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades, with certain population clusters in extreme decline, thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species," and asserts "that we are already on the path of a sixth major extinction is now scientifically undeniable." A January 2022 review article published in Biological Reviews builds upon previous studies documenting biodiversity decline to assert that a sixth mass extinction event caused by anthropogenic activity is currently under way. A December 2022 study published in Science Advances states that "the…