Bruce H. Lipton
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 Each wave of extinction nearly wiped out all life on the planet. Some researchers believe, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, that we are "deep" into the sixth mass extinction. Unlike the others caused by galactic forces such as comets, the current extinction is being caused by a force much closer to home—humans. As you sit on your porch and watch the sunset, note its spectacular color. The beauty in the sky reflects the pollution in the air. As the world we know decays, the Earth promises us an even greater light show.
Meanwhile we are leading lives without a moral context. |
Mark Lynas
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 The sixth mass extinction of life is well under way as global temperatures climb towards three degrees.
The Age of Loneliness has begun. Growing food in the greenhouse
All plants have a thermal tolerance threshold, and the world's major food crops are no exception. Grains are particularly vulnerable to heat during flowering and setting seed, and temperatures over 30°C cause an escalating pattern of damage. |
| In North America too, one degree of climate change could push a threatened species over the brink to extinction - and this one is cute and furry. According to WWF, pikas - small, hamsterlike creatures with rounded ears and bushy whiskers - are the first mammal to be endangered by climate change. |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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 The plant is a protected species and is in danger of extinction.
Preparation: To prepare an infusion, pour boiling water over 2 to 10 g drug and strain after 10 minutes.
Daily Dosage: The average daily dose is 3 g drug. The dosage of the infusion when used as a broncholytic is 1 cup, 3 to 4 times daily. literature
Bendz G, Lindberg G. Note on the Pigments of Some Drosera Species. Acta Chem Scand. 24; 1082-1083. 1970
Budzianowski J. Naphthohydroquinone glucosides of Drosera rotundifolia and D. intermedia from in vitro cultures. Phytochemistry 42 (4); 1145-1147. 1996
Budzianowski J. |
Mark Lynas
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| As the ecologist and pika enthusiast Dr Erik Beever puts it: 'We're witnessing some of the first contemporary examples of global warming apparently contributing to the local extinction of an American mammal at sites across an entire eco-region.'
It has become something of a cliche to talk about the 'canary in the coal mine' when discussing climate impacts on the natural world - but one group of animals more than any other exemplifies this point: the amphibians. |
Dr. Michael Heinrich, Joanne Barnes, Simon Gibbons and Elizabeth M. Williamson
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 Coptis teeta Wallich [Mishmi (gold thread), Ranunculaceae] is an example of a species under threat of extinction due to over-exploitation. It is found in the eastern Himalayan regions, particularly a small mountainous region of Arunachal Pradesh in north-eastern India. The rhizome is a prized medicinal commodity and is used for gastrointestinal complaints and malaria. However, it has been brought close to extinction by deforestation and over-exploitation. Conservation schemes have been proposed, but it is too early to be certain whether the species can be saved from extinction. |
Mark Lynas
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| Indeed, an amphibian - the Costa Rican golden toad - is often cited as the first known case of a global warming extinction.
Once the 'jewel in the crown' of Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest (to paraphrase the scientist and author Tim Flannery), this Day-Glo orange amphibian was observed in its hundreds back in 1987, gathered around pools in the forest in preparation for mating. But there were already signs of danger: the amphibian expert Marty Crump, who witnessed this last golden toad mating frenzy, also watched the resulting eggs get left behind as the forest pools dried. |
Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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 It turned out that the meat of the flying fox bat was a prized Chamorro delicacy, so much so that the local animal population was hunted to the point of extinction in the years preceding the decline in the Parkinsonism epidemic. Cycad served as a key natural food source for the Guam flying fox; furthermore, BMAA toxin bio-accumulated in the animal's flesh.90 This accumulation occurred without apparent harm to the bat but seemed to explain the dire consequences for humans higher up the food chain. |
Mark Lynas
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| The lesson is as clear as it is daunting: if we are to save humanity and the planet from the worst mass extinction of all time, worse even than that at the end of the Permian, we must stop at two degrees.
