Remembering the Passenger Pigeon

Why don’t we grieve for extinct species?

From an Article by Jeremy Hance, The Guardian, November 19, 2016

Photo: Martha flies again. Martha was the world’s last passenger pigeon, who perished on September 1, 1914. Once the most populous bird on the planet, passenger pigeons vanished remarkably quickly due to overhunting and habitat destruction. In 2014, mourners carried this model up Mount Caburn and burned it in a pyre.

In early 2010, artist, activist and mother, Persephone Pearl, headed to the Bristol Museum. Like many concerned about the fate of the planet, she was in despair over the failed climate talks in Copenhagen that winter. She sat on a bench and looked at a stuffed animal behind glass: a thylacine. Before then, she’d never heard of the marsupial carnivore that went extinct in 1936.

“Here was this beautiful mysterious lost creature locked in a glass case,” she said. “It struck me suddenly as unbearably undignified. And I had this sudden vision of smashing the glass, lifting the body out, carrying the thylacine out into the fields, stroking its body, speaking to it, washing it with my tears, and burying it by a river so that it could return to the earth.”

Pearl felt grief, deep grief, over the loss of a creature she’d never once seen in life, a species that had been shot to extinction because European settlers had deemed it vermin. Yet, how do we grieve for extinct species when there are no set rituals, no extinction funerals, no catharsis for the pain caused by a loss that in many ways is simply beyond human comprehension? We have been obliterating species for over ten thousand years – beginning with the megafauna of the Pleistocene like woolly rhinos, short-faced bears and giant sloths – yet we have no way of mourning them.

Still, Pearl didn’t push the grief under or ignore it. Instead, she sought to share it. In 2011 Pearl, who is the co-director of the arts group, ONCA, and the theatre group Feral in Brighton, helped organise the first ever Remembrance Day for Lost Species. Held every November 30th, it’s since become a day for activists, artists and mourners to find creative ways to share their grief for extinct species – and reinvigorate their love for the natural world.

“We hope the Remembrance events will function as funerals for humans do,” Rachel Porter, a co-founder of Remembrance Day for Lost Species and a movement therapist, said. “Such rituals are ancient, embedded within us. We are just placing this common ritual into an unfamiliar context.”

But there are no rules to the Remembrance Day for Lost Species and anyone can start a public event or hold a private ceremony. This year, they are going on all over the world, including a dinner for the dodo in London, a poetry reading in Berlin, and a remembrance ritual for the thylacine outside of Brisbane, Australia.

Graphic designer and art therapist Julia Peddie, who is hosting the thylacine ritual in Australia this year, said she remembers as a child first learning about how humans wiped out the dodo – and how the knowledge crushed her. “I can only imagine how children feel now, witnessing such enormous losses, and wonder if they are desensitising in order to cope,” she said. “Remembrance Day for Lost Species provides an opportunity for children and adults to connect with their grief, and in doing so, reclaim a part of themselves.”

 “Actual grief is hardly practiced today,” Megan Hollingsworth, a poet and founder of the collaborative art project ex·tinc·tion wit·ness, said. “If it were, children would neither be murdered in war nor would they go hungry and homeless in the streets of the world’s ‘wealthiest’ nations. Water would be protected. The desires of ‘grown’ men and women would not ever trump the needs of any single child, let alone whole communities.”

Hollingsworth, also one of the founders of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, will be holding a bell tolling ceremony in Montana on the 30^th of November.

Photo: A processional for the great auk during the Remembrance Day for Lost Species in 2011. The great auk went extinct in 1844 after the last two known animals were killed violently by men seeking their eggs. The species was pushed to extinction by killing for its feathers, eggs and even to use as fishing bait.

“Telling the stories of recently extinct species is a way of capturing people’s imaginations to this end,” said Pearl. “It’s not science or statistics, it’s history, it’s real life – and in an age of cultural amnesia, storytelling inspired by historical events is a way to learn lessons from the past.”

But many probably fear that allowing themselves to feel the grief – really feel it – will result in a personal collapse. Hollingsworth said that an environmental studies professor once told her: “‘I can’t think of this as grief. That would be endless.’”

But this is “where the misconception lies,” according to Hollingsworth. Grieving doesn’t bring endless suffering, but healing and health.

“What happens when I don’t grieve someone’s death? What does it mean not to feel or express sorrow when someone passes unnecessarily due to my negligence? Just the thought of this is chilling to me as the sociopath is brought to mind,” she said.

Grieving in the Anthropocene

Legend says the world’s last thylacine died cold and alone. The story is that it was mistakenly locked out of its nighttime quarters at the zoo in Hobart, Tasmania during an unusually cold night in 1936. The animal, which was never even identified as a male or female, perished from exposure. That was 80 years ago this year.

