“The trees can’t up and walk. So I think that the long-lived species are going to have a harder time keeping up with these increasing human-derived selection pressures.”

– Sarah Otto, a renowned theoretical biologist at the University of British Columbia

The pressures we have been putting on the natural world are creating a rapid alteration in evolution of species large and small.

“Though few are yet aware of it, it is a global emergency. You have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, of the waters and the soils. And now the world is changing—changing so rapidly, so dangerously, changing now in ways that will affect you more than you realize.”

The Global Emergency

“It’s not evolution like you might have been taught — something that you look into fossil records to track. Now we can track this over the course of days.”

She said when species go extinct due to human pressures, or evolve to survive the world we’ve made, we lose natural “treasures.”

“Evolution is one of the most wondrous aspects of this planet. It’s led to incredible diversity of life,” she said. 

“So to be watching, as the species blink out, and the rest have to adapt to us, it really makes me take pause. I think it should make us all take pause.”

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