DEATH — any death — is a troubling thing. What’s more, if it is the death of the last species.
Malaysia lost its last Sumatran rhino, Iman, on Saturday. Though we lost her to natural causes, human action and inaction have ended this and other kinds before.
Read deforestation and poaching. If the World Wide Fund for Nature is correct, there are only 80 Sumatran rhinos — the only rhinos with two horns — left in Indonesia.
We are such slow learners. We learn very little from other deaths. Until death visits us, by which time no lesson is worth learning.
It is not that data on the extinct and the soon-to-be-extinct do not exist. They do, and in copious copies, too.
One such is by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which with the regularity of clockwork alerts us to what has gone extinct in the wild to what is critically endangered, and everything in between.
Then there is our very own Department of Wildlife and National Parks’ (DWNP) publication, The Red List Of Mammals for Peninsular Malaysia for 2010.
There, three species are said to be gone for good: Indian grey mongoose, Javan rhinoceros and Banteng. With Iman gone, we may have to add Malaysian Sumatran rhino to the “extinct in the wild” list.
DWNP’s report also lists 30 mammals as endangered, among them being the Malayan tiger, leopard and otter civet.
And for the rest of the world, the narrative is equally dismal. Quoting an intergovernmental report on biodiversity, the National Geographic monthly says more than one million species of animals and plants are set to disappear in the next 10 years.
This alone should distress us to extinction. We may not be able to know exactly how many are out there, but IUCN data seem to point to more than six million animal and 1.2 million plant species.
We have not done this before, but we will make an exception. We gladly borrow the words of the National Geographic’s in-house ad — “Without Them There Is No Us” — to drive home the lesson on what we lose when a species disappears. The impact is humongous.
Our lives will be besieged in so many known and unknown ways.
Consider the humble bee as a case in point. They fly from flower to flower pollinating them to fruits. And in the process, they give us honey.
Take them away from the equation and all we are left with are flowers that may have been something more.
We must never forget this: the Earth’s capacity to support human life depends on other life forms being around.
We — man, mammals, other animals, insects and plants — are all connected. Our ecosystem is designed that way.
Sadly, we behave otherwise. And we are about to pay a price for our errant conduct. Be warned: biological annihilation is heading our way.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) call it the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. But there is hope yet.
PNAS estimates a short window of two or three decades at most for us to arrest the annihilation.
Failing to act would mean losing many more last ones.