The Dissolving Silence of Extinction René Ten Bos
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Radboud University 18 May 2017 Dies Natalis The dissolving silence of extinction René ten Bos “I need to say hello To the crow.” (Captain Beefheart, Ice cream for crow) A reek of crudeness Dear ladies and gentlemen, Imagine: you call out but there is no answer. Only silence. Your voice is nothing but an obscure breath of wind over the forest, the desert, the water – wherever you are. No more than a tremor in the air, no matter how desperate or enraged. There is no answer. The medium you are in no longer resonates. How absolutely and quite literally disconnected is a reality in which your voice can no longer form part of a network of recognisable and meaningful sounds? Is this what hell is like? There must have been one Hawaiian crow or Corvus Hawaiiensis that experienced something very close to this hell. You just heard this bird’s call. It once flew through the rain forests of the archipelago, but loss of habitat led to it becoming extinct in the wild. Imported species hastened its demise: rats and snakes stole eggs from its nests. Parasites are also mentioned, as is the hunt for rare feathers. You can probably easily imagine that somewhere in a forgotten corner of the rain forest one last Hawaiian crow sent a last tremor through the air. And then: silence, the silence of dissolution, when nothing respects the agreements once made. When the fabric of collectivity itself has rotted away. The last specimens were spotted in 2002. Since then the only specimens alive can be found in zoos. Expensive breeding programmes were launched, and in late 2016 people tried to re-introduce five specimens to Hawai. A few weeks later, three were found dead, following which the remaining two were quickly brought back to the safety of the zoo. It was as if the jungle didn’t want them anymore. How tragic is the fate of a crow? If we are to believe poetess Judith Herzberg, most of us see crows as ugly hard birds. Like magpies and seagulls. Not endearing birds, like whinchats, thrushes or nightingales. No, hardened city dwellers – accustomed to urban filth and decay. Scavengers surrounded, in the words of another poet, Harrie ter Balkt, by “a reek of crudeness”. Darkness, says ter Balkt, is a good friend to the crow, with its crooked nail-like beak, always eager to pick at “the wrong things in the wrong places”. The crow does not have a nice reputation. It is antipoetic. Let’s be honest: are you saddened by the fate of the crow you just heard? Is Hawaii not perfectly fine without its crows? After that last tremor through the air, life on the island went on as usual. But maybe you should think a little further. The Hawaiian crow is not just any crow. And it was not particularly well adapted to the urban setting. Its home was the rain forest. It also suffered from what some extinction biologists call “ecological naïveté”. This refers to the fact that certain endemic species do not automatically recognise invasive newcomers as a threat. These species see no reason to assume that creatures such as humans, when they see them for the first time, would be dangerous. We happen to know that the first Western travellers to reach remote islands were always surprised by the fact that indigenous animals seemed to see no reason to flee. We know for certain that the Hawaiian crow warmly welcomed people to his biotope and accompanied them, hopping from branch to branch, as if to emphasise his duty as a host. We also know that this crow must have been a very intelligent animal, an animal with a complex social and emotional life, an animal that for all kinds of reasons has been described as a “feathered monkey”. Yes, of all clever crows, the Hawaiian crow may well have been the cleverest. I believe it was Tom Waits who once sang that crows, if approached by humans while nesting, will not, unlike many other species, attack, but instead start building a decoy nest, a strategy we invariably fail to see through. Crows are usually too clever for us, but the Hawaiian crow could not cope any longer, and saw its world fall to pieces. Diffuse extinction Extinction is intimately linked to the concept of loss. But do we actually know what it is that we have lost? And is this loss experienced as loss? Most people in this room will never have heard of the Corvus Hawaiiensis. Nor will they have heard of the thylacine, the golden toad, the Saudi gazelle, the Caribbean monk seal or the Japanese sea lion – all animals that have died out in this century or the last. It is difficult to miss something if you’ve never heard of it. After all, you cannot lose something you did not even know you had. One of the problems of endangered species is that most of them are not very spectacular. They are often rodents, frogs, or worse still, beetles. What applies to crows may apply even more to such unspectacular species: Who cares about their fate? Add to this the fact that we have not even mapped most animal species yet. The British philosopher Timothy Morton once wrote that evolution is not a movie that can be shown on TV. The same applies to species extinction. Extinction is usually a complex process. When it comes to extinction, loss - if experienced at all - is diffuse. Some animals, such as the Angola sable antelope, were declared extinct only to be rediscovered later. People hope to bring other species, such as the above-mentioned thylacine, back to life by cloning, a process referred to as de-extinction. This word, “de-extinction”, exemplifies such bravado that we may well ask ourselves whether its proponents are aware of how complex the processes they are dealing with are. Would Tasmanian fauna really benefit from the reintroduction of the thylacine? Is there still room for such a species? And to make it more interesting still: are we absolutely sure that this species is extinct? Many extinct species are given the status of cryptid: a species of which we do not know for sure whether it still exists. Extinction biology can easily drift towards cryptozoology – the thylacine or the crow then acquire a nearly mythical status, like the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster. Having said this, the average extinction biologist is fully aware of the diffuse nature of extinction. According to Australian researcher Thom van Dooren, to whom I owe most of my story about the Hawaiian crow, such processes rarely have “clear edges”. Which is why researchers distinguish different types of extinction. Some are named after great biologists from the past. I will give you a few examples. A Linnaean extinction occurs when something goes wrong in the relationship between a species and its living environment, leading to the population decreasing until there are none left. A Wallacean extinction occurs when there is strong reason to suspect that a species is extinct, but the situation is not entirely clear, for example because the species in question has not been systematically studied or because the area where it lives is largely inaccessible. A third type of extinction is not named after a great biologist: the Phoenix extinction occurs when the species has become extinct, but there is still DNA material available, which in turn leads to speculation about Phoenix-like resurrections. This is the case for the thylacine in Tasmania, but also the woolly mammoths on the Siberian island of Wrangel. Ecological extinction is yet another type: the species may not have become entirely extinct, but it no longer has a function in the ecosystem of which it was part. What is, in concrete terms, the ecological role of the Amur leopard if there are only 30 or 40 of them left in the wild? The positive thing about these four types of extinction is, of course, that they keep hope alive: there has been some damage, but there is also somehow the possibility of recovery. In 2015, the World Nature Fund announced that the number of Amur leopards had doubled: to 60, maybe even 80. In South Korea researchers are apparently seriously working on cloning the mammoth back into existence – which would be ideal for the international ivory trade. Potential successes in the fight against extinction simply appeal to us more than a real, unambiguous extinction. This kind of real extinction occurs when there is no more genetic material available and the number of specimens in the wild is less than 1. Hard extinctions don’t make us cheerful. When it comes to animals, especially charismatic animals, we much prefer diffuse extinction. Some philosophers and ecologists are even so saddened by radical extinction that they opt nowadays for the extinction of our own species. These advocates of so-called voluntary human extinction argue that the planet can still recover, even if the conditio sine qua non is that we ourselves are no longer there to reap the benefits. Indeed, the fact that we – and we alone – have always wanted to reap the benefits, is precisely the reason why global extinction is so rampant. Let there be no misunderstanding about this: extinction has been around since the dawn of time, but it is happening incredibly fast now, so fast that Elizabeth Kolbert, a well-known American science journalist, seriously speaks of the “sixth wave of mass extinction”. What does this mean? It means that extinction has not been so extensive since a meteorite hit Yucatan a long time ago.