2525. E.O.Wilson: The Sixth Extinction: Life and Death in the Biosphere

By E. O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, May 2016

Editor's note: The following text is from E. O. Wilson's Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, chapter 7: "Why Extinction Is Accelerating?"  Only a few sentences from the first paragraph were omitted to shorten the text as much as possible. Title and subtitles are mine. I urge the reader to read the entire book. 

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Very few people wish to see species disappear, except those occasional pests that attack our bodies and sources of food….Other than still-unknot pathogens among bacteria, microscopic fungi, and viruses, the number of species worthy of extinction, or at least of harmless storage in liquid nitrogen, is probably (my guess( fewer than a thousand…

The millions of other species are beneficial to human welfare, whether directly or indirectly. There are unfortunately almost countless ways humans are hastening their extinction, what ever might be their present or future beneficial roles.  The human impact is largely due to the excess of the many quotidian activities we preform just to get on with our personal lives.  Those activities have made us the most destructive species in the history of life.

The extinction rate

How fast are we driving species to extinction? For years paleontologists and biodiversity experts have believed that before the coming of humanity about two hundred years ago, the rate of origin of new species per extinction of existing species was roughly one species per million species per year. As a consequence of human activity, it is believed that he current rate of extinction overall is between one hundred and one thousand times higher than it was originally, and all due to human activity.

In 2015 an international team of researchers finished a careful analysis of the prehuman rates and came up with a diversification rate ten times lower in general (groups of closely related species). The data, when translated to species extinctions, suggests species extinction rates at the present time are closer to one thousand times higher than that before the spread of humanity. The estimate is further consistent with an independent study that detected a similar downward shift in the rate of species formation in pre-humans, as well s in their closet relatives among the great apes.  

Every expansion of human activity reduces the population size of more and more species, raising their vulnerability and the rate of extinction accordingly.  A 2008 mathematical model by a team of botanists predicated that between 37 and 50 percent of rare tree species in the Brazilian Amazon rain forest, “rare” defined as having populations of fewer than ten thousand individuals, will suffer early extinction, caused by contemporary road building, logging, mining, and conversion of land to agriculture. The lower figure, 37 percent applies to areas  developed in part but protected by careful management. 

It is difficult to make comparisons of origin and extinction rates across different kinds of plants and animals in different parts of the world. But all the available evidence points to the same two conclusions. First, the Sixth Extinction is under way; and second, human activity is its driving force.

Does conservation work? 

This grim assessment leads to a second question: How well is conservation working? How much have the efforts of global conservation movements achieved in slowing and halting the devastation of Earth’s biodiversity? Having served on the boards of Conservation International. The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund00U.S., and as advisor to many local conservation organizations, I can testify to the zeal and inspiration, backed by private and public funding, and to the years of sweat and blood in the field, that have gone into conservation efforts around the world during the past half century. How much has this heroic effort accomplished? 

In 2010 a survey conducted by close to two hundred experts on vertebrate land animals (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians) analyzed the status of all the 25,780 know species. One-fifth were confirmed as threatened with extinction, and of these a fifth had been stabilized as a result of conservation efforts.  An independent study in 2006 had already concluded that extinction of bird species in particular had been cut by about 50 percent as a result of conservation efforts during the past century.  Thirty-one bird species worldwide still live because of efforts on their behalf. In short, global conservation thus far, when averaged out for land-dwelling vertebrates, has lowered extinction rates of species by approximately 20 percent. 

Next, what is the impact of government regulation, in particular the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973? A review made in 2005 found that a quarter of the 1,370 American plant and animal species classified earlier as threatened achieved new population growth, while 40 percent declined, with 13 of the listed species improved enough to be taken off the endangered list. The most important statistic is that while 22 spaces had slipped into extinction, 227 had been saved that would likely have otherwise disappeared.  Among the more familiar protected species that have climbed back to health are the yellow shouldered blackbird, green sea turtle, and bighorn sheep. 

These successes have show that conservation works, but at the level of effort being applied at the present, it falls far short of what is needed to save the natural world. The conservation movement has slowed the species extinction rate but failed to bring it anywhere close to the prehuman level.  At the same time the birth rate of species is dropping rapidly. Like and accident patient in emergency care continuing to hemorrhage and with no new supply of blood available, stabilization is out of reach and further decline and death are inevitable.  We might be inclined to say to the surgeons and conservationists alike, “Congratulations. You have extended a life, but not by much.”  

Of course, not all wild species are threatened by the assault on biodiversity.  A few are compatible with a humanized environment.  What fraction of the present survivors will last to the end of this century? If present conditions persists, perhaps half.  More likely, fewer than one-fourth. 

That is my guess. But the fact is that due to habitat loss alone, the rate of extinction is rising in most parts of the world.  The preeminent sites of biodiversity loss are the tropical forests and coral reefs.  The most vulnerable habitats of all, with the highest extinction rates per unit area, are rivers, streams, and lakes in both tropical and temperate regions.

