Earth currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, according to scientists | 60 Minutes

in what year will the human population grow too large for the earth to sustain the answer is about 1970 according to research by the World Wildlife Fund in 1970 the planets three and a half billion people were sustainable but on this New Year's Day the population is 8 billion today wild plants and animals are running out of places to live the scientists you're about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs we're going to show you a possible solution but first have a look at

how humanity is already suffering from the vanishing Wild the story will continue in a moment in Washington state the Salish sea helped Feed the World with this weather and the way things feel once I get out here it's time to be fishing that's what it feels like commercial fisherman Dana Wilson supported a family on the Salish Seas legendary wealth of salmon he remembers propellers churning the water off Blaine Washington and cranes straining for the state's 200 million dollar annual catch that used to be a buying station they're gone now they don't buy anymore so that

building over there used to buy salmon they don't buy salmon anymore they're it's it's just it's it's just not here in 1991 one salmon species was endangered today 14 salmon populations are foundering they've been crowded out of rivers by habitat destruction warming and pollution Dana Wilson used to fish all summer today a conservation Authority grants rare fleeting permission to throw a net there was a season there was a season now there's a day there's a day and sometimes it's ours sometimes you might get 12 hours 16 hours that's what we're down to here the vanishing

wild scuttled a way of life that began with native tribes a thousand years ago I don't remember anybody doing anything other than salmon fishing fisherman Armando Briones is a member of the Lummi tribe which calls itself people of the salmon he didn't imagine the Rich Harvest would end with his five fishing boats all of a sudden you're trying to figure out well how am I going to make that paycheck for my family well for me it was like well I have a backup for a backup for a backup for a backup Briones backups include his

new food truck switching to crab fishing and Consulting on cannabis Farms his scramble to adapt is being repeated around the world a World Wildlife Fund study says that in the past 50 years the abundance of global wildlife has collapsed 69 percent mostly for the same reason too many people too much consumption and growth Mania at the age of 90 biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true you seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable oh humanity is not sustainable to maintain our lifestyle yours and

mine basically for the entire planet you'd need five more Earths not clear where they're going to come from just in terms of the resources that would be required resources that would be required the systems that support our lives which of course are the biodiversity that we're wiping out humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we're sawing off in 1968 Ehrlich a biology professor at Stanford became a doomsday celebrity with a bestseller forecasting the collapse of nature when the population bomb came out you were described as an alarmist I was alarmed I am still

alarmed all of my colleagues are alarmed the alarm Ehrlich sounded in 68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine he was wrong about that the Green Revolution fed the world but he also wrote in 68 that heat from greenhouse gases would melt polar ice and Humanity would overwhelm the wild today humans have taken over 70 percent of the planet's land and 70 percent of the fresh water the rate of Extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time we know the rate of Extinction is extraordinarily High because of a study of the fossil

record by biologist Tony barnowsky ehrlich's Stanford colleague the data are Rock Solid I don't think you'll find a scientist that will say we're not in an Extinction crisis barnowsky's research suggests today's rate of Extinction is up to 100 times faster than is typical in the nearly four billion year history of life these Peaks represent the few times that life collapsed globally and the last was the dinosaurs 66 million years ago there are five times in Earth's history where we had mass extinctions and by mass extinctions I mean at least 75 percent three-quarters of the known

species disappearing from the face of the earth now we're witnessing what a lot of people are calling the sixth mass extinction where the same thing could happen on our watch it's a horrific state of the planet when common species the ubiquitous species that we're familiar with are declining Tony barnovsky's colleague in the study of Extinction is his wife biologist Liz Hadley faculty director at Stanford's Jasper Ridge research Preserve in California you know I see it in my mind and it's a really sad state if you spend any time in California you know the loss of

water the loss of water means that there are dead salmon you see in the river right before your eyes but it also means the demise of those birds that rely on the salmon fishery Eagles it means you know things like minks and otters that rely on fish it means that our habitats that we're used to the forests that you know three thousand year old forests are going to be gone so it means silence and it means some very catastrophic events because it's happening so quickly it means you look out your window and three quarters of

what you think ought to be there is no longer there that's what mass extinction looks like what we see just in California is you know the loss of our iconic state symbols we have no more grizzly bears in California the only grizzly bears in California are on the state flag that's our state mammal and they're not here anymore is it too much to say that we're killing the planet I would say it's too much to say that we're killing the planet because the planet's going to be fine what we're doing is we're killing our way

of life the worst of the killing is in Latin America where the World Wildlife Fund studies says the abundance of wildlife has fallen 94 since 1970. but it was also in Latin America that we found the possibility of Hope Mexican ecologist Gerardo cevalos is one of the world's leading scientists on extinction he told us the only solution is to save the one-third of the earth that remains Wild to prove it he's running a 3 000 square mile experiment in the collectible biosphere Reserve near Guatemala he is paying family Farmers to stop cutting the forest we're

going to pay each family certain amount of money that is more than you will get cutting down the forest if you protect it and how much are you paying out every year uh for instance each family here will get around one thousand dollars more than enough here to make up for lost Farmland in total the payouts come to one and a half million dollars a year or about two thousand dollars per square mile the tab is paid through the charity of wealthy donors the investment to protect what is left is I mean really small the

payoff on that investment is being collected on savalios's Jungle cameras thirty years ago the Jaguar was very nearly extinct in Mexico now savalia says they've rebounded to about 600 in the reserve there are other places where there are reserves around the world where they've been able to increase the populations of certain species but I wonder are all these little success stories enough to prevent mass extinction all the big success that we have in protecting forests and recovering animals like tigers in India Jaguars in Mexico elephants in Botswana and so on are an incredible amazing successes

but there are like grains of sand in a beach and to really make a big impact we need to scale up this 10 000 times so they are important because they give us hope but they are completely insufficient to cope with climate change so what would the world have to do what we would have to do is to really understand that the climate change and species Extinction is a threat to humanity and then put all the Machinery of Society political economic and social towards finding solutions to the problems finding solutions to the problems was the

goal two weeks ago at the U.N biodiversity conference where Nations agreed to conservation targets but at the same meeting in 2010 those Nations agreed to limit the destruction of the Earth by 2020 and not one of those goals was met this despite thousands of studies including the continuing research of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich you know that there is no political will to do any of the things that you're recommending I know there's no political will to do any of the things that I'm concerned with which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my

colleagues think we're we've had it that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to in the 50 years since ehrlich's population bomb Humanities feasting on resources has tripled we're already consuming 175 percent of what the Earth can regenerate and consider half of humanity about 4 billion live on less than ten dollars a day they aspire to cars air conditioning and a rich diet but they won't be fed by the fishermen of Washington's Salish sea including Armando Briones the tribe has been fishing salmon here for hundreds of years

yeah and your generation is seeing the end of that it's getting harder and harder um I hate to say I don't want to say it's the end of it why do you feel so emotionally attached to this it's everything we know I'm fortunate enough to know where I know a lot of different things I've done a lot of different things in my life um I've Gotten Good at uh evolving and changing um but not everybody here is built like that and to some of us this is what they know this is all they know the

five mass extinctions of the ancient past were caused by natural calamities volcanoes and an asteroid today if the science is right Humanity may have to survive a sixth mass extinction in a world of its own making