“The Lord God Bird. R.I.P., Dr. Lorin Swinehart writes of the extinction of species from the planet.

By Dr. Lorin Swinehart

“There is terrible evil in the world. It comes from men. Men will never rest until they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.” —Richard Adams Watership Down

One would almost anticipate hearing weeping, wailing, and lamentations across the globe at the doleful news that the beautiful ivory-billed woodpecker had at last been declared ex-

tinct. The “Lord God Bird” had joined the growing list of species, like the passenger pigeon that once blackened our skies with its countless numbers, that are gone forever. Once gone, no species will ever be seen again.

The first response of those who sighted the woodpecker was, “Lord God!” providing it with the nickname The Lord God Bird. The ivory-billed woodpecker had once inhabited coniferous forests and lowland areas across the American South. Over the years, the great bird had become increasingly rare. As always, habitat destruction was the main culprit. When so many Southern forests were decimated by loggers, the ivory-billed’s homeland shrank to nearly nothing. Those who hunted the rare bird, seeking its plumage for women’s hats or to fill private collections, share the blame. The last accepted sighting of the bird was in 1944, and the last sighting in Cuba was 1987.

In the years since, sounds and sightings of the ivory-billed had been reported in Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, and elsewhere. In 2004, Gene Sparling reported an ivory-billed sighting in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. The report was good for local business as ornithologists and bird lovers converged upon the neighboring small town. Local restaurants offered woodpecker burgers, and one barbershop provided woodpecker haircuts. The Nature Conservancy purchased 18,000 acres of possible ivory-billed habitat in hopes of preserving a small population of the magnificent bird. Alas, it all came to naught. If Mr. Sparling was correct in identifying an ivorybilled, it may have been the last surviving specimen in that area or anywhere else.

While I will never be blessed with the sight of an ivory-billed woodpecker, I have on a few occasions met one of its close relatives, the pileated woodpecker. The first time was in Ohio’s Fowlers Woods Nature Preserve. I was hiking solo, as is so often my wont, when I heard a deep drumming, as though someone was beating on a hollow log with a fence post. The pileated woodpecker, like the now vanished ivory-billed, drums in order to warn of interlopers, defend territory, or solicit mating.

What met my gaze as I came to a sudden halt reminded me more of either a pterodactyl resurrected in the twenty-first century or the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker. The pileated woodpecker may have a wingspan of nearly three feet. One’s first sighting of a pileated inspires both awe and disbelief.

It seems that the numbers of pileated woodpeckers are increasing at the present. While I did not hear Woody’s raucous laugh, it is true that the popular cartoon woodpecker was modeled after a pileated. I could well imagine Woody’s hilarious laugh as he pecked down a pesky utility pole.

Sadly, the ivory-billed woodpecker was not the only species to be declared extinct in the recent report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There are 22 others, including nine birds, one bat, a plant that only appears on some Pacific islands, and eight freshwater mussels. Globally, many other species tip precariously on the edge of extinction.

While some may not rue the passing of an endangered bat, in the world of nature everything has a proper place, even the often feared and loathed bat. Bats do eat mosquitoes (while mosquitoes, it seems, exist to feed bats), and they spread seeds and pollinate crops and flowers. Most of us would not give a thought to a vanishing freshwater mussel. I remember canoeing down Ohio’s Mohican River and collecting abandoned mussel shells which I used to hold paper clips and other items on my classroom desk. I hope some sort of freshwater mussel survives yet in Midwestern streams.

It has been reported recently that even the American bumble bee, one of our chief pollinators, may soon buzz no more about our vegetable and flower gardens. A variety of factors are at work in the case of the bumble bee, including pathogens, climate change, and pesticides.

The World Wildlife Fund reports that one of every five animals present today face extinction, that 28,000 may vanish in the near future. The list includes several species of elephants in Africa and Asia, as well as rhinos, gorillas, the orangutang, chimpanzees and bonobos, Indian, Indonesian and Siberian tigers, the Tibetan snow leopard, various species of sea turtles, the spider monkey, dugong, pangolin, and polar bear.

