Lonesome George, Just Another Casualty of Mass Extinction

Lonesome George is dead, long live Lonesome George. The 100 year-old icon, the last Pinta Island tortoise, has gone to some great, sparsely vegetated island in the sky. His loss was mourned across the blogosphere.

The news brings sad tidings, to be sure. I had the pleasure of snaring a little one on one time with the solitary giant back in 2008, while on an assignment in the Galapagos. At the Charles Darwin Research Center, where scientists were trying in vain to get him to mate, you used to be able to walk right up to his compound and stare into those baleful reptilian eyes of his and say, ‘Come on, Georgie. Make it happen.’

He didn’t, and now his species has been erased from the face of the earth. So it goes.

I’m glad, however, that this woeful conservation tale—George was the lone survivor after his island was overrun by invasive plant-devouring goats brought in by settlers, and scientists’ sophisticated efforts to preserve his bloodline ultimately failed—is getting plenty of coverage in the media. It’s a reminder that species are dying out, and that it’s our fault. Period. What I wish more outlets would cover, though, is the fact that this is just one extinction of dozens that’s likely to occur today.

The Center for Biological Diversity estimates species now are going extinct at a rate somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times the background rate (faster than they would have without human interference). That means that dozens of species, many of which scientists have never even had a chance to discover and record, are going extinct every single day. The reasons are many: climate change, deforestation, human development, invasive species, poaching, overfishing, etc, etc, etc. They don’t call it the anthropocene (“the age of man”), or the sixth great extinction, for nothing.

But for every Lonesome George or, say, Javan Rhino we lose, every high profile species snuffed out, thousands more go quietly into the night. Our wildlife crisis, the plight of biodiversity loss, is far greater than the economic crisis, when distilled into the sort of dollars-and-cents-cost-benefit analysis our bureaucrats and businessmen better comprehend. But we still don’t care. We can’t.

It’d make life in the anthropocene unbearable if we mourned the passing of every fungus or insect or flower or tiny mammal species. Plus, bugs are gross. And who needs fungus. Most people don’t grasp the true scope of this phenomenon; that our entire biosphere is fundamentally and radically transforming. That whole regions are facing biodiversity loss on a scale that may lead to habitat destruction. Recently, 21 respected biologists released a paper that warned that once more than 50% of the world's natural landscape is demolished or developed, our entire ecological web may collapse. As in, the whole thing. For the record, we're currently at 43%. In other words, George’s demise is a bummer, but he’s a drop in the terrestrial bucket.

There must be a way to make these threats more tangible, more urgent to the public that is posing them. Something beyond austere nature documentaries and tired conservation campaigns from wildlife groups. Because, while both are noble, neither are working. Like climate change, biodiversity loss is a vague and ambiguous problem—psychologically, humans aren't well-equipped to compute it. I know I'm not.

In the Galapagos that day, I lingered after most of my tour group had moved on. I just sat there staring at old George for a while. He made a beautiful martyr; his dinged-up nose, the ultra-slow swing of his long neck, the way he’d just plop his scaly head in the dirt. It was like he was begging me to project all kinds of conservationist guilt onto his bulky frame. So I stared. But not much boiled up. My gut remained unwrenched.

As evocative a symbol as he was, his plight was already too pedestrian—extinction is everywhere. It’s background noise. That’s just the way things are now; species dying off at a rate that’s actually beyond our comprehension. George was probably going to die without ever mating, and the scientists knew it. I knew it. Boredom crept in after a few more long moments, and there wasn’t much more to say than what I’ll say again now:

So long, Lonesome George.

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