Destroying the world's most successful killing machine

Humans killed by sharks annually: 5.

Sharks killed by humans annually: 100,000,000.

Source, based on this study and others (see comments for more).

This discrepancy points to a common feature of our predicament, the often vast gulf between our usual assumptions (sharks are a dangerous animal) and our rapidly changing situation (during my lifetime, literally billions of sharks have been killed and their populations have fallen off a cliff, declining by somewhere in the region of 90%). The fact that sharks are survivors from the Silurian period (making them roughly twice as old as the oldest dinosaurs! And there is some evidence that they may be even been around during the Ordovician) and yet our actions are having such drastic effects during the blink of a geological eye highlights just how powerful we (collectively) are. We have truly become a force of nature. I get the impression that few people have really grasped emotionally how shocking and radically novel this new situation is.

There seems to me to be a misunderstand claiming a particularly Christian character holding back such understanding, namely, the idea that it is somehow arrogant to think that puny little humans can have such large, planet-wide effects. Yet true humility is really an extension of the virtue of honesty. There is no virtue in pretending to be something other than we are. Romans 12.3 says "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought" but does not go on to say "but think of yourselves as lowly worms, capable of nothing and worth even less". Instead, the second half of the verse is "but rather think of yourself with sober judgment". Sober judgement is what is needed. We have all kinds of reasons to be humble - from dust we came and to dust we return - yet let us acknowledge that various historically novel quantitative developments over the last few decades have brought us into a qualitatively new relationship to the rest of the natural world. To do so is not arrogance, but sober judgement. And when we notice that this relationship is increasingly one of destruction, then the potential for arrogant boasting of our powers is quickly chastised.

The title of world champion apex predator, held for over 400 million years by sharks, is now ceded to homo sapiens sapiens, who will be doing well if we can make it through the next 400 years without being the cause of another mass extinction.

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