Lately it seems that we have been inundated with climate related images of dead or dying creatures from around the world, their suffering inflicted by rapidly changing environmental conditions. Flesh and bone carcasses on sun-baked mud flats. Oil soaked birds on despoiled shorelines. Heat, drought and famine all taking their toll. And it seems it is business as usual for carbon emissions.
It is depressing for someone of a certain age (myself, at 70) to see so much of the world I grew up in threatened with biological loss on such a vast scale. I think back on my childhood, and remember a larger, more exotic world, a world where citizens of China wore silk costumes and lived in pagodas. Where primitive Africans lived in thatched huts, surrounded by elephants and giraffes.
Thai dancers. Seal hunting Eskimos. It was geographical education by stereotype, and in the early 1950’s, it was what counted as social studies.
I realize now that the view of the world taught to me at that age was a myth, a simplified story to give me a rudimentary image of a world vastly more complex than I was prepared to deal with. Even then, species were threatened, cultures were suppressed by colonialism, and co2 levels had been on the rise since the beginnings of the industrial era.
Leaving the myth of an exotic world behind, not withstanding the many very real natural wonders still remaining, I attempt to revisit our modern predicament with a more open awareness, and I find an even starker truth to confront. Very likely within the lifetime of my son and granddaughter, the last elephant will die.
In the abstract, biodiversity is a simple enough concept. Species health is sustained and even improved by a diversity of organisms. Mass extinctions, on the other hand, break down the interconnections in the ecological web of all life. In the realm of concrete numbers, the facts are even more simple, and more brutal. There are many species of mammals and birds whose numbers have been reduced to the double or even single digits (white rhino). Many more are threatened.
What does it mean to say that there will be a ‘last elephant’? A ‘last hummingbird’? A ‘last human’? When we read that 80% of Puerto Rican ground insects have disappeared, does that even register? That ocean life is disappearing at alarming rates? When the last elephant dies, that will herald the total disappearance of my childhood, along with my view of a world that never really existed.