The Once and Future World Read online

  By any name, the species had its true nature cast aside at every turn in order to aid and abet its destruction. Thylacines originally lived both in Australia and on the island of Tasmania. By the time European sailors visited these places, the thylacine had already faded from the continental mainland, possibly as much as three thousand years earlier, and probably due to changes in the ecology caused by the arrival and enduring presence of human beings—the people who came to be known as Aborigines. On Tasmania, however, Aborigines and thylacines managed to live alongside one another, and the animals were abundant enough that even the first party of Europeans to set foot on the island encountered thylacine tracks. Shy, cryptic and most active at night, the “Tasmanian tiger” was, at first, mainly a mystery to the colonists. As European-style fields and farms spread over the Tasmanian landscape, however, reports began to spread of thylacines killing sheep and chickens. The losses appear never to have been very great, but the thylacine was quickly made into a monster. Where once a settler might write of feeling “very lucky to have been so close to a tiger” or remark that, in Tasmania, “there is nothing that will hurt a man but a snake,” suddenly the thylacine was so feared and hated that men who killed one often burned its skin and smashed its bones. The idea of dying in the fangs of a thylacine took on a nightmare quality—the animals were said to kill like vampires, draining their victims of blood. Having gained supernatural powers through human storytelling, the thylacine was denied its flesh and blood vulnerability. By the late 1800s, when scientists were having difficulty finding any thylacines at all, sheep ranchers still claimed the hills were “infested” with them.

  Science, meanwhile, promoted its own form of denial. Struggling to explain why many of Australia’s distinctive species, including the thylacine in Tasmania, appeared to be rapidly declining in the face of European settlement, many academics were quick to blame the animals themselves. They were “the stupidest animals in the world,” “a race of natural born idiots,” wrote the superintendant of the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., in 1903. Other respected scholars declared the thylacine “sealed off … from the great evolutionary advances that took place elsewhere on earth,” “badly formed and ungainly and therefore very primitive,” “unadaptable and so ill-fitted for survival in a changing world.” In 1936, when the thylacine went extinct after a century of habitat loss and extermination campaigns, another brand of denial was added: the claim that no one had known the animals were so close to the brink. In an exhaustive review of the evidence for that enduring belief, Australian researcher Robert Paddle uncovered at least twenty-five warnings about the scarcity of the thylacine. In fact, the species was protected under law exactly fifty-nine days before the last known thylacine died in captivity. “The pathetic excuse—‘we did not know what was going on’—was as unreal in Tasmania in 1888, as it was in Germany over fifty years later,” writes Paddle. “The sense of loss associated with extinction, and the acceptance of responsibility, guilt and blame for allowing it to happen, are not easily borne.”

  The last thylacine is believed to have been captured in 1933 in the Florentine Valley of southwestern Tasmania. The animal was trussed and tied to a pack horse, then taken to the town of Tyenna, where it was put in a cage and briefly ogled—ladies and gentlemen, the fearsome Tasmanian tiger!—by the locals. Then it was sent to the state capital, Hobart. On arrival at that city’s zoo, it was filmed for sixty-two seconds by the zoologist David Fleay, and then, in the species’ most memorable final act, it bit Fleay on the ass.

  Those sixty-two seconds of footage make for uncomfortable viewing. The dodo, the great auk—they’re remembered only in oil paintings that bring to mind long-ago times beyond our understanding. The simple fact that you can watch a Tasmanian tiger on film is a constant reminder that the animal still existed in living memory; it had been gone for only a month when my own father was born. Behold the last thylacine. It blinks, it paces—it yawns! Its gape is astonishing, nearly the height of the animal itself and lined with slender teeth. Its eyes are anxious and curious and do not suggest stupidity. And it is extinct. The Tasmanian tiger will never blink or pace or yawn or look out at the world with anxious eyes again.

