Why such a fuss about extinction?

BBC News, David Shukman, Science editor, 25 March 2013

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What is wrong with extinction? I realise this question is the conservation equivalent of a landmine - or an elephant trap. And that it is likely to ruffle a lot of fur.

But I ask because I am merely wondering whether we sometimes forget a grim reality of the story of life on Earth - that extinction has always been with us.

In fact, it has quite often been good for us.

We are certainly far better off without velociraptors slashing their way through our cities. Our streets are safer with no sabre-toothed tigers. And imagine trying to swat one of those monster prehistoric insects like a vulture-sized dragonfly.

The question of extinction most recently surfaced at the talks on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) - the treaty meant to save endangered species from the devastating effects of trade.

The slaughter of rhino, the decimation of elephant, the forlorn last stand of the tiger - all had their profiles raised as the delegates in Bangkok negotiated their fate.

And anyone hearing the protests and the campaigns, and the shocking statistics about the losses, might be forgiven for thinking that extinction was some new kind of evil that was not invented until rapacious and uncaring mankind came along.

I should state right now that some of the most ghastly examples are indeed entirely the result of man's activities, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes carelessly.

Natural order

However, taking a long view, extinction has been part of the natural order of things throughout Earth's history.

The most famous mass wipe-out was the loss of the dinosaurs. And four other great die-offs have been identified - one of them killing off something like 90% of species.

But there is so-called "background" extinction as well - species fading out year by year, creatures quietly losing out to others and disappearing. These losses might not be spectacular - in fact, they're routine.

The result is that the average species only lasts a few million years. Mammals do worst, surviving between one and two million years. Clams do better at five to seven million.

A few hardy survivors - the leatherback turtle is a prime example of a sturdy design - cling on for tens of millions of years.

But the blunt truth is that the living world is a restless, churning enterprise in which nothing endures forever. Astonishingly, almost every life form that has ever existed on the planet has died out.

It is worth pausing to absorb what that means. Something like 90% - or even 99%, according to some estimates - of every kind of sea creature or land animal or insect or plant that enjoyed a spell on Earth then vanished into oblivion.

Some remains morphed into fossils and ended up on the shelves of museums. Others have left no trace.

No mourning

Charles Darwin wrote of extinction in his landmark On the Origin of Species.

For him, the process of evolution involved new species gaining ground and others losing out. He certainly did not mourn the passing of the losers.

The leatherback turtle is a great survivor

So, in the clamour to conserve a host of iconic species, is there a case for us to be more realistic about our ability to intervene? Might the awkward fact be that we can't save everything?

It is certainly the case that the creatures with the best chance are those whose looks or adorability or loveable eyes have attracted the strongest support. No-one is fighting to save the tubeworm.

But should the emphasis change if extinctions are our fault? Or, worse than that, if the losses are accelerating because of us - by tearing up habitats or causing pollution or simply slaughtering every member of a species?

There is a long list of animals whose disappearance can be blamed squarely on human actions.

I met one of them on the Galapagos Islands a few years ago - Lonesome George, the last giant tortoise of his species, a lumbering, sad-eyed, endearing creature.

On his home island, the plants that he and his kind depended on had been nibbled away by goats brought by sailors, while their eggs were eaten by rats that jumped from the ships. The tortoises themselves used to be carried on board to serve as living larders.

Clearly attitudes to the natural world change over time - and vary between regions.

For a poor villager in Africa, poaching an elephant for its tusks is easy money. For people in China, ivory and rhino horn are important culturally and - wrongly - medicinally.

Conservation is a fairly new idea - ivory used to be a major staple of British Empire trading.

By contrast, I found the sight of a haul of smuggled tusks in Bangkok Airport profoundly depressing. The stench was intense and a customs officer said the ivory "smelled like death".

Unintended effects

Darwin was unsentimental about
extinction

So what are the arguments for resisting extinction? One is purely selfish - economics.

For example, if we fish every last tuna, thousands of people in the fishing industry will lose their jobs. Likewise, if every lion or elephant is shot, the tourist trade will suffer. Extinction can cost in hard cash.

