Extinction
Wilbur Norman
As a child Rosa Stonaker was taken to see Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of
Rough Riders of the World show. She was mightily impressed by the parade
and spectacle. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced: a combination
of the circus, a trip to the far corners of the world, and the fantasia of the
American West all in one. Horseback riding and shooting were familiar
activities but the colorful foreigners and bedaubed, feathered Indians —
that was another matter altogether! Rosa
was my grandmother. She was born into a pre-electric 19th century and died in
the fourth quarter of the 20th, her life bridging the jump from steam train to
Maglev. It was a long, full life but she never forgot her excitement at seeing
the ÔwildÕ Indians all eastern Americans grew up reading about; a world that
evolved and morphed, as all worlds must, with both winners and losers in the
struggle for survival. The
more scientific amongst us may think of human populations as being part of the
process of adaption and evolution but rarely do most of us consider ourselves
as vulnerable to the process of extinction. We are, after all, the pinnacle of living organisms; not for nothing are we Òking
of the hill, top of the list, head of the heap!Ó There are hundreds of
examples, however, where specific, discrete human populations have declined in
numbers to the point where they, inexorably, floated over the abyss and into
the void we call extinction. As Paul Ehrlich wrote, Òit is not always necessary
to kill the last pair of a species to force it to extinction.Ó (Ehrlich,
Dobkin, Wheye. The Passenger Pigeon,
1988.) If
we find our human origins, that Ôfirst causeÕ, to be a somewhat vague and
unknown terra incognita, rife with
speculation and subject to mutating scientific theories, we are sure to be
discomfited by the brute force of evidence concerning the terminal ÔendingsÕ of
many of our kind. As we move through our galaxy, gliding on the slick principles
of celestial mechanics whose properties, if not wholly described, are at least
glimpsed, we have come to learn that species extinction is, in fact, a wholly
natural and, pardon the expression, rather common event in the story of the
earth; more than 99% of all creatures that ever existed are now extinct. It is
a fact of life — or death, shall I say, whether we like it or not. Central
to our attitude is that when we look into the mirror of extinction the face we
see is our own — both as cause and consequence. We are, to borrow words
from the educational theorist Paulo Freire, subjects
as well as objects, that is, those
who know and act and those who are known and acted upon. Despite
the horrors of the 20th century, it is possible to write that warfare, in the
case of tribal peoples, is not today the predominant engine of their
obliteration. Cultural erosion has been, for a long time, a Ôby-productÕ of
modernization, assimilation, societal values (and their loss), habitat change
and destruction and other types of activities whose focus is not the eradication
of a people, per se, but reflects the contemporary world at work and the
multi-various ways we do business. In most instances it is a hash of selective
blindness coupled with a benign neglect of the consequences of our actions. It
penetrates almost every culture on earth; all global roads are now cul-de-sacs. There
have been and still are well-intentioned attempts to assist endangered
populations. These efforts are themselves fraught with peril for those
populations no matter how well-meaning the aid or the
giver. Just as the Ôobserver effectÕ may alter an outcome in science, the
observation and injection of foreigners into societies transforms those
societies; the act of observation and involvement changes the people observed.
I am not writing here about something as esoteric or
New Age as the old idea that a butterfly beating its wings in the Himalaya
affects me here in the western hemisphere. I am thinking more along the lines
of events as important as the introduction of epidemic/epizootic diseases and
other actions as seemingly insignificant as the introduction of Chicago Bulls t-shirts.
Introduction of ideas, objects and principles into societies is anything but
deterministic. It is, instead, a stochastic process of the highest order, a
system in which a collection of random variables lack pre-determined outcomes;
there are only probabilities, and not always defined ones at that. You may well
know where you start but where you end is anything but certain. Extinction
of a tribe does not measurably threaten the survival of homo sapiens as a species (unless, perhaps, they had a plant they used
to cure cancer.) Rather, as a bookman, I think of it as a large and beautiful library
in a quaint alpine inn. An old, dog-eared brochure on the mantel tells us there
are about 10,000 volumes in the library, assembled over the span of 500 years
by a family that valued learning and the quality of rarity for its own sake.
