I have had discussions with people who don’t think that extinction of species is as big a deal as conservationists want to make out.
Mass extinctions are not uncommon in the history of the earth. We just happen to be living at the time a mass extinction. No harm. No foul.
But really it’s no fowl.
I think the most profound question about extinction is one I often hear politicians make about national debt or the strength of social insurance programs: Surely you don’t want to leave behind that much debt for our children? Surely you want social security to be around for future generations?
The concept of “generational theft” can also be brought to bear on the question of extinction.
There are many animals that I’ve never seen alive.
I came to late to see a sea mink slinking along a rocky Maine shore, and I came too late to see the skies blacken with passenger pigeons and Eskimo curlews. I will never be able to visit the Falklands and see that unique island wolf that once roamed its beaches, and I will never know what it’s like to hear the Carolina parakeets, the great North American conure, flit through the forests of West Virginia.
These animals have all been robbed from me by the previous generations.
But I cannot go back in time and tell them to stop the madness. They were merely operating within the cultural frameworks of their time. Nature’s bounty appeared to be limitless, and then came the fall.
Even the scientists of the day weren’t aware of what they were doing.
A case in point is the great auk, a giant flightless sea bird that was native to the North Atlantic. It swam and dived much like the penguins of the southern oceans, but it was more agile than a penguin in the water.
The great auk was in the family of sea birds that includes the puffins, the murres, and guillemots. All living birds in the family can fly, but the great auk could not. As a result, the great auk was forced to nest on remote islands with sloping approaches to the sea. All the other birds in the family could fly into jagged rocks that protruded from the sea, but the great auk was greatly handicapped in this regard.
To make matters worse, there were only a finite number of such islands in the whole North Atlantic, and each summer, they would become jammed with throngs of giant black-and-white birds.
Sailors on fishing and whaling ships were quick to notice the boon that came from fat birds laying nice, plump eggs on easily accessed islands. Not only could they kill the birds and eat them, they could also collect their eggs. And if a whaling ship needed a bit more oil to top off its stores, it could render down some auks into oil. Fishermen used the meat for bait, and down collectors found its down a good substitute for eider.
In the early nineteenth century, its population crashed, and every naturalist worth his salt demanded eggs and skins of adults for taxidermy. There was a rush to kill as many auks as possible and to collect as many eggs. Every gentleman naturalist wanted specimens and eggs for study, and the fishermen and whalers were happy to provide them.
It was in this madness that the last of the great auks were killed on the island of Eldey off the coast of Iceland. The extinction of the great auk happened when three Icelandic fishermen came across a pair of the auks tending to their single egg. Two men killed the adults, and the third man, perhaps angry that there were only two birds to be had, smashed their egg with his boot.
This attack happened on July 3, 1844, and that date is rather unique. It is one of the few times we know the very second of an extinction. Those auks were the last two birds of their kind, and they were killed in the name of scientific curiosity.
This story has been dramatized in so many books that it’s almost reached legendary status.
It’s because this is one of the few times we know exactly when the generational theft was complete.
Reading account after account of how numerous great auks were in the North Atlantic, my imagination is piqued.
What would have been like to see the great assemblages of auks on their islands?
It’s something I will never see. It’s something that I can only read about in books and conjure up in the back of my mind.
A piece of me is angry that the great auk was allowed to go extinct in this fashion, but it is that anger that I realize a simply moral truism.
What if someday, future generations look back on us and wonder why we didn’t do enough to stop the tiger or the cheetah from becoming extinct?
Extinction for both of these cats is a very real possibility, and if they do go, we will be as much robbers as the men who took the lives of the last auks.
Knowing what we know now, don’t we at least owe it to future generations to try to preserve a bit.
Is that too much to ask?
Or are we so consumed with ourselves that we can’t try to save a bit?
The answer to that question is the one that will show us who we were to the historians of the future.
Were we able to hold forth on our engines of progress just a bit to allow a few truly remarkable wild things survive?
Or were we took caught up in the desire to subdue it all?
We are never going to return to the mythic age before man. Many anti-conservationists scoff at the strawman that claims that all conservationist want to do is destroy civilization and return it back to the days when all things were wild and untouched.
So long as humans exist on the planet, that goal can never be achieved, and all conservationists know this.
But just because we cannot return to the true ecological Garden of Eden doesn’t mean we can’t try to preserve what we can.
To refuse to do otherwise is to be comfortable with a terrible kind of generational theft.
I certainly am not.
Exactly! I personally feel robbed, deprived. Though I regret not being able to see them, somehow I don’t feel deprived of the dinosaurs or other animals that disappeared due to natural extinction events. But the fact that I can’t experience the species you name because of the avarice and short-sightedness of people–my ancestors–who decided not to care about the future (me, my children, my granddaughter) makes me furious–always has.
What will our progeny, 50, 100, 1,000 years in the future think of us? What will they call us…perhaps the wastrel generations? Will they curse us? Or will they be ignorant of/numb to the prospect of what might have been, beggared figuratively as well as literally? How will we of the 19th through 21st Centuries be remembered in the history books? Not in a kindly manner I suspect.
