BRATTLEBORO — In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced its proposal to remove 23 species (22 animals and one plant) from the endangered species list because they are believed to be extinct.
Let the finality of that declaration sink in.
For some of these creatures, humans held out hope for over 100 years that they would be seen again, but now scientists are saying hope is lost.
For these birds, mussels, bats, fishes, and plants, there is no tomorrow.
The endangered species list and the protections it provides to listed species has been a lifeline for many non-human animals and plants, but it will not save them all.
Though species have always come and gone, the rapidity with which they are currently disappearing is so clearly linked to human causes that papers and books are being written about the sixth mass extinction.
According to a 2020 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, humans evolved into a world more diverse than it had ever been, and our activities are directly or indirectly destroying that same life-giving environment.
What does that mean for our survival?
If we're the agents of the sixth mass extinction, we may be so good at destruction that we'll put an end to humanity.
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We aren't alone here, but saying we share the planet with other life doesn't seem quite right. “Sharing” implies some sort of compromise or willingness to portion out the bounty of the Earth with others. I see a world where humans take, and then take more. We take from non-human species, we take from our fellow humans. We think first, and often only, of ourselves.
Instead of offering compassion and thanks to the life we evolved with, like the yellow-blossom pearly mussel, last seen in the 1980s cleaning the water of the American Southeast, we simply do as we please without regard for the well-being of others.
It's no wonder our world strikes many of us as chaotic and cruel: We are reaping what we've sown.
But what if, instead of destruction and pain, we sowed beauty and peace? Then we will reap:
• Improved air quality from stopping the burning of fossil fuels
• A population boom for whales when we quit plying the ocean to bring cheap plastic doodads from one place to another
• Lasting peace and the songs of birds when we invest in trees instead of nuclear weapons and fighter jets
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In the wonderful novel Migrations, author Charlotte McConaghy writes, “[W]e don't always have to be poison, a plague on the world...we can nurture it, too.”
Her protagonist knows that to right our course will take radical action and a deep commitment to not always centering human life, but raising up the needs of all life - a true sharing of the bounty.
It can be scary to not center what we perceive to be our needs, so I'll leave us with the words of another sage writer, Terry Tempest Williams, from her book Erosion.
“I will find my way into new country that beckons me to take unexpected risks, which turn out not to be risks at all, but the next step.”