Friday, March 13

Reflection by Amy Boyd

Pyrenean ibex. Christmas island pipistrelle. Spix’s macaw. Giffard’s cyanea. Formosan clouded leopard. 

So many species that were our relatives have been driven to extinction.

Bachman’s warbler. Wooly-stalked begonia. Golden toad. Hawaiian crow. Madeiran large white butterfly.

All other forms of life are our relatives. This is not just an indigenous belief; it is a scientific fact: we are all related, though those of us raised in western cultural norms often don’t think of all living beings as family. 

Pinta island tortoise. Brambled cay melomys. Po’ouli. Waiautoa forget-me-not. Yangtze river dolphin.

The existence of these relatives I am naming has been wiped out by human indifference, or greed, or carelessness, or outright aggression, or all of the above.

Western black rhinoceros. Javan tiger. Green blossom mussel. Bennett’s seaweed. St. Helena redwood. Appalachian Barbara's buttons.

And so many, many more are on the brink, or headed in that direction. Some do not have common names, especially those that are plants, fungi, insects, and other things we pay less attention to than our fellow warm-blooded creatures. Some have only their scientific names, which to a botanist like me, nevertheless sound lyrical: 

Pradosia glaziovii. Galipea ossana. Lachanodes arborea. Sitalcicus gardineri. Xanthostemon sebertii. Dryopteris ascensionis. 

We recite the names of those we have lost as a sign of lament. Knowing the names of other beings is an act of recognition and respect, so reciting their names is a way to name and recognize this loss.

To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name; to confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the namable world; to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy. To name is to pay attention; to name is to love.

–Maria Popova

Many of those that have gone extinct were never described and never named. I can only recite the names of those that someone named and recorded.  So many species have already been wiped from existence by human activity before we even knew their names, much less how they lived, what they did, what they offered to the world. I cannot include them in my list, because I do not know their names. Still, I mourn them. 

We don’t know exactly how many species we share the planet with. We do know that there are far more unknown than known. Scientific estimates of how many species are going extinct per year range from 200 on the low end to 100,000 on the high end. Some of these may have gone extinct without our help–-extinction has been part of the living world ever since life began–-but almost all are due to human activity, particularly habitat loss. And most are unnamed. They vanish before we even acknowledge they exist. But we can still lament their loss.

And I believe that we must. If I follow words of Jesus telling me to love my neighbor, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly, I must apply this also in how I act towards the other living beings who are my neighbors and kin, not just to people. 

As you join me in lamenting the accelerating loss of species at the hand of our own, I leave you with a song: the song of the last remaining Kauai o’o, a male singing out with no one of his kind to hear him. It is often said to be the loneliest sound in the world.