Dave Foreman is Director of The Rewilding Institute, a non-profit conservation think tank based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is dedicated to developing and promoting the ideas, strategies, and vision of continental-scale conservation.

The Extinction Crisis

The Crisis

The most important—and gloomy—scientific discovery of the twentieth century was the extinction crisis. During the 1970s, field biologists grew more and more worried by population drops in thousands of species and by the loss of ecosystems of all kinds around the world. Tropical rainforests were falling to saw and torch. Wetlands were being drained for agriculture. Coral reefs were dying from god knows what. Ocean fish stocks were crashing. Elephants, rhinos, gorillas, tigers, polar bears, and other "charismatic megafauna" were being slaughtered. Frogs were vanishing. Even leviathan—the great whales—were being hunted down in their last redoubts of the Antarctic and Arctic seas, and their end was in sight. These staggering losses were in oceans and on the highest peaks; they were in deserts and in rivers, in tropical rainforests and Arctic tundra alike.

A few biologists—including geneticist Michael Soulé (who later founded the Society for Conservation Biology) and Harvard's famed E. O. Wilson—put these worrisome anecdotes and bits of data together. They knew, through paleontological research by others, that in the 570 million years or so of the evolution of modern animal phyla there had been five great extinction events. The last happened 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous when dinosaurs became extinct. Wilson and company calculated that the current rate of extinction is one thousand to ten thousand times the background rate of extinction in the fossil record. That discovery hit with all the subtlety of an asteroid striking Earth: right now, today, life faces the sixth great extinction event in earth history. The cause is just as unsettling and unprecedented: eating, manufacturing, traveling, warring, consuming, and breeding by six billion human beings. For the first time in the history of life on Earth, one species is killing countless others. For the first time, one species, Homo sapiens—that's us—is waging a war against nature.

The crisis we face is biological meltdown. Wilson warns that the proportion of species driven to extinction "might easily reach 20 percent by 2022 and rise as high as 50 percent or more thereafter." Soulé has said that soon the only large mammals left will be those we consciously choose to protect; that "[the twentieth] century will see the end of significant evolution of large plants and terrestrial vertebrates in the tropics." He writes, "The end of speciation for most large animals rivals the extinction crisis in significance for the future of living nature. As [Bruce Wilcox and I] said in 1980, 'Death is one thing, an end to birth is something else.'"

I wish Soulé and Wilson could be brushed away as crackpots hanging off a far edge of science, but not only are they among the most lionized biologists of our time, their dismal views are commonplace in the scientific community. In 1998, the American Museum of Natural History commissioned the Louis Harris poll to survey the nation's leading biologists. "Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a 'mass extinction' was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years."

However, few members of the public are aware of the crisis. "Sixty percent of the laymen polled professed little or no familiarity with the concept of biological diversity, and barely half ranked species loss as a 'major threat.'" A Newsweek Earth Day poll in 2000 found that a mere 5 percent of Americans thought that endangered or vanished species was the most important environmental problem. Even among members of nature conservation groups, most seem unaware of the magnitude of species loss, and few conservation organizations are forthright in putting the extinction crisis at the top of their agendas and sounding the alarm about the dead-end road down which humanity is hurtling. The crisis is made worse by this ignorance.

Considering the biological catastrophe we are in, it is gut-wrenching to find that only a small percentage of people are aware of the crisis and our responsibility for it. There may be several reasons for this head burying. First, scientists and conservationists have not done the best job of publicizing and explaining the extinction crisis, nor has the media given it due heed. Second, the money and research time given to the problems facing nature are so small that we do not even know how many species there are. That alone makes accurate analysis difficult. Third, anticonservationists have fogged the issue so well that the public and mainstream media have been turned away from the core issues regarding extinction. Fourth, extinction events happen in time and territorial scales that are hard to comprehend. After all, humans have evolved to react to short-term and close-range stimuli. Fifth and closely related, much of the devastation is slow and incremental. Many of us are blind to that which is not sudden. Sixth, the mere thought that we are causing a mass extinction is so soul shattering that most people who hear of it refuse to even consider it. Finally, the values we place on nature make it easy for us to exploit it for our personal economic gain.

The Diversity of Life

Before we can understand the extinction of species, we must know what species are and what their significance is. And before we can understand the extinction crisis, we must know something about biological diversity, or biodiversity.

It seems that we humans are adapted to classifying things. Even the act of collecting baseball cards or porcelain figurines comes from this fancy. From our earliest times, we have named, numbered, and classified life forms. Genesis recounts the old Middle Eastern myth where Yahweh brought all the animals before Adam to be named. Not only are we driven to classify things, but we seem to be pretty good at it. We also seem to be consistent at...