Forty years ago, there were an
estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million. Compared to the
hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5 million bobwhites sounds like a
lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5 million missing and the troubles
that brought them down — and are all too likely to bring down the rest of them,
too. So this is not extinction, but it is how things look before extinction
happens.
The word “extinct” somehow brings to
mind the birds that seem like special cases to us, the dodo or the great auk or
the passenger pigeon. Most people would never have had a chance to see dodos
and great auks on their remote islands before they were decimated in the 17th
and 19th centuries. What is hard to remember about passenger pigeons isn’t
merely their once enormous numbers. It’s the enormous numbers of humans to whom
their comings and goings were a common sight and who supposed, erroneously,
that such unending clouds of birds were indestructible. We recognize the
extraordinary distinctness of the passenger pigeon now because we know its
fate, killed off largely by humans. But we have moralized it thoroughly without
ever really taking it to heart.
The question is whether we will see
the distinctness of the field sparrow — its number is down from 18 million 40
years ago to 5.8 million — only when the last pair is being kept alive in a zoo
somewhere. We love to finally care when the death watch is on. It makes us feel
so very human.
Like you, I’ve been reading dire
reports of declining species for many years now. They have the value of causing
us to pay attention to species in trouble, and the sad fact is that the only
species likely to endure are the ones we humans manage to pay attention to.
There was a time when it was better, if you were a nonhuman species, to be
ignored by humans because we trapped, shot or otherwise exploited all of the
ones that got our attention. But in the past 40 years, we have killed all those
millions of birds or, let us say, unintentionally caused a dramatic population
loss, simply by going about business as usual.
Agriculture has intensified. So has
development. Open space has been sharply reduced. We have simply pursued our
livelihoods. We knew it was inimical to wolves and mountain lions. But we
somehow trusted that all the innocent little birds were here to stay. What they
actually need to survive, it turns out, is a landscape that is less intensely
human.
The Audubon Society portrait of
common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are. Let me
offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth
capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species
capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So far, our economic interests have
proved to be completely incompatible with all but a very few forms of life.
It’s not that we believe that other species don’t matter. It’s that,
historically speaking, it hasn’t been worth believing one way or another. I
don’t suppose that most Americans would actively kill a whippoorwill if they
had the chance. Yet in the past 40 years its number has dropped by 1.6 million.
In our everyday economic behavior,
we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson
has argued eloquently and persuasively that we cannot, that who we are depends
as much on the richness and diversity of the biological life around us as it
does on any inherent quality in our genes. Environmentalists of every stripe
argue that we must somehow begin to correlate our economic behavior — by which
I mean every aspect of it: production, consumption, habitation — with the
welfare of other species.
This is the premise of
sustainability. But the very foundation of our economic interests is
self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see way too little self
to care.
The trouble with humans is that even
the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to
the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness
of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility
itself.
We look around us, expecting the
rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused,
when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.