By Virginia Morell '71
rom my perch in the top of a giant Ceiba tree, one of the tallest trees in Ecuador's Amazon rain forest, I could look out over the tropical landscape just as the scarlet macaws and black-bellied cuckoos do.
You often get the impression that the Amazon Basin is flat and dark, a broad expanse of jungle that runs for thousands of green miles until it hits the wall of the Andes. But eyeing it, cuckoo-like, at treetop-level, it looked more like a rolling grassland prairie, the crown of each tree forming a round, small hill that bumped up against the next. And while it was dark beneath the trees, here on a wooden platform built into the Ceiba's highest arms, the world was all sky and sun. It's here, too, in the highest reaches of the rain forest's canopy that biologists are discovering tens of thousands of new species, from insects and plants to previously unknown mammals.
I was here as a guest of one of those researchers, Terry Erwin, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution, who's documenting the insects of the Amazon. Erwin's made a name for himself by calculating the world's total number of species based on his Amazonian insect collections; recently, he estimated that some 100 million types of organisms share this planet with us. I'd come to learn how he arrives at such figures and collects the insects of the upper canopy, and I'd come to see a forest he'd described to me as one of the most biologically diverse and humanly untouched regions remaining on Earth. My visit was part of a six-month journey I was making around the globe for National Geographic, researching six stories for a special issue (and online site) the magazine published last February about the state of the world's biodiversity--the shorthand term biologists use to describe the bountiful variety of life--as we approach the end of the millennium.
By the time I'd reached Ecuador, I'd nearly lost count of the places I'd been, and simply told friends who asked that I'd been everywhere from Madagascar to Maine. On my travels, I'd seen ruffed lemurs, long-tongued flies, and fierce, mouse-sized carnivorous marsupials, called mulgaras; I'd hiked over the threatened fynbos on South Africa's Cape and explored one of the few intact forests left in the Philippines; I'd sat in the dark in the Peruvian Andes, waiting with biologists for bats to fly into their mist nets; I'd learned to collect ants by sucking them into a glass vial through a small rubber tube, to spot chameleons and frogs in the beam of my headlamp, and to identify the call of one of the world's rarest birds, the fiery-throated fruit eater.
It had been a grand and glorious tour, but worrying, too. One of the stories I'd been asked to write was called "The Sixth Extinction," a title referring to the staggering number of species the world is currently losing. Paleontologists studying the fossil record have determined that this high rate of extinction has occurred five other times. In each of those previous cases, the cause was a natural catastrophe, such as the meteor that crashed into Earth 65 million years ago, resulting in the demise of the dinosaurs. The cause today, however, is us--humans. As our numbers have increased, we've pushed aside vast numbers of plants and animals, eliminating thousands of them--permanently. Many more are at risk of vanishing. Some biologists have calculated that between 25 and 50 percent of the world's flora and fauna--fish, birds, plants, mammals, reptiles, insects--will either be extinct or on the edge of extinction in the next one hundred years.
irds may best illustrate the size of the problem.
There are some 9,000 species of birds with us today; of these 1,100 are now teetering on the brink of extinction. Another 2,000 have vanished already. Hawaii alone has lost 90 per cent of its bird species in the last few thousand years, largely because of humans hunting them for food and feathers and destroying their habitat. "Normally, you wouldn't witness an extinction event in your lifetime," Stuart Pimm, one of the leading thinkers in conservation biology, told me. "It should be very rare; it ought to be a one-in-100-year event, something highly unusual. Instead, we're losing several species of birds per year. And that's only the birds."
I'd met Pimm early on my biodiversity tour, and his words and figures haunted me as I journeyed from country to country, marveling at the plants and animals of forest, desert and sea. Pimm was overseeing a project in the Everglades National Park to try to save one species of bird, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, from toppling over the brink. The sparrow is a simple small brown bird, with a smattering of gold feathers above its eyes; it is not a large, charismatic species, like the tiger, and yet Pimm and his team had pulled out all the stops to save this bird. They'd mapped every nest, put tiny radio tracking devices on the sparrows to find out where they spent their winters, and banded every nestling that had the good luck to hatch. None of this was excessive, Pimm argued, since the sparrow, after all, lives in one of our national parks. "This is a place we've set aside to protect our species," he told me. "We shouldn't be losing species in a national park in the richest country in the world. And it's not going to happen--not on my watch."
That sparrow, I later realized, was one of the lucky creatures. It had a defender--actually, a whole team--devoted to seeing that it does not disappear. But most of the highly endangered plants and animals don't have a strong voice speaking and fighting for them; and while I found individuals, such as Pimm, who dedicated their lives to saving a particular species or ecosystem, most people are consumed by the demands of living their own lives, and providing for their families. By the time I reached Ecuador, it seemed to me that most of these organisms will certainly go the way of the Hawaiian birds, as well as the dodo and moa, large, flightless birds, we humans hunted to extinction.
I turned these thoughts over while looking across the Amazonian forest, a place that is rich beyond measure in species of all kinds. After my visit here, I would be returning home to begin writing my articles. The "Sixth Extinction" story troubled me the most: if it came across as too negative, then people would stop reading it. That's the problem in writing about environmental issues. The public has heard various doomsday scenarios so many times that people understandably tune out when another ominous "sky is falling" article appears. I'd discussed this problem with Pimm and other researchers I'd visited, scientists on the front-lines of trying to stop species from disappearing. Pimm's words in particular kept coming back to me: "We have to give people hope--and there's good reason to have hope. Everyone who chooses to not cut down a tree, or joins a recycling drive, or makes any small change in their life to protect the environment, that person is helping to save a species."
Pimm was trying to revive the idea of stewardship, that we have a responsibility to our planet to care for it and its creatures. And as bleak as I felt about our chances of stopping these extinctions, I agreed with him. That would be the "message" my stories would carry; I would leave out my own dark thoughts.
As a writer, you always hope that with a series such as this one, your words touch people, make them think, maybe even stir them to action. And indeed, after this biodiversity issue appeared, the Geographic was flooded with letters. Will that help save any one of the thousands of species destined for the extinction bin? I wish I could say yes.
In addition to writing for National Geographic, Virginia Morell '71 is a contributing correspondent for Science and a contributing editor for Discover and International Wildlife. The author of Ancestral Passions, a biography of the Leakey family of anthropologists, she is currently co-authoring a book with Richard Leakey about his work as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Future assignments for the Geographic will take her to Monterey Bay, California; the Blue Nile Gorge in Ethiopia; and the island haunts of early evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace in Indonesia.
--Illustration by Dugald Stermer