The brochure also says that 6000 of the volumes are unique to this library with
the remainder being books one might find in libraries elsewhere. Imagine the
innkeeper using those bookÕs pages to kindle the libraryÕs fireplace. About every
two weeks a body of knowledge would disappear, much of it not replicated
elsewhere. If a scenario like this does not make you shudder substitute
something else close to your heart; imagine Indian baskets or varieties of
fruit trees. There
are significant instances where a named population is, or has been, described
as extinct when, in fact, they have simply assimilated into other cultures.
They may be extinct as an historical unit but their genetic code is still
there, living on in the bodies of Ôothers.Õ Two examples of this can be found
in my home state. At
one time the largest pueblo in New Mexico was near the modern-day town of Pecos.
The people lived in a forty-mile stretch of land along the upper Pecos River
and encountered Spanish conquistadors only fifty years after Columbus.
Beginning in the early 17th century Franciscan monks set up shop, bringing
European manners, foods and, of course, Catholicism. The Pecose–os eventually
began to suffer a steady decline in numbers and were further decimated by enemy
Indian raids, first from the Apache, then from the Comanche. The pueblo had the
great fortune — and then misfortune, to be one of the front lines between
northern New MexicoÕs agricultural pueblo peoples and the nomadic tribes of the
Great Plains. Enriched by trade they then became targets. By 1793, after a
Comanche raid killed most of the men, the Pecos pueblo population numbered 152
people. In 1838 the remaining men, women and children of Pecos Pueblo, a
culturally unsustainable seventeen people, moved to live with their Keresan
Tiwa-speaking cousins at Jemez Pueblo. Over time they have been absorbed into
that pueblo and are no longer a wholly separate peoples. And
where did the Pecose–os come from? Their forebears may be seen in the ancestral
Puebloan (Anasazi) culture at Chaco Canyon and its hinterlands. In the first
half of the 12th century the people at Chaco left in droves. In school we
learned they disappeared, vanished essentially, leaving no trace other than, in
many cases, their possessions in situ.
In truth, probably facing increasingly tough environmental pressure, they moved
elsewhere, to places where there was water and defensible habitation. The
present day Pueblo peoples of New Mexico owe their existence to their genetic
and cultural forebears, the Anasazi. These
sorts of examples hold true for the animal kingdom as well. The dinosaurs are
extinct but some of their genetic offspring are to be seen flying all around
us. The birds we admire are direct lineal descendants. The current proof is
from recent paleontological discoveries of dinosaurs with feathers, survivors
of the massive die-off from what is called the K-T extinction at the end of the
Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago. The instigating event is believed to
have been an asteroid impacting the earth in what is now Mexico. The Chicxulub
astrobleme, a crater with ginormous dimensions is the evidence. With
regard to animals, amidst the dismal record of human-caused plant and animal
extinctions there are a few bright spots where species in dire straights have
been brought back from the brink. Whether they will prosper remains another
matter. In 2003 I trekked with two companions up a mountain in the Hustai
National Park in Mongolia to get a glimpse of, and photograph, the Przewalski,
or Takhi, horse, of which 300 survive in the wild. But 300 is
great progress! In
1960 the species was down to only twelve of these magnificent horses, all in
zoos. Through the diligence and hard work of a Dutch couple these twelve horses
were exchanged among the zoos for breeding, allowing horses to be reintroduced
into Mongolia. There are now around 1200 animals in zoos in addition to the
wild stock. In light of the fact that no one has ever successfully domesticated
the Tahki horse, it is wonderful to be able to write that of the worldÕs three
subspecies of horse, we still have two with us, the
domesticated and the Takhi. The third, the tarpan, lost the battle in 1909 and there exists only one
taken-in-the-wild photograph and one drawn-in-the-wild print of a living,
probable tarpan. (The horses we call wild
in the western U.S. and in Australia are really domesticated animals gone
feral.) There
is something to be said for at least knowing what species exist — and are
going extinct. The Smithsonian Institution houses the Biodiversity Heritage
Library (BHL) making so-called gray literature less, wellÉ gray (difficult to
find written material.) They describe their operation as, Òa consortium ofÉlibraries
that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversityÉ
and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a
part of a global Òbiodiversity commons.Ó BHL also serves as the foundational
literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life.Ó (— BHL website) The
Encyclopedia of Life is an on-line cataloging effort seeking to document the
1.9 million living species known to science. Like astronomy, it is one of the
few technical areas where non-scientist experts can make a contribution. I was
fortunate to be present at the National Geographic Society book party for E.O.
