Pity the passenger pigeon

Or don't

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the great buffalo herds of the American West were hunted nearly to extinction. Conservationists at the eleventh hour mounted a campaign to save this iconic species. Now it is no longer endangered. Most people are glad it’s not.

In the 1960s fewer than five hundred nesting pairs of bald eagles were known to exist in the United States outside Alaska. Hunting had played a part in the decline of the species, but also pesticides and loss of habitat. Legal protections were extended to the bald eagle, and the species has made a remarkable comeback. Again, most people have been pleased.

I’m as happy as anyone that buffalo and bald eagles are doing well. But I’ve often wondered what it is we’re applauding when we learn that a species has been saved from extinction. To put the matter the other way around, what’s lost when a species goes extinct?

I understand feeling sorry for an individual buffalo that is killed. A buffalo is a living creature that feels pain. One doesn’t have to endorse the concept of animal rights to prefer that animals not be slaughtered wantonly—although we do it all the time to the cows and chickens we eat, and most of us, including me, don’t agonize over their fate.

A better illustration of my question is the bald eagle. While the buffalo’s near extinction was the result of the killing of millions of existing animals, the eagle’s decline resulted mostly from a failure of reproduction. Pesticides like DDT thinned the shells of eagle eggs, which cracked and prevented hatching. While placing the eagle on the endangered species list helped save the species, banning DDT probably did more. The eagle was saved not by halting the killing of existing eagles but by ensuring the creation of new eagles.

Unlike an individual beast or bird, which is a living, breathing thing, and unlike even a herd or a flock, which are groups of living, breathing things, a species is an idea: the idea of generations of the critters existing over time. When we mourn the demise of a species, we lament that this idea no longer has physical manifestation.

To be sure, ecologists point out that the loss of a species can disrupt ecosystems that have evolved around those species. But species disappear constantly in natural history. In fact more than 99 percent of all species in the history of the earth have gone extinct. The loss of one species opens a niche for other species. The extinction of the dinosaurs made possible the emergence of mammals and eventually us.

An argument made for the preservation of rainforests is that they contain undiscovered natural precursors for medicines that might relieve human pain and suffering. When we lose a species, we'll never get its potential back. And we might never know what we lost.

This is true enough. But also true is that the great majority of species of plants and animals have no distinctive direct benefit to humans. Regarding those 99 percent of extinct species, few people lie awake nights wondering what miracle cures died with them.

It's worth noting that not everyone is happy that certain species have been preserved or brought back from the brink. Ranchers around Yellowstone National Park have resisted the reintroduction of wolves. Loggers in Oregon nailed dead spotted owls to trees to protest protection efforts that cost them their jobs. Construction workers in Central Texas curse the blind salamander for preventing development around its habitat.

These complainers are criticized as placing human welfare, starting with their own, above the well-being of other species. The criticism is justified.

But so is the observation that the conservationists are selective in their choice of species to celebrate and preserve. There were more passenger pigeons in America than buffalo in the nineteenth century. They’re all gone now, and almost entirely forgotten.

Chalk some of it up to canny marketing. The bald eagle is the national bird, for heaven's sake. If we can't protect that, what can we protect? The buffalo reminds us of a more innocent era.

Leave aside that eagles make their living stealing prey from other birds. And that the innocent era of the buffalo included a generations-long war against the indigenous peoples of America.

The fact is that when we preserve species we do it as much for us as we do it for them. It preserves a particular notion we have of the natural world. Maybe this notion benefits buffaloes and bald eagles that wouldn’t have existed without it. But it can’t logically be said to harm the passenger pigeons that don’t exist today, because something that never existed–that is, the individual birds that never existed after the species went extinct–can’t be harmed.

Our conservation practices are very human-centered. But why shouldn't they be? We’re humans.

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