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winstar4d slot We Can’t Keep Waiting for Our Leaders to Save Us
We were living in a cataclysmic age of mass extinction and climate instability even before the election. Now the climate denier in chief is poised to gut the environmental protections that do exist. Even so, conservation nonprofits are struggling to raise the funds they need to challenge his wrecking-ball agenda in court. The people who care are feeling defeated, and the fight has not yet begun.
I was already grieving, and the approach of Remembrance Day for Lost Species, which falls each year on Nov. 30, didn’t help. Was this really the best time to pick up “Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures” by the dazzling British author and scholar Katherine Rundell? Did I really want to read another book about how so much of life on earth is close to ending?
As it turns out, this is the perfect book to read in the aftermath of a planet-threatening election. In times like these, terror and rage will carry us only so far. We will also need unstinting, unceasing love. For the hard work that lies ahead, Ms. Rundell writes, “Our competent and furious love will have to be what fuels us.” This is a book to help you fall in love.
Among the 23 endangered creatures she celebrates in “Vanishing Treasures,” the last on the list is humans. This is not a sly overstatement to make a point. How will we grow crops if we lose the pollinators? What medical advancements — like the GLP-1 drugs, derived from a study of Gila monsters, that now treat diabetes and obesity — will we miss if reptiles go extinct? Which diseases will run rampant in our communities if scavengers are poisoned out of existence?
We have hardly begun to understand how inextricably our health and safety are intertwined with those of our wild neighbors. Data is hard to come by, in part because controlling for variables is so difficult outside a lab. But when a fatal fungal disease called white-nose syndrome began to wipe out bat colonies in 2006, researchers realized it might offer a way to study the direct effect on humans of a population collapse in wildlife. In September, the journal Science published a study that linked the sudden loss of bat colonies to a spike in infant mortality.
Bats feed on many insects that would otherwise feed on crops. Researchers discovered that in counties where bat colonies were destroyed, farmers compensated by using more insecticides — on average 31 percent more — than they had used when bats were helping to keep insects in check. In those counties with higher levels of insecticide use, infant mortality was also 8 percent higher, on average, than in counties with healthy bat populations. A spike in environmental toxins explained the spike in infant mortality, but the real reason more than 1,300 babies died was the disappearance of bats.
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