An established principle in conversation biology for all habitats is that a reduction in art results in   a fraction of the species disappearing in time by roughly the fourth root of the area.  If 90 percent of a forest is cut, for example, about half of the species will soon disappear that would have been otherwise persisted. And the beginning most of the species may survive for a while, but roughly half will have populations too small to persist for more than a few generations. 

Barro Colorado Island in Panama has proved a valuable natural laboratory to study the effect of area on extinction. Covered by rain forest, it was created by the formation of Gatun Lake in 1913 during the construction of the Panama Canal. An ornithologist, John Terborgh, predicated that after fifty years the island would lose seventeen bird species.  The actual number was thirteen, representing 12 percent of the one hundred eight breeding species originally present.  On the other side of the world, a 0.9-square-kilometer patch of rain forest, the Bogor Botanical Garden of Indonesia, was also isolated, not by water but by clearing of all the forest around it.  In the first fifty years it lost twenty of its sixty-two breeding bird species, approximately the number expected.

Causes of extinction

Conservation scientists often use the acronym HIPPO for a quick recall of the most ruinous of our activities, in order of importance:

Habitat destruction. This includes that caused by climate change.

Invasive species.  This include plants and animals that crowd out native species and attack crops and native vegetation, as well as microbes causing disease in humans and other species. 

Pollution. The effluents from human activity are killers of life, especially in rivers and other freshwater ecosystems, the most vulnerable of Earth’s habitats. 

Population growth.  Although it is still widely unpopular to say so, we must really slow down. Reproduction is obviously necessary, but it is a bad idea, as Pope Francis I has pointed out, to continue multiplying like rabbits.  Demographic projections suggest that the human population will rise to about eleven billion or slightly more before the end of the century, thereafter peak, and begin to subside. Unfortunately for sustainability of the biosphere, per-capita consumption is also destined to rise, and perhaps even more steeply than human numbers. Unless the right technology is brought to bear that greatly improve efficiency and productivity per unit area, there will be a continued increase in humanity’s ecological footprint, defined as the area of Earth’s surface each person on average needs.  The footprint is not just local art, but space scattered across land and sea, in pieces for habitation, food, transportation, governance, and all other services down to and including recreation.

Overhunting.  Fishing and hunting can be pressed until the target species is driven to extinction or on the way, making the last surviving populations subject to final erasure by disease, competition, changes in weather, and other stresses survived by larger ad more far-ranging populations of the same species. 

Single causes in the decline and extinction of species can be identified readily in a few cases. One example is the dietary preferences of the brown tree snake, which is especially skilled in preying on bird nestlings.  Another has been identified in the decline of the monarch butterfly in the Midwest, which famously overwinters in masses of millions on pine trees in Mexican state of Michoaćan.  By 2014, there was an 81 percent decline of the butterflies in the United States Midwest populations, attributed to a 58 percent decline in milkweeds, the exclusive food plant of the monarch caterpillars. The milkweeds have fallen off in turn because of the increased use of glyphosate weed killer in corn (maize) and soybean fields.  The crops have flourished after being genetically modified to resist the weed killer, while the wild milkweed plants have not been so protected.  With their food supply unintentionally reduced the migrating monarch butterflies of both the United States and Mexico have declined steeply. 

In most extinctions, however, the causes are multiple, linked to one another in some way, all ultimately the result of human activity.  In one well-analyzed example of multiple causes, the Allegheny wood rat has vanished or grown endangered through a third of its range.  It is considered to have suffered from the extinction of the American Chestnut and hence the loss of its seeds, on which the species partly depend. Also important have been the logging and fragmentation of forests where the wood rats live, plus further reduction of this habitat by the voracity of the invasive European gypsy moth.  The coup de gras is the roundworm infection from raccoons, which are animals better suited than the wood rats to live around humans.

Those unimpressed by the fall of a rodent may turn a more caring eye to the songbirds that migrate each yea between their winter grounds in the New World tropics and breeding range in the eastern United States.  From data compiled by the federally sponsored North American Breeding Bird Survey along withe Audubon  Society Christmas Bird Count, it is clear that populations of more than two dozen species are in a steep descent.  Those affected include the wood thrush, Kentucky warbler, eastern kingbird, and bobolink. One, Bachman’s warbler, whose wintering ground was in Cuba, has gone extinct.  I have a place in my heart for this little bird.  During field trips to the floodplain forests of the U.S. Gulf Coast, which brought me close to canebrakes where the warbler once nested, I’ve often looked and listened for a Backman’s as best I could (admittedly not very skillfully), but to no avail.

It sometimes seems as though the reminder of American native plants and animals are under deliberate assault by everything humanity can throw at them.  Leading the list is our deadly arsenal are the destruction o both wintering and breeding habitats, heavy use of pesticides, shortage of natural insect and plant food, and artificial light pollution causing errors in migratory navigation.  Climate change and acidification pose newly recognized yet game-changing risks—shifts in all aspects of the rhythms of the environment away from those necessary for wildlife survival and reproduction.  

