The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet.... Mark Lynas

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СКАЧАТЬ grounds would be exhausted at most after a decade, sometimes from one year to the next. All told, the twentieth century saw the slaughter of about 3 million whales, leaving only between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales in the whole world. The killing goes on still, thanks to the ‘scientific whaling’ loophole (more like a chasm) in the current International Whaling Commission (IWC) system. Norway, Iceland and Japan continue to kill whales today using the fig-leaf of scientific research, and these countries and their allies have recently tried to overturn the whaling moratorium altogether at the IWC. Whilst it is plausible that stocks of smaller whales like minkes can support a sustainable annual catch, there is a stronger case for leaving the whales alone altogether until their numbers – and the marine ecosystem generally – can properly recover.

      Although no whale species were driven to outright extinction, some marine animals have been extinguished completely. The Steller’s sea cow, a gentle and intensely social Pacific species, was wiped out for its meat and blubber in the mid-eighteenth century. The great auk – a flightless penguin-like seabird that once lived in huge numbers around the North Atlantic – was also exterminated in a determined campaign of slaughter. Once clubbed to death, the bodies would be plunged into boiling water, their feathers torn out (for stuffing pillows and mattresses, as well as adorning hats), whilst the carcass would be boiled for its oil (used for lighting lamps) and the remainder used to fuel the fires that powered the whole ghastly enterprise.²³ Ship crews would move onto remote islands with the sole purpose of killing as many birds as possible during the summer months. Even on the brink of extinction, the hunting continued: the last breeding pair of great auks were beaten to death in Iceland on 3 June 1844, and their single remaining egg was broken.²⁴

      Early seafarers were not exactly sentimental about the creatures they encountered. William Dampier, writing about the fur seals he saw on Juan Fernandez island in 1709, marvelled at their beauty, agility and grace, ‘how they lie at the top of the water playing and sunning themselves’ as he put it. But like everyone, Dampier soon got down to business. ‘A blow on the nose soon kills them,’ he added helpfully. ‘Large ships might here load themselves with seal-skins and Trane-oyl [oil]; for they are extraordinary fat.’²⁵ And large ships did just that, reducing the island’s enormous colonies of seals down to an eventual grand total of just two hundred individuals. One American naval captain related in 1891 how the shooting of fur seal females at sea left their offspring on the shore to starve: ‘Thousands of dead and dying pups were scattered over the rookeries, while the shorelines were lined with emaciated, hungry little fellows, with their eyes turned towards the sea uttering plaintive cries for their mothers, which were destined never to return.’²⁶

      Species after species was relentlessly pursued. Walruses were boiled down for their oil. Giant tortoises were seized in raids on the Galapagos Islands and kept alive by being turned on their backs in ships’ holds for months at a time before being eaten for their meat. In ‘one of the great wildlife exterminations of colonial times’, as marine historian Callum Roberts puts it, an original population of 50–100 million hawksbill turtles in the Caribbean was reduced to just a few thousand (it is still critically endangered worldwide).²⁷ Sea otters, which once swam in their millions in Pacific coastal waters from Mexico to the Arctic, were reduced to fewer than two thousand by 1911. As industrialisation proceeded, the depletion of whole areas could speed up: when seal colonies were first discovered in the remote South Shetland islands in 1820, a quarter of a million were killed and the population brought to near-extinction within just three years.²⁸

      All this is in the past, of course. But its impacts are still very much with us, and in many different ways the global slaughter continues. There are no large wild animals left on our planet in anything like the abundance they once enjoyed. Those few hunted species that remain are still under intense pressure; it is as if humanity has learned nothing from past exterminations. Today the extinction of the bluefin tuna is an imminent threat: quotas set at the time of writing by the sadly misnamed International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas are high enough to permit fishing boats to catch every single adult bluefin during next year’s season.²⁹ The fish don’t have much of a sporting chance: illegal spotter planes guide industrial fleets to wherever the last few thousand individuals can be found.³⁰ Nor have the economics changed much since the days of whaling: the trading conglomerate Mitsubishi was recently accused of stockpiling frozen bluefin in expectation of a post-extinction price bonanza.³¹ With individual fish worth up to $100,000 on the Tokyo sushi market, the tragedy of the commons plays out anew every time the tuna fleets set sail.

      The destruction of fish habitat is also routinely ignored in the interests of short-term profit. The North Sea off England’s east coast, for example, was not always the murky and uninviting body of water it is today: once its waters were kept clean and sediment-free by rich oyster beds on the sea floor – but these have been ploughed up by trawlers and the sea bottom reduced to a muddy, turgid wasteland. The pressure is unrelenting: intensively fished areas can be hit tens of times in a single year. Deep cold-water corals thousands of years old, supporting flourishing colonies of other marine life, can be reduced to rubble by a single pass of a trawler. Photographs of trawled coral colonies show piles of stony wreckage like the ruins of a pillaged city.

      Oceanic island birds are some of the most threatened species anywhere because they are particularly vulnerable to predation by introduced alien invaders. Half of Hawaii’s 140 native bird species are now extinct, thanks to the devastation wrought by introduced rats, pigs and cats. On Australia’s Christmas Island, the Pipistrelle bat population (I realise bats are mammals, but the point is the same) has plummeted by 90 per cent in the last decade (down to a mere 250 mature individuals), due largely to predation by invasive species like wolf snakes, rats and feral cats.

      Consequently, one of the quickest wins for biodiversity conservation is the elimination of alien species from islands. In the biodiversity ‘hotspot’ of the Galapagos Islands, 140,000 marauding goats have been removed, whilst in the islands off western Mexico – well-known for their unique species and thriving seabird colonies – cats, rats, goats, pigs, donkeys and rabbits have all been removed to protect endemic animals and plants from destruction. The cost has been tiny, compared with the benefits achieved: just $20,000 per colony for 200 seabird colonies protected, and $50,000 per species for 88 endemic species that are found nowhere else on Earth.³² That any species anywhere else might be lost for the want of such paltry sums would be a terrible indictment of our current lack of concern for the myriad of plants and animals that share this planet with us.

      BIODIVERSITY AND THE EARTH SYSTEM

      Of course, we may fret about biodiversity loss, but life in general is incredibly resilient. Living species have colonised every nook and cranny of the planetary system. Spiders, anchored by tiny threads, whizz across the stratosphere carried by hundred-mile-an-hour jet-stream blasts. Thermophilic bacteria cluster hungrily around deep-sea volcanic fissures where temperatures soar well past boiling point. Oil-well samples show flourishing microbial life 2 kilometres or more below our feet.³³

      Extraordinary diversity is everywhere: a single 30 g sample of soil from a Norwegian forest has been estimated to contain 20,000 different species of bacteria.³⁴ We are ourselves walking ecosystems: tiny mites crawl around in our eyelashes, whilst billions of bacteria populate our guts. Higher forms of life may be fewer in number, but are far more varied in form. All told, there are estimated to be 11 million СКАЧАТЬ