Saving endangered animals will help save us, too

We were living in a cataclysmic age of mass extinction and climate instability even before the election. Now the climate denier in chief is poised to gut the environmental protections that do exist. Even so, conservation nonprofits are struggling to raise the funds they need to challenge his wrecking-ball agenda in court. The people who care are feeling defeated, and the fight has not yet begun.

I was already grieving, and the approach of Remembrance Day for Lost Species, which falls each year on November 30, didn’t help. Was this really the best time to pick up Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by the dazzling British author and scholar Katherine Rundell? Did I really want to read another book about how so much of life on earth is close to ending?

As it turns out, this is the perfect book to read in the aftermath of a planet-threatening election. In times like these, terror and rage will carry us only so far. We will also need unstinting, unceasing love. For the hard work that lies ahead, Rundell writes, “Our competent and furious love will have to be what fuels us.” This is a book to help you fall in love.

The vanishing treasures

Among the 23 endangered creatures she celebrates in “Vanishing Treasures,” the last on the list is humans. This is not a sly overstatement to make a point. How will we grow crops if we lose the pollinators? What medical advancements — like the GLP-1 drugs, derived from a study of Gila monsters, that now treat diabetes and obesity — will we miss if reptiles go extinct? Which diseases will run rampant in our communities if scavengers are poisoned out of existence?

We have hardly begun to understand how inextricably our health and safety are intertwined with those of our wild neighbours. Data is hard to come by, in part because controlling for variables is so difficult outside a lab. But when a fatal fungal disease called white-nose syndrome began to wipe out bat colonies in 2006, researchers realised it might offer a way to study the direct effect on humans of a population collapse in wildlife. In September, the journal Science published a study that linked the sudden loss of bat colonies to a spike in infant mortality.

Bats feed on many insects that would otherwise feed on crops. Researchers discovered that in counties where bat colonies were destroyed, farmers compensated by using more insecticides — on average 31% more — than they had used when bats were helping to keep insects in check. In those counties with higher levels of insecticide use, infant mortality was also 8% higher, on average, than in counties with healthy bat populations. A spike in environmental toxins explained the spike in infant mortality, but the real reason more than 1,300 babies died was the disappearance of bats.

Rundell calls bats “the under-sung ravishments of the night.” They deserve to exist because they are a treasure of the natural world, not because they help us grow food and keep our babies safe from neurotoxins. Nevertheless, to protect the bats is inevitably to protect ourselves.

Wildlife populations are disappearing at an unthinkable rate, but we are getting nowhere in the effort to curb emissions or to protect the habitats of the creatures who yet survive. In 2022, the world’s nations made a historic pledge to keep 30% of the earth wild. So far most of those countries have failed to produce a plan for doing so.

We can’t keep waiting for our leaders to save us. We need to wake up every morning looking for what we can do, collectively and individually, to buy enough time for our leaders to get this right. In a time of darkness, what light is left to us?

A highly incomplete list would start with eating less meat and dairy, a change that would reduce deforestation and climate-altering emissions. We could buy less stuff to reduce transportation emissions and raw-material extraction.

Poison harms not just babies, but every creature in the food chain. Instead of poisoning our way out of inconvenience, we can practice a policy of peaceful coexistence by avoiding insecticides and rodenticides. We can give the night-flying insects back to the bats. We can give the rodents back to the owls and the foxes. We can leave the leaves where they fall to foster habitat for overwintering insects. We can turn off outdoor lights at night to protect migrating birds and nocturnal animals.

When we must drive, we can drive slower, particularly on roads through wild areas. Last month a Yellowstone-area grizzly bear, beloved by the many people who knew her from social media and a PBS documentary, was hit by a car and killed. It was a tragic accident, nobody’s fault, but every year millions of non-famous animals — and some 200 people — are also killed in collisions between wildlife and cars. Wildlife crossings can significantly reduce these encounters. So can simply slowing down.

Such measures are small at best, but if we adopted them all and adopted them together — and especially if we used them as first steps toward growing awareness and greater change — we could make a measurable difference even without the help of feckless government officials.

In states that allow them, citizen-initiated ballot measures can do an end-run around those leaders. In the same election that gave both the White House and Congress to the party of Big Oil and Big Construction, voters also supported five state-level conservation or climate-resilience initiatives, including one in red Louisiana. As Justin Balik, senior state programme director for the advocacy group Evergreen Action, told the nonprofit news site Grist, “When push comes to shove, there are voters across the country
that care about protecting the environment and cleaning up pollution, especially when it’s articulated in concrete, specific terms.”

No time left to spare: Fund conservation efforts

In addition to all the practical changes we can make in our own spheres, it is now more urgent than ever to ensure that conservation nonprofits like Evergreen Action are sufficiently funded to take this fight to the ballots and to the courts. In the wake of the US election, Ms. Rundell announced that she will donate 100 percent of royalties from “Vanishing Treasures” to a rotating list of conservation organisations.

Nonprofits like the Centre for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, the Environmental Defence Fund, the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Sierra Club — along with regional organisations, like the Environmental Law & Policy Centre in the Midwest and the Southern Environmental Law Centre in the South — have experience in using the law to defend the environment from the worst excesses of Republican obeisance to industry and oil. Pick an organisation from a vetted list by Charity Navigator or CharityWatch and help it do the work that none of us is equipped to do alone.

There is no time left to spare. Precious things have been lost already, but not everything will be lost, and we must fight for those things. There is still so much we can save. Including ourselves.