ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Circling the drain: the extinction crisis and the future of humanity.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Limited drought tolerance in the neotropical seasonally dry forest plants impairs future species richness.Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) · 2026Article
- Destructive by nature? What human-driven extinctions of mammoths and mastodons mean for today's planetary environmental crisis.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Review
- The silent microbial shift: climate change amplifies pathogen evolution, microbiome dysbiosis, and antimicrobial resistance.Tropical diseases, travel medicine and vaccines · 2025Review
- Global scale assessment of the human-induced extinction crisis of terrestrial carnivores.Science advances · 2025Article
- Best practices for the naming of species.Journal of mammalogy · 2025Article
- Responses of oak seedlings to increased herbivory and drought: a possible trade-off?Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Principles of environmentally sustainable agriculture for building resilient and resource-efficient food systems.Turkish journal of biology = Turk biyoloji dergisi · 2025Review
- One Health Ethics and the Ethics of Zoonoses: A Silent Call for Global Action.Veterinary sciences · 2024Review
- Safeguarding Earth's biodiversity by creating a lunar biorepository.Bioscience · 2024Article
- Freshwater fish and the Cretaceous/Palaeogene boundary: a critical assessment of survivorship patterns.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Underlying and proximate drivers of biodiversity changes in Mesoamerican biosphere reserves.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- What is extinction research?Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Article
- Article
- Russian Biodiversity Collections: A Professional Opinion Survey.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Reimagining infrastructure for a biodiverse future.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Helminths in Invasive Raccoons (Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Additive and interactive effects of anthropogenic stressors on an insect herbivore.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A critical analysis of plant science literature reveals ongoing inequities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humanity has triggered the sixth mass extinction episode since the beginning of the Phanerozoic. The complexity of this extinction crisis is centred on the intersection of two complex adaptive systems: human culture and ecosystem functioning, although the significance of this intersection is not properly appreciated. Human beings are part of biodiversity and elements in a global ecosystem. Civilization, and perhaps even the fate of our species, is utterly dependent on that ecosystem's proper functioning, which society is increasingly degrading. The crisis seems rooted in three factors. First, relatively few people globally are aware of its existence. Second, most people who are, and even many scientists, assume incorrectly that the problem is primarily one of the disappearance of species, when it is the existential threat of myriad population extinctions. Third, while concerned scientists know there are many individual and collective steps that must be taken to slow population extinction rates, some are not willing to advocate the one fundamental, necessary, 'simple' cure, that is, reducing the scale of the human enterprise. We argue that compassionate shrinkage of the human population by further encouraging lower birth rates while reducing both inequity and aggregate wasteful consumption-that is, an end to growthmania-will be required. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.