Ripple WJ, Wolf C, Newsome TM, Galetti M, Alamgir M, Crist E, Mahmoud MI, Laurance WF (13 November 2017). "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice"(PDF). BioScience. 67 (12): 1026–1028. doi:10.1093/biosci/bix125. คลังข้อมูลเก่าเก็บจากแหล่งเดิม(PDF)เมื่อ 2019-12-15. สืบค้นเมื่อ 2021-04-17. Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.
Dirzo, Rodolfo; Young, Hillary S.; Galetti, Mauro; Ceballos, Gerardo; Isaac, Nick J. B.; Collen, Ben (2014). "Defaunation in the Anthropocene"(PDF). Science. 345 (6195): 401–406. Bibcode:2014Sci...345..401D. doi:10.1126/science.1251817. PMID25061202. S2CID206555761. In the past 500 years, humans have triggered a wave of extinction, threat, and local population declines that may be comparable in both rate and magnitude with the five previous mass extinctions of Earth’s history.
Hollingsworth, Julia (June 11, 2019). "Almost 600 plant species have become extinct in the last 250 years". CNN. สืบค้นเมื่อ January 14, 2020. The research -- published Monday in Nature, Ecology & Evolution journal -- found that 571 plant species have disappeared from the wild worldwide, and that plant extinction is occurring up to 500 times faster than the rate it would without human intervention.
"Without humans, the whole world could look like Serengeti". EurekAlert!. สืบค้นเมื่อ August 16, 2020. The existence of Africa's many species of mammals is thus not due to an optimal climate and environment, but rather because it is the only place where they have not yet been eradicated by humans. The underlying reason includes evolutionary adaptation of large mammals to humans as well as greater pest pressure on human populations in long-inhabited Africa in the past.
Stokstad, Erik (5 May 2019). "Landmark analysis documents the alarming global decline of nature". Science (ภาษาอังกฤษ). AAAS. สืบค้นเมื่อ 26 August 2020. For the first time at a global scale, the report has ranked the causes of damage. Topping the list, changes in land use—principally agriculture—that have destroyed habitat. Second, hunting and other kinds of exploitation. These are followed by climate change, pollution, and invasive species, which are being spread by trade and other activities. Climate change will likely overtake the other threats in the next decades, the authors note. Driving these threats are the growing human population, which has doubled since 1970 to 7.6 billion, and consumption. (Per capita of use of materials is up 15% over the past 5 decades.)
deBuys, William (March 2015). "The Politics of Extinction – A Global War on Nature". Tom Dispatch. Uncounted species – not just tigers, gibbons, rhinos, and saola, but vast numbers of smaller mammals, amphibians, birds, and reptiles – are being pressed to the brink. We’ve hardly met them and yet, within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth’s biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.
Leakey, Richard; Lewin, Roger (1996). The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN978-0-385-46809-1.
Linkola, Pentti (2011). Can Life Prevail?. Arktos Media. ISBN978-1907166631.
Martin, P. S.; Wright, H. E. Jr, บ.ก. (1967). Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-00755-8.
McCallum, Malcolm L. (2015). "Vertebrate biodiversity losses point to sixth mass extinction". Biodiversity and Conservation. 24 (10): 2497–2519. doi:10.1007/s10531-015-0940-6. S2CID16845698.
Newman, Lenore (2019). Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food. ECW Press. ISBN978-1770414358.
Nihjuis, Michelle (23 July 2012). "Conservationists Use Triage to Determine Which Species to Save and Not". Scientific American.