NYT- species loss editorial

[Guest guest]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/opinion/15wed4.html?th= & emc=th & pagewanted=prin\

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Watching the Numbers and Charting the Losses — of Species

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Like everyone, I have been reading the graphs and looking at the numbers that

measure the convulsions in the global financial markets. And as I do, I keep

hearing the echo of another frightening set of numbers — the ones that gauge the

precipitous declines in the species that surround us. The financial markets will

eventually come back, but not the species we are squandering.

 

Last week in Barcelona, Spain, the International Union for the Conservation of

Nature released results of a global survey of mammal populations. It concluded

that at least a quarter of mammal species are headed toward extinction in the

near future. Don’t think of this as an across-the-board culling of mammals, of

everything from elephants to the minutest of shrews. The first ones to go will

be the big ones. And among the big ones, the first to go will be primates, which

are already grievously threatened. Nearly 80 percent of the primate species in

southern and southeastern Asia are immediately threatened.

 

The causes are almost all directly related to human activity, including, for

marine mammals, the growing threat of ocean acidification, as the oceans absorb

the carbon dioxide we emit.

 

The numbers are not much better for other categories of life. At least 22

percent of reptile species are at risk of extinction. Perhaps 40 percent of

North American freshwater fish are threatened. In Europe, 45 percent of the most

common bird species are rapidly declining in numbers, and so are the most common

bird species in North America. Similar losses are expected among plants. What is

especially worrying is how much the rate of decline has increased over the past

half-century as the human population has increased.

 

These numbers are shocking in their own right. But they don’t begin to tell the

whole story. These are projections for the most familiar, best studied, most

easily counted plants and animals, which, all told, make up less than 4 percent

of the species on Earth. It is only reasonable to assume that many, if not most,

of the legions of uncounted species are doing as poorly.

 

What complicates matters further is a simple lesson we might also draw from the

present financial crisis: everything is connected. No species goes down on its

own, not without affecting the larger biological community. We emerged, as a

species, from the very biodiversity we are destroying. At times it seems as

though the human experiment is to see how many species we can do without. As

experiments go, it is morally untenable and will end badly for us.

 

The good news here is the same good news as always — the resilience of nature.

Given even the slightest chance, declining species often find a way to recover.

But the bad news is also the same bad news — human irresponsibility. In our

myopic pursuits, we characteristically overlook the possibility of giving

species the chance to recover.

 

We are watching a global, international effort to stabilize the financial

markets. It will take a similar effort to begin to slow the rate at which

species are declining. The bottom line is that what is good for biodiversity is

also good for humanity. This includes protecting habitat and finding ways to

reduce human pressure on other species. It also includes a concerted effort to

slow climate change, which, unchecked, could have a devastating impact on the

entire planet.

 

What we need, really, is a new ability to think selfishly in a slightly

different way. Instead of saving the Sumatran orangutan or the Iberian lynx for

itself, it may make more sense to think of saving them for ourselves — not as

resources to be harvested somewhere down the road or even as repositories of

genetic difference, but as essential elements in the biological complexity from

which we arose and in which we thrive.

 

Without them, we are diminished.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

>Last week in Barcelona, Spain, the International Union for the

>Conservation of Nature released results of a global survey of mammal

>populations. It concluded that at least a quarter of mammal species

>are headed toward extinction in the near future.

 

 

The spin here has gotten a great deal of media attention, as

was the intent of the spinners, in seeking more money for purging

" invasive " species in the name of conservation, but the reality of

the IUCN findings is that what they turned up is nothing more than

what random chance would suggest.

 

That " a quarter of mammal species are headed toward

extinction in the near future " is really just a coin-toss scenario:

at any given time,

half of your flips will come down heads, half will come down tails,

and about half the time you will get either heads or tails twice in a

row.

 

A very few species, presently including many large

charismatic megafauna, are at risk of extinction. We all know about

those situations, and I have spent much of my time for the past 40

years writing about them.

 

However, while the particular species at risk vary by time

and place, the odds are that at any given time and in any given

place about 25% of an order will be in steep decline, 25% will be

steeply increasing in abundance, and 25% each will show either up or

down trends to a more moderate extent.

 

Balancing out the declines in many of the most familiar large

charismatic megafauna, we have rapid proliferation of many others,

including whitetailed deer, pumas, Norway rats, cane rats,

raccoons, feral pigs, coyotes, urbanized rhesus macaques, and

many dozens of others.

 

This hardly means that we should not be worried about the

plight of the whales, elephants, rhinos, all great apes except

ourselves, etc.

 

Their plight, however, is hardly a crisis for the whole of

the mammalian order. The total biomass of mammals and total numbers

of mammals may be greater than at any previous point in history,

albeit that more of the mammals now are anthropoid apes & our direct

dependants, the rats et al, than was the case 100 and 1,000 years

ago.

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

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Fax: 360-579-2575

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