So can we make it? I mentioned earlier that the crossing of the Arctic 'tipping point' (particularly the loss of the 'solar mirror' of sea ice) may drive the planet into higher levels of warming whatever we do now. Experts are not agreed on this, however. One academic analyst has calculated that there is only a 7 per cent chance that we already have crossed the two-degree line. |
John J. Ratey, MD
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 The answer lies in a neurological process called fear extinction. While we can't erase the original fear memory, we can essentially drown it out by creating a new memory and reinforcing it. By building up parallel circuitry to the fear memory, the brain creates a neutral alternative to the expected anxiety, learning that everything is OK. By wiring in the correct interpretation, the trigger is disconnected from the typical response, weakening the association between, say, seeing a spider and experiencing terror and a racing heart. Scientists call it reattribution. |
Dr. Arthur Janov
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 The difference between a feeling therapy and a cognitive one is the difference between cure and extinction of a symptom—between cure and palliation, cure and denial, between cure and self-deception, and between appearances and essences. It is the difference between emotions and ideas, of a holistic approach versus the treatment of fragments. It is the difference between a therapy of recall and a therapy of reliving. (We need to keep in mind that real remembering is something organic; we remember with all of us.) The danger in therapy is what the patient cannot recall. |
Anne Harrington
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 It cannot harm and may comfort and avoid the too quick extinction of opiate efficacy."67
Such sentiments, however, were by 1945 already the talk of a fading generation. Medicine was in the process of changing, transforming itself into a practice rooted in the laboratory. It was also in the first stages of claiming for itself an entirely new arsenal of pharmaceutical interventions, from new analgesics to new antibiotics. |
Joerg Gruenwald, Ph.D.
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| The plant is a highly protected species and is in danger of extinction.
Preparation: To prepare an infusion, pour boiling water over 1 to 2 g drug and strain after 10 minutes.
Daily Dose: The average daily dose is 3 g drug. The dosage of the infusion when used as a broncholytic is 1 cup, 3 to 4 times daily.
LITERATURE
Ayuga C et al, (1985) An R Acad Farm 51(2):321.
Budzianowski J et al., Ellagic acid derivatives and further naphthoquinones from Dionea muscipula and four species of the genus Drosera in vitro cultures. In: PM 59(7):A654. 1993. |
Charles Barber
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 Buddhism—2,500 years old compared to CBT's fifty—is based on the Four Noble Truths: (1) life is full of suffering; (2) the root cause of suffering is attachment to worldly things and worldly ideas; (3) it is possible to cease suffering, based on the extinction of and detachment from one's attachments; and (4) the pathway out of suffering is to follow the Eightfold Noble Path, which includes mindfulness and concentration. In its preoccupation with suffering and its relief, Buddhism has a natural resonance with mental health and psychiatry. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Bauer, of Creighton University, Nebraska, who reported on October 26, 1934: "Due to susceptibility to tuberculosis and other diseases the average life span of the Eskimo of Alaska is only 20 years and their race is doomed to extinction within a few generations unless modern medical science comes to their aid." The Masai tribes of East Africa live on mostly cows' blood and milk, and meat. Their average life span is 60. A typical 45-year-old man looks about 20 to 30 years older. |
Mark Lynas
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| As Chief Gary Harrison told the UN Climate Change Conference in Montreal in December 2005: 'Arctic indigenous peoples are threatened with the extinction or catastrophic decline of entire bird, fish and wildlife populations, including species of caribou, seals, and fish critical to our food security. Climate change threatens to deprive us of our rights, of our rights to sustain ourselves as we have done for thousands of years.'
Unlike animals and plants, however, the Arctic's indigenous human inhabitants can fight back. |
David R. Montgomery
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 Despite the occasional mass extinction, life and soils symbiotically grew and diversified through climate changes and shifting arrangements of continents.
As soil completes the cycle of life by decomposing and recycling organic matter and regenerating the capacity to support plants, it serves as a filter that cleanses and converts dead stuff into nutrients that feed new life. Soil is the interface between the rock that makes up our planet and the plants and animals that live off sunlight and nutrients leached out of rocks. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 If these chemicals cause serious reproductive abnormalities and potential extinction in wildlife, what do they do to us?
In 2002, the first nationwide study of man-made chemicals and hormones in 139 streams revealed that 80 percent of streams tested were contaminated. Several of the chemicals examined are known or suspected of disrupting the hormone systems of animals and people. Of these, only a small fraction have been regulated at all, much less tested for toxicity, persistence in the environment, or other harmful characteristics, such as hormone disruption. |
David Steinman
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 I thought of myself as on the brink of psychic near extinction and nullification and that nothing good could happen. I guessed all throughout the life trip, I'd been one of those desperate seekers of inspiration of the successful comeback. Costa Rica was nothing, if not the ecological comeback kid of Planet Earth.
"Where are you going?"
A DFW skyhop picked me up in his electric cart.
I boarded my flight, and we landed a few drinks later. I walked out of the terminal into the warm humid air. I saw Europeans, especially Germans, everywhere, more Europeans and Asians than Americans. |
| Pimm and Clinton Jenkins, conservation, ecology, and extinction investigators from the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, wrote that the world's three remaining tropical forests and twenty-five "hot spots" harbor "most of the world's species of plants and animals."44 Indeed, more than half the animal species in the world live in rain forests.45 Only a single square mile of Amazon rain forest is home to up to fifteen hundred species of butterfly. |
Brigitte Mars, A.H.G.
