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ANATOMY OF A ROSE -- EXPLORING THE SECRET LIFE OF FLOWERS |
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THIRTEEN: The Seventh Extinction "EIGHTEEN DEAD." "Twenty-eight dead." "Thirty-two dead." Day by day in late July 1999, my eleven-year-old son made these announcements, as I prepared to leave for the Sixteenth International Botanical Congress in St. Louis, Missouri. In a period of two weeks, a heat wave in the Midwest would kill 271 people. My son was counting the death toll in St. Louis alone. Heat exhaustion causes fatigue, dizziness, nausea, headache, and cramps. The skin looks pale and clammy. Breathing becomes shallow. Pulse is rapid. In high humidity, the body is less able to cool itself through the evaporation of sweat. Clammy, sweaty skin turns hot and dry. Heat exhaustion is now heatstroke. The brain shuts down. It's out of control. That July, the sick, old, and young in St. Louis, Missouri, were dying of heatstroke. Volunteers brought swamp coolers and air conditioners to the poorer parts of town. Some people refused help. They drew the curtains and locked the doors. Some people had air conditioners but would not use them. Some people never saw a volunteer. One woman woke every two hours to bathe her grandmother with a cold sponge. Just before dawn, the younger woman rose from her bed and went to the couch. Grandmother was dead. The Sixteenth International Botanical Congress took place in downtown St. Louis at a large convention center. Four thousand scientists from one hundred countries met to talk about plants. They gave more than 1,500 presentations at 220 symposia in rooms so cold I wore a light sweater. The congress is held every six years, not often in the United States, not since 1969. It is a mega-event, a botanical mecca. This year, it was a kind of dirge. The president of the congress began by predicting that, if trends continue, one-third to two-thirds of all plant and animal species will be lost during the second half of the twenty-first century. A natural rate of extinction is about one species per million per year. The rate is now one thousand times that and will rise to as much as ten thousand times the natural rate. So far, the earth has experienced six major mass extinctions, beginning with the Cambrian extinction over 500 million years ago. In 2050, my son will be sixty-three years old. He will see the beginning of the seventh extinction. One could also argue that I am seeing the beginning, and he will see the end. The sixth extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared, along with two-thirds of other species on land. That disappearance is still a bit of a mystery. The seventh extinction won't be a mystery at all. Our children can take careful notes. Most of these losses will be in the tropical rain forests, an ecosystem we are losing so rapidly that in fifty years we can expect to have 5 percent of what we have now. I have been told over and over, often very cleverly, how many acres of rain forest are being cut down every minute of the day, how many acres for every breath I take, for every heartbeat. I can never seem to remember that number. The president of the International Botanical Congress outlined a seven-point plan that would slow the current rate of extinction. The plan involved money, organization, and research, nothing that isn't possible or reasonable. Throughout the congress, more plans would be revealed, all requiring money, organization, and research. In smokeless rooms, over conference tables, men and women were hatching plots to save the world. Among the elite, back-room deals were being made. At least, I hoped so. I sat in a lecture hall listening to a woman pinpoint how we have made a mess of things. Human beings have transformed 50 percent of the land surface of the planet. We have doubled the amount of nitrogen in the environment and increased the amount of heat-trapping gases in the air. Scientists no longer argue whether global warming is real. Every year is the hottest on record. Every summer has a deadly heat wave. The oceans are in serious trouble. Some fifty dead zones, areas with little or no oxygen, have appeared in our coastal waters. The largest in the Western Hemisphere is in the Gulf of Mexico and is caused by nitrogen and phosphorus flowing down the Mississippi River. Shorelines are eroding. Toxic algal blooms have increased. Over 60 percent of coral reefs, which sustain one-quarter of marine wildlife species, are threatened. Much of the damage is unseen and underappreciated. Commercial trawlers literally scrape up the seafloor. What does it mean to clear-cut the ocean? That July, newspapers claimed that the human population on earth had just reached six billion. Less than forty years ago, we were half that. In fifty years, we will be double that. I am one among six billion. My son will be one among twelve billion. We are clearly in overstock. This is where it gets tricky. Look at my eleven-year-old son. He is adorable. He will be adorable when he is sixty-three years old. Not a single one of us is less valuable because there are so many of us. In another room at the botanical congress, a man talked about alien invasions. Plants and animals and fungi travel around the world bringing disease and disharmony. Invading species are a major reason why we are losing species. Humans are the co-conspirator. Snakes ride on planes to islands that never had snakes. Viruses hop aboard the luggage. Sometimes, we knowingly introduce exotics.
Skyrocket with Broad Tailed Hummingbird Islands are particularly susceptible. Hawaii is the extinction capital of the world. This state contains one-third of the nation's at-risk plants. Half its species of wild birds are gone. Virtual islands -- small, wild places surrounded by human development -- reflect our larger problem of habitat fragmentation. We are creating islands everywhere. Scientists talk about weedy species, like Homo sapiens, and the future of the planet as a planet of weeds. Hawaii's honeycreepers will be gone. The sparrow will remain. The water lily will be gone. The dandelion will remain. Any questions? About alien invasions? Global warming? Extinction? A reporter stood up and addressed the scientist. "With everything you know, with everything you have told us, do you have any hope?" The audience waited. We watched the scientist's face. We watched him blink and move his mouth. We watched him look down. We watched him look up. The moment passed when he could have said yes. "That's an unfair question," the scientist said. We have come to this: "Do you have hope?" is an unfair question. *** WE KNOW OF over 250,000 species of flowering plants. There are many more we have not discovered. We think that 25 percent of green plants will go extinct in the next fifty years. One researcher estimates that a plant species disappears somewhere every week. In the United States, one in three plants is at risk. Many of these extinctions could be prevented. But we don't have much hope of that. When we estimate what will happen to flowers, we may be underestimating what is happening to pollinators, which also show a worldwide decline. The extinction of one species can cause a cascade that affects others. The male euglossine bee visits certain orchids to collect perfume to use in mating. The female euglossine bee has a long-distance trapline, in which she pollinates woody plants scattered in the forest. These plants are threatened by lumbering, grazing, and development. The bees are threatened for the same reasons, as are the orchids. The success of each species is linked to the success of each species. We didn't kill off the passenger pigeon because we shot the last pigeon. We killed so many of them that they could no longer function as a group. As it turned out, this was the only way they could function. Most flowers are more adaptable than passenger pigeons. At least, we hope so. Every day, at the International Botanical Congress, I read about the heat wave in the newspaper. In Chicago, a fourteen-year-old boy lay in bed. He was very ill. To make matters worse, the utility company had turned off the electricity in his mother's apartment because she hadn't paid the bill. This may have been a misunderstanding between her and the landlord and the company. She had, after all, only recently moved into the apartment. The article said that the utility company was very, very sorry because after they turned off the electricity, after the temperature rose, in the middle of the heat wave, the mother could no longer cool down the sick boy. I imagine this woman rushing from her apartment, trying to find help, full of rage and disbelief. This can't be happening! The boy died while she was gone. I cannot see the mother's face. But I can see the boy, waiting, lying on his bed, his skin hot. He knows he is dying. He is too sick to care much. But he knows.
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