The loneliest word, and the extinction crisis

We're in the midst of an extinction crisis. Just two months ago, an international committee known as IPBES released a report, compiled over 3 years by 145 experts from 50 countries, that said 1,000,000 plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, many within the next few decades.

Martha, the very last passenger
pigeon, shown when she was
still alive.

Before getting to that report, I want to introduce a word that I only just learned: endling. An endling (the word was coined in 1996) is the last surviving member of a species. One example was Martha, the very last passenger pigeon, who died in the Cinncinnati Zoo in 1914. Passenger pigeons numbered in the billions in the 19th century, but humans wiped them out.

In 2012 we lost another endling, Lonesome George–the very last Pinto Island tortoise from the Galapagos Islands–who died at around age 100.

If you want to see a particularly poignant example of an endling, watch this rare and heartbreaking video of Benjamin, the very last Tasmanian tiger (or thylacine), pacing around his cramped enclosure in Hobart, Tasmania. This film from 1933 is the last known motion picture of a living thylacine. Benjamin died in 1936.

Two Tasmanian tigers in the Washington, D.C. zoo, in a photo
taken around 1904. Photo credit: Baker; E.J. Keller. from the
Smithsonian Institution archives

We have records of other endlings too: the last Caspian tiger was killed in the 1950s in Uzbekistan, and the last great auks were killed for specimen collectors in 1844.

Unfortunately, we're likely to see more and more endlings in the years to come. The causes of extinction are varied, and many of them are related to human activities. The IPBES ranked the culprits, in descending order, as:

1. changes in land and sea use,
2. direct exploitation of organisms,
3. climate change,
4. pollution, and
5. invasive alien species.

In response to the IPBES report, the House of Representatives held a hearing in May to discuss the findings. Republicans on the committee took the opportunity to display a new form of denialism: extinction denialism. As reported in The Guardian, Representatives Tom McClintock and Rob Bishop used their time to attack the reputations of the report's authors, rather than addressing the very serious consequences of large-scale extinction. They called two climate-change deniers as witnesses, who also used their time to attack the authors.

This is a classic strategy used by deniers: attack the messenger, rather than dealing with the substance of the report. Let's consider just a few of the report's main findings (see much more here):

• Across the planet, 75% of the land and about 66% of the marine environments have been significantly altered by human actions.
• Up to $577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss (bees and other insects)
• In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished.
• Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, covering a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.

The report is a call to action. It explains that transformative change is needed to protect and restore nature, and collective action is needed to overcome special interests such as the fossil fuel industry, which donates heavily to politicians. The Congressional hearing was a vivid demonstration of how effective the anti-environmental lobbyists have been.

Endling is the saddest word in any language. If we humans continue to treat nature as we've done in the past, we're going to see many more videos like the one of Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger. Let's hope we can do better.