We are not edging up to a mass extinction

I walk around the grounds I live at, it's a small mixed-use farm in western NJ surrounded by a nature preserve that's left to go wild. My landlord holds a PHD in ag science, so we have some unusual trees (stuff like metasequoia, which was thought to be extinct until getting discovered in one valley in China) and plants that grow here. When I get stressed out, I walk around and forage and note the types of plants.

One of the more remarkable trees that grows along the back is a lone American chestnut, it's actually large enough to produce chestnuts. I tell people, this is a tree that made up something like 25% of the trees in the Appalachian region, they numbered in the billions up until the time of our great-grandparents. Now there's just a few hundred, that's it! A fungal blight that gets carried by oak trees will prevent survival of 99.9%+ American chestnuts. There's also a Chinese chestnut here, they are resistant to the blight. However, I've heard they don't taste the same, so I'll do battle this year against the squirrels in hopes of collecting a harvest of the chestnuts the world forgot.

A short walk away a prickly vine with triangular leaves covers around an acre of forest undergrowth. It produces brilliantly blue berries. I learned about it a week ago when I spotted it for the first time at a place I used to frequent as a child. I searched for it since it has such a distinct look. It's a tearthumb. Edible, but highly invasive from China. I could never hope to pull all of it out since it's so fibrous and named after what it does to your hands if you grab it. Where it doesn't spread by growing, birds and rivers carry the berries miles away. Freshwater boaters seem to have been highly efficient at moving them around the region (I theorize the vines grow onto boat trailers, then the boaters drop them in lakes... and the berries float off to take root on a nearby shore)

I think of the place I saw the tearthumb for the first time, it was covering a forest clearing that had been created in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy. There had been ash trees there, but the emerald ash borer and the invasive undergrowth have ruled out replanting ash and made it tough to plant new native trees. So no more ash in the future, going the same way as the chestnut.

Coyotes couldn't cut it in NJ, but they evolved/adapted into something else that could take down larger prey and live closer to people. A large coywolf was gulping down peaches a few weeks back just a few hundred yards from my house. I ask the landlord (he's 88 with 84 years spent here)... "Should we think about shooting it?". The answer is pragmatic, "So long as they don't linger around people, they are good to have to regulate the deer population." I'm OK with this, the whitetail population is out of control here and there simply are not enough predators (or hunters).

I drove out to Pennsylvania today to go to a viewing. A spotted lanternfly landed by my feet in the parking lot. Girlfriend stomped it with her boot and we end up killing 5 or 6 before realizing this is a futile battle. These hitched a ride somehow and live on another invasive tree called the Tree of Heaven (or Hell, or ghetto palm). They have ruining the vinyards in the region but haven't made it out to where I live yet. I begin to wonder if Pennsylvania brought China any such comparable natural calamity, or if it's just the tear gas they send to HK causing enough misery.

Fall will come soon, and with it a new round of camel crickets will emerge from basements and wells. The brown marmorated stinkbug will try to force its way into my house to overwinter, and by Halloween numerous asian ladybugs will suddenly appear one day. It's a new, unbalanced reality we live in that the native species haven't fully adapted to.

But it doesn't mean the native species won't adapt. I mentioned that our landlord is very old, but just the other day he speaks of a black walnut tree that he planted years back. Now it must be understood, we have legions of squirrels that live here: from grey to red and even flying. Apparently, they wouldn't touch this tree for over a decade. We're at the edge of its natural range, so maybe they didn't consider it food? At some point, they changed behavior and now eat it. I've thought the same about the stinkbugs: The first years we were inundated with thousands entering households (I want to say it was 2013 or 2014 that were the particularly bad years). I've wondered if birds and other animals figured out it was food since there's maybe only a dozen that will make it in the whole season now where it had been hundreds before. I even trained my parent's dog to eat them by pointing them out!

Eliminating all the megafauna there (leaving only bears and, depending on how you count, moose and bison) should count for something.

The article is correct that these extinctions and near-extinctions are not themselves a disaster for the natural world, which after a million years would hardly differ, so much as indicators of criminal mismanagement of our own behavior.

Yes, 99.99% of all species to ever exist are extinct but we are pulling species out that would have continued if not for us. Denying this will only make it worse in our soundbite culture.