Tigers R Us

In an Animal Planet poll, the world's favorite animal was the tiger. Hooray. Animals that humans have known since our species began, their range and numbers have dwindled since at least the 19th century. There were only about 100,000 left at the start of the 20th century. I remembered reading about them as endangered species in the early 70s. Today there may be as few as 2,000 in the wild, or as many as 3,500. Tiger, tiger burning out.

Tigers are the victims of land clearing and hunting for profit, giant pandas and monarch butterflies of urbanization, mountain gorillas of all of that plus human warfare in their remaining habitat, bluefin tuna of overfishing, and we know what's killing off the polar bear. And those are only six of the most endangered on the World Wildlife Fund watch list. There are hundreds, thousands more, including less glamorous lifeforms, like coral.

Today (Jan. 11) the United Nations launched the International Year of Biodiversity. The announcement was not exactly front page news in the U.S.--what could compete with Harry Reid's comment of more than a year ago, or Mark McGuire admitting he used sterioids in the 1990s? This is depressingly familiar when environment and the Climate Crisis are the topics: the Google News search will show you the BBC story, other European outlets, environmental sites and blogs, as well as Aljazeera, Xinhua and the Malaysian Insider. (The Wall Street Journal covered German Chancellor Merkel's remarks on the subject.)

Perhaps that's related, at both ends of causality, with the fact that experts, organizations and governments have decried species extinctions for decades and done very little about it. As Richard Black in the BBC story notes, "Eight years ago, governments pledged to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, but the pledge will not be met."..

"The big opportunity during the International Year of Biodiversity is for governments to do for biodiversity what they failed to do for climate change in Copenhagen," said Simon Stuart, a senior science advisor to Conservation International and chair of IUCN's Species Survival Commission.

Black also notes something else that isn't new: With species extinctions running at about 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate, some biologists contend that we are in the middle of the Earth's sixth great extinction - the previous five stemming from natural events such as asteroid impacts.

The end of species signal the end of their habitat, principally forests that are torched and bulldozed away, lands and waters that are poisoned, but also climate-sensitive landscapes, waters and ice. Animals, insects, plants--that's biodiversity, too, the web of life that supports our existence.

So UN leaders spoke today of economic impacts, the numbers indicating the stupendous stupidity of this destruction. Black notes deforestation costs the global economy between $2 and $5 trillion a year. Earlier estimates of the world's ecosystems and "natural capital" placed their economic value conservatively at $33 trillion a year--when the total gross national product of the entire world is $18 trillion a year.

There is natural death for species and habitats. Sometimes sudden, more often over time. Even natural crashes can have devastating consequences for other species. This unnatural killing of biodiversity in general is suicide for humans as a life form. Before that happens, the economic costs will topple civilizations. Life would go on, without us.

There's more awareness of the problem, and more support for efforts to protect at least some species. But at this level of action it's not enough. Emotive photos and amazing motion pictures try to substitute for untold centuries of human interaction with animals and plants--the interactions that, in Paul Shepard's phrase, "made us human," but are now not even memories. But are these consciousness-raising efforts enough, strong enough, fast enough?

They're battling the conservatism of the comfortable, the interests of the monied and powerful, and science that only recently began to emerge from its unconscious assumptions, derived (so professor of psychology and ethnology Jordi Sabater Pi believed) from religions that preached that animals and nature were inferior and subservient to humans. Commenting on the near eradication of some of our closest genetic relatives, apes and chimpanzees (millions lived in Africa a century ago, 90% gone now), Dr. Pi said, "I believe that humanity is on the road to abolishing the mistreatment of animals, but when it finally makes it into legislation, there will not be any animals left in the wild to protect."

As for what this International Year can accomplish, Black writes that "the UN hopes some kind of legally-binding treaty to curb biodiversity loss can be agreed at the CBD summit, held in Japan in October." There's also an agreement on deforestation that looked as if it was a done deal at Copenhagen time, but mysteriously stalled. These could be significant, if they happen.

The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and other organizations have for years been taking a direct approach: buying up vulnerable land--often in tropical forests where 40% of known species live--to preserve that biodiversity. What such relatively small measures will ultimately do is hard to figure. But Chancellor Merkel was right in linking biodiversity to the climate crisis. Their stories are related, and are going to be related, however they come out.