Facts about biodiversity

There exist several facts about global biodiversity to keep in mind while trying to save it.  The first is that the human caused agents of extinction are synergistic.  As  any one of the agents intensifies, it causes others to intensify also, and the sum of the changes is an acceleration of extinction.  Clearing a forest for agriculture reduces habitat, diminishes carbon capture, and introduces pollutions that are carried downstream to degrade otherwise pure aquatic habitats en route. With the disappearance of any native predator or herbivore species, the reminder of the ecosystem is altered, sometimes catastrophically.  The same is true of the addition of an invasive species. 

Another overarching principle of biodiversity is the greater richness of tropical environments over temperate environments, in both number of species and vulnerability.   While the variety of aphids, lichens, and conifers increases poleward, a vastly larger number of other kinds of organisms increase in the opposite direction.  For example, you can expect to find about fifty species of ants in a square kilometer of New England temperate forest (if you care to look) but up to ten times that number in a comparable area of rain forest in Ecuador or Borneo.

A third principle of biodiversity worth noting is in the relation between its richness and the geographical range of the species comprising it. A large fraction of the species of plants and animals of the temperate NorthAmerican are distributed across most of the content, but very few species range the same way across tropical South America. 

When these last two principles are linked, both entailing the numbers of resident species, we find as expected that on average tropical species are more vulnerable than temperate species.  They occupy smaller ranges and thereby manage to sustain smaller populations. Furthermore, existing as they do among a greater array of competing species, they tend to be more specialized in where they live, in what they eat, and by the predators that hunt and eat them.  

As a general rule to follow in conservation practice is therefore that, while clear-cutting a squat kilometer of old-growth coniferous forest in Canada, Finland, or Siberia will do a lot of environmental damage, cutting the same area of old-growth rain forest in Brazil or Indonesia will do far more damage.  

Finally, there is the immense disparity between the 62,839 known species of vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, the total number in 2010) and 1.3 million known invertebrate species (also 2010). Almost all the information on quantitative trends in biodiversity are based on the vertebrates, the big animals with which we have intimate familiarity. There are well-studied groups within the invertebrates, notably mollusks and butterflies, but even these organisms are less well known than the mammals, birds, and reptiles.The great majority of invertebrate species, notably hyper diverse insects and marine organisms, remain to be discovered and made known to science. Nevertheless, of those groups well enough studies to make  estimate of their conservation status down to species, such as freshwater crabs, crayfish, dragonflies, and corals, the percentages of vulnerable and endangered species are comparable to those of vertebrates.

Avoiding misconceptions about the Sixth Extinction 

In thinking about life and death in the biosphere, it is important to avoid two misconceptions. The first is the a rare declining species is probably senescent.  You might think that its time has come so let it go. The contrary, its young are just as vital as the young of the most aggressive expanding species with which they compete.  If its population is shrinking in size from vulnerable to endangered to critically endangered (the scale of descent used in the Red List of the International Union of Conservation of Nature)*, the reason is neither age nor destiny of the species. Instead, the reason is the predicament in which the Darwinian process of natural selection has placed it.  The environment is changing, and the genes assembled by earlier natural selection are by happenstance not able to adapt quickly enough.  The species is a victim of bad luck, rather like a farmer who invests at the start of a ten-year drought.  Put some young individuals into an environment where the genes are better adapted, and the species will flourish. 

Humanity, keep in mind, is the principal architect of such maladaptive environments. Conservation biology is the scientific discipline by which better environment are identified and protected or restored for species imperiled within them. 

Biologists recognize that across the 3.8 billion-year history of life over 99 percent of all species are extinct. This being the case, what, we are often asked, is so bad about extinction?  The answer, of course, is that many of the species over eons didn’t die at all, they turned into two or more daughter species. Species are like amoebae; they multiply by splitting, not by making embryos.  The most successful are the progenitors of the most species through time, just as the most successful humans are those whose lineages expand the most and persist the longest. The birth and death rates of humans are close to a global balance, with birth having the edge for the last sixty-five thousands years or so. Most important, we, like all other species, are product of a highly successful and potentially important line that goes back all the way to the birth of humanity and beyond that for billions of years, to the time when life began.  The same is true of the creatures still around us. They are champions, each and all. Thus far.  

* The Red List scale for individual species is the following in descending order: Least Concern (LC), Near Threatened (NT), Endangered (N), Critically Endangered (CR), Extinct in the Wild (EW), Extinct (E). 

2317. State of World Plants, 2016: One in Five Are at Risk of Extinction

By Kathy J. Willis and Steve Bachman, Royal Botanic Gardens, 2016

Endangered Baobab tree

This is the  first document to collate current knowledge on the state of the world’s plants. A large team of researchers has reviewed published literature, scrutinised global databases and synthesised new datasets. The output presented here represents a status report on our knowledge of global vegetation as it stands in 2016, including a synthesis of existing information about vascular plants (Figure 1), new  findings emerging from the review process, and an update on current knowledge gaps.

