One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth?
By Margaret Renkl
May 13, 2019 nyt
NASHVILLE — The gift of springtime is the panoply of new life: gray buds breaking open into bright flowers, gray branches sprouting leaves in a thousand shades of green to make a bower of our common lives. In the treetops, birds throw back their heads to sing their full-throated, body-shuddering songs. An ordinary suburban yard becomes a carpet of wildflowers, each one visited by tiny, iridescent bees which seem to materialize overnight out of nothing but the mild springtime air.
But it’s not all flowers and bird song; springtime is also deadly. All the new mouths must be fed. The bluebirds in my nest box are catching those tiny bees for their four hungry nestlings. Somewhere in this yard a large rat snake is hunting, and I can’t be sure if the baffle I’ve mounted on the nest-box pole is large enough to keep the snake out. Even if it does, a house wren with murder on his mind is scooting around in the underbrush with a dagger of a beak, and he will kill those bluebird nestlings in an instant if their father isn’t vigilant enough to protect them.
I worry. Every year I worry about the bluebird babies, and every year I remind myself that house wrens and snakes have their own purposes for springtime, each as urgent as the bluebird’s. This is just the way the natural world works. Pay attention, and it will break your heart a dozen times before dinner.
Last week, the United Nations released the summary of an enormous report that broke my heart in more ways than any backyard-nature observations ever have. The Times article about the report, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace,” called it “the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization.” The story opens with the picture of an olive ridley sea turtle washed up on an Indian beach. The turtle is dead, apparently strangled: Fishing rope is looped around its neck, cutting into its throat.
That photo undid me. All week long I found myself coming back to it until I had it committed to memory, the shapes and the colors, though part of me would prefer never to think about that image again. I kept being struck anew by the sorrow of that one lost creature, that one preventable tragedy. The turtle’s great head is bowed, resting on the sand. Its eyes are closed; its ancient face is drawn back in a mask of grief. The turtle’s whole body signals resignation, surrender. In the background, children play in the surf.
If the photo is traumatizing, the story is worse. Because of human activity — both direct activity, like fishing and farming, and indirect activity, like the fossil fuels that accelerate climate change — up to one million species of plants and animals are headed for extinction if we don’t take immediate measures to halt the devastation.
That’s one million species. Every individual creature in a species — times one million. We can’t possibly conceive of such a thing. We can hold in mind, however uncomfortably, the image of a single animal who died a terrible death. Devastation on this scale is beyond the reach of imagination. How could we hold in mind a destruction so vast it would take not just one sea turtle but all that animal’s kind, as well as all the kind of 999,999 other species?
Whole expanses of the natural world are disappearing. It’s not just poster animals like polar bears, tigers and elephants; it’s life on earth as we know it.
I hear a truth like that and succumb to despair. I look around at all the ways I’ve tried to help — at the reusable grocery bags and the solar-field subscription, at the pollinator garden and the little meadow of wildflowers, at the lawn mower blades set high enough to harm no snakes or nesting cottontails, at the recycle bins and the worm composter, at the nest box for the bluebirds and the nest box for the house wrens and the nest box claimed this year by a red wasp — and it all strikes me as puny, laughable, at best a way to feel better about myself. How is any of this a solution? Or even the path to a solution?
I asked myself those questions even as I filled the bird feeders and cleaned the birdbaths, even as I planted more milkweed seeds and watered the new cedar and serviceberry trees we planted this spring to feed wildlife in the years to come. What’s the point? How will any of this matter?
And then I noticed that I hadn’t seen any activity in the bluebird box for some time. Over and over again I’d get up from my desk, stand at the front window and watch — but there was no sign of either parent. In midafternoon, just as I’d made up my mind to check on the nestlings that I was sure were dead, the male bluebird flew up with a caterpillar in his beak and climbed into the box. Relief whooshed through my body; all the muscles I didn’t know I was tensing relaxed.
I don’t have the power to reclaim soil degraded by industrial farming practices. I can’t persuade equatorial countries to protect their rain forests. I’m not able to affect in any way the irresponsible decisions of my own country’s president — decisions that will unquestionably hasten the great extinction — much less those made by the leaders of other nations. But I can put up boxes for cavity-nesting birds and roosting boxes for bats. I can cultivate the host plants of butterflies, knowing that some of their caterpillars will feed baby birds. I can make my yard a haven for insects, including the red wasp, an important pollinator which is too quickly maligned. I can keep my yard free from chemicals and let the wildflowers go to seed.
And I can remind myself, all day long every day, that there’s a difference between doing something and doing nothing. That “something,” small as it might seem, is not “nothing.” The space between them is far apart, limitless stretching distances apart. It’s the difference between a heartbeat and silence.
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