Just 1 Species

“UNLESS…” - Dr. Suess, The Lorax

The last Truffula Tree.

By accounts of his closest friend Fausto Llerena, Lonesome George had a sweet and gentle nature. His neck was long in photos with big, greying wrinkles. It’s said that when two or three people visited him in his home, he could be social, but more than that and he’d sooner or later sneak off into hiding. He made an exception for Fausto. They could spend lots of time together, and for nearly three decades, they saw each other every day.

Lonesome George was a Pinta Island Tortoise. He was also an endling, the last known existing member of his species. All efforts failed to breed him with various relatives from other subspecies. When Fausto Llerena, an Ecuadorian conservationist and ranger at the Galapagos National Park, went to visit his friend on June 24th, 2012, he found that Lonesome George had passed away in the night, and with his passing, an entire species was gone forever. George had died of cardiac arrest.

Fausto told Mongabay, “I feel like I’ve lost a best friend, there is a void and there is sorrow, especially when I see the photos, in my heart I’m not convinced he’s dead.”

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Lonesome George the Pinta Island Tortoise (d. 2012)
Toughie the Rabbs’ Fringe-Limbed Tree Frog (d. 2016)
Sudan the Northern White Rhino (d. 2018)
Celia the Pyrenean Ibex (d. 2000)
Martha the Passenger Pigeon (d. 1914)

These are a few names of famous endlings. I’ve seen lists like this before, and probably you have too, maybe a hundred times. For me, not much ever sticks. We live in an era of ecological collapse, and I spent most of my childhood encountering lists or images of animals on the brink that I’d never met and never would meet. What are you supposed to do with that information? Feel guilty? Obligated? Donate? Donate and then forget until the next blob of disconcerting information shows up on your doorstep to be tackled?

“What does it take for any of this information to matter?” Daniel Schmachtenberger asks here. Great question. There is no shortage of information. But, how to let it matter?

I won’t bury the lede any deeper: This piece of writing is meant as an invitation, and one especially for you. Why you? Because you are a human being, which means you have a heart and consciousness, which means you have the capacity to love and care about something beyond you. That is the only real requirement for fulfilling this invitation.

The invitation is that when you close this article, you visit the Red List on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) website. The invitation is that you peruse this list, which tracks the 47,000 species the IUCN has documented that are at risk for extinction, and you choose just 1 species there, and you decide—just because you can—to love it. Maybe you learn about it, study it, discover what it eats, where it sleeps, how many are left, where it lives, why it is threatened. You visit it if you can. But especially most of you all, you build a home in your consciousness and your heart for this species, not as some 2-dimensional concept or number on a list, but as something you come to know, as real, personal and beloved.

Will you do that?

47,000 species under threat of extinction might sound like a big number. But then, these are only the species that are documented and surveyed. Estimates say there are roughly 10 million species of life, only 1.7 million of which we’ve documented. So, that’s just 47,000 of the known 1.7 million.

Let’s look at some more big numbers. 47,000 documented species may be on the brink, but a well-founded proposal from Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson says 30,000 species go extinct each year. That’s 82 per day. That number could rise 10x in the coming decades, Wilson suggested before dying in 2021. Maybe you say, “Well, isn’t there a background extinction rate? It seems like a big number, but evolution requires cannon fodder.” Thankfully, fossil and geological records do indeed reveal an average background number for annual extinctions. Barring catastrophe, species go extinct at a rate of roughly 1 per 1 million per year. There are about 10 million species (1.7 million documented), so that’s a background extinction rate of roughly 10 per year.

Human activity accounts for the other 29,990.

The ilk of Lonesome George were wiped out by feral, invasive goats introduced to Pinta Island in 1958. The goats were introduced by humans. The goats were finally removed in 2003, but not before they grazed into oblivion the vegetation the tortoises relied on for their food.

What does it take for any of this information to matter?

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A few vignettes:

1.

When I was 20 years old, I was cruising around on a bike with a friend on the Olympic Peninsula. It was evening, but still light enough to see. I was young then, sober, crazed, and at times erratic. When I saw the doe and her fawn in the street ahead, I decided to speed up and head straight for them, yelling. The doe ran away, but the fawn in its terror ran right for me. I tried to swerve, but not in time, and the fawn ripped into the side of my front wheel, then keeled over motionless on the pavement. I could not believe it. Ahead, the doe stopped in the street and looked back at her baby. She must have been terrified. I laid my bike down and knelt beside the fawn. I thought it was dying. Unthinking, I picked it up and held it against my chest. Its heart beat rapidly against mine. It still did not move. I stood, and began to walk toward the doe with the fawn in my arms. I myself was now terrified. It could not die. I could not let it die, not over something so stupid. I whispered to it. I asked if it was ok. Its eyes were glassy and gazeless, its body stiff, but its heart kept beating, it kept breathing. The doe stared at me, raised her head, and then suddenly the fawn began to kick its legs against my chest. I set it down, and it ran to its mother. Soon, they were out of sight. I stood there in the dark, stunned yet relieved. I vowed to not do a thing like that again.

2.

