Peak Oil News and Message Boards

A new National Academy of Sciences study concludes the planet is facing a real threat of “biological annihilation.” The scientists who carried out the research call the decimation of the world’s large mam- mals a “global epidemic” and say the rate of decline is accelerating. Up to 50 percent of all individual ani- mals have been lost in recent decades. Two-fifths of the 177 mammal species sur- veyed lost more than 80 percent of their range or geographic distribution between 1900 and 2016. The release of this study coincides with news that the world’s population has reached an all-time high of 7.6 billion. In Asia, the world’s most populous continent, three-fourths of the mammal species sur- veyed have lost 80 percent of their range in the last century or so. The fact that animal and human popu- lations are moving in opposite directions