“60 per cent of the mass of all mammals are domesticated animals - cattle, swine, sheep, horses, cats and dogs. For birds, it is even more stark. Sixty per cent of birds on Earth are from a single species - domesticated chickens. Taken as a whole, the mass of human produced material is, as of 2020, about equal to the mass of living material on earth.
If we were to sample the planet today in the same way that we sample the fossil record, we would look at the distribution of bones, and conclude that something very strange was going on so that so much of the vertebrate biomass was made up of so few species. We would be talking in terms of catastrophic environmental damage, of mass extinction.
Indeed, the biomass of wildlife has declined at a horrifying rate. The world into which Emilio Marcos was born in 1978 was home to 2.5 times as many wild vertebrates as the one in 2018. In a geological snap of the fingers, we have lost more than half of the living individual vertebrates on the planet.”
-Thomas Halliday, Otherlands
