Many of you will have heard of the Golden Toad, the Passenger Pigeon, the Tasmanian Tiger, the Great Auk, the Quagga, and the Stephens Island Wren.
All of these animals are extinct, all within the last 250 years, and all (except perhaps the Golden Toad) almost entirely due to the actions of humans.
These species were all lost in distant parts of the world or, in the case of the European Great Auk, generations ago. These names, although familiar to us, seem to resonate with times and places other than our own.
Perhaps this is why so many seem immune to the pleas of conservationists citing examples such as these as evidence for our continued detrimental effect upon the environment. Extinction seems to be a remote phenomenon not directly affected by the actions of modern Brits.
Maybe this would be different if we had recently lost a species of our own, if we had an example of an endemic British species recently lost due to the actions of modern Brits.
Well as a matter of fact we do.
I was shocked to read in this months BBC wildlife magazine of the Ivell's Sea Anemone - a species endemic to Britain that became extinct as recently as 1983. Even as someone who has completed a degree in Biology, with modules on British marine ecology, the name was completely unfamiliar to me.
It is obviously a terrible shame, perhaps even criminal, that the Ivell's Sea Anemone is gone for good, but why are conservationists not using the name to their advantage? What are they not shouting on rooftops that the Scottish Wild Cat, the Red Squirrel, and the Smooth Snake are in danger of going the same was as the Ivell's Sea Anemone? Why is every British school child not taught to say its name and lament its loss?
In a time when the general opinion is that the environment can wait in the face of larger challenges such as economic recovery, perhaps the Ivell's Sea Anemone should be used to remind us Brits that the environment is as much our responsibility as that of the rainforest-felling third world dictatorships we so love to condemn and patronize.
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I suppose it would be easier to shout about species such as the Ivatt's Sea Anemone if there was some visible consequence of it going extinct, apart from there simply not being any of the species around any more. Did it have a quantifiable larger effect on the ecosystem as a whole?
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons challenges like the economic recovery get notice and attention is that the consequences of not recovering is intuitive for most people. Maybe it's up to biologists to make it easily understandable to people what it'll actually mean to the rest of the ecosystem and world at large for a particular species to go extinct.
Throughout its history ecological research has shown that the consequences of a species' increase or decrease are extremely complex, and to some extent unknowable. The point is that ecosystems provide services, in this case the brackish environment the anemone lived in almost certainly helps to purify water. The loss of the Ivell's Sea Anemone will have affected this in one way or another.
ReplyDeleteThe challenge of conservationists is to quantify the economic value of these "ecosystem services". How much would it cost for humans to pollinate flowers in the place of bees, purify water in the place of mangrove forests, or convert carbon dioxide to oxygen in the place of trees?
To a certain extent conservationists are beginning to do this and alert economists to the true value, but there is a long way to go.