I have always loved nature and am fascinated by the variety of birds and animals that exist on this planet, as well as the numerous varieties of plants. And it saddens me to see a species totally disappear as it becomes extinct.
On April 28, 2005, conservationists and government officials held a news conference that made headlines around the world. Their bombshell announcement: The ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought extinct, had been rediscovered in bottomland forest in Arkansas. The bird had last been seen in 1944. Here was an example of the phoenix-like rebirth of a “lost” species - an icon of the great old-growth forests of the Deep South and a species that had charmed the imaginations of great American naturalists from John James Audubon to Roger Tory Peterson. There are very few natural history stories over the last century that equal this one for the excitement, joy and amazement it generated.
Now, some 16 years later, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has issued another announcement, formally declaring the ivory-billed woodpecker to be extinct. Most of those in the know will not be surprised, though the finality of the story is causing sadness.
So what happened over that time span to change governmental and scientific opinion? It is very simple actually. Over the passage of those years, researchers were never able to locate and document a living population of the bird. Either the tiny relict population had winked out, or the original sightings had been in error.
The context of the rediscovery is worth recalling. In 2005, Americans continued to reel from the horrors of 9/11, as well as despair over the quagmire of Uniyed States-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Good news was in short supply. The ivory bill announcement gave our nation something about which to be joyful. Every national news broadcast featured the story, as did practically every newspaper on Earth.
This over-the-top reaction is still surprising. Think about it: We are talking about a rare forest-dwelling bird that even in the best of times would be seen by very few. In fact, this is the prototypical example of “existence value," the economic term for the satisfaction that people feel from knowing that something important to them continues to exist. Americans, it turned out, cared about the ivory bill, and rejoiced in the knowledge of its rediscovery.
Just having the big woodpecker alive in a swamp near Brinkley, Arkansas, made people happy. So the positive lesson from this episode is that species are important - more important than our politicians would like to acknowledge.
Conservative cost-cutters in Congress and prior administrations have sought to defund Endangered Species Act. Our citizenry, however, wants to see concrete action taken to keep species from dying out and becoming extinct. Endangered Species Act’s success in the recovery of the bald eagle, osprey, whooping crane and California condor has been applauded by the country at large. Americans do not want to lose their most iconic wildlife species.
That is encouraging. But the recent ivory bill story confirms a grim reality. Largely lost in the news coverage is the fact that Fish and Wildlife Service announcement actually mentioned 22 other species that have gone extinct, a list that crosses taxonomic classes and broad geographies, from Hawaii to Mississippi. There is no longer any denying the start of the great extinction pulse that is taking off in our Anthropocene era - the Earth’s sixth major extinction. According to Fish and Wildlife Service, we are losing plants, birds, fish, crustaceans, mollusks and mammals at an alarming rate.
In reality, this list merely hints at the losses we have already incurred - because it is so hard to document the disappearance of a species. Many species of bees and other arthropods will have been lost long before they ever even make it onto the endangered species list. The arthropod extinction crisis is just beginning to be recognized, and the scale of loss may be enormous. The same may apply to plants.
Because our society’s industries focus mainly on supplies of petroleum, coal and metals, we tend to forget about the importance of living species to our civilization’s well-being. But recall that even coal and petroleum are resources produced by living species, and that all of our critical foods and fibers are generated by them as well. The extinction crisis is threatening the diversity of the biological life-forms that comprise the ecological base upon which we live. Networks of species perform the ecosystem services that support our living biosphere - forming the foundation of a healthy existence for humankind on planet Earth.
We should mourn the loss of the ivory-billed woodpecker. But after mourning, we need to gin up our anger and get busy taking action to halt further declines to our most treasured species - as well as those we hardly know. In fact, the extinction pulse is being driven, in large part, by the climate crisis. To combat species loss, we need to address climate change. And to ensure greater climate resiliency, we need to preserve all species, great and small.
To date, our stewardship over the world’s biodiversity and ecological systems has been lackluster at best. As a result, we now face the environmental one-two punch of climate change and species loss.
The crisis is here.
What are we going to do about it?
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