The report is in three sections. The  rst part describes what we currently know about plants: how many plant species there are, new plant discoveries in 2015, our current knowledge on plant evolutionary relationships and plant genomes, the number of useful plants, and the location of the world’s most important plant areas. We also present a country-wide focus, this year on Brazil. The second part of the report assesses our knowledge of global threats to plants.

In particular, we review the potential impacts of climate change, land-use change, invasive plants, plant diseases, and extinction risk. The third part details international trade, as well as policies and international agreements that are in place to deal with some of the threats.

There will inevitably be gaps in this report. We cannot claim to have covered all of the evidence currently available; this year is the beginning of an annual process, and in future years we will add to this knowledge base. However, by bringing the available information together into one document, we hope to raise the pro le of plants among the global community and to highlight not only what we do know about threats, status and uses, but also what we don’t. This will help us to decide where more research effort and policy focus is required to preserve and enhance the essential role of plants in underpinning all aspects of human wellbeing.

Professor Kathy J. Willis

Director of Science, RBG Kew

Steve Bachman

State of the World’s Plants – Strategic Output Leader, RBG KEW

State of World Plants, 2016, PDF

2261. Book Review: Extinction: A Radical History

By Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 28, 2016

UNLESS YOU’VE DELIBERATELY ignored the accelerating drumbeat of headlines, reports, and nonfiction books that have appeared over the past decade, you’re at least vaguely aware that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet, in which 25 to 40 percent of all species are expected to disappear by 2050. 

Because extinction is generally a silent, invisible process, we are rarely forced to confront its inherent tragedy and the potentially vast ecological ripples of even a single species’ eradication. When we do, we wonder how we can possibly intervene, individually or collectively. While conservation efforts have widespread support and can boast a few modest (and temporary) victories, they have been overwhelmed by the ongoing wave of anthropogenic annihilation.

Which leads to the question that Ashley Dawson’s slim and forceful book, Extinction: A Radical History, aims to answer: how can we stem the tide? By identifying capitalism as the primary culprit, and placing the current mass extinction in the context of ongoing struggles for social and environmental justice, Dawson points the way toward appropriate forms of conservation for an era of devastating loss.

Why has half the planet’s wildlife disappeared over the last 40 years? Why are we losing approximately 100 species every day? The answer, Dawson argues, lies not in the proximate drivers of extinction (deforestation, habitat fragmentation, poaching, overfishing, and climate change) but in the nature of capitalism itself. Whereas recent popular works on extinction (such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History) and climate change (such as Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate) have shied away from calling for an explicitly anticapitalist environmental politics, Extinction makes a compelling case for its urgent necessity. It does so through an “etiology of the present catastrophe” that combines deft historical synthesis with a careful attention to economic and racial inequality and the legacies of imperialism. Because of its demand for ceaseless expansion and its emphasis on anthropocentric utility as the sole criterion of value, capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own material reproduction. In this light, the exploitative features of modern capitalism become “particularly starkly evident when seen through the lens of extinction.”

This argument is far from new, but it is buttressed by a valuable — if somewhat compressed and sweeping — historical perspective. Dawson’s training in postcolonial literature makes him keenly aware of the importance of cultural narratives, and he begins with one of the oldest surviving human stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which he reads as a legitimizing myth of the deforestation practiced by the ancient Sumerian city-state of Uruk. Population pressures and unsustainable agricultural practices had disastrous consequences for Uruk and the region: the surrounding forest and its creatures, which the god Humbaba had protected, were transformed into desert remarkably quickly. Dawson follows this narrative up to the present day, describing the shifting cultural norms regarding animals and nature from ancient Rome through European colonization.

Colonialism had dramatic environmental consequences that scholars have only recently appreciated: colonists transported countless invasive species, forced indigenous peoples into integration in destructive market economies (such as the fur trade), and decimated native cultures that were efficient environmental managers. In addition, Europeans carried with them and attempted to impose cultural beliefs that inspired and permitted their conquest. The ideology of dominating and mastering a passive (feminine) nature was “intended to justify European expropriation of indigenous people and their land” but also “established an exploitative attitude toward flora and fauna” that continues to the present day.

Echoing many scholars in the environmental humanities, Dawson argues that much of the proliferating discourse on the Anthropocene (the current era in which humans act as a geologic force) falsely portrays a monolithic “humanity” as a natural architect of mass extinction. It thereby elides the culpability of modern forms of capital accumulation, which were constructed by and primarily benefited wealthy white Northerners. Dawson rightly refuses to see a propensity for environmental degradation as a core element of human nature (if such a thing can be said to exist), noting that cultures and practices of relative sustainability were developed and maintained by indigenous peoples and inhabitants of the global South for millennia. Since our diagnosis of the causes of the contemporary mass extinction necessarily frames our response to it, the question of whether contemporary rapacity equals that of prehistoric homo sapiens sapiens is critical. Dawson points out that this equivalence is not only “historically inaccurate” but “politically disempowering.”