WilsonÕs new one-volume edition of Darwin where he enthusiastically described
the plans for what eventually become EOL. The siteÕs popularity very quickly required
a total reworking to accommodate its vast readership. Language
devastation is on the agenda, too. We have lost one-half of all historical
languages in the last 500 years and are on the path to losing thousands more.
There are about 6700 current languages (UNESCO) with around 2500 of those in
danger of extinction. Five hundred are spoken by fewer than
ten people. Aside from past colonial policies, language hegemony is a
contributing factor; 25% of the worldÕs peoples speak Mandarin, Spanish or
English in countries where, it must be remembered, there are many other rich
language traditions. ÒThere are now more students of English in China than
there are people in the United States.Ó (Alex Rose, Lost in Translation, 2010.) One of the instructive and surprising
facts is that since 1950 the United States has lost 53 languages, a greater
number than any other country. We have lost a total of 115 since our ÔdiscoveryÕ
by Columbus. The
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages reported several years ago,
Òevery 14 days [now closer to ten days] a language dies. By 2100, more than
half of theÉ 7,000 languages spoken on EarthÉ will likely disappear.Ó In
partnership with the National Geographic Society they have identified five
ÔhotspotsÕ where languages are vanishing faster than in other regions. Northern
Australia Central
South America North
AmericaÕs upper Pacific coastal zone Eastern
Siberia Oklahoma
and the southwestern United States Why,
one may ask, should we care about the loss of a language? My answer is that
language is the ligature between thought and action, between oneÕs own mind and
the mind of a neighbor. Languages are a mental picture, the flesh and blood manifestation of human
adaption to the wide variety of ecosystems on our planet, adaptations that may
have taken millennia to develop. Languages are road maps to the workings
of the human brain, repositories of history and culture, libraries of a
peopleÕs existence. Like an outdoor art commission, languages are site
specific. The loss of any one of the worldÕs languages, many of which have no
written vocabulary, is a loss that cannot be made right. There are people who
believe we may one day take the genetic material from a frozen mastodon and
clone a living, breathing animal, that, with back-crossing, will yield a
pachyderm 95% similar to the mastodons of ancient times. No such magic is
available in the realm of human languages. Language is the product of group
cognition and mind in a living culture, the wisdom, if you will, of a world
entire. Dictionaries, as important as they are, cannot impart the full feel and
nuance of the verbal interactions represented between their pages. The
current edition of Ethnologue: Languages
of the World (2009, 16th edition) provides a sobering list of 473 of the
worldÕs most endangered languages. Each of these languages have
only a handful of native, almost always elderly, fluent speakers. Here is the
roster by continent: Africa
(46 total) The
Americas (182 total) Asia
(84 total) Europe
(9 total) The
Pacific (152 total) It
is a sad inventory, especially as the languages on this list are almost
certainly beyond recovery. At an attrition rate of two to three per month, 72
to 108 languages have been lost since EthnologueÕs 16th edition was first
published three years ago. When I took the time to read the actual list of
languages, pondering the expiring populations that speak, think, act, play and
worship in them, it made me appreciate how my grandmother Rosa must have felt
in the first decade of the 20th century when she viewed the still-living
Martha, the sole surviving American passenger pigeon. Martha, the last of her
kind, spent her final years in the Cincinnati Zoo. The sadness on that occasion
must have been palpable. Extinction is a one-way street. ********** Reprinted From: The ATADA NEWS Winter 2013 |