Furthermore, there may be unintended effects from eliminating "keystone" species - the loss of one plant or creature in a food chain may affect a whole web that we depend on in some way that we have not yet understood.

In Thailand, I heard that too few tigers could mean too many deer. In turn, that would mean more destruction of vegetation with a knock-on impact on the birds and monkeys that live in the trees.

Another argument is moral - that as the most powerful species on the planet, we have an obligation not to obliterate others, especially if it is through wanton carelessness.

In other words, a mark of civilisation would be to feel responsibility for the survival of weaker species.

A final point that I find compelling is that we are the first species to have gained the remarkable knowledge that every living thing has its DNA at its heart. We all share that.

We may not like everything - ants, spiders, slugs and snakes - but we are related to them. In an extremely loose sense, they are family. And that casts the threat of extinction - and our role in it - in a very different light.

David Shukman's report What's wrong with extinction? will be broadcast in a new programme, BBC News: The Editors, starting on BBC1 on 25 March at 23:15 GMT.

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"Common Questions from Non-Lightworkers" - Feb 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll)

"... Question Three: Is there life on other planets?

Are you kidding? There's life everywhere. Everywhere! Right now, your scientists are searching for microbial life on all the planets and their moons in your solar system, and they will eventually find it. They expect to find it. They will eventually understand that the seeds of life are everywhere.

How much life might there be? How long has it been "out there"? When science starts to realize the scope of how long life has been in your galaxy, they will begin to see something counterintuitive to evolution - their own Human history. How old is your Universe? Ask your scientists and they will say about 13 billion years. That's OK. Let's use their numbers. How old is your own planet - 4 or 5 billion, perhaps? Correct. But how old is humanity? Why weren't you here with the dinosaurs? You think the earth wasn't ready? Do you think that perhaps that which controls evolution was a little too stupid to make a Human sooner, but the process could make a dinosaur? Have you ever thought about these things?

If you put the earth's entire history into a 24-hour clock, life itself only started in the last hour and humanity, all of civilization, happened the last few seconds. Isn't that odd to you? Therefore, in a Universe that may be 13 billion years old, you arrived in the last few seconds. Did you ever think maybe you're the newest ones on the block? Well, you'd be right.

If the Universe is really that old, do you think perhaps there are civilizations in your galaxy that might be a billion or more years older than you? If that's the case, do you think perhaps they have gone through anything you're going through? Do you think any of them might have had your DNA attributes? Perhaps they also went through what you are going through spiritually? Perhaps they even went into a quantum ascension status? The answer is dozens of them.

You already know them and you've listed them in your publications. The ones who directly seeded you are called Pleiadians. The ones who seeded them might be Octurian and the ones who seeded them may be even Orion. They're everywhere, and they're all here as well. They're looking at you, for you are the ones who are next, and you are passing this marker of the shift ...."

"The Timing of Creation"– Aug  12, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll) - (Text version)

“…. The First Look

About 200,000 years ago is when it literally began. The concept of the "divine seeding" of planet Earth happened at that point, and the fields metaphorically started to be ploughed. There is an issue and we're going to call it the way species work with Gaia. This is something that happened simultaneously with the grid creation of Gaia. For now we give you something that no one has thought about. When we speak of the grids of the planet, you make an assumption that these grids always existed on the planet. For the planet is old and you might say, "Well the grids have always been there." But I'm here to tell you that only one was always there, and that's the magnetic grid. But it was spiritually void. That is to say, it only had that which was created from the Earth's core movement. Today, when we talk about the grids of the planet, our conversation involves the consciousness of humanity, which is imbued upon the magnetic grid. We also tell you about the Crystalline Grid and about the Grid of Gaia consciousness. Both of these react to Human compassion.

