Gary Larson created hundreds of cartoons that made me laugh
out loud, and a few that left me baffled. But I can recall only one that made
me sad. A young dinosaur stands in a “street” with caves along both sides. He’s
carrying a bat and glove, wearing a ball cap and a sad expression. Notes are
posted out side all three cave entrances: “Extinct.” “Extinct.” “Sorry,
extinct.” The caption reads, “Suddenly, Bobby felt very alone in the world.”
The dinosaurs died out, though not at the hands of the
cavemen. The generally accepted view among scientists is that this mass
extinction was the result of a cataclysmic event – the earth being struck by a chunk
of interplanetary real estate the size of Petaluma. Ka-boom! The resultant
waves and clouds of debris and smoke changed the global climate habitat, making
it impossible for those magnificent reptiles to carry on.
There are no actual dinosaurs left living in Sonoma County,
but amphibians not far removed from the gene line of their Jurassic ancestors
still remain. The Tiger Salamanders live in the seasonal swamps known as vernal
pools, wetlands that come and go with the passing of the rainy season. But
they, too, are facing extinction. Their habitat is being crushed by a planetary
real estate process, the relocation of dirt, asphalt and concrete by the
now-dominant earthly life form –Homo sapiens. Translation: our urban sprawl is
eliminating salamander habitat, and thus, the salamander.
In geologic time, this extinction is as sudden as the
meteoric blast that nailed the dinos. But to the humans
who are causing this eviction from the gene pool, it has been too gradual to
notice. A 20 acre shopping mall here, a few 15 acre subdivisions there, 80
acres of new freeway, year after year, and “suddenly” 90% of their original vernal
pool homeland is gone. Vernal pools are unusually rich biotic environments,
Sonoma County’s equivalent of the Costa Rican rainforests, say their human
defenders. Expecting a Tiger Salamander to live somewhere else is like asking
your neighbor to go live in Lake Sonoma.
If we “can’t afford” to protect what’s left of the
salamander’s homeland, we will end up driving another species into the Auschwitz
of extinction. Whether you believe in
evolution or intelligent design, this little creature, with its unique
combination of appearance, behavior, and relationships, is history. We will no
more be able to bring it back than we can bring our long-lost loved ones back
to life. Some say it’s just a “slimy salamander”, but how many bricks can we
kick out of our ecological foundation before our building collapses? This
salamander, someday, might be critical in controlling a vector for a mutant
super-plague. We don’t know.
To those who think scientific breakthroughs will save us: if
we perfect Jurassic Park methods of cloning, that still leaves our revived
creation without a place to live. And even if we learn how to “terraform” a new habitat, recreating *all* the lost threads
in the vernal pool fabric, it begs the question: why would we wait to buy a ton
of cure when we could have bought a gram of prevention.
I read that it was going to cost $400 million to preserve
the remaining 4000 acres of salamander habitat. That number assumes the only
way to preserve the habitat is for the public to buy it, and that every habitat
owner should be paid the speculation price they could get from “developing”
(i.e. destroying) the Tiger Salamander homeland. That sounds like endangered species
extortion. We have laws to protect our biological heritage, like Urban Growth
Boundaries, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Water Act. We need to be
enforcing, not gutting them. We cannot afford to subsidize land speculation any
more than we can permit the death of another species.
The Right Wing is pushing policies that borrow from our
children, from looting Social Security to liquidation of our ecological assets.
We need to resist them, and start living in a way that demands less of others.
We are not all alone in the world.