Personalizing Extinction

This is a tale of loss and how people respond to loss. Few people know frogs are disappearing from the mountains of Central America. Those who do, can’t do anything about it. All we can do is to try to understand the loss. The context of Panama is important to the story as is the way that scientists relate to such an event in the natural world. Thus, this story is a research log, a travelogue, a description of natural history, and a documentation of one part of one of the great extinctions occurring in our lifetime, perhaps in the history of life itself.

I am not sure if most people even care about species extinctions in any real sense. When young, my goal was to do something with nature. The realization that people were actually paid to live out in the wild made the career of park ranger extremely attractive to a fishing/ backpacking 5th grader. Then, a trip to the Mediterranean as a young teenager got me into a snorkel and under the sea for the first time. I could not believe what was in front of my eyes…coral, fish, algae, and marine biologist seemed like a dream job. In college I was seduced by the idea of pre-med and the ideal of helping people. Upon deeper reflection, the things that really excited me in the past revolved around nature, not around being a mechanic to fix humans. The grades and test scores were there for medical school, just not the desire. So my path went toward ecology as a graduate student.

After school and work in Oregon and Montana, I landed in Kansas. How can an aquatic ecologist move from those places to the flat, dry Midwest? Well, supporting a family and the option of a paying job was quite attractive. Yet, it did not take long to develop a deep connection to Flint Hills Tallgrass Prairie and particularly the streams that drain it. The streams are clear, clean, and full of fascinating algae and aquatic animals. Kids love to wade in streams and turn over rocks, I just never grew out of that phase.

I am what E. O. Wilson calls a biophile, a nature lover. Many ecologists and taxonomists spend their lives studying the natural world because they too are biophilic. Others take nature up as a hobby and watch birds, camp, fish or hike. But these are the exception, most people want nature at an arm’s length. An animal show on cable TV is ok, maybe a cute movie about penguins. The dirty business of actually being in nature is so far from most peoples’ everyday life, that they cannot be expected to care much about the loss of a few species. To someone who has this deep attachment to the unbelievable diversity of life on our planet, extinction is a troubling idea.

The story of extinction is not dramatic. As Elliot says, the world ends “not with a bang but a whimper.” Extinction is the quiet catastrophe going on all around us now. The amphibian extinctions are emblematic of the fate of many species and how much of humanity is disconnected to that fate. Chris Cokinos in his book “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds” and Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine in “Last Chance to See” both dealt with extinctions. The former deals with the emotional toll in very direct terms, the later is seasoned with Adams’ humor which diffuses the anguish of experiencing species extinctions. Both books served as inspiration to my attempt to put extinctions of some species into context and convey the personal side of watching species disappear from the earth forever, while describing how scientists are documenting the effects of such disappearances.