THE AGE OF HUMAN DOMINATION
For decades, in scientific and research circles as well as in everyday life, the influence that man has had on planet earth and the functioning of its biodiversity has been discussed. Even at first glance, it is easy to conclude that humanity has influenced the appearance of the planet Earth and the life of all its inhabitants in many different ways. It is a well-known fact that industrialization significantly contributed to the modernization of the world and made life easier for man in many things, and the process of globalization only accelerated dynamic changes that fundamentally changed everything that was known until just a few decades ago. However, one can easily ask the question, to what extent the world has changed under the influence of human hands, and what consequences these changes will have in the future.
One of the most significant studies dealing with this issue, published in 2018, showed that all wild animals make up only about 4.2% of all mammals on planet Earth. If this data is compared with earlier data, the conclusion is reached that in the last 100,000 years, the percentage of wild animals on planet Earth has decreased by 85%. The other 96% of mammals on planet Earth are divided into 36% humans and about 60% farm animals, i.e. animals in the food industry, which are mostly cows (about 35%) and pigs (12%). The same study also showed that 70% of all bird species are farm birds that are used for egg production or for growing meat, while 30% of them are wild birds.
If we look at the entire life on our planet, the study showed that 82% of all living things are plants, 13% are bacteria, while the remaining 5% of living things include all other animals, insects, fungi, and humans. It is hard to imagine that all 8 billion people on planet Earth represent only 0.01% of the living world of our planet, but the fact is that people, even in such a "small" capacity, are responsible for the disappearance of about 83% of plant and animal life. Only 1% of living things on planet Earth are organisms that live in the seas and oceans, and in the last 300 years, humans have been responsible for the decline of about 80% of marine life.
In 2018, the WWF organization also announced the in the last 50 years, humans are responsible for the destruction of 60% of all animal species in the world, and the greatest impact of this is visible in South America, where loss of approximately 90% was recorded. "Depending on which life forms on Earth we are talking about, the current rate of species loss is 100 to 1000 times higher than just a few hundred years ago, that is, since humans started changing the Earth's chemistry and driving other creatures out of existence."
