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Appropriately, Lipotes Means Left Behind
The Chinese yellow river dolphin is now extinct, leaving only four freshwater dolphin species in the world. All of them are critically endangered.
I am not normally a politically active or environmentally concerned person; the extent of my contributions include switching to vegetarianism and donating $10 when I can afford it to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), but this upsets me. My brother once asked what would happen if a species disappeared. He used the giant panda as an example, seeing as how it's one of the most visible of the endangered animals.
Truthfully, I was unable to give him a reason why it should bother me so much. If you think about it logically, it probably wouldn't make a difference. There'd be more plants, less oxygen being taken up, and unless it's a keystone species--which very few large animal species are--then the rest of the environment would not suffer. Moreso, one could point out that it is simply a matter of natural selection. The panda, relying on one major food source, and requiring large amounts of that food, would naturally die out faster than others who can easily adapt.
So why does it bother us? Pushing aside the alarmist nature of most environmentalists, what is there that we should worry about? Sure, future generations should be able to enjoy animals as we do, but have you, personally, suffered from the lack of the dodo? Have you felt a pang of remorse at not having ever seen a wooly mammoth?
The answer is that there really is no rational reason why endangered animals should be so important to us; why the preservation of seemingly inconsequential species should rile us. The final answer to the question of is there any lasting consequences to the loss of most endangered species is simply no.
When people ask me what good the liberal arts are, I have to explain that though they may seem inconsequential, the liberal arts are the key to civilization. Science would never advance if there existed no means of recording results and applying them to future situations. Taken on an individual basis, survival itself is dependent upon the written word. Observations are made about smallpox; tests are made, results recorded; a cure is made. A person who at some point might have died from smallpox is cured. Without the ability to write, that person would have died.
In the same way, the seemingly inconsequential loss of a species is monumentally important to the human race. If not for anything else, the loss of a species shows our own inability to maintain the survival of a thing we deem important. The baiji died because of pollution, overfishing, and boating that interfered with the almost totally blind dolphin's ability to hunt.
So why does this matter? Why do we care, when rationally, we shouldn't?
I don't have an answer. I can't figure out logically any serious social or economic ramifications--besides the potential loss of any number of medicines and scientific advances--of losing a species.
But it still makes me overwhelmingly sad to think that there is one less species on Earth that I am going to study when I perform my graduate research, one less dolphin species swimming and hunting in a river.
I am not normally a politically active or environmentally concerned person; the extent of my contributions include switching to vegetarianism and donating $10 when I can afford it to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), but this upsets me. My brother once asked what would happen if a species disappeared. He used the giant panda as an example, seeing as how it's one of the most visible of the endangered animals.
Truthfully, I was unable to give him a reason why it should bother me so much. If you think about it logically, it probably wouldn't make a difference. There'd be more plants, less oxygen being taken up, and unless it's a keystone species--which very few large animal species are--then the rest of the environment would not suffer. Moreso, one could point out that it is simply a matter of natural selection. The panda, relying on one major food source, and requiring large amounts of that food, would naturally die out faster than others who can easily adapt.
So why does it bother us? Pushing aside the alarmist nature of most environmentalists, what is there that we should worry about? Sure, future generations should be able to enjoy animals as we do, but have you, personally, suffered from the lack of the dodo? Have you felt a pang of remorse at not having ever seen a wooly mammoth?
The answer is that there really is no rational reason why endangered animals should be so important to us; why the preservation of seemingly inconsequential species should rile us. The final answer to the question of is there any lasting consequences to the loss of most endangered species is simply no.
When people ask me what good the liberal arts are, I have to explain that though they may seem inconsequential, the liberal arts are the key to civilization. Science would never advance if there existed no means of recording results and applying them to future situations. Taken on an individual basis, survival itself is dependent upon the written word. Observations are made about smallpox; tests are made, results recorded; a cure is made. A person who at some point might have died from smallpox is cured. Without the ability to write, that person would have died.
In the same way, the seemingly inconsequential loss of a species is monumentally important to the human race. If not for anything else, the loss of a species shows our own inability to maintain the survival of a thing we deem important. The baiji died because of pollution, overfishing, and boating that interfered with the almost totally blind dolphin's ability to hunt.
So why does this matter? Why do we care, when rationally, we shouldn't?
I don't have an answer. I can't figure out logically any serious social or economic ramifications--besides the potential loss of any number of medicines and scientific advances--of losing a species.
But it still makes me overwhelmingly sad to think that there is one less species on Earth that I am going to study when I perform my graduate research, one less dolphin species swimming and hunting in a river.