B-b-but, some say, we are at the verge of being able to recreate these species from bits and pieces of DNA. Fine, and where will these resurrected species live, zoos, or game farms catering and available only to the uber-wealthy? Who will teach these creatures how to live and prosper? Who will they breed with…their clones?
Eventually, we too will probably be just a layer in the fossil record and the ecosphere will heal. But till then we will have impoverished the legacy of those who will follow us. We have (and continue to do so) “sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.”
(And that’s my not so humble opinion.)
I think it is only going to get worse. If we keep up the practices of today’s “energy” companies who are ruining the land to sell our natural gas overseas to the highest bidders (China and Europe) we will have to stop our denial about our actions: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/fracking-water-killed-trees-study-finds/?_r=0
How many species are being done in with these bad practices of setting fracking fluids in large pools to evaporate into the air… methane regularly being released… The NY Times is one of the few legitimate news centers that is fighting these energy companies by publishing the horrors that are going on in our country regarding fracking. What are the long term effects of breaking up the shale beneath the ground? There is even fracking within the Los Angeles city boundaries where there are many earth quakes…
It’s not just the animal kingdom, its the environment that supports all of it. Very scary…
I could post many articles but this is one I think you might want to read: http://tinyurl.com/ndl53my
I find it very upsetting.
They just don’t seem to get it. Fossil fuels are a dead end–literally. We now have viable alternatives. Short-term greed is the only thing holding us back. This is truly a “limited-time offer.”
What is really upsetting is that these energy companies basically own our news here in the states. This should all be on the front page of newspapers and on the network and cable news stations. Our country is being raped so that pockets can be filled and as you stated, this is for the short term. US land and water is being destroyed to sell natural gas to China and Europe. Instead of seeing this information in the news we see some young female singer acting like a degenerate in front of everyone. Our country loves to be entertained and loves to live in denial.
Too bad there is no tomorrow.
All the “green” alternatives relies on materials which will be depleted in the next 5 to 10 years; and the alternative technologies are supposed to be replaced every 20 years.
There’s no way around it: we are screwed no matter the resource.
“And when your kids grow up, and their kids too, and they turn to you and ask
Where are the lions, the cheetah, the killer whales and the great white sharks?
And why can’t we here the howls of wolves across the highlands, the moorlands and the dales?
And you will say
Because our ancestors took the wolves from us, and we took the rest from you.
And when they ask why? You will say
Because they didn’t know.
And not enough of us cared.”
I also recall, with sadness, reading about those extinctions in almost modern times. I recall reading a library book with photos of thylacines shot dead and held up by their feet by grinning Tasmanian farmers. They were ignorant individuals around 1936, but the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginal people, a whole race of human beings, was also done and photographed not much earlier and that was done by a government still under UK colonial direction I believe. Then there was the cultural and almost physical extinction of the native north americans.
Now we are rightly concerned about what is going on in Syria, but I’m old enough also to recall the USA using chemical weapons against the people of Vietnam. Babies are still being born with deformities as a result of that. The world seing a napalmed young girl running with skin falling off her probably was the final catalyst in ending that war. Now we see the USA supporting Israel in its ill treatment of the palestinian people. It just goes on…
One of the saddest sights for me is that old black and white footage of possibly the only thylacine on the planet pacing a zoo cage. The only thing I can imagine that would be more tragic is them succeeding in the cloning of one and seeing colour footage of the only thylacine on the planet.
As for what humans have done to other humans and continue to do, the more I know, the more despair it fills me with.
Yeah, same for me. It’s a terrible feeling of powerlessness to see how recklessly destructive our species can be.
Our immediate ancestors did not begin this. H. sapiens has been at it for millenia.
You may or may not subscribe to Martin’s hypothesis regarding Pleistocene overkill and the Clovis people. You may subscribe to more climatic determinism, or comet impact. The evidence is scant enough that many hypotheses can survive. But there is little question that the now-extinct megafauna would have done a better job surviving climate change and possible impacts if they were not subject to human predation.
It’s pretty clear what happened to the moa in New Zealand.
We make the Clovis were rank amateurs even if they were responsible in the first place. judging by the last 500 years, we’re well on the way to being a mass extinction event in our own right.
Some ecologists think we’ve left the Holocene and are now in a new epoch called the Anthropocene:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/What-is-the-Anthropocene-and-Are-We-in-It-183828201.html
Great article… I would say to the geologists who are looking for changes in the rock layers that all the drilling and breaking up of underground shale provides that…
Thanks for the link, that’s a great article. I used to be a skeptic and think how arogant we were thinking we could affect the environment to such a degree. Then I saw a photo of the earth from space at night and realized what a fool I’d been. If that’s what we can see, what have we affected that we can’t see.
I wonder how long we’ll be in the Anthropocine before we hit the Shitwe’rescrewedcine.