A new term has emerged in recent years to describe and define our era, the Anthropocene, a time in which humans dominate the entire globe, for better or, far more often, worse. There have been mass extinctions in the past, an estimated one every 26,000,000 years, mostly, it seems, triggered by asteroid collisions. The human footprint is responsible for the great majority of extinctions or near extinctions in our time.

Humans may also provide the solutions. The lowly snail darter, a tiny fish facing elimination by the rising waters of the Tellico Dam many years ago, now thrives in nearby streams because of a serious effort to save it. The American bison that once covered our prairies was gunned down until only a small population remained. Now, its numbers have increased, and many are raised commercially by livestock farmers and ranchers. After President Richard Nixon eliminated the use of DDT on federal lands, many bird species began a comeback, including the red tail hawk, the kestrel, the pelican, and our nation’s symbol, the bald eagle. Even the gigantic California condor, once extinct in the wild but rescued through human intervention, again drifts across the skies above the arid landscapes of California, Utah, and Mexico.

In the short run, is there hope for preserving some species facing annihilation during the Anthropocene? Dr.

Jane Goodall’s latest publication, The Book of Hope, suggests that there is. Dr. Goodall finds hope in the resilience of nature, the idealism of young people, the human intellect, and the indomitable human spirit.

These proposals deserve close examination. Nature does, indeed, tend to bounce back. Forests rise again from the ashes after devastating fires. The land eventually heals from the destruction wrought by strip mining for coal and other minerals, although the process is agonizingly slow, even with human intervention. Goodall points to New York City’s famous Survivor Tree, now blooming again after being crushed by the plummeting Trade Center on that terrible day in September 2001. She also points to the example of a huge camphor tree that survived the bombing of Nagasaki during the closing days of World War II and now lives on as a holy shrine for many Japanese.

I have witnessed the power of young people in the course of my lengthy teaching career. In 1980, along with a friend and colleague, I formed a student chapter of Amnesty International at my old high school, where I served for 34 of my 36 years in the classroom. The students were elated when their letters to the attorney general of Mexico caused a young university student to be released from custody after a lengthy period of being held incommunicado. Later, their letters earned responses from authorities in Uganda, Mali, South Africa, and the USSR. Several years later, I formed a student environmental group. Students joined with enthusiasm, collecting wastepaper and plastics for recycling and questioning school officials about the use of such materials as styrofoam in the cafeteria. Young people tend to be sensitive to any form of injustice and to care about the world they will inherit.

What I did find was that young women filled most of the ranks. While some superlative young male students became vigorous advocates, most of our members were female. Given that overpopulation fuels all of our other dilemmas, the global emancipation of women is essential to the survival of all life on earth. Educational opportunities can inspire and sustain that emancipation, a challenging goal, particularly under such regimes as that recently reinstalled by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The time has long passed for women to be recognized as equals rather than marginalized, subservient baby factories in bondage to obtuse, thuggish males.

Dr. Goodall recognizes that the human intellect, properly employed, possesses the potential to solve nearly all of the problems that mar the earth, our island home, whether involving human rights or the preservation of wildlife and the natural environment. Our intellect, paired with what she calls our indomitable human spirit, can save us all. Can. Not necessarily will. That is up to all of us. Yet, Dr. Goodall points with satisfaction at the good works accomplished by her global Roots and Shoots program that inspires and motivates young persons to initiate meaningful changes in the world they will inherit. The organization, founded by Dr. Goodall, now has a presence in 140 countries, boasts 8,000 groups, and an estimated membership of 150,000 youth. The organization acts on three fronts: preserving the environment, conservation of natural resources and humanitarian interests, and promotes such activities as organic food production. Young people who make up the membership have fostered meaningful changes on the Lakota Sioux Reservation in North America, in India, Tanzania, Burundi, and downtrodden urban areas in the US.

