Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got till its

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got till its

You don't know what you've got till it's gone.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. Last week, US Wildlife officials recommended that 22 animals and one plant within the US and Guam be marked extinct. Gone forever. In total, the extinctions include eight freshwater mussels, 11 birds, two fish, a bat, and a plant, and one of those now-extinct birds is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Thanks to archive recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, we can still hear the sounds of that woodpecker. For more on this extinction crisis, we turn to Catrin Einhorn who covers wildlife and extinction for the New York Times. Welcome to the show, Catrin.

Catrin Einhorn: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa: What is happening here? Why are species becoming extinct?

Catrin: It's really because humans are changing the planet so drastically. I think that when we think of environmental crisis, everyone's brain right now goes to climate change, and of course, that is a major environmental crisis. There's another one, and that's a real crisis of biodiversity loss. Extinction rates are accelerating, so they're like a thousand times above what they would naturally be. What would happen if species were just naturally occasionally going extinct, and that's because humans are basically taking away the habitat of animals. That's the major, major driving factor. It's not climate change yet. Although, it may become climate change down the road, and climate change is already adding to the problem, but the major thing is farming, logging, mining, overfishing at sea. Basically, we're just taking up so much room on this planet that animals don't have enough space left.

Melissa: Okay. This might seem obvious, but I'm genuinely curious. How do I know if an animal or a plant isn't extinct? I have to say my daughter's in second grade and they're studying birds and she's really into woodpeckers. This is the bird that she's really chosen to obsess over at seven years old. When I learned that the ivory-billed woodpecker was one of the birds that had become extinct, I just felt it in my stomach, but I also wondered how would you know.

Catrin: It's hard because you wouldn't necessarily know. If we didn't have scientists studying these things, we wouldn't know and one of the major concerns that scientists have is that species are blinking out that we haven't even registered. There are so many species that Western science hasn't even identified yet, and so do we even know what animals are going extinct? Really leading scientists are very concerned about that. With the ivorybill, this is a bird that was already quite rare by the turn of the century, by say, the 1930s, and that's because European colonists and their descendants logged the areas where the ivorybills lived.

As those areas were logged, the birds became fewer and fewer and then there's this heartbreaking story that happened where in the 1930s, 1940s, some ivorybills were found in low Louisiana in this tract land they called the singer track. I believe because it may have been owned by the singer or sewing machine company, but then it somehow was transferred to the Chicago Lumber and Mill company. I'm not sure if I'm getting the name exactly right, but conservationists begged that lumber company not to log this land because they had found these ivorybills there and they went ahead and did it and that was before the Endangered Species Act.

Now there is a law on the books which protects the habitat of threatened and endangered animals, but that protection wasn't in place for the ivorybill, and although some birders are convinced and still deeply believe that they have seen ivorybills in Arkansas. Very recently, federal officials just think that the best available science shows that they're extinct.

Melissa: This is the sound of a Bachman warbler. It's another bird that US Wildlife officials say should be marked as extinct. Though there are protections for endangered species, Catrin told me there's been an acceleration of the loss of species.

Catrin: First of all, this is a global acceleration and the Endangered Species Act is a more stringent law than most countries have on the books, but even within the United States, there's a lot of concern that while the Endangered Species Act can provide life support for animals and has had some incredible success stories in bringing animals back like the black-footed ferret or the California condor. Nevertheless, there are so many species that are suffering. For example, recently federal officials announced that Monarch butterflies are threatened and should be on the endangered species list, but they're basically on the waiting list because there is not enough resources to get them on the list.

Melissa: Wait. Wait. Wait. Monarch butterflies?

Catrin: Yes. Their populations are really plummeting. Especially the Western ones, those are in terrible shape. That's like a 99% decline. That's really bad, but most Monarchs, the Eastern Monarchs are the ones that overwinter in Mexico and they do this just incredible multi-generational migration between Northern United States and Canada, all the way down to Mexico and back. Those butterflies are also showing really steep declines and that's a combination of habitat change. Partly, milkweed is the only food that Monarch caterpillars can eat.

Milkweed grows naturally all over North America, but when farmers started using Roundup so the corn and the soy is genetically modified to resist the Roundup. It can resist the spraying, but obviously, the milkweed is not, and so where it used to grow alongside those crops, it eliminated huge swaths of habitat. So now people are planting milkweed to try and provide on their balconies, in their backyards, wherever it may be and that's been a huge movement and it's great, but what scientists say is like, you're taking two steps forward and one step back because then you also have the problem of climate change. There are increased storms and drought that they're very vulnerable to.

Melissa: Look, nothing would make me happier than just ranting maybe for the next seven to 10 minutes about Roundup and about the effects, but and I want to just come to this farmers use what they have to use in order to grow crops to feed people and to turn at least some profit or to look to break even. Farm life no one's getting rich off of that. How do we balance something like the need for the Monarch to have this milkweed to move across generations in this migration, and also to feed lead humans on the planet and for people to live above a level of subsistence?

Catrin: This is the big question. Monarchs are one example, but this is the problem of the biodiversity crisis in a much bigger way, and what these leading international panels of scientists who study this would say is we really need to change the way that we do agriculture, both in terms of moving more to regenerative agriculture, but also changing the way that we eat. We can't eat as intensively as we do in terms of the amount of meat that we eat ends up taking up such a big footprint, and it's not allowing enough space for the rest of the species on this planet, which our survival ultimately does depend on them or is interlinked with them.

We're talking about this almost a competition between agriculture and wild areas, but ultimately, we rely on nature for our very survival. In other words, wetlands filter and restore groundwater, pollinators pollinate our food. If we start seeing ecosystem collapse, it's going to affect us so there are very selfish reasons that humans should be concerned about the biodiversity crisis.

Melissa: Can you say a little more about the specifics of how that works so I can hear right now the conversation that happens when I say a plant became extinct? I can see this blank eye, so why do I care if a plant became extinct? Why do I care if Bachman's warbler is extinct? What difference does that make to me?

Catrin: At the individual species level, I think that there's so much that researchers still don't know about this really intricate dance that ecosystems do, and so Bachman's warbler has been gone for some time, it seems. The ecosystem is not collapsing, so I don't know that there is a practical argument for that particular species. Of course, when you talk about too many species disappearing from an ecosystem, that's when you start really setting yourself up for some bigger problems. Apart from the practical human-centered argument, I think that there are also moral arguments about our place on this earth. It's interesting because people have such, now that I cover this, people have such different reactions because some people just like you express such dismay at the thought of, "Oh my God, we drove this species to extinction. This is this result of untold years of evolution, and they have all these fascinating behaviors and characteristics that are now gone."

Other people are like, "So what?" I was talking about cheetahs and how cheetahs are just really doing terribly. Their numbers are plummeting and they were like, "Who cares if cheetahs go extinct?" I thought, huh, like, well, they're the fastest land mammal. They're so iconic in some way and I don't really know how to respond to that other than, I don't know, like, "Do you care about art? Do you care about--?" It gets to-- at some point, I'm not totally sure how to communicate the importance of a cheetah to someone who doesn't think that cheetahs are worth anything or valuable to save.

Melissa: Catrin Einhorn covers wildlife and extinction for the New York Times, and she gives her child a fabulous name. Catrin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Catrin: Thank you so much, Melissa.

[00:11:27] [END OF AUDIO]

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.