What, then, is to be done? Existing and emerging responses to species extinction, Dawson argues, are not only insufficient but might actually exacerbate the problem. Traditional conservation practices — often focused on “saving” charismatic megafauna such as elephants, polar bears, and whales — may be noble endeavors, but they constitute a “paltry bandage over a gaping wound,” a claim that even their fiercest defenders would have to concede. Two novel strategies have attracted a great deal of attention, support, and funding: “rewilding,” which reintroduces key species into large tracts of new wilderness, and “de-extinction,” which proposes to resuscitatate vanished species through genetic engineering. While Dawson finds the former practice relatively harmless, he offers a scathing attack on the latter. De-extinction is potentially disastrous ecologically, he claims, because resuscitated wooly mammoths and passenger pigeons would not only hasten the demise of other species but could themselves suffer and disappear a second time. More broadly, such a Jurassic Park approach constitutes a form of “neoliberal disaster biocapitalism,” in which mass extinction becomes an opportunity for new forms of property, accumulation, and control. (As McKenzie Funk showed in his book Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, climate change presents similar opportunities for eco-profiteering.) Not only are traditional conservation practices, along with rewilding and de-extinction, destined to fail, they offer the false hope that there there are solutions short of fundamental geopolitical transformation.

What must be constructed instead, Dawson forcefully argues, is a form of “radical conservation.” This would require recognizing that “the extinction crisis is at once an environmental issue and a social justice issue, one that is linked to long histories of capitalist domination over specific people, animals, and plants.” Dawson’s prescriptions build on initiatives from the global climate justice movement, including the adoption of “degrowth” (minimizing economic growth and consumption), the seizing of assets of major fossil-fuel corporations, and a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions, which would fund renewable energy generation, technology transfer to vulnerable nations, and compensation for eco-victims. It is here that Extinction disappoints in its brevity: a fuller explanation of these measures would have offered a useful contribution to the emerging literature on environmental politics in the Anthropocene. Moreover, Dawson is surprisingly nonspecific about the fate of threatened species beyond an abiding faith in the wisdom of the “people of the global South” that might not ultimately be rewarded. Of course, one might also argue that the radical measures Dawson advocates are currently political nonstarters; however, as he notes, “we cannot let the present state of affairs determine our horizon of hope and sense of possibility.”

Indeed, the goal of Extinction is to expand our horizons of possibility. Dawson’s raw and sometimes polemical language reflects an emotionally honest response to the incredible violence of species extinction and climate change, as well as a desire to inspire appropriate collective action. While its candor may remind readers of recent eco-apocalyptic meditations (such as Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene), Extinction provides an implicit rebuke to their contention that “we’re fucked” and can only accommodate ourselves — philosophically, culturally, psychologically — to a now-inevitable collapse. Though undeniably cathartic, such potentially self-fulfilling claims hide more than they reveal. In particular, they obfuscate historical and present responsibilities for contemporary environmental crises, the buffer provided by wealth, power, and privilege (for nations and individuals), and our ability to mitigate and adapt to whatever changes lie in store.

Extinction — and the environmental justice movement that inspires it — seeks to shift our perspective from the beneficiaries of “civilization” to the human and nonhuman victims of its exploitation and ecological destruction. For the millions of species that face extinction, and the billions of comparatively innocent poor and/or indigenous people that suffer from the destabilization and decline of life-supporting ecosystems, radical sociopolitical movements have the potential to slow the dual crises of mass extinction and global climate change. From such a perspective, the question of whether the emergence of an effective anticapitalist environmental politics is “realistic” or “practical” is irrelevant. It is essential. Though thinkers such as Christian Parenti have questioned the value of calling for an unlikely revolution given the “compressed timeframe” of climate change, such demands — and the movements they inspire — can also succeed by advancing alternative perspectives, highlighting neglected issues, and exerting political pressure that can influence public policy and the direction (and speed) of technological development.

Extinction is intended as a primer, and it builds on and points readers toward more detailed and nuanced treatments. On the affective dimensions of extinction, readers might consult Thomas van Dooren’s elegant Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, which demonstrates the entanglement and mutual constitution of humans and nonhumans through six heartbreaking stories of avian extinction. On the historical and current relationship between capitalism and that thing we call “the environment,” Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital seems poised to become a foundational text, synthesizing environmentalist and Marxist perspectives to argue that capitalism has always been a fundamentally ecological project. Sadly, these and many other innovative and important works in the environmental humanities are aimed primarily at academic readers. Extinction: A Radical History makes a case for being the most accessible and politically engaged examination of the current mass extinction, and is therefore a welcome contribution to the growing literature on this slow-motion calamity.

1561. Building an Ark for the Anthropocene

By Jim Robbins, The New York Times, September 27, 2014

Credit: Jason Holley 

WE are barreling into the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet. A recent study published in the journal Science concluded that the world’s species are disappearing as much as 1,000 times faster than the rate at which species naturally go extinct. It’s a one-two punch — on top of the ecosystems we’ve broken, extreme weather from a changing climate causes even more damage. By 2100, researchers say, one-third to one-half of all Earth’s species could be wiped out.