Now, here is the puzzle: If you don't have divine Human consciousness, then what about the grids? Do they exist without the Human Being? The answer is that they needed to be created simultaneously with the seeding of divine DNA. So what the Pleiadians did was not only to start the seeds of humanity's change into divine DNA, but they created the conscious grids of Gaia as well. They had to, for the conscious grids of Gaia are a confluence of humanity's decisions brought to Gaia's energy. The consciousness that we are talking about is the spiritually sanctioned Human Being that exists with a piece of God inside him, and with DNA that has 23 chromosomes instead of the common 24 that all the others have through biological evolution.

Let us back up and say it again and make it simpler, my partner [admonition to Lee to speak more plainly]. The triad of grids on this planet that we have spoken of over and over are the consciousness grids of Gaia, and were created at the same time as the seeding of humanity with Pleiadian DNA. For all the teachings we've been giving, especially about the Crystalline Grid, these grids have been reacting to Human consciousness and compassion. Therefore, the very essence of the current Gaia energy is also related to the creation of humanity.

These are the attributes of the Pleiadians work 200,000 years ago, and it was done quantumly in ways that you have no conscious awareness of at the moment. For these things are beyond your ability to understand right now, since you are still in a single-digit dimensionality. But the result back then was "a conscious Gaia." So you might say Gaia itself was actually created quantumly from the Seven Sisters energy, just like you.

The Gaia that existed before then was still Gaia, but not as it is now. It was a Gaia that was creating the dirt on the earth and the energy of biological life of the earth. It was the mother of all life on the planet, but not a Gaia that responded to Human consciousness. That's very different. So Gaia greatly expanded when the Pleiadians came, and that was by design.

It took 110,000 years for this to settle itself, and for the ground to be ready for more than 16 species of Human Beings to leave so that only one was left. When that occurred at approximately 90,000 years ago is when you can start calibrating who Humans were and who they became.

The Others

Now, what about all of those other types of Humans, and how did they leave? I'm  going to give you an attribute of something that exists even today. This is difficult for my partner, for he has not heard this before. This information has not been brought in this fashion before. Go slowly, my partner.

The variety of species on this planet comes and goes accordingly as they are needed for the energy they create. So one of the tasks of Gaia is to create and eliminate species. When they are no longer needed for the purpose of Gaia's development, they cease to exist and they die out. If new life is necessary, if new concepts of life are needed, Gaia is cooperative and they are then created. The actual creation of species is something that environmentalists have not clearly seen. That is to say the mechanics of how it works is not fully recognized as something that is strongly coordinated with your weather. But you have already seen the mechanics of some of this in your long-term studies, for you have already noted the coming and going of many species through the ages. It's ongoing.

The Appropriateness of the Elimination of Species

Now, along come Humans and they see all this coming and going of living things, but they want to save them all - all the species that exist. For in their linear mind, all species should remain and exist, since they are here. The attribute of Gaia, however, is to eliminate them, cull them out, to bring in new ones. I just gave you the mechanics of the reasons species come and go. It's appropriate and is a natural building process for new species.

When the Pleiadians started to create the grids of the planet, Gaia cooperated in what was to come, knew the purpose, and what was needed for survival of this new spiritual Human. Gaia knew this since the energy of Gaia had seen it before [reason given below]. So the old attribute, which needed many kinds of Human Beings, slowly died out. It was natural. There was not a war. There were no horrible plagues. There were no volcanoes or tsunamis that consumed them. Through attrition, appropriateness, and 110,000 years, they disappeared.

So approximately 110,000 years ago, there was only one kind left, and this is science, for everything that you study will bear this out, and anthropologists have already seen it and have asked, "What happened back then at this time that would have eliminated these other kinds of Human variety?" It's a puzzle in science that I have just answered, for science looks only for physical events as triggers. But instead, it's the marriage of Gaia consciousness that you call "Mother Nature," which facilitated this. It's the same today when you see a variety of species diminish as Humans take over a greater portion of the earth. I'll call this "the appropriate elimination of unique life forms, which allow for the growth of global awareness and quantum evolution." Some species only exist to allow others to climb the ladder of nature, then they disappear. Gaia knows what the ladder looks like. You don't. ... ”

"The Big Picture - You Are Not Alone" - Feb 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll) - (Text version)