The Yangtze River in China is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world. It stretches over 6,000km and is home to 10% of the world's human population (roughly 660 million people). Flanked with metallurgical, power, chemical, auto, industrial belts, and high-tech development zones, it is considered one of the main arteries of Asia's economy.
The Yangtze is also the habitat of several critically endangered and extinct creatures. The Chinese Alligator and the Chinese Paddlefish are among those that are endangered due to years of dredging and pollution; the Yangtze river dolphin, however, has been recently declared "functionally extinct" after a six-week river survey revealed no trace of the cetacean. This is the fourth time since the year 1500 that an entire evolutionary line has become extinct and the first large vertebrate forced to extinction by human activity in 50 years.
So, what happens now? Another dead or dying creature is put on a growing list, doomed to the status of the dodo bird or the dinosaur where the knowledge of its place in a balanced ecosystem is instead replaced by its physical eccentricities for interesting schoolbook fodder.
And what are the effects? One could argue that the existing ecology of the Yangtze river is being destroyed with pollution, growth, and even just because of human habitation. Sure, there are working plans for ecological restorations of certain regions of the Yangtze river. By reintroducing plant and animal life that is still available we are at most insuring that we maintain a "status quo" biodiversity that continues to wane overtime. This is beneficial, of course: trying to hold on to what is left by participating in restorative ecology allow us the opportunity to become reconnected with nature (and it looks great in print), but damages have already been made, and there are things that we can't restore, right?
Maybe.
In 2005, Paul Martin, Emeritus Professor of Geosciences at the Desert Laboratory of the University of Arizona in Tucson, published Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of North America, a book with an interesting proposition. North America was once dominated by a variety of larger animals than we find today: lions, mammoths, camels, giant beavers, giant armadillos, and sloths the size of compact cars. In his book, Mr. Martin broaches the subject of reintroducing animals from around the world of similar ancestry to those that became extinct after nomads began crossing the Bering Strait into North America. By creating experimental ecosystems that haven't existed for thousands of years Mr. Martin conjectures that we can better understand certain problems, ranging from what we've made of our world, what we've lost, and how to continue.
These problems are at once vague and provocative. There is no intended or expected outcome in an experiment such as this, just the hope that people could learn from what has been long forgotten. With advancements in bioengineering it becomes even more provocative. What if we could rebuild the population of Yangtze dolphins once the river's pollution levels are low enough to support such an endeavor? Better yet, with proper genetic material, what if we could reintroduce the entire list of species we've destroyed over the past 10,000 years? If biodiversity is a measure of the health of a biological system, the reintroduction of plants and animals that once supported such diversity would not only help the earth on a large scale but also help us. The benefits of biodiversity include increased resistance to catastrophes, a greater and more varied food supply with increased nutritional value, the possibility of new medicines and industrial materials, a more regulated atmosphere, as well as aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural values.
This situation isn't plausible now, of course. Until then, here is a project that is food for thought. Carrie Norman and Vivian Lee of SHoP present us with the loss of wildlife in a most intriguing way: by serving it as an entree with its history and how long we have left to eat it on the side.
"Re:courses is a menu campaign aimed to educate the public of the most elemental impact of global warming on everyday life: sustenance."
"Re:courses shortens the distance between our table and the ecological systems that provide for it; abstract notions of "ingredients" are enriched and made real by the knowledge of where they came from and the factors that endanger them. Most importantly, the intangible facts of climate change are brought close to us, we can understand what we are losing when it is measured by the mouthful."
Right click on the image and select "Save Link As" to download. Re:courses, Summer 2007.
Stay Informed:Links to other websites
* Douglas Adams on the now-extinct Baiji dolphin