As a result, efforts to protect species are ramping up as governments, scientists and nonprofit organizations try to build a modern version of Noah’s Ark. The new ark certainly won’t come in the form of a large boat, or even always a place set aside. Instead it is a patchwork quilt of approaches, including assisted migration, seed banks and new preserves and travel corridors based on where species are likely to migrate as seas rise or food sources die out.

The questions are complex. What species do you save? The ones most at risk? Charismatic animals, such as lions or bears or elephants? The ones most likely to survive? The species that hold the most value for us?

One initiative, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services formed in 2012 by the governments of 121 countries, aims to protect and restore species in wild areas and to protect species like bees that carry out valuable ecosystem service functions in the places people live. Some three-quarters of the world’s food production depends primarily on bees.

“We still know very little about what could or should be included in the ark and where,” said Walter Jetz, an ecologist at Yale involved with the project. Species are being wiped out even before we know what they are.

Another project, the EDGE of Existence, run by the Zoological Society of London, seeks to protect the most unusual wildlife at highest risk. These are species that evolved on their own for so long that they are very different from other species. Among the species the project has helped to preserve are the tiny bumblebee bat and the golden-rumped elephant shrew.

While the traditional approach to protecting species is to buy land, preservation of the right habitat can be a moving target, since it’s not known how species will respond to a changing climate.

To complete the maps of where life lives, scientists have enlisted the crowd. A crowdsourcing effort called the Global Biodiversity Information Facility identifies and curates biodiversity data — such as photos of species taken with a smartphone — to show their distribution and then makes the information available online. That is especially helpful to researchers in developing countries with limited budgets. Another project, Lifemapper, at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, uses the data to understand where a species might move as its world changes.

“We know that species don’t persist long in fragmented areas and so we try and reconnect those fragments,” said Stuart L. Pimm, a professor of conservation at Duke University, and head of a nonprofit organization called SavingSpecies. One of his group’s projects in the Colombian Andes identified a forest that contains a carnivorous mammal that some have described as a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear, called an olinguito, new to science. Using crowd-sourced data, “we worked with local conservation groups and helped them buy land, reforest the land and reconnect pieces,” Dr. Pimm says.

Coastal areas, especially, are getting scrutiny. Biologists in Florida, which faces a daunting sea level rise, are working on a plan to set aside land farther inland as a reserve for everything from the MacGillivray’s seaside sparrow to the tiny Key deer.

To thwart something called “coastal squeeze,” a network of “migratory greenways” is envisioned so that species can move on their own away from rising seas to new habitat. “But some are basically trapped,” said Reed F. Noss, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Central Florida who is involved in the effort, and they will most likely need to be picked up and moved. The program has languished, but Amendment 1, on the ballot this November, would provide funding.

One species at risk is the Florida panther. Once highly endangered, with just 20 individuals left, this charismatic animal has come back — some. But a quarter or more of its habitat is predicted to be under some three feet of water by 2100. Males will move on their own, but females will need help because they won’t cross the Caloosahatchee River. Experts hope to create reserves north of the river, and think at some point they will have to move females to new quarters.

Protecting land between reserves is vital. The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, known as Y2Y, would protect corridors between wild landscapes in the Rockies from Yellowstone National Park to northern Canada, which would allow species to migrate.

RESEARCHERS have also focused on “refugia,” regions around the world that have remained stable during previous swings of the Earth’s climate — and that might be the best bet for the survival of life this time around.

A section of the Driftless Area encompassing northeastern Iowa and southern Minnesota, also known as Little Switzerland, has ice beneath some of its ridges. The underground refrigerator means the land never gets above 50 or so degrees and has kept the Pleistocene snail, long thought extinct, from disappearing there. Other species might find refuge there as things get hot.

A roughly 250-acre refugia on the Little Cahaba River in Alabama has been called a botanical lost world, because of its wide range of unusual plants, including eight species found nowhere else. Dr. Noss said these kinds of places should be sought out and protected.

Daniel Janzen, a conservation ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is working to protect large tracts in Costa Rica, said that to truly protect biodiversity, a place-based approach must be tailored to the country. A reserve needs to be large, to be resilient against a changing climate, and so needs the support of the people who live with the wild place and will want to protect it. “To survive climate change we need to minimize the other assaults, such as illegal logging and contaminating water,” he said. “Each time you add one of those you make it more sensitive to climate change.”

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, beneath the permafrost on an island in the Arctic Ocean north of mainland Norway, preserves seeds from food crops. Frozen zoos keep the genetic material from extinct and endangered animals. The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive in Michigan, meanwhile, founded by a family of shade tree growers, has made exact genetic duplicates of some of the largest trees on the planet and planted them in “living libraries” elsewhere — should something befall the original.