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 Because of its light salmon color, the wood of the tree was once in such demand for the making of walking sticks and umbrellas that the tree became in danger of extinction. It has also been used to make magic wands, burned as an incense to attract prosperity, and worn in medicine bags as a protective amulet. A dish of allspice berries placed in a sick room can lift the patient's spirit and help prevent the spread of infection. Allspice essential oil is used in perfumery, mens' cologne, and mouthwash. |
Bruce H. Lipton
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| One of the new studies concludes that the "natural world is experiencing the sixth, major extinction event in its history." [Lovell 2004] This time though, the cause of the extinctions is not extraterrestrial. According to one of the study's authors, Jeremy Thomas: "As far as we can tell this one is caused by one animal organism—man."
Walking the Talk of Cells
In my years of teaching in medical school, I had come to realize that medical students in an academic setting are more competitive and backbiting than a truckload of lawyers. |
| Some researchers believe, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, that we are "deep" into the sixth mass extinction. Unlike the others caused by galactic forces such as comets, the current extinction is being caused by a force much closer to home—humans. As you sit on your porch and watch the sunset, note its spectacular color. The beauty in the sky reflects the pollution in the air. As the world we know decays, the Earth promises us an even greater light show.
Meanwhile we are leading lives without a moral context. |
Carlo Petrini
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 That is, indeed, a very serious picture, and it led the director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, to speak of "mortgaging the future" and of "thresholds of mass extinction":
Over the past fifty years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber, and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. |
Alex Steffen
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 Popular in the early twentieth century, the breed has teetered on the edge of extinction for years. Martins first became interested in rare, heritage breeds while raising and distributing 1,500 Bourbon Reds through Slow Food USA's [see Doing the Right Thing Can Be Delicious, p. 51] Heritage Turkey Project. The undertaking proved that it takes only a modest boost in the market to save a species: even this relatively small surge in demand improved the Bourbon Red's chances for survival; the breed's status went from "rare" to "watch" on conservation lists. |
Alan R. Gaby, M.D., Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., Forrest Batz, Pharm.D. Rick Chester, RPh., N.D., DipLAc. George Constantine, R.Ph., Ph.D. Linnea D. Thompson, Pharm.D., N.D.
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 Modern herbal practitioners now prefer alternatives to goldenseal, since the plant is threatened with extinction due to overharvesting.
Chamomile (page 656), high in the flavonoid (page 516) apigenin, may soothe injured and inflamed mucous membranes. In addition, a test tube study has shown that apigenin inhibits H. pylori?7 and chamazu-lene, another active ingredient in chamomile, reduces free radical activity,38 both potential advantages for people with gastritis. Human clinical trials are needed to confirm chamomile's effectiveness for treating gastritis. |
Alex Steffen
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| The program has brought about a hundred crop species back from the edge of extinction.
Not only has NS/S helped to revive traditional Native American farming in the region—which had all but disappeared—and to preserve the biodiversity of the Southwest, it has boosted the health of the Tohono O'odham Nation's people. The nation, like many other indigenous North American groups, has suffered from endemic diabetes since adopting the typical Euro-American high-fat, high-sugar diet. |
Carlo Petrini
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| Writing about the reports publication, journalist Antonio Cianciullo adopted this very appropriate metaphor:
We are facing ecological bankruptcy and our first possessions are already being pawned: during the last twenty-five years we have seen one in three mangrove forests and one in five coral barriers disappear; two out of every three ecosystems are showing signs of decline; 25 percent of mammals, 12 percent of birds, and 32 percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction. |
Alex Steffen
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| We could easily assemble and maintain a database of names, pictures, and information on species that have gone extinct or are clearly bound for extinction. People can then "adopt" dead species. The membership dues? Tattooing an image of that species (with its Linnaean name) on a visible place on your body.
By doing so, you would agree to become someone who remembers, in a very personal way, that this plant or animal no longer exists, because we killed it—someone who is willing to talk with others about it, to drag the taboo out of the closet and carry it around. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 An article in the Vegetarian Times estimates that current rainforest destruction causes the extinction of approximately 1,000 species per year. For each fast-food quarter-pound hamburger, 55 square feet of the rainforest are destroyed. One hundred species become extinct for 2 billion fast-food burgers sold. The erosion on the land used for livestock in the U.S. accounts for about 85 percent of the 40 million acres of topsoil lost per year. A vegan diet, on the other hand, makes 5 percent of the demand on the soil in the U.S. |
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