Andrew Blaustein: We are undergoing an unprecedented extinction event in our time right now where amphibians, many populations throughout the world, are disappearing.
Ecologist Andrew Blaustein told us that scientists have recently learned more about diseases that may be killing millions of frogs and other amphibians.
Andrew Blaustein: One of them is this thing called the chytrid fungus, which is a fungus that really wasn’t well known until about 10 years ago and it seems to be correlated with many of the amphibian declines especially in the tropics.
Although the chytrid fungus and other diseases can spread naturally among frogs, Blaustein noted that human destruction of their habitat is also to blame.
Andrew Blaustein: It could trigger a stress response, and then just like people, frogs can get diseases when they’re stressed.
Frogs eat lots of mosquitoes and flies. So if frogs were to disappear entirely, Blaustein said, we humans would feel the consequences.
Andrew Blaustein: We would have a heck of lot more insect pests around.
And, Blaustein noted, frogs are also important sources of new medicines.
Andrew Blaustein: Frogs are often hopping pharmaceutical systems. They have so many anti-bacterial and anti-viral and anti-fungal compounds on their backs. They’ve even isolated certain kinds of medicine that can slow down the HIV virus.
Blaustein said that if amphibians go extinct it indicates that something’s wrong with the environment.
Andrew Blaustein: If amphibians are affected now, other types of animals can be affected, such as mammals and birds, maybe people.
Blaustein talked about amphibian death as being an indicator of a larger natural phenomenon.
Andrew Blaustein: I think we should be aware that we’re in a major extinction event. It’s called the 6th extinction event right now. We should do everything we can to tell people what’s going on so that if there are human causes for some of these extinction events we can lessen those. It’s really important for a lot of reasons that we preserve our biodiversity
Our thanks to Andrew Blaustein
Andrew Blaustein is a professor in the Department of Zoology and director of the Environmental Sciences graduate program at Oregon State University. Blaustein’s research has focused on amphibians, in particular: the effects of introduced exotic species, the role of environmental contamination and disease, and the impact of ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Blaustein serves on the Board of Directors for the Amphibian Conservation Alliance, based in Washington, D.C.
Photo Credit: Clearly Ambiguous
It appears to me as if one certain thing humanity cannot keeping doing much longer is the very same thing we are so adamantly and foolishly doing now as the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us choose to recklessly speed up the ever increasing, seemingly endless growth of the global economy as well as to deceptively manipulate human beings into going along with a conspicuous per-capita overconsumption and unreserved overpopulation agenda.
If we keep doing what we are doing now and the human community keeps getting what it is getting now, I fear that sooner rather than later everything we are led to believe we are protecting and preserving will be ruined. In the not-too-distant future a distinct probability could exist that one of two colossal calamities will occur. The wanton dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort unless, of course, the world’s ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy (the modern “economic colossus”) continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point humanity’s runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Could we talk about the need for a new vision for life on Earth?
Months ago Andy Revkin of the NYTimes and the Dot Earth community asked the question, “What does humanity do when we grow up?” Dr. Joel Cohen has explained elsewhere how humanity is currently in an adolescent phase of its development and is moving toward maturity. Other experts have suggested that the behavior of people in many places is even more primitive, in the sense of being less grown-up than adolescents and more nearly infantile.
Perhaps another way of coming up with a new vision would be to ask the question, “What might a human world look like when full grown, mature human beings with feet of clay design, construct and organize a new world order in the future?”