In 2008, Connie Barlow, a biologist and conservationist, helped move an endangered conifer tree in Florida north by planting seedlings in cooler regions. Now she is working in the West. “I just assisted in the migration of the alligator juniper in New Mexico by planting seeds in Colorado,” she said. “We have to. Climate change is happening so fast and trees are the least capable of moving.”

1528. On the Human Caused Sixth Great Mass Extinction: Have We Learned Anything from the Case of the Passenger Pigeon?

By John W. Fitzpatrick, The New York Times, August 29, 2014

Passenger pigeon was probably the most abundant bird species ever lived until it went extinct hundred years ago this week when the last of them called Martha died in Cincinnati Zoo

ITHACA, N.Y. — THE passenger pigeon is among the most famous of American birds, but not because of its beauty, or its 60-mile-an-hour flight speed. Nor is it a cherished symbol of our great country. No, we remember the passenger pigeon because of the largest-scale human-caused extinction in history.

Possibly the most abundant bird ever to have existed, this gregarious pigeon once migrated in giant flocks that sometimes exceeded three billion, darkening the skies over eastern North America for days at a time. No wild bird in the world comes close to those numbers today. Yet 100 years ago this week, the very last pigeon of her kind died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha, and her passing merits our close attention today.

Mercilessly slaughtered by the tens of millions at breeding colonies in the North and at huge wintertime roosts in the South during the post-Civil War era, passenger pigeons were shipped by trainloads to dinner tables in homes and restaurants across the East. Their population fell from biblical numbers at midcentury to tiny, aimless flocks in 1890. By around 1900 the few birds that remained were all in captivity. The last male died in 1910, leaving Martha as a barren relic of past abundance.

Martha is receiving plenty of eulogies this year, including several recent books and even a petition for a presidential proclamation honoring her centenary. I suggest that our most important eulogy would be to reflect on her species’ once great numbers, on the century that has passed since her death and on the century that begins today. We need to imagine Martha asking us, “Have you learned anything from my passing?”

It seems that whenever humans discover bounty, it is doomed to become a fleeting resource. The fate of cod fisheries in the late 1900s mirrors that of the passenger pigeon a century before. Pacific bluefin tuna, down 96 percent from their unfished numbers, may be next in line. Countless such examples exist around the world, but the good news is that we still have time to reflect on them before their populations dwindle down to their last respective Marthas.

This is the message of the 2014 State of the Birds report, a periodic assessment of the health of our nation’s bird populations compiled by the nation’s leading bird conservation specialists in collaboration with state and federal wildlife agencies.

The report, which is to be released Sept. 9, uses data from long-running, continentwide population surveys to analyze which bird communities are doing well, and which are in trouble. The results show some clear lessons that — had we followed them in the late 1800s — could have saved the passenger pigeon.

Perhaps the most significant conclusion is a simple validation: Timely conservation action really does work, even for species that have reached alarmingly low numbers. But let’s emphasize that word “timely.” After all, several states did pass laws to restrict pigeon hunting, but they did so after passenger pigeons were reduced to a few stray flocks. For a species that laid only a single egg in the nest, and may have required the social stimulus of large flocks to breed, these meager actions were too little, too late.

Unlike the Americans of the 1800s, today we have an arsenal of gauges that allows us to measure how bird species are faring. The Audubon Christmas Bird Count, the Breeding Bird Survey by the United States Geological Survey and Canadian Wildlife Service, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird data-collection program provide robust continentwide estimates of population sizes and trends. Because birds are such sensitive barometers of landscape health, these measures help us identify deeper environmental issues that demand attention. Peregrine falcons and bald eagles, for example, demonstrated that our underregulated pesticide habits were poisoning the environment, and us. But once we knew this, we acted decisively — and it worked. Both of these species are now off the endangered species list, and our environment is vastly healthier than when these species were declining precipitously.

The Endangered Species Act is by far the most powerful piece of environmental legislation ever passed. Today, the act continues to be a source of on-the-ground success — a steadfast reminder that timely conservation pays off. Thanks to the emergency actions authorized and funded by the act beginning in the 1980s, just a few weeks ago I saw two majestic California condors flying free in the federally protected Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur. There is scarcely a sight in the natural world more thrilling, and the emerging success of the condor breeding and reintroduction program should be a source of immense national pride. Still, the condor’s susceptibility to lead poisoning, mainly from hunters’ bullets, reminds us that much remains to be done to secure its future.

The State of the Birds report documents that for every success story, a number of other birds and their habitats are in serious danger. The report cites 230 species on a watch list of birds that are currently in danger of extinction or at risk of becoming so without significant conservation action.

With dozens of species on the list, Hawaii leads all regions in the United States in terms of threats, yet receives less than 5 percent of the recovery funding from the federal government’s endangered species program. Presumably this is because more charismatic species receive a disproportionate share.

The list also highlights the plights of seabirds, like albatrosses and petrels; shorebirds, like plovers and sandpipers; and four high-profile species of grouse, which perform spectacular spring mating dances in 18 states across our prairies and Western sagebrush.