  The last thylacine lived out its brief remaining days in a wire-topped cage, its only shelter a tree that was not yet in leaf so early in the antipodean spring. In the last two weeks of the animal’s life, nighttime temperatures dropped below freezing, and soared as high as 42 degrees Celsius by day. One witness reported hearing the thylacine’s ululating cry of distress. It died in the night on September 7, 1936. In an unsettling act of complacency, the body was apparently thrown away, though the last thylacine—only recently confirmed as a male—has since come to be remembered fondly as Benjamin, Benjy for short. From that moment onward, the species has been subjected to the only act of denial still available: it has been refused the finality of extinction. After seventy-seven years without hard evidence of a living thylacine, people still regularly claim to see the animals in the wild.

  Throughout all of this dark history, one fundamental truth about the thylacine had to be constantly pushed aside. Amid all the ignorance and excuses, the blood, poison, traps and lies, a slender countercurrent has always existed in the story of humankind versus Thylacinus cynocephalus. From the very first, reaching back into the days of the Aborigines, there have been people who, for their own reasons, never did buy into the fear and hatred directed toward the animal. It is because of these rare few that we know that the thylacine, like other dog-like species around the world, had the capacity to live not only alongside us, but among us. With appropriate human care, they were capable, as Paddle puts it, of “perception and friendship,” of “love and interest.” A thylacine, in other words, made an excellent pet.

  * Similarly, the birds today known as “cowbirds” were formerly known as “buffalo birds.”

  * The last known auks were a breeding pair killed on Eldey Island, Iceland; it’s said that their egg was broken in the melee.

  * Male thylacines had pouches also, which they used to stow their scrotal sacks.

  Chapter 3.

  A TEN PERCENT WORLD

  Several years ago, a grey whale swam into the heart of Vancouver, British Columbia, a metropolis of two million people. Such encounters are not unheard of; one year earlier, a whale swam beneath New York’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the gateway to the city’s harbour, and briefly put on a show for the residents of Staten Island and Brooklyn. Vancouver’s whale, though, passed under three bridges and straight into the urban core up a dead-end channel narrow enough to be known as False Creek. There, ringed by marinas and reflected in glass towers, the whale thrilled people from every walk of life.

  Most people considered that day a fluke—a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Maybe it was. But little more than a century ago, grey and even humpback whales—the species famous for its beautiful, mournful underwater songs—were an ordinary presence off Vancouver’s shores. Hundreds of whales lived in or passed through the area; a newspaper from 1869 reports that they “spouted their defiance” at the growing city from its waterways. They did not defy for long. Within forty years, every one of the region’s great whales had been hunted and killed. Only a tiny minority of people are aware of this history, and for them, the grey whale’s visit had a different meaning. It raised the hopeful possibility that what was once, may be again.

  The way you see the natural world around you determines much about the kind of world you are willing to live with. If you are aware that whales once swam in your local waters, then you can ask yourself whether they might belong in those straits and bays once again. If you’re unaware of the animals’ past presence, then their absence will seem perfectly natural, and the question of whales in the future simply will not occur to you. Seattle, Washington, is less than two hundred kilometres down the Pacific Coast from Vancouver and shares its whaling history. There, a poll found that more than 70 percent of residents consider their local waters—which h
ave been affected by human activities for millennia, and have suffered dramatic declines in sea mammals, fish, shellfish and seabirds—to be in good condition and not in need of restoration.

  Every corner of the planet has been touched by human influence—in order to understand our current state of nature, we need to look at the present through the lens of the past. To do so is obviously complicated, involving not only science and statistics, but also the way that we experience the natural world—the sights, sounds and sensations of life on earth. Yet if this blue-green globe was once a richer and more varied place, we should be able to make some rough measure of the amount of change that has occurred. Nature as we know it today is a fraction of what it was, but what might that fraction be? No single study has made the calculation, but an accumulation of research on the decline of species after species, of living system after living system, does point toward a figure.

  We live in a 10 Percent World.

