The Western lowland gorilla, dying off at the hands of bushmeat harvesters and through related Ebola infections. Photo by Arpingstone.
The New Scientist title has it right: Endangered species list is more bad news. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) has released the latest version of the Red List, a roster of endangered species with the severity of threat to their survival described, and the news just keeps getting worse.
Lowlights:
The woolly-stemmed begonia is declared extinct.
The western lowland gorilla is now considered to be “Critically Endangered” — at risk of going extinct at a moment’s notice, due to habitat pressure, bushmeat hunting and Ebola infection. The other subspecies of lowland gorilla, the Cross River gorilla, has been Critically Endangered since 1996.
The Sumatran orangutan is Critically Endangered.
The Po’o-uli, a bird of Maui, has not been seen since 2004, when probably the last two wild individuals were observed. It has been declared “Critically Endangered — Possibly Extinct”, a new designation for the IUCN.
The gharial is now Critically Endangered.
The first coral species ever listed as endangered — the Floreana coral and Wellington’s solitary coral — made it to the Red List this year. Both are Critically Endangered, the Wellington’s solitary coral being Possibly Extinct.
And a current topic of discussion on some progressive blogs is whether or not it’s too mean to suggest North Americans have kids at the replacement rate or lower.
I am seeing the blinking Warning Light of Misanthropy glaring on the path I am treading. I am not sure that’s a bad thing. I love people. I love art and literature and music, I love humor and architecture and science, and right now if you asked me whether I would trade all of human achievement for a world with western lowland gorillas…
I might tell you to read the book I finished in the Mojave last week, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us,
Or I might tell you something I recently learned about Johnny Cash. In 1964 Cash was driving in the Los Padres National Forest in California and his truck caught fire. Before the fire, there were 53 condors living in Los Padres NF. After the fire, there were four. The 49 condors Cash killed were almost half the total world population of California condors. [Update: this book says nine survived. Either way.]
I love Cash’s music still, despite learning that at his hearing he professed not caring about “your damn yellow buzzards.”
But give me that magic wand, and offer me the chance to decide between a world where those 49 [update: or 44. Either way.] condors died in 1964, and a world without “Cry, cry, cry”? Not a moment’s hesitation there.
There is no human accomplishment so grand that it outshines a single damn yellow buzzard, and I would burn down the Library of Congress with myself in it if it gave the lowland gorilla another year.
That’s how I feel today.
Out of curiosity, is there an online resource for the Cash story?
I’m glad I’m not the only person who feels this way. Although, it’s not entirely that I feel that the sum of human achievement does not justify the extinction of individual species - although I do feel that way. It’s more that we are teetering on the brink of the next mass extinction, without a clue how to reverse its momentum, brought about entirely by our own hubris.
Lauren, I dug for an authoritative source, and found one with a different survivor total which I linked in the updated text. It’s an autobiographyof Cash.
There is no human accomplishment so grand that it outshines a single damn yellow buzzard, and I would burn down the Library of Congress with myself in it if it gave the lowland gorilla another year.
Why? I agree with you about “Cry, Cry, Cry” (although “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is in another league entirely), but this last bit is taking it too far, in my opinion.
Funny how you pegged the exact things I’ve been pondering today. Not Cash and lowland gorillas, precisely, but Weisman’s book, which I’ve been listening to, and why having babies is so fucking important to people, when by any reasonable measure there are, in fact, sufficient humans already, and not enough wolves, gorillas, or alligator snapping turtles. How very much joy I would get from watching one of the (very few) Idaho wolfpacks doing to this man what I saw a captive pack in Ontario do to a couple of beaver carcasses a couple of weeks ago, and how that joy kind of makes me feel like a bad person, but only kind of.
I couldn’t agree more with the closing sentence. And I am the son of a librarian.
And then there’s this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6990802.stm
With a fitting grand prize to go with it, too.
Welcome, KZ.
And ugh.
Whooo, great post. (I held my breath for the conclusion and let a resounding Yesh! out at the end.)
Speaking of caring for non-human living things: I’ve been receiving a ton of hate comments for a (harmless) rescue animal petition I posted on my flickr site. Man, but I am sick of the Internuts. (I’ve posted a little message for those who wander in and are tempted to get their hate on. Fuckers.)
Adding to KZ’s link, Russia just tested its spanking new vacuum bomb. Putin’s so proud. He calls it “the father of all bombs.”
Words in exchange for gorillas? Never really thought of it in that way ... guess I would go with the gorillas. We could always write more but we couldn’t whip up even one new gorilla.
My wife and I don’t have kids, don’t plan on having kids, don’t understand the need for kids. At times like this refusing to procreate feels like the best thing I’ll do my entire life.