Another term now gaining popularity is “eco-grief,” the sorrow experienced by those who know of the destruction of the natural world by human misbehavior. It would seem that there is no palliative for eco-grief other than hope. Regardless of our purist intentions and best endeavors, no one will ever again thrill to the unique, “Wuk! Wuk!” call or the deep drumming of the Lord God Bird. But there remains hope for the future of the pangolin, the elephant, the tiger, the bumbling bumble bee. A most recent fund-raising item from Defenders of Wildlife depicts two majestic gray wolves with the caption, “Don’t Let Us Disappear.”

As Dr. Goodall reminds us, only we can prevent future disappearances. Lorin Swinehart

By Judy Dykstra-Brown From the Ojo Archives

After going to a New Year’s party for a few hours, I came home to welcome in the New Year online with a friend.

I was railing on about the fact that a prompt site for which I wished to download an app only had apps for phones and tablets. When I asked if they had an app for my Mac computer, they said no, the place they went to set up the prompt site didn’t have a setup for a Mac computer. This, in addition to the fact that more and more apps and software are being set up to accommodate the tiny screens on cellphones and tablets without taking into consideration that some of us are on computers has caused me to wonder if computers are becoming obsolete!

The fact that many baby boomers are now well into their sixties and approaching their seventies means our eyesight is not going to get any better, and frankly, I need the bigger screen. In addition, somehow those born in previous generations (at least mine) seem to have been born with larger thumbs than more recent generations, for I find it is physically impossible for me to navigate a phone or Kindle or tablet keyboard with even my fingers, let alone thumbs.

I then mentioned how everywhere I went, people were all on their phones— playing games, talking to people other than the people they were with, reading the news or blogs or email. No one was where they actually were! He replied that this didn’t bother him but then seemed to do an about-face by admitting, “I think something big is going to happen that will bring about the end of civilization, but I don’t necessarily know what it is. It might be Isis and it might be iPhones!”

What he has just said has the ring of truth to me. I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing, but never put it so well. I am frightened about how smart phones have taken us away from our surrounding people and environments. We are no longer one place at one time. Even if we are not talking on the phone, there is the potential of every person we know calling us at any time and any place. And most of us make that call a priority over whatever is going on at the time.

My friend then told me about a new app that Photoshops the faces of those talking on the computer, fixing the glitches, covering up all those details that Photoshop is so adept at covering up. Again, I had a feeling of déjà vu, because I’ve been reading Ultimate Jest by David Foster Wallace, and just today, he talked about a time in the future when people on social networks are able to download an app that Photoshops their faces.

Eventually, the app makes changes to the point where people no longer really want to meet in person, because they feel they have become the false representation of themselves—or at least prefer it. No need to put on makeup, comb your hair, get dressed. Virtually, they will be perfected!! The trend reaches its zenith when in time, the app doesn’t even bother to start with the real image of the speaker but instead uses the image of a movie star or other “beautiful person” who most resembles the speaker–eventually coming to the place where what they have in common is four limbs and the same color of hair!

What he describes is so close to what my friend has just described to me that I get a chill down my back and the brain freeze I always get when I’m faced with a startling truth I’ve never thought of before. Is there any science fiction that will not eventually become fact????

David Foster Wallace describes a turn that eventually makes people reject their fake personas and to go back to voice-only conversations that do not even present any images at all. In time, those who use the visual phones with face and body altering apps come to be seen as narcissistic, gauche and behind the times. This is something I cannot imagine happening as our dependence on cyber unreality becomes more and more prevalent.

As we retreat more and more into fantasy and living in the far distance, what will happen to the immediate world around us? Will it cease to have importance as anything other than providing for our immediate creature comforts such as food, bed, warmth, water and medical attention? Will all of our psychological, artistic, amorous, social and familial needs be met through our online devices? And as these devices get smaller and smaller, will we ourselves evolve into miniature beings capable of managing them? Are we evolving back down to subatomic size, and is this a cycle? Has it happened before?

Ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous. And yet who among us, born in the forties or fifties, would have ever imagined we could communicate with both words and pictures through the air, watch a movie on a device smaller than the hand piece of a telephone, or that people would be living their “real” lives out and even choosing husbands and wives on TV for all to see? How do we tell the difference between what is possible and what is impossible anymore? I’m afraid it is hard to predict with any confidence at all.

Judy DykstraBrown