Notes for: Barrow Extinction Article Oxford Encyclopedia of Environmental Sciences

• Question for class-more history on how extinction was explored in the 19th century
• Prospect of extinction, the loss of a species or other groups of organisms has provoked strong responses
• Until the 18th Century, there was a deep belief held that species couldn't entirely vanish
• It was only until the 19th century that the idea of extinction would be widely accepted.
• Naturalists, conversationalists, and sportsmen developed arguments for preventing extinction, they created wildlife conservation organizations, lobbied for early protective laws and treaties, and pushed for for government refuges.
• In the first half of the 20th century, scientists began gathering gathering more data about the problem through government inventories of endangered species and the first life-history/ecological studies of those species
• The second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have both been accelerating threats to the world's biota(the animal and plant life of a particular region, habitat, or geological period.) and greater attention to the extinction problem
• Laws like the Endangered Species Act of 1973, have been enacted and numerous international agreements were negotiated to address the issue.
• Despite the effort, it is fearful that the current state of species loss is similar to the Five Great Mass Extinction.
• The world is facing a biodiversity crisis, aka the Sixth Extinction
• Scientists launched a new mission that conserves and reverses biotas loss.
• Another controversial approach is rewilding, which involves establishing expansive core reserves that are connected with migratory corridors which includes the populations of apex predators, and de-extinction, which uses genetic engineering techniques in a bid to resurrect lost species (Jurassic Park reference!!!)
• However, climate change threatens those said plans

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• Biological extinction is the loss of a species either from natural causes or from human hands.
• Ever since the early 19th century, extinction is viewed to be the key to understanding the Earth's biological diversity.
• Despite the ESA of 1973, scientist warned that we would be facing a biodiversity crisis.
• Around the 18th century, it was believed that animals could not go extinct because it went against naturalists' heavy beliefs about the balance of nature.
• Frank Egerton argued "a balance-of-nature concept is part of most cosmologies"
• By the end of the 17th century, Thomas Burnet, a theologian, used a specific term: "oeconomy (the practice of managing the economic and moral resources of the household for the maintenance of good order.) of nature". to describe the "Well ordering of the Great Family of Living Creatures"
• The possibility was out of the question to the men of the 18th century because it went against their belief of the food chain system, without it, everything would be thrown into epoch

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• For many years, naturalists failed to differentiate between the inorganic and organic origins of the objects they labelled as fossils.
• Martin Rudwick argued, even if fossilized remains that seem to have come from once living beings, some of them, like ammonites, had no known analogs among existing species.
• Naturalists clung to the hope that organic remains of creatures that differed from those of any known animal might still be found deep in the ocean or at other unexplored parts of the world.
• Thomas Jefferson defended his decision to include the mammoth in his line of extinct animals

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• It would soon be discussed that human colonization and man-made geographical changes would also contribute to extinction
• The destructive potential of humans soon received confirmation with the published accounts of the loss of three island birds in the mid-18th century: the dodo, the moa, and the great auk.
• The dodo: fell victim to overhunting and predation from the animals that Europeans had introduced to the island. The destruction proved so complete that by the end of the 18th century, naturalists began to doubt whether the dodo had ever actually existed.
• The dodo and it's cousins were the “first clearly attested instances of extinction of organic species through human agency”

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• As the story of the bison reveals, romantic nostalgia and ardent nationalism were two key arguments in early campaigns to rescue endangered species.
• The

longstanding belief that every organism plays a vital role in maintaining the stability of the world—an idea initially suggested by the notion of economy of nature and later reinforced with the emergence of the science of ecology

• naturalists maintained that

plants, animals, and biotic communities should be preserved to allow for the possibility of the continued scientific study of them.

• the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966,

which required the Department of the Interior to continue compiling an official list of wildlife threatened with extinction but only protected vertebrate species on federal refuges.

• In March 1973, 80 nations signed the Convention of Trade in Endangered Species

(CITES), an IUCN-led initiative that had been in the works for over a decade.

• Congress strongly supported legislation it believed was intended to save iconic species facing extinction, like the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus),the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), and the whooping crane (Grus

americana; Petersen, 2002). ---

• conservation biology was an emerging “mission-oriented discipline

comprising both pure and applied science” that focused on “the knowledge and tools of --

Wells, The Extinction of Man Notes

• It is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal that the bare idea of its extinction seems incredible to it.
• No doubt man is undisputed master at the present time—at least of most of the land surface; but so it has been before with other animals.