A man pulls from his pocket a futuristic, streamlined flat metallic box that has been constructed in China but filled with chemical components dug from great underground mines in what was once a vast, unspoilt South American wilderness. Looking through a glass screen, forged with heat produced from the burning of 400m-year-old fossil swampbeds, the man considers the question he would like to type into his metal box, a request that would involve it interacting remotely with an air-conditioned server room in a data centre in coastal Finland. He types the question “Why do animals go extinct?” and there is a silent pause before the universe shatters with irony into a million pieces.
It’s easy to point the finger at humans when talking about the global extinction crisis. But the first thing to say about extinctions is that they are not new and they aren’t always our fault. When one looks at the great chapters of life written within layers of strata, for instance, one sees extinction is rather a common phenomenon in the history of life on Earth. In fact, of all of the species preserved as fossils, 99.9% belong to extinct groups. That means, to a close approximation, that all life is extinct, as Prof Norman MacLeod at London’s Natural History Museum puts it.
So why is extinction so common? Bluntly, species are replaced. They are outcompeted by new arrivals: squashed out by new species built by an unthinking agent we call natural selection. Individual by individual, we imagine, species may have been starved out by competitors, or roughed up by storms, droughts, floods, novel diseases, parasites or, perhaps most often, a combination of all of these things. Many species will last 5m or 6m years, however, so they are hardly a flash in the pan, but their inevitable decline will nearly always arrive. Everything alive is in the grip of extinction. It is just a matter of degree.
Extinction isn’t always doom and gloom, either. It can be exciting. It is enthralling to consider that there was a time when the last Tyrannosaurus rex, the last dodo or the last woolly rhinoceros walked the Earth, blissfully unaware of his or her status as an “endling”, a rather sweet word used to describe the individual representing the end of their species’ line.
Humans, as it happens, have come to know a few endlings during our brief time on Earth. Only recently, our grandparents and great grandparents, for instance, shared a world where the endlings of Tasmanian tigers, passenger pigeons, quaggas, sea minks, Tacoma pocket gophers, great auks, slender-billed grackles and flightless wrens walked the Earth. Each one eventually perished, pushed out by rats, hunters, cats, goats and pigs or over-zealous zoo-keepers. But still, to our grandparents and great grandparents, extinctions such as these were rare events. Fables, almost.
Instead, theirs was an age that would have celebrated animals for their hardiness. Their tenacity, even. Their God-given ability to live and breed and (in the case of fish) to throw themselves into our nets to sustain humanity, seemingly forever. These were the glory days, when humankind could get away with imagining that, on the whole, nearly all modern animals might last forever. If only it could have continued like that.
We now live in an age where, of course, scientists regularly count animals. We started keeping lists and monitoring nature. Through conservation science, we became the proverbial God that chalks up the fate of each and every sparrow and songbird. And their dwindling numbers shamed us from the clouds back down to Earth.
Nowadays, through conservation science, the message we read is loud and clear. Many extinctions are looming. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2016, 13% of all bird species, 25% of all mammals and perhaps as much as 50% of amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction. They are on their way out. Even insects, a family that not even a meteorite could topple, are feeling the strain.
What are the causes of these declines, then? You know the answer to that, I’m sure. If not, where have you been? Habitat loss, overfishing, bycatch, desertification, the illegal wildlife trade, poaching, poisoning, invasive wildlife diseases, invasive parasites, invasive predators, climate change – the list is familiar to anyone who cares enough to listen. And that’s the bigger question, right? None of this really matters unless we add context. Do we care about extinction? This is the more important question, I believe. Animals go extinct for a hundred reasons, and many of them, in the modern day, are because of us. But do we really care?
And so we reach the end. There is an epilogue. That man at the top of this piece picks up his stream-lined metal box again, and asks Google whether extinctions matter. Google thinks it over. The man waits. The man waits a few more moments, his eyes locked to the screen. Google throws up the opinions of a thousand opinion pieces like this one. He looks all around him at birds and bees and butterflies and everything else. He turns off his phone. And then he finds the answer.