While the last thylacine may not have actually died from the cold, it certainly died in a kind of loneliness that is almost impossible for humans – seven billion and rising – to comprehend. It was, after all, an endling. The last of its kind.

And yet do we barely remember it, let alone weep for it.

Photo: A child visits the ‘grave’ of Bombus franklini, a bee that went extinct in 2006, during the Funeral for Lost Species.

Julia Peddie said the 80th Anniversary of the extinction of the thylacine “went fairly unnoticed in the mainstream media” even in its native Australia. Despite little media around the anniversary, Australia still has a lot of “nostalgia” for the thylacine, said Peddie, to the extent that some people believe it still inhabits the wild lands of Tasmania.

Perhaps, this is a kind of denial in action, an inability to accept the extinction of what once was; a denial that may continue to allow Australians – and people around the world – to ignore the losses going on right in front of them.

Australia is an epicentre of extinction. It has the highest mammal loss of any country on Earth. Since European arrival, the country has lost at least 30 species of mammal. And another was lost just this year: the Bramble Cay melomys, the world’s first mammal known to have gone extinct due to climate change.

“The stories of lost species remind us that things do end, they do die, that we are causing irrevocable and deeply distressing changes – but that the ending’s not yet written for the stories of rhinoceros, of hedgehogs, of phytoplankton,” said Pearl.

So, really, why don’t we grieve for the passenger pigeon, the golden toad, or the Yangtze River dolphin? Or how about Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog which just vanished from the Earth in September? Why don’t we rend our garments for the woolly mammoth, or tear our hair for the dodo or smear our windows with ash for the great moas that once roamed New Zealand? It can’t hurt. It could only heal.

“We need to imagine and invent new rituals for the Anthropocene,” said Pearl. “What would a memorial for the Caspian tiger or the elephant bird look like? A memorial for the Great Barrier Reef? For 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2?”

The age of the Anthropocene is an age of grief, put simply. Not showing, sharing or indeed feeling that grief will make it all the more unbearable. But a collective keening may be key to moving forward and creating a new society that fully respects and cherishes the millions of life forms that call this planet home.

Photo: A memorial to the passenger pigeon on a beach in Wales by Emily Laurens in 2014.

This guy knows his stuff and his ants!

In his latest book, Pulitzer Prize–winning scientist Edward O. Wilson argues for a bold step in conservation

From an Article by Dean Kuipers, Outside Magazine (March 2016), February 23, 2016

Photo: E.O. Wilson in the ant collection room at Harvard University.

Few people know more about biodiversity than Edward O. Wilson. The 86-year-old Harvard biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner helped popularize the term in a groundbreaking 1988 report of the same name. So when he argues in his new book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life ($26, Liveright), that species loss is a critical threat and that we need to turn fully half the planet’s land surface into biodiversity reserves, it’s more than an idle thought experiment.

“To let things continue at the present rate, we could easily be down to half the species left on earth,” Wilson told me from his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. “We could lose millions just in the next few decades.”

Like many scientists, Wilson believes that the planet is currently experiencing a “sixth extinction,” during which species are disappearing as much as 1,000 times faster than they did before humans were around. And we have yet to even encounter the vast majority of life-forms among us. We’ve named approximately two million species, but the best estimates are that another 6.7 million, give or take a million, have yet to be discovered.

Slowing the rate of extinction has long been a crusade for Wilson. More than ten years ago he calculated that, in order to stop or significantly slow species loss, 50 percent of the earth’s land must be protected. (Currently, only 15 percent is formally preserved.) “The only way we’re going to save the situation is by radical means,” he says.

His Half-Earth proposal is certainly that. Many of the world’s preeminent naturalists helped him compile a list of areas with high biodiversity—not just the rainforests of the Congo and the Amazon, but also little-known spots like the church forests of Ethiopia and the just-opening wildlands of Myanmar.

Safeguarding an additional 35 percent of the earth comes with logistical challenges: Would people in preservation areas be relocated, or would they be allowed to stay? Would governments agree to such protections? Oddly, Wilson skips over these issues and instead spends a portion of the book criticizing “new conservationists,” a small group of individuals who believe that smart economic development rather than high fences is the best strategy to preserve what’s left of the wild.

Wilson lambasts people like Peter Kareiva, current director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, who has advocated higher living standards as a way to save nature. Fearing a loss of emphasis on the nonhuman, Wilson uses his book as a club in this internecine fight. “I do believe they are dangerous,” he says. “I had to come down pretty hard on them.”

Kareiva, for his part, admires the Half-Earth idea. “Wilson has been a crusader for biodiversity unlike any other scientist,” he says. But he thinks the antagonism is misplaced. “If you sat us in a room and put a map in front of us and asked us what do we want the world to look like in 2050, we might end up with very similar maps.”

