Ecological Suicide

Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2015

The mounting evidence that we are moving along the fast track to ecological suicide can no longer be denied. A new word ‘endling’ has been coined to describe an individual which is the last of its species. There are too many recorded tragedies of endlings who issued mating calls, but there was no one left to answer them. In Cut From History, author Eric Freedman writes that “It is deep-to-the-bone chilling to know the exact date a species disappeared from Earth. It is even more ghastly to … know that nobody knew or cared.” Elizabeth Kolbert details the depressing facts in her book entitled The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. She estimates that about half of the species of plants and animals currently in existence will die out by 2050. This is not due to any natural catastrophe, but rather due to destructive effects of human activities.

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