  Consider that just 14 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is currently protected from human exploitation, along with approximately 1 percent of the oceans. Yet even those numbers give too optimistic an impression of what has been set aside. We have, for example, preserved nearly 40 percent of the world’s snow and ice—more than any other major habitat type—but just 5 percent of its temperate grasslands, which alone cover one-tenth of the planet. Similarly, almost 30 percent of coral reefs are within marine protected areas, but only 6 percent have effective protection from threats that range from pollution to overfishing. Eighty percent of reefs had their largest animal species depleted even before the year 1900; rounding to the nearest whole figure, the number of coral reefs worldwide that are considered “pristine” is zero.

  The planet is still home to a surprising amount of wild country. A full 44 percent of the earth’s land is composed of areas larger than ten thousand square kilometres that have fewer than five people per square kilometre. But again, that figure does not represent anything like the world in all of its variety. Most of those big, empty spaces are in the polar regions, northern forests, the Amazon and the world’s deserts—areas that, with the exception of the Amazon, are relatively poor in animals and plants; the earth’s richest habitats are also the places where people like to live. What’s more, many of these wide-open spaces look quite different when seen in a finer grain. Measured by population density, for example, the United States has large wilderness areas in its western drylands and Rocky Mountains; look more closely, and just 2 percent of the Lower 48 states is composed of undeveloped roadless areas larger than twenty square kilometres. Drawn as a square, a space that size would take an hour to cross on foot.

  Or perhaps we should look at the flagship species of wildness—the planet’s most magnificent animals. In the oceans, the world’s biggest fish, from tuna to cod to swordfish to sharks, have been reduced to an estimated 10 percent of their past abundance. Research over the past decade suggests that the great whales, too, may number one-tenth or less of their historical peak; even grey whales on the Pacific coast of North America, which at twenty-five thousand animals had been considered an almost fully recovered population, are now known to have a richness of genetic diversity that suggests they numbered three to five times more in the past. Imagine: seventy-five thousand whales making the yearly migration from their breeding grounds off Mexico to the food-rich waters of Alaska. On land, meanwhile, just 20 percent of the globe still houses all of the major mammal species that it did in the year 1500. That figure is twice as high as 10 percent, but with rare exceptions, those species—the 250 largest fur-bearing animals, from polar bears to elephants, from kangaroos to jaguars—are even more vastly reduced in raw numbers than in range.

  To pay attention to the web of life on earth today is to acknowledge that our times are grim almost without relent. The best available evidence suggests that we exist in the accelerating freefall of what has been branded “the sixth extinction”—a fading-to-black of species worldwide at a rate that recalls five earlier spasms of mass loss imprinted in the fossil record. These range over time from the Ordovician extinction, 440 million years ago, in which 85 percent of known animal species died off, most likely through the fluctuations of an extreme ice age, to the most recent Cretaceous extinction, which sidelined 75 percent of species, among them the dinosaurs, probably in the aftermath of an asteroid’s collision with the earth or a period of spectacular volcanic eruptions. Today, worst-case scenarios count as many as 36 percent of the planet’s life forms as vulnerable to near-term extinction. It is not an empty threat: among species believed to have gone extinct since the year 2000 are the Chinese paddlefish, a European mountain goat called the Pyrenean ibex, and a tiny vesper bat with the lovely name of Christmas Island pipistrelle.

  The news that one or another plant or animal is at the brink of eradication is now so commonplace that jaded newspaper reporters talk of “species-of-the-week” stories. Yet living things are defined not by frailty, but diehard tenacity. Three billion years ago life on earth came into being, a miracle still beyond our understanding, and has carried on through every conceivable calamity. If anything can be said to be the mysterious “spark of life,” it is this singular impulse: to be. Extinction is not mere death; it is the death of the cycle of life and death.

