a lil science

Book: Lost Wonders: 10 Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century, by Tom Lathan

“‘[T]rying to balance despair and hope, problems and successes, that’s part of the high-wire act of doing ecology and conservation.’”

Extinction is a heavy subject; it ought to be handled with care and tact, with appropriate scientific expertise. Pity that this humble author possesses none of the above. Still, she’ll try.

You’ve probably heard that we are living through the sixth mass extinction in history, what with human activities raising the background extinction rate to about 1000 times of what it normally should be and everything. Combined with the effects of climate change and habitat destruction, it really isn’t a nice time to be a non-human inhabitant of this pale blue dot.

The problem is, what does that mean for people like you and me? How does losing an obscure endangered animal on the other side of the planet affect us? We’ve seen plenty of disturbing statistics, such as the one a few lines back, but somehow it’s a little hard to apply them to real life. After all, it’s just numbers…right?

This is something this book changed, at least for me. The ten species featured in here, whether it’s a giant tortoise, a fish, or a tree, have one thing in common—they were seen alive after 2000, but since then have all disappeared. In other words, their extinctions occurred entirely within these two decades or so. That arguably has a much larger emotional impact than, let’s say, the tale of the dodo or the traveller’s pigeon, if only because it’s much more recent for us and can’t be blamed on ignorance alone.

Speaking of emotional impact, that’s another thing this book took me by surprise with. Extinctions usually aren’t things people witness. We think it’s like evolution—it’s slow, it’s difficult, it happens over millions of years if not longer. We think there’s no way for anyone to watch a species go extinct in real time, because the idea simply seems too foreign in our minds: how could a story stretching on for longer than we’ve existed just…end? In front of us, no less? The demise of a species is beyond comprehension; being present for it, even more so.

But in this book are countless testimonies from people who did exactly that—scientists, conservationists, caretakers, you name it. They did everything in their power to help: they led captive-breeding programs, they campaigned for recognition for their species, they studied tirelessly to figure out how to keep their wards comfortable and healthy. Sometimes their efforts led to a momentary respite, a moment where the population numbers climbed instead of dropped, but ultimately they all ended in one thing: extinction.

“‘It was a very humbling experience to be there at the point of a death of a species,’ Cairns-Wicks tells me, when I ask her what it was like to witness the extinction. ‘It was like burying—’ she begins, but interrupts herself mid-sentence. ‘The tree was…sort of anthropomorphic by the end.’”

Reading this book was a mixed experience. On the one hand, I already knew what would happen (the title made it pretty obvious). I knew every species preserved in these pages is dead, gone from the face of the Earth. But I can’t help hoping that somehow, despite all odds, that wouldn’t happen. The work of everyone working to save one species, no matter how large or how small, was enough to keep my hopes up. It’s depressing, really, but also…heartwarming? That certainly isn’t the right word for it, but what touched me the most was how much people were willing to sacrifice for the wellbeing of a species. Most of us would probably never notice a tiny snail even if it danced right in front of our faces, but there were people who did, and they cared enough to track these snails meticulously to realize they were disappearing one by one. Now, call me a rabid optimist, but that gave me hope. At least people care.

I’d like to end this book recommendation (if it can even be called one) on this note. These tales might be far away from us; the species that went extinct in them might be ones which would never affect us directly. But their stories, whether originating from concrete hills in Malaysia or islands in the Galapagos Islands, can bring us just a little bit closer to the extinctions occurring everywhere in our world as we speak. Perhaps they can remind us that unless we do something, these stories will keep repeating, each time culminating in an Earth that’s a little less diverse. Or perhaps they can encourage us that not all hope is lost, that there’s still something humanity can do in the face of something as scary and as unfathomable as extinction.