Joni Mitchell – “Big Yellow Taxi”

A freshwater dolphin, known as the baiji, indigenous to the Yangtze River in China is probably now extinct. This is thought to be due to a number of factors, including pollution, damming of rivers, but largely unsustainable fishing practices. This is one of those things that happen when unrestricted capitalism takes over in a country with over a billion people. China’s fish exports doubled from 2004 to 2006 – largely to the US and Mexico. China needs more fish, bothersome sustainable fishing techniques just get in the way, so get fish however you can dolphins be damned. We know that China is really struggling with unregulated growth of their noveau capitalist economy. More and more contaminated foods are turning up in the West – even Wal-Mart recently banned Chinese catfish fillets (a little late for the baiji) – and the pet food stories have been well publicized.

What got my thinking about this was an interview of Edward O. Wilson by Bill Moyers on the podcast version of his excellent “Journal” program. Wilson is an entomologist and ecologist who has been lately studying mass extinction. Since I got into science, I’ve always been a fan of Wilson’s. He grew up in the country around Mobile, Alabama, got through the questionable Southern public school system and made his name studying fire ants - really making the best of your surrounding. A recent project of Wilson’s has been The Encyclopedia of Life – an online encyclopedia of every species on the planet. Wilson asks us to “imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available by single access on command.” The effort seems to have stalled recently, but the ambitious idea is a good one. There may be between 30 and 100 million species on the planet of which only 1.6 million have been identified, and there’s no central repository of information on those.

What struck me more from this interview, however, was Wilson’s discussion of extinction. There are predictions that nearly 50% of species will be extinct by the end of the 21st century. The occasional big mammal like the baiji is the exception. Most of the things that will become extinct are microorganisms, some of these we may not even know had existed. Wilson talks about ecosystems as a fragile network and there is no way to predict what effect these extinctions might have on the whole. For the capitalist in the audience, many of these organisms are economically crucial for things like crop pollination (where are the bees going?) and water purification.

Wilson’s most recent book is called “The Creation” and is targeted to the fundamentalist religious reader – those who don’t believe in evolution. Unlike the antagonistic vitriol of an author/scientist like Richard Dawkins, Wilson asks the reader to set aside differences of opinion regarding the origins of the planet. Instead he asks the reader to concentrate what the scientist and the religious believer have in common – an [tag]ecological[/tag] crisis. Even one who truly believes that God created the earth as stated in the bible must recognize that stewardship of that creation is crucial. This approach to swaying opinions is a good one, I think. We scientists often speak with the arrogance of presumed knowledge which can immediately turn off the lay man. I was listening to a debate about whether global warming was real or not. The global-warming-doesn’t-exist side was using all kinds of bogus science to support their cause and the other side was getting frustrated. One of them said something like, the other side is using dodgy science but if I try to explain why that is the case “this audience” wouldn’t understand. There’s a successful debating tool – insult the intelligence of your audience. In this book, Wilson tries to bridge that gap. Let’s hope, for all of our sakes, that he’s successful.

“Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it’s nothing but flowers…”

-Talking Heads – “(Nothing But) Flowers”