Indeed, in the second to last chapter of Half-Earth, Wilson makes the case for smart and fast development. Human population, he believes, will peak at around 11 billion near the end of the current century. (It now stands at 7.3 billion.) Technology will help transform the global economy from extensive (requiring large amounts of money, people, and natural resources) to intensive (boosting both productivity and efficiency). And energy production will continue to become less connected to fossil fuels. In short, over the coming decades, humanity will achieve a smaller footprint and leave room for other species. It’s the kind of argument a new conservationist might make.

“We’re finally seeing conservation starting to get more on point,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute, which has rattled mainstream environmentalism in part by arguing that it needs to embrace “ecomodernist” development to fix the planet. Shellenberger has his own critique of Wilson: “He doesn’t address the dirty, bloody work of conservation on the ground.”

Nor did he intend to. Half-Earth is less detailed plan than aspirational goal. Wilson is leaving it up to us to figure out how to do it, and after looking at the technological and economic trends, he believes we will. “The reason is that we are thinking organisms trying to understand how the world works,” he writes. “We will come awake.”

Wherever Wilson presents this idea, he is wildly cheered. He considers that evidence of a generation prepared to make tough decisions. “Many young people see in this something worthwhile to dedicate themselves to,” says Wilson. “This book is saying we don’t have to yield. We don’t have to plant the white flag and start setting ourselves up for the 
destruction of the living world.”

Earth, Protected

Though the book doesn’t include a comprehensive map of proposed sanctuaries, Outside assembled an approximate guide to the best places in the biosphere, according to Wilson 
and other scientists. —Nicola Payne

Homeland Security

The redwood forests of California, the South’s longleaf pine savanna, and the Madrean pine oak woodlands of the mountainous Southwest are crucial North American ecosystems.

Under Siege

The Amazon River basin, the forests of the Congo basin, and the church forests of Ethiopia have faced unrelenting decimation by human hands in recent years.

Hot Spots

Wilson and others believe that certain countries possess such rich biodiversity that the majority of their land is worthy of study and protection. These include Bhutan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Myanmar, Madagascar, New Guinea, and South Africa.

Photo Displays of Mountain Destruction

WV Mountain Party:  “Resolution to Ban Extreme Extraction”

From Tom Rhule, Mountain Party of WV, October 26, 2014

On September 30, 2014, a quorum of the State Executive Council for the Mountain Party of West Virginia passed the following Resolution to ban extreme extraction by unanimous vote*:

WHEREAS in the wake of the West Virginia American Water Crisis the pollution in streams, rivers, and other source waters from the mountain top removal of coal and associated operations, as well as the high pressure high volume hydrofracking of the Marcellus have caused the serious decline of public health and the economies of communities across the State; and

WHEREAS WV Lawmakers continue to allow the injection of coal prep slurry into abandoned coal mines despite the mounting evidence that doing so has poisoned the source waters for a number of our rural communities; and

WHEREAS there is official government documentation that the State of West Virginia has improperly permitted wastewater containing toxic amounts of radium along with other hazardous waste byproducts from horizontally hydrofracking the Marcellus to be injected into Class II underground wells; and,

WHEREAS Class II underground injection wells were never designed for hazardous wastes and therefore are insufficient to properly sequester such wastes from our drinking water sources; and,

WHEREAS there are currently over seven hundred Class II underground injection wells as documented by the EPA within the borders of our State; and,

WHEREAS since 2007, improperly marked tanker trucks are known to have dumped hazardous Marcellus drilling waste fluid onto roadways, into rural streams, rivers, and abandoned coal mines within the borders of our State; and,

WHEREAS in 2011 it was reported to the Joint Legislative Oversight Commission on State Water Resources that many millions of gallons of the waters of the State were being diverted for use to high pressure horizontally hydrofrack the Marcellus, but 62 percent of which is not being properly accounted for by that industry; and,

WHEREAS in Sept. of 2011, when passing into law governor Tomblin’s Horizontal Well Act (H.B. 401), WV Lawmakers wrongfully assigned the WV Department of Environmental Protection to measure, regulate and report on the radioactive waste byproducts produced by high pressure horizontal hydrofracking, and,

Whereas the aforementioned HB 401 remains in direct conflict with West Virginia Code of State Regulations §64-23-16, the proper title being “Radiation Safety Requirements for Technologically Enhanced Radioactive Materials (TENORM),” which mandates all oversight and regulatory authority including measurement, storage, and disposal for such radioactive waste to West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources where that agency’s health experts must be mandated to be properly trained to protect West Virginia’s citizens and their future generations from the ravages caused by the mishandling of TENORM; and,