A few years ago, I was living in San Miguel de Allende, México, which is high and dry desert in the summertime. One afternoon, I opened the front door and saw something black dangling by a thread, silhouetted in the blaze. I thought I knew what it might be, and the red hourglass on its abdomen confirmed my suspicions: latrodectus mactans, black widow. As a child, I loved all things strange, dangerous, and venomous. I scooped her into a jar. I had no plan for the widow. I just wanted to look at her. I loved her tiny legs and how deeply black her body was. I loved her delicacy. When after a few hours someone asked me why I was keeping her, I decided to let her go. I brought her out to the park nearby, and set her in the grass. At first, the widow took a few steps forward. Then she stopped. Then she did something that changed me. She got very close to the ground and drew in her legs, making herself smaller and smaller. What was she doing? She was hiding… from me. She did not want to be seen. She was scared, this tiny creature. I’d grown up with wild tales of the widow’s venom. Yet here she was, hiding from me. In that moment, my love for her lost the quality of fascination and became about appreciation, awe, and protection.

3.

I recently walked into the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’m not a religious guy, but I have been inspired by Saint Francis since I first read his beautiful prayer which pleads, in part:

“Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to be understood, to love than to be loved. For it is in self-forgetting that one finds, it is in forgiving that one is forgiven, it is in dying that one awakens…”

Francis was the patron saint of many things, including animals, ecology, and, rather beautifully, not dying alone. As I read about him last week, I remembered the moment when I discovered my own commitment to not letting things die alone. I was the passenger in a car driving through Scotland near the Findhorn Ecovillage. In front of us in the middle of the road, I saw a duck struggling, almost dragging itself, to get from one side to the other. “Stop, let me out!” I cried, and I ran into the street, swept the duck up in my hands, and brought it to the grass. In my hands, it had been moving slightly, but it was weak, and as soon as I laid it on the grass, it closed its eyes for the last time. Perhaps it took a few more breaths, but that was it. It was gone. A few days passed before my own tears came. What had happened to it? Ducks are social creatures. Why had it gone off to die alone? My heart ached, and perhaps the very fact that my heart was capable of aching in that way is why I came upon that duck that day, to be with it in its final breath.

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“UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to change. It’s not.” The clarity and quote emerge from the Once-ler toward the end of Dr. Seuss’ masterpiece, The Lorax.

The Once-ler—now that’s a sad case. Driven by the urge to make his fortune, the Once-ler discovers that he can convert Truffula trees into thneeds. What is a thneed? Well, a thneed is a useless “Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need.” Soon after chopping down his first Truffula tree, the Once-ler encounters the Lorax, an odd little creature who speaks for the trees, “for the trees have no tongues.” The Lorax warns of bad things to come if the Once-ler keeps chopping down the Truffula trees. The Once-ler turns up his nose.

The years go by. Business is booming. Demand for thneeds exceeds supply. The Once-ler doubles down, building more efficient machines to cut down more trees more quickly. He hires a workforce and builds factories. Occasionally, the Lorax renews his pleas as the lakes grow polluted, the fish flee, and the Brown Bar-ba-loots who depend on the fruit of the Truffula trees lose their food source.

At the climactic moment when nearly all local life has been extirpated, a loud whack echoes across the valley: the sound of the last Truffula tree falling to the ground.

With nothing left to protect, the Lorax exits the wasteland the Once-ler has created. He leaves behind him a pile of stones on which is written a single word: “UNLESS.”

The Once-ler grows old and reclusive, spends his twilight years worrying, and puzzles over UNLESS until in that hour far too late, he gets the message: “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to change. It’s not.”

What does it take to care?

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Take this question with you to just 1 species. That is my invitation. Find out what it would take to care about just 1 species, bring it into your consciousness, house it in your heart, love it deeply for no reason.

Your care might not prevent its extinction. The hour is late. 82 species, here this morning, gone this evening, rinse and repeat tomorrow. So, find out what your care can do.

Caring is a dangerous thing, because caring changes you. The man who captured the black widow is not the man who stood above it hidden in the grass. Care comes in 4 colors: anger, sadness, fear, joy. If you care, you feel, and if you feel, you run the risk of changing.

The people in the world who know best say the Sumatran Rhino, population ~34, are doomed before the end of the century. The genetic viability is too low, the available habitat is too small, the advice of experts for captive breeding has gone unheeded too long. So what? Love them anyway. Find out who they are and what they do. Listen to them sing, and wonder, why do they sing that way, big mammals like this? Or wonder what you’ll wonder. Let it touch your heart. Why not?

There are many other species like this. Find just 1. Don’t care with the intention of cause. Start by caring with the intention of kinship. When you care with the intention of kinship, the actions that emerge from you originate from a different place than caring with the intention of cause. Find out what that place is. Life on earth descends from a common seed. Your brothers and sisters are fading. Go be with them in the descent. If you feel guilt or despair, mixed emotions, unmix them, so you can also delight in who and what these creatures are. Let the mystery prick you, and if your heart breaks, hug someone, or lean your back into an oak. Start with kinship, and maybe that leads to cause, and maybe your cause is simple—to know, to become a carrier of this one branch of the tree of life, so that where you go, it goes, forever.