"Allen says that she wrote this book 'accompanied by many tears', but warns that it is too easy to judge the generations that came before us, while our own shows equal carelessness."
Mention extinction, and the first animals that come to most people's minds will be dinosaurs, followed by the iconic dodo, woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger. Barbara Allen's book ranges more widely, taking in a number of creatures I (and probably you) had never heard of, and moving closer to the present day, to species whose demise is most definitely down to human activity. Inevitably a sad compilation, it's informative and engaging too, largely thanks to the author's device of giving a 'voice' to a member of each vanished species. Most famous of these is 'Lonesome George', the Pinta Island tortoise who died in 2012 at about a hundred and ten years old - like other animals here he was an 'endling', the poignant term for a lone survivor destined to die unmated and as the last recorded individual of its species.
In the opening, Barbara Allen, a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, speculates about why she's included some animals rather than others - for example two of those I've just mentioned, the woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger, don't appear here. "What I do know," she acknowledges, "is that no book, with one exception, can contain stories about every extinct species; the only volume that can, and does, cradle those sad tales close to its heart, its core, is Earth."
The concept of extinction was first used in 1796 by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who spoke of animals living in "a world previous to ours". The religious establishment was affronted by this, just as it was sixty years later by the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. We now know that extinctions are caused both by cataclysmic events such as asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions and by more gradual changes such as pollution, competition for food or shelter, and habitat loss. But how can we know when a species truly is extinct? The IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) is the global authority, categorising a species as extinct if no sightings have been reported for fifty years - though there are sometimes comebacks from 'Lazarus' species such as the coelacanth, which until 1938 had been known only as a fossil. But it's sobering to note that 41% of amphibians, 27 per cent of mammals and 13% of birds are currently threatened with extinction. More optimistically, the IUCN's Green List analyses conservation efforts and their impact on species recovery.
Allen also writes about 'de-extinction' or 'resurrection science', and how this could be done through cloning and genetic engineering; but she examines the ethics of this, how feasibly it can be done, the effects on other species if, say, mammoths were reintroduced to the Arctic tundra, and whether hubris might result in humans thinking that by 'tinkering' they could do better than nature. And, as she points out, "If we think we can 'replace' a species, then apathy may set in, making us less inclined to protect others."
In the midst of the sixth mass extinction, or Holocene extinction, many of us experience the ecological grief referred to by the American conservationist Aldo Leopold when he wrote of the 'world of wounds' experienced by those who care and learn about the natural world. Allen wonders how best to 'memorialise' the lost creatures, recognising that each led its individual life and was not just a representative of its species. She describes the huge 'Lost Birds' sculptures of Todd McGrain: the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the great auk, the heath hen and the Labrador duck, each sculpture positioned, where possible, at the site where the last known individual was shot or sighted. As McGrain says, "at those places haunted by what is missing". Some of the creatures in this book are illustrated with drawings, others by sad photographs of an animal alive or preserved: Qi Qi, the world's only captive Yangtze river dolphin; the Xerces blue butterfly; a stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker; a solitary Quagga in a cage in London Zoo.
Allen's own approach is to give an individual of each species a character and allow it to 'speak' to us, in tones of outrage, resignation, boastfulness or accusation. The Dodo, for example, introduces itself: "What a stupid name! Sets me up as a thing of ridicule; if one is not accorded respect, it is easier to kill ... some individuals in the past and in the present have found it had to believe that I was real, that I was not a made-up character for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I wonder when children realize that I was factual, real, rather than a creature of legend or fantasy? But fantasy doesn't exist and now neither do we." The Spectacled Cormorant, which inhabited Bering Island, complains that "Less than a century after we had been 'discovered', we were extinct" - thanks to its short wings and lack of suspicion of humans.
It's hard to comprehend how the once so numerous passenger pigeon could have been allowed to become extinct. The acclaimed bird artist John James Audubon wrote in the 1930s that when a flock passed over "the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse". (The book's cover shows a version of his painting of these pigeons, with the birds as blank silhouettes.) A flight of the massed birds could take three days to pass. Of course, they consumed grain and damaged trees and were not beloved by farmers, so they were shot in their thousands, sometimes as part of organised competitions. Forest depletion also led to a reduction in their numbers; efforts to save them came too late. The last known bird, Martha, died in 1914 at Cincinatti Zoo.
Allen says that she wrote this book "accompanied by many tears". but warns that it is too easy to judge the generations that came before us, while our own shows equal carelessness. The penultimate chapter has the Bramble Cay Melomys, a rodent inhabitant of Papua New Guinea, lamenting as the tides rise higher that humans destroyed it: "not face to face but, rather, through greed, or ignorance, or indifference ... or apathy". Snails, small rodents and amphibians don't attract the attention given to polar bears or snow leopards, but their loss is just as significant as that of the bigger, more iconic species.
It could be argued that the fate of most species on Earth is to become extinct in time, but human activity has produced a current rate of loss estimated to be between 100 and 1000 times the rate of natural background extinction. Allen's book doesn't include any British species, but the recent State of Nature report found that an alarming one in six species, including the once-familiar water voles, hazel dormice and turtle doves, are at risk because of farming activity, pesticide use and habitat loss.
"May we endeavour," Allen concludes, "to add as few names and pages as possible to this book of extinction." Amen to that.
Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds is published by Reaktion Books
See also: The Invention of Nature - the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, reviewed by Linda Newbery
Sarn Helen, a Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future, by Tom Bullough, reviewed by Alison Layland
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