WHEREAS during the last regular session of year 2013,, WV lawmakers passed Senate Bill 243 to amend governor Tomblin’s Horizontal Well Act which now grants drilling companies the right to keep from public scrutiny the countless proprietary chemicals which are known to be used during the hydraulic fracturing process; and,

Whereas SB 243 now enacted essentially prevents well owners and public water providers from knowing which particular chemicals may be in their source waters thus preventing proper monitoring against contamination; and,

WHEREAS by 2014, numerous water wells both private and publicly owned are now known to have been compromised by the careless mishandling of toxic chemicals and associated waste byproducts of high pressure high volume horizontal hydrofracking operations across the State; and,

WHEREAS the Bill of Rights to the West Virginia Constitution prominently places the health, safety and welfare of the People of the State above all corporate right to profit from the aforementioned fossil fuel industries as they are presently permitted by State and Federal regulators and their respective governments:

BE IT RESOLVED that we, the Citizens of the Great State of West Virginia and members of the Mountain Party call for the ban of all surface mine and high pressure horizontal hydrofracking operations within our borders because every chemical associated with these extraction industries must be safely handled, properly identified, registered, prominently labeled, and regulations enforced. This moratorium resolution shall include every chemical substance, whether used or produced, organic or inorganic, in every phase of each industrial process including mixing. use. storage, transport and disposal.

Be it further resolved that the Mountain Party believes that the long term negative economic and environmental consequences of the aforementioned extreme extraction fossil fuel industry techniques dwarf the short term economic benefits to the Great State of West Virginia, and that all political and legal means must be implemented to protect the health, safety, and welfare of her Citizens.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

*After the above Resolution to ban extreme extraction was passed, the following informational paragraph was proposed to be appropriately inserted in accordance with the timeline of the Resolution:

Whereas, in 2009, tests by the State of New York of 24 samples of Marcellus flowback from West Virginia and Pennsylvania hydrofracked wells revealed the presence in toxic quantities of 4-nitroquinoline 1-oxide, one of the most cancer-causing toxins known to man, for which the State of WV has not, and is not currently testing in any drinking water source; and, …

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Contact:  Tom Rhule,  Communications Director,  at:  mountainpartywv@gmail.com

World Wildlife Fund’s state of the planet report reveals alarming and avoidable biodiversity loss

From an Article by Andrea Germanos, staff writer, Common Dreams, September 30, 2014

Human activity has brought the planet’s life-supporting systems to the brink of tipping points, causing an “alarming” loss in biodiversity and critical threats to the services nature has provided humankind. So finds the newest state of the planet report (pdf) from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which offers a damning look on the health of the Earth. “We’re gradually destroying our planet’s ability to support our way of life,” stated Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF.

Among the report’s findings is a dramatic loss in biodiversity. Its Living Planet Index, managed by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and based on over 10,000 populations of over 3,000 species, shows a 52 percent decline in global wildlife between 1970 and 2010. And that’s a trend that “shows no sign of slowing down.”

Among the causes of the decline are climate change, habitat loss and degradation, and exploitation. Breaking these losses down further, the report states that populations of freshwater species have declined 76 percent, compared to losses of 39 percent each for marine species and terrestrial populations. Region-wise, Latin America has suffered the biggest decline in biodiversity, with species populations plummeting 83 percent.

Global wildlife populations have declined over 50 percent between 1970 and 2010.The impacts of humankind’s assault on the planet are not being felt equally, the report notes, as higher-income countries have an “ecological footprint” five times higher than those of lower-income countries. In fact, because of resource imports, high-income countries “may effectively be outsourcing biodiversity loss,” stated Keya Chatterjee, WWF’s senior director of footprint.

Looking at humanity’s overall “ecological footprint,” the report states that we need 1.5 planets to provide for the current demands on nature. Water footprints are noted as well, and the report states that in some areas “such as Australia, India and USA … life-giving aquifers are being severely depleted.” Agriculture is responsible for the lion’s share of use, accounting for 92 percent of the global water footprint

Because of the human activity changes is causing on the planet, the report states, “we can no longer exclude the possibility of reaching critical tipping points that could abruptly and irreversibly change living conditions on Earth.”

The WWF stresses that these sobering statistics were not unavoidable, and that the challenges we now confront to effect change are not insurmountable. “The scale of biodiversity loss and damage to the very ecosystems that are essential to our existence is alarming. This damage is not inevitable but a consequence of the way we choose to live,” stated Professor Ken Norris, Director of Science at the ZSL.

As WWF’s Roberts stated, “we already have the knowledge and tools to avoid the worst predictions. We all live on a finite planet and it’s time we started acting within those limits.”

To hear more about some of the details of the report, watch the video from the Zoological Society of London.