![]() But scientists today report an accelerated loss of biodiversity 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of approximately one to five species annually. It is true, species extinction has been a natural part of the Earth’s evolutionary history, as evidenced with the disappearance of dinosaurs in the Cretaceous Era, 65 million years ago, to the extinctions of the great megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons in the late Pleistocene Era who inhabited the last ice age some 10,000 years ago. Grief is part of extinction that when understood parallels love. What must it be like to surrender to one’s isolation by way of howl or cry or flight or bloom to attract a response, a glimmer or glint of kin? Certainly, they must know, sense, or fear this fact. Imagine an individual animal or insect or plant-alone-reaching, wandering, wondering, if they are the last of the living members of their kind. Say their names: great auk, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, Steller’s sea cow, Caribbean monk seal, Great Plains wolf, Puerto Rican long-nosed bat, Maryland darter, Utah lake sculpin, Labrador duck, heath hen, Bachman’s warbler, Xerces blue butterfly, Wyoming toad, and Panamanian golden frog-all extinct beginning in the 1800s to present. ![]() On the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, I am thinking about extinction and what that means for a creature, a living being, to vanish from existence. ![]()
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