Well of course that’s a hypothetical words for gorillas exchange, soitnly, but yeah. Fortunately, I’ll never be put in the position of having to decide, because except as hypotheticals such choices are never offered… except in the sense you describe in your second paragraph, where your path pretty much describes mine.
Sucks, too, because I love kids. In fact, I love them so much I’ll just spare mine from coming into a world that will lack gorillas.
A colleague once told me that not having kids is the most selfish decision one could possibly make. It was one of the handful of times in my life that I’ve been so gobsmacked by the stupid that I was unable to articulate a response.
In my twenties, I came up with a little fantasy of my own - a button which, when pushed, removed from existence all humans on this planet. I would have done it in an instant, with no malice whatsoever towards my fellow naked apes. Now? Hey, I have nephews and a niece.
I read recently that, by new calculations, all Arctic ice may have melted by 2030. Because of ignored synergistic effects, such as the carbon dioxide emitted by melting permafrost, Global Warming is accelerating at a dizzying clip. It’s ironic that, apparently, humans have signed their own death warrant with the same negligence and greed by which they have consigned so many finer species to oblivion.
There is no human accomplishment so grand that it outshines a single damn yellow buzzard, and I would burn down the Library of Congress with myself in it if it gave the lowland gorilla another year.
hear hear…we’re not the first species to modify our environment…it’s time we fucking got over ourselves with the whole civilization crap.
as for kids, not having them could arguably be the single biggest (or maybe a close second behind dropping dead) act for the environment that anyone can do in their lifetime.
I think the you’re all nuts. The amount of suffering eliminated by the knowledge contained in the library of congress is exponentially larger than the joy created for anything or one by the gorillas (except possibly for the gorillas themselves). And all of you would throw all that away for a mystical, post-industrial fairyland where we all return to a lower rung on the food chain. Good plan, folks.
Ironic that the first outraged library defender apparently has trouble understanding what s/he reads.
I realize you didn’t say “the knowledge in the library of Congress” I was responding more to the “there is no human accomplishment that outweighs the value of a single buzzard,” which appears to be a repudiation of the whole knowledge thing. I just get upset because most of the policies suggested “for the environment” in reality turn into “suck it, poor people in the third world,” and I find that offensive.
Unless you really mean to compare, say, individual pieces of pop music to animals. On the other hand, give me a choice between “eradicate smallpox” and dead animals, it’s not difficult.
Environmentalism in the developed world is often marred by the colonialist culture present in said developed world, it is true. Many of the mainstream environmentalist discussions taking place in the states these days totally ignore the existence of US corporate imperialism and resource extraction, for instance.
But “most of the policies”? Nonsense. And you’re making that argument in exactly the wrong place. I’ve spent much of the last twenty years publicizing the efforts of environmentalists in the third world. Wangari Maathai? Vandana Shiva? Josphat Ngonyo? Chico Mendes? The Grupo de los Cien? The Colectivo Ecologico Jalisco? The Viva Sierra Gorda activists? The Borneo-Project-aligned native activist groups in the Kalimantan?
UniversitÁrea Protegida Nicaragua? Did you know India has its own chapters of Greenpeace? Did you know that some of the biggest campaigns by environmentalists against “progressive” modern technology took place in India, at the Narmada Dam site, and in China in Three Gorges (despite severe government suppression?)
The vast majority of environmentalists in the world ARE third world people. Most of the environmental problems in the world could be solved, or at least mitigated, if the US and its corporate citizens just stopped getting in their way.
But that’s beside the point of the original post, and besides my past support work really doesn’t shield me from the possibility that I might offer up ideas that would have effects on poor people and people of color that I didn’t think of.
The point is that the “getting rid of human culture” thing is a reductio ad absurdum argument.
My point was to illustrate that almost everyone in this society unquestioningly places human cultural achievements as far more important than the survival of not just individual species, but entire habitats full of unique and irreplacable species.
This is hubris, and it will kill us. If we don’t start considering the innate worth — and right to exist — of our fellow species, it’s very likely that the Library of Congress will be irrelevant to whatever humans still exist, even if no one burns it down.
Ah well, that’s the thing about eradicating smallpox, or not. There’s dead animals either way.
I just get upset because most of the policies suggested “for the environment” in reality turn into “suck it, poor people in the third world,” and I find that offensive.
I’m not sure exactly what that has to do with this thread, but I’ll bite anyway. What I find most offensive is people in the First World refusing to recognize that we have to give up our lavish lifestyles, and totally rethink our relationship to the planet. Which is, I think, more like what this thread is about.
I knew I should have waited a bit longer for the definitive response. Sigh.
Nah, Rob, you just did the “shorter.”