Paradise lost? W ho remembers the passenger pigeon? Once there were five billion of them flying over the cities of Canada and the US. So many in fact that a flock would be the width of a mile and they would block out the sun. But thanks to hunters and trappers, by 1914 they had become extinct. Or maybe the Pinta Island tortoise – six feet long and weighing the same as a lion – which, if they weren’t hunted, starved to death after goats introduced by whalers and pirates ate all their vegetation. The last one died in 2012. We know there have been at least five mass extinction events on our planet, from the meteor which killed off the dinosaurs around 66 million years ago to the ‘Great Dying’ 252 million years ago when a rise in greenhouse gases wiped out 96% of all species. According to scientists we are on the brink of the sixth mass extinction – known as the Anthropocene extinction – and this time there isn’t an errant meteor or natural warming to blame. As the name implies, it is just us. “We are already within a biodiversity crisis and on the way to an extinction and biodiversity crisis. We see in every species of animal or plant group that they
The passenger pigeon
More plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction than ever before but work is under way to prevent the great extinction, writes David Craik
are in decline. They are slowly vanishing from our neighbourhoods and forests,” says Dr Thomas A Neubauer, of Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. “There is a shift in the distribution of species. Where we once found them, they are now absent because they are trying to find refuge. But they can’t run away from us and our impact forever.” Species in decline That includes human activities such as habitat destruction, deforestation, agriculture, climate change, building, pollution, over-fishing and introducing invasive species of animals and fauna into new environments. “If we continue then many species will become extinct,” Neubauer adds. “The extinction rate after the dinosaur meteor remained high for five million years. Our biodiversity crisis is advancing much faster than that.” According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, one million out of eight million species on Earth are threatened with extinction. The WWF says population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have fallen by an average of 68% globally since 1970. It says that, in some parts of the world, leatherback turtles have declined by between 20% and 98%, with an 84% decline at Tortuguero Beach in Costa Rica. African elephant populations in the Central African Republic have declined by up to 98% and, in the UK, populations of grey partridge have fallen 85% and populations of Arctic skua in Orkney have dropped by 62%. Saving wildlife There are more than 138,300 species featured on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, with more than 38,500 species threatened with
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Wealthsmiths Winter 2021
