Editor’s Note

Our species Homo sapiens emerged approximately 300,000 years ago. That sounds like a long time ago, until you visualise Earth’s multi-billion-year history as a 24-hour-day starting at midnight. We—modern humans—showed up a few seconds before 23:59.

We are so much younger than all the species featured in this marine and freshwater-themed issue of Current Conservation. Horseshoe crabs are living fossils who have existed for around 450 million years outliving dinosaurs and surviving five mass extinctions. Turtles appeared around 220 million years ago, while cetaceans such as whales, dolphins and vaquitas emerged 50 million years ago.

Yet, the pursuit of infinite economic growth and ‘development’ have wreaked havoc on our rivers and coasts, on the world’s oceans—only five percent of which have been explored—on deep sea creatures from ancient lineages as old as life on Earth, and on the delicate balance of nature. As new entrants on a grand geological timeline, I echo John Green’s question in The Anthropocene Reviewed: “Are we the period at the end of the very long sentence of Earth life, or a comma somewhere in the middle of that sentence?”

- Devathi Parashuram