These days the Endangered Species Act seems to be considered by many to be a hostile government action, as evidenced most recently by intense political responses, including efforts in Congress to block adding the sage grouse to the endangered species list, and to weaken key provisions of the act. Yet, on this centenary of Martha’s death, it bears reflection that a strong federal Endangered Species Act would have saved the passenger pigeon a century and a half ago.

Preserving abundance in nature is ecologically just as important as rescuing rare species en route to extinction. The passenger pigeon taught us that even the most numerous species can undergo population collapses in astonishingly short periods of time. Cod fishermen of the North Atlantic learned the same painful lesson just two decades ago. It is far more effective and cost-efficient to conserve a species while it is abundant than to wait until it reaches the brink.

The State of the Birds report identifies more than two dozen “common birds in steep decline” — species that are showing early warning signals of distress, having recently lost more than half of their global populations. Mostly, these species are barometers for greater environmental issues. The eastern meadowlark and northern bobwhite are fading from rural America right along with the family farm and its smaller-scale agricultural practices of pasturing cows and keeping grass buffers. Common nighthawks, those fantastic evening acrobats that flash through our ball-field lights to catch bugs on summer nights, are disappearing alongside native pollinators like bees. Many experts suspect that continent-scale declines in the prey of insect-eating birds have resulted from agricultural and homeowner insecticide use.

I suggest that the broader conservation argument transcends cost efficiencies and scientific analyses and should focus instead on the moral questions posed by Martha. Most of us wish we could see those storied passenger pigeon flocks for ourselves, so why aren’t we doing everything possible to keep some of our most common wild things from meeting the same fate? Don’t our great-grandchildren have the right, as part of their American heritage, to experience choruses of meadowlarks singing “spring is here!” from treetops and fence posts?

In the past century, we have built the greatest conservation system in the world. Sadly, the passenger pigeon just missed the dawn of conservation in America. In 1900 the Lacey Act became our nation’s first federal wildlife protection law, and three years later President Theodore Roosevelt saved pelicans and egrets from plume hunters by establishing Pelican Island in Florida as our first national wildlife refuge. Numerous other laws and actions followed, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which still protects all nongame birds today.

A century after Martha’s death, the results of bold conservation actions are all around us, and are not limited to high-profile birds like falcons and eagles. The State of the Birds report shows that wetland birds altogether have increased significantly since 1968. The reason for this growth of waterfowl populations like the mallard, blue-winged teal and gadwall dates from the 1930s, when federal laws established the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp Act and an excise tax on firearms and ammunition to provide funding for wildlife management and habitat protection.

The report’s population indicators also identify habitats where conservation investments are desperately needed today. “Aridland” birds of the American desert, chaparral and sagebrush — such as the sage grouse, gilded flicker and black-throated sparrow — have declined by nearly half since 1968. These declines, driven primarily by habitat loss and fragmentation owing to energy and residential development, have been exacerbated recently by severe drought. Drive along our iconic Western desert highways and you may not notice anything unusual, but it’s a bird habitat in crisis.

Why should we care about these aridland birds, or any birds? It’s a common question, as elected officials and voters weigh conservation investments alongside health care, immigration and economic issues.

Besides our moral imperative to maintain the earth’s beauty and bounty for future generations to enjoy, it is important to view birds as accessible indicators of the health of our lands and waters. Take those declining meadowlarks as one example: In my home state of Minnesota, where meadowlarks commonly sang atop utility poles back in the 1950s, the patches of wild grasslands they depended on are now horizon-to-horizon farm fields. As a consequence, barges now get stuck in sediment-filled portions of the Mississippi River because grasslands no longer intercept silt-laden runoff waters from farms. The toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie that recently rendered Toledo’s water supply undrinkable had a similar origin. In short, healthy bird habitat makes for healthy human habitat.

If the image of train cars filled with passenger pigeons stuffed 300 to the barrel stands as our most infamous icon of carelessly unsustainable exploitation, then we need to return to the Martha question: “Have you learned anything from my passing?” As we plunder the final few percent of our once abundant ocean fisheries, perhaps we should start referring to bluefin tuna as passenger pigeons of the sea.

Roosevelt’s pelicans and egrets recovered because our nation made their continued abundance a priority and took bold action. But with 230 species on the 2014 State of the Birds watch list, the job Roosevelt pioneered is not at all finished. Like good housekeeping, or maintaining a strong military, conservation is not a one-and-done proposition. It requires continued commitment and investment.

Naysayers wrongly told Roosevelt that seeking to restore and maintain nature’s plenty wasn’t financially practicable, that it would disrupt economic growth. He did not heed these dire warnings, and instead championed actions that would avoid repeating the passenger pigeon mistake.

Today, the tragedy of the passenger pigeon exhorts us to have the courage to redouble these efforts in protecting what remains of nature’s abundance.

John W. Fitzpatrick is executive director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.