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The Next Holocaust The real story on endangered species. By Susan Zakin I already told you that I'm not one of those Birkenstock-clad, soft-voiced women. You know, the kind who like to garden. I, on the other hand, specialize in growing mold. That's usually in my kitchen, when I go away for a week and leave dishes in the sink. So it was a quixotic mission when I went to Bach's nursery to buy pots for some cactus a friend had given me. But it turned out to be a useful trip because the guys at Bach's are snitches. They're the ones who called authorities when they saw county road contractors nuking pygmy owl habitat outside the nursery's gate. You see, Doug, a botanical illustrator, and Joe, who's studying for his master's degree in landscape ecology, understand the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Pima County's effort to come into compliance with the Endangered Species Act may not only decide the fate of the owls but also pretty much every acre of Pima County outside the Tohono O'odham reservation, over the next 30 years. The trouble is, Doug and Joe are in a tiny minority. It's time to change that.
That's pretty much where this story starts. Don't worry, I'm not going all the way back to the Ordovician (440 million years ago), the Devonian (370 million years ago), the Permian (250 million years ago) or even the Triassic Period (215 million years ago). I'm not going to delve into why the dinosaurs bit the big one at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago. Theories about these old-time extinctions usually include something about glaciation, volcanoes, or what David Quammen calls "a shitstorm of asteroids" in Song of the Dodo, the definitive book on the current extinction crisis. The reason I'm not writing about those extinctions is they all had something in common. They had nothing to do with us. This one does. I hate to risk disappointing you further, but I'm also not going to get into pseudo-religious-philosophical discussions about whether human-caused extinctions are "natural" because humans are part of nature. The use of the word natural in this context means about as much as it does when printed on a label on something you buy at the supermarket, i.e., nothing. Let's take a look at the facts instead. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, who was one of the pioneers of conservation biology before he began talking about population bombs, estimates that the current extinction rate is roughly 100 times the normal level. (The extinction rate in rainforests is about 1,000 times the norm.) E.O. Wilson of Harvard, probably the nation's most renowned conservation biologist, has estimated that we will lose three-fifths of the world's mammal species over the next 30-50 years. A majority of biologists polled by the American Museum of Natural History in 1998 believed one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Seven out of ten believed that this die-off poses a major threat to humans in the next century. A major threat to humans? "Extinction is most threatening to people of cultures that are on the edge, like indigenous cultures," said biologist Steve Gatewood, executive director of the Tucson-based Society for Ecological Restoration. "For instance, what happens if the Inuit run out of walruses?" But there are other concerns. Gatewood says we simply can't foresee the effects of mass extinction. Wiping out a particular species could cause rapid evolution of a new species harmful to humans. In other words, the loss of something as lowly as a fungus could unleash deadly viruses. "We simply don't know," said Gatewood. "The trouble is, we won't know for several generations." Scientists have a tough time selling the American public on this idea. For one thing, we're not used to looking very far ahead. For another, most of the voting-age public didn't learn conservation biology in school. The discipline didn't come into common academic parlance until the 1980s, when computers allowed researchers to crunch huge amounts of data. What the biologists found alarmed them. In many places, plants and animals had been reduced to tiny fractions of their former ranges. Those small, isolated populations are vulnerable to both inbreeding and what scientists call "stochastic" events: fire, drought, or disease. What does this mean? For starters, Yellowstone National Park might not be large enough to keep grizzlies alive over the long haul. Here at home, it's the reason Pima County can't get away with subsidizing ranchers in the Avra Valley and writing off the land in the Tortolitas in their attempt to satisfy the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. The pygmy owl populations in these two places--practically the only areas that have significant owl numbers--are too small to have a good chance of survival without the other one around. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The problem of extinction is compounded by obscurity. The same American Museum of Natural History poll showed that 60 percent of laymen professed little or no familiarity with the concept of biological diversity. Barely half ranked species loss as a major threat. "The public is mostly unfamiliar with the concept of biodiversity and considers pollution the biggest threat," wrote Marjorie Connelly in the New York Times in 1998. Obviously, it's time for that to change. Keep reading.
Next week: The Endangered Species Act is a Republican Plot.
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