  The pioneering book on the sixth extinction is The Sinking Ark, published by the biologist Norman Myers in 1979. Myers applied a more accurate term, however—“the great dying.” Extinction may hold centre stage in the global conversation about disappearance, but it is far from the whole story. Much more common in daily life is extirpation, sometimes called “local extinction”—the vanishing of particular species from particular places. Tigers are not extinct, for example, but they have disappeared from 93 percent of their original range, including the nations of Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Singapore, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, as well as most (and possibly all) of China’s provinces and several Indonesian islands. The Pashford pot beetle, on the other hand, is thought to be extinct, but has never been known to live beyond certain bogs in east-central England. Which is the greater loss, the extinction of the Pashford pot beetle from its few swamps, or the extirpation of the tiger from an area sixty-five times the size of the entire United Kingdom? That is a question to be weighed on the cosmic scales. Extinction wipes out, point by point, the clues to the code of existence; extirpation is the great, sucking retreat of the tide of life.

  The great dying can also be a matter of simple, numerical subtraction. Consider the wolf. Once the planet’s most widespread carnivore, the wolf is still present in 65 percent of its primeval range worldwide. That sounds hopeful, almost impressive, except that the animal is categorized as “fully viable” in just five of the sixty-three countries where packs once prowled; the “viable” nations include the United States, where wolves have vanished from more than 90 percent of their former range outside of Alaska. Genetic research suggests that the wolf population in North America could be as low as 5 percent of historical numbers, and declines have been even more severe in the rest of the world.

  More resilient life forms appear to challenge the idea of a 10 Percent World. Behold the birds, with their tremendous adaptability and mobility. The global population of wild birds has dropped by an estimated one-fifth to one-third in the past five hundred years; from an avian perspective, ours is at worst a 66 percent world. And yet: What weight do we give to the 154 recorded bird extinctions over that same period, from the dodo on the island of Mauritius to the recently vanished po’o-uli of Hawaii? How do we account for the 190 additional bird species that are classified as being at extremely high risk of extinction, which amount to 2 percent of all our feathered friends? Where in the miserable calculus do we count the steady replacement of bird diversity by that handful of hardy, aggressive, opportunistic species—crows and starlings and pigeons and mynas—that thrive in the new wilderness of human civilization?

  Other branches of the tree of life
make the vision of even a 10 Percent World seem like rose-tinted optimism. Recent reviews of diadromous fish—those species that divide their lives between fresh and salt water, such as salmon, herring, eels, whitefish and sturgeon—found them to be among the hardest-hit creatures on earth. Researchers from two New York universities studied twenty-four species along the Atlantic coasts of North America and Europe; they found that every one of them has decreased by more than 90 percent from its historical abundance and more than half have declined by more than 98 percent. One species, the houting, has been extinct since 1940. I for one had never heard of it before.

  Reach at random into the ecological grab bag, and one loss invariably leads you to others. When Columbus first encountered North America, it was home to as many as five billion black-tailed prairie dogs, rodents that live in underground colonies. Today, they endure on just 2 percent of their historical range. Prairie dogs are considered an indicator species of the health of North America’s plains, and, sure enough, just 10 percent of the continent’s native grasslands are still natural in any meaningful way. Most have been converted for agriculture, with the soil itself exhausted: one-third of the planet’s arable land is now unproductive, and on the remainder the extraction of nutrients outpaces their replenishment. Twenty percent of the earth is still covered with ancient forests, but more than 50 percent of nations no longer have any old-growth forests at all, and fully half of the forest cover that has vanished in the last ten thousand years worldwide has been lost in just the past century.

  You can take the cosmic view: the current rate of species extinction is thought to be as much as one thousand times higher than the background rate through evolutionary time. You can look at the world through a magnifying glass: in the United Kingdom, a world leader in insect conservation, scientists report that so many insect species are in danger of extinction that it would be impossible to develop recovery plans for each one individually. Even plankton, the tiny life forms that are the basic building blocks of the ocean food chain, have recently been estimated to be declining by 1 percent per year. But how long have they been in decline?