On Vanishing Species

Norman Myers
The Sinking Ark: A New Look at the Problem of Disappearing Species
Ask a man in the street what he thinks of the problem of disappearing species, and he may well reply that it would be a pity if the tiger or the blue whale disappeared, but he may add that it would be not be significant, not as compared with crises of energy, population, food and pollution—the “real problems.” In other words, he cares about disappearing species, but he cares about many other things more: he simply does not see it as a critical issue. If the tiger were to go extinct tonight, the sun would still come up tomorrow morning.
      In point of fact, by tomorrow morning we shall almost certainly have one less species on Planet Earth than we had this morning. It will not be a charismatic creature like the tiger. It could well be an obscure insect in the depths of some remote rainforest. It may even be a creature nobody has ever heard about. But it will have gone. A unique form of life will have been driven from the face of the earth forever.
      Equally likely is that by the end of the century we shall have lost one million species, possibly many more. Except for the barest handful, they will have been eliminated by the hands of humans. [TOP]

Sir Peter Scott, 1917-
Sadly, I have discovered that there is no hope whatever of saving all that I or any other conservationist would like to save, but if we can work together without internecine strife and keep working hard without losing heart, we shall save a great more of our natural world than if we had never tried.
Living species today, let us remember, are the end products of 20 million centuries of evolution; absolutely nothing can be done when the species has finally gone, when the last pair has died out. [TOP]

Jack Olsen
Slaughter the Animals, Poison the Earth
Within a few decades, the last mountain lion will be gone. Bears and bobcats will hold out longer because there are many more of them, and the wise and canny coyotes will outlast all the other large predators. But unless there are massive changes in the American West, unless the livestock lobbies and the federal poisoners release their strangleholds and give up their myths and prejudices, the day will come when the last weak and sickened coyote will drag himself to his feet and lift his voice to the skies, and there will be no answer. [TOP]

Romain Gary, 1914-
The Roots of Heaven
Our fate is linked to the survival of the Amazonian rain forests, the plankton in the seas, the fish in our lakes and rivers, and, by extension, the jaguar, the wolf, the grizzly bear and the bald eagle. You may not feel personally disturbed by the knowledge that more than 200 species of mammals, birds and reptiles have become extinct within the last three or four centuries, mostly through our fault, or by the realization that hundreds of others—the gorilla, the orangutan, the giant tortoise, the whooping crane, the big cats, the whales—will soon be found only in fairy tales unless there is something I permit myself to call a change of heart. But is it really necessary to keep on saying that no man is an island? How many warnings do we need? How many proofs and statistics, how many deaths, how much beauty gone, how many “last specimens” in those sad zoos?
      ... Still, I am confident that there is something more behind this drive for the preservation of the earth and its inhabitants than an exclusive preoccupation with a continued presence on this planet. Every book on ecology reminds us that when the balance of nature is threatened, it always finds a way to restore that balance, at whatever cost. If endangered by us, nature will strike back and show no more concern for Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Mozart than for daffodils. We are dealing here with an overwhelming force, that of life itself, and we know next to nothing about it.
The only thing we do know is nature has no favorites among the species. [TOP]

H.B. Hough
There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be created in this form again. We are looking upon the uttermost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light. We are in touch with the reality of extinction. [TOP]

Jon Wynne-Tyson, 1924-
Talk for Writers Against Experiments on Animals, London, 4/24/85
Until we establish a felt sense of kinship between our own species and those fellow mortals who share with us the sun and shadow of life on this agonized planet, there is no hope for other species, there is no hope for our environment, and there is no hope for ourselves. The writing is on the wall—large and clear. [TOP]

Roger L. Disilvestro
Age of Destruction
We seem to be running out of the essentials of life, such as clean water and air and even untouched forests, just as in the 19th century we were running out of wildlife. A hundred years ago we changed our attitudes and stopped thinking about wildlife as an inexhaustible commodity to be used up heedlessly. ... Now we need to change our basic values once again, need to learn to care for and nurture the land and the seas and the air we breathe. We cannot hope to save wildlife, nor ensure our own survival, while we go about destroying the Earth. The future thus depends on humanity coming finally to see that it is part of the natural world—as vulnerable to destruction as any wolf or whale or clear running stream, as integral to the proper workings of the planet as the blowing of the winds and the shining of the sun. [TOP]

David Mallett
And You Say That the Battle is Over
There are those who would deal in the darkness of life,
there are those who would tear down the sun,
and though most men are ruthless,
some will still weep
when the gifts we were given are gone. [TOP]

David R. Brower
Friends of the Earth
There is one ocean, with coves having many names; a single sea of atmosphere, with no coves at all; a thin miracle of soil, alive and giving life; a last planet, and there is no spare. [TOP]

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
Every creature is better alive than dead, man and moose and pine tree, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. [TOP]

The Right Honorable Earl of Jersey
What an appalling indictment it is, what a disgrace to humankind, that the road of its so-called civilization should be built on the memories of extinct species and species on their way to extinction. [TOP]

Professor J. Howard Moore, 1862-1916
Better World Philosophy
A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession. [TOP]

Chief Sealth (Seattle), c. 1786-1866
Chief Seattle’s Testimony, an 1854 oration, attributed
What is man without the beasts? If the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. [TOP]

Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452-1519
Notes
Nothing will be left. Nothing in the air, nothing under the earth, nothing in the waters. All will be hunted down, all exterminated. [TOP]

William Beebe, 1877-1962
When a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one is seen again. [TOP]

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