Witness To Extinction

The tragic recognition of the extinction of the Yangtze River Dolphin or baiji in 2007 became a major news story and sent shockwaves around the world. It made a romantic story, for the baiji was a unique and beautiful creature that features in many Chinese legends and folk tales. The Goddess of the Yangtze, as it was known, was also the lone representative of an entire and ancient branch of the Tree of Life. But perhaps the greater tragedy is that its status as one of the world's most threatened mammals had been widely recognized, yet despite wide publicity virtually no international funds became available. A compelling read by a young naturalist, Samuel Turvey tells the story of the plight of the Yangtze River Dolphin from his unique perspective as a conservation biologist deeply involved in the struggle to save the dolphin. This is both a celebration of a beautiful and remarkable animal that once graced one of China's greatest rivers, its natural history and its role as a cultural symbol; and also a personal, eyewitness account of the failures of policy and the struggle to get funds that led to its tragic demise. It is a true cautionary tale that we must learn from, for there are countless other threatened species that will suffer from the same human mistakes, and whose loss we shall not know until it is too late.

'Witness to Extinction' tells the story of the plight of the Yangtze River dolphin. It is both a celebration of a remarkable animal that once graced China's greatest river, and a personal, eyewitness account of the failures of policy and the struggle to get funds that led to the tragic demise of a species.

Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.

Over Australia's 2019-20 Black Summer bushfire season, scientists estimate that more than three billion native animals were killed or displaced. Many species - koalas, the regent honeyeater, glossy black cockatoo, the platypus - are inching towards extinction at the hands of mega-blazes and the changing climate behind them. In Flames of Extinction, award-winning science writer John Pickrell investigates the effects of the 2019-2020 bushfires on Australian wildlife and ecosystems. Journeying across the firegrounds, Pickrell explores the stories of creatures that escaped the flames, the wildlife workers who rescued them, and the conservationists, land managers, Aboriginal rangers, ecologists and firefighters on the front line of the climate catastrophe. He also reveals the radical new conservation methods being trialled to save as many species as possible from the very precipice of extinction.

Realizing the link between her own estrangement from nature and the cultural shifts that led to a dramatic rise in extinctions, award–winning writer Melanie Challenger travels in search of the stories behind these losses. From an exploration of an abandoned mine in England to an Antarctic sea voyage to South Georgia's old whaling stations, from a sojourn in South America to a stay among an Inuit community in Canada, she uncovers species, cultures, and industries touched by extinction. Accompanying her on this journey are the thoughts of anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers who have come before her. Drawing on their words as well as firsthand witness and ancestral memory, Challenger traces the mindset that led to our destructiveness and proposes a path of redemption rooted in our emotional responses. This sobering yet illuminating book looks beyond natural devastation to examine "why" and "what's next."

The first undisputed gravity wave ever recorded is so strong it sets in train a series of events that threaten all life forms. Climate specialist, Eric Jensen assisted by the beautiful investigative reporter, Zona Royale, grapple to make sense of the resultant earthquakes, tsunamis and disastrous volcanic activity that result and which rapidly lead to climate chaos as two further waves are encountered. As the climate heads towards ice age conditions and industry and commerce falter, a religious sect with a sinister cult at its center, grows in power as it feeds on the fear generated by the expected apocalypse and the disorienting effect the gravity waves have on life itself especially the elderly, who cannot adapt to changed reality as time itself is briefly altered. Zona Royale's daughter is kidnapped as Zona exposes the cult and Eric's own life is soon in danger as he attempts to rescue them. As the third wave strikes, the earth is poised on the tipping point of what is predicted to be the greatest extinction of life ever to occur.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

In Decolonizing Extinction Juno Salazar Parreñas ethnographically traces the ways in which colonialism, decolonization, and indigeneity shape relations that form more-than-human worlds at orangutan rehabilitation centers on Borneo. Parreñas tells the interweaving stories of wildlife workers and the centers' endangered animals while demonstrating the inseparability of risk and futurity from orangutan care. Drawing on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies, Parreñas suggests that examining workers’ care for these semi-wild apes can serve as a basis for cultivating mutual but unequal vulnerability in an era of annihilation. Only by considering rehabilitation from perspectives thus far ignored, Parreñas contends, could conservation biology turn away from ultimately violent investments in population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare, even if it means experiencing loss and pain.