Watching, from the Edge of Extinction

To those struggling on the frontlines to save endangered plants and animals, the crucial challenge is to confront the biological causes of those species’ decline. But just as threatening to their survival are obstacles erected by human politics, greed, corruption, folly, and hypocrisy. In this mesmerizing book, Beverly and Stephen Stearns tell the stories of people who have worked directly with disappearing species in Europe, Africa, North America, and Oceania. They are stories of passion and commitment, of competence and selflessness. They are also stories that alarm, for even as unheralded heroes are working to reverse what often seems to be a species’ inevitable march toward extinction, incompetent or self-interested parties are often working against them.

The authors interviewed people who work with endangered species as diverse as Mediterranean monk seals, large blue butterflies, African wild dogs, native Hawaiian crows, Texas salamanders, and rare plants on Mauritius. These dedicated individuals, in discussing how they view their work, the problems they encounter, and their thoughts on the broader significance of extinction, reveal that the causes of extinction are unique to each species—sometimes subtle and complex, at other times obvious and simple. Yet an extinction always represents an irretrievable loss of evolutionary potential and a diminishing of the beauty, diversity, and value in our own lives. The dramatic lessons of this book shed new light on the problems of endangered species and offer hope that we may yet change the fate of those species that totter on the edge of extinction.

Intelligently affecting stories of animals reduced to rarity, what leads to their predicament, and the people and ideas working to ward off extinction. Considering the current wave of extinctionroughly estimated at two species per dayjournalist Beverly Stearns and her husband Stephen (Zoology/Univ. of Basel, Switzerland) ask how much of it is natural, how much attributable to poaching, indiscriminate harvesting, disease, predators, habitat loss, and competition with exotics. What is the significance of a creatures disappearance? The Stearnses have taken a small but diverse sample to elucidate the many roads to extinction; in their ten cautionary tales, with protagonists ranging from snails to dodos to wild dogs, the deleterious role of humans is always in evidence. Some episodes show punctuated equilibrium meeting a dead end, but for the most part we see people with principles, who think about evolutionary potential and the effect of species loss on our values, battling the greedy, corrupt, and hypocritical, who think about personal power, money, and ego display. The more pungent stories include the tale of a landowner fighting to protect the Hawaiian crow (`alala) after incompetent researchers from the National Audubon Society bungle their fieldworkthough the details of how the clever crow got into such a fix remain unclear. Other intriguing tales show the English large blue butterfly losing its improbable adoptive parents (red ants) through human ignorance and then being reintroduced, trailing in its wake pale dog-violets and pearl-bordered fritillaries. The saga of the Barton Springs salamander proves to be a Texas tale of ordinary folk, town meetings, and a Boy Scout turned environmental lawyer going to bat against a multinational corporation with politicians in its pocket and billions to throw about, to protect a unique pale pink salamander. This survey of representative extinction dramas makes one thing clear: The fate of endangered species is not sealed. Though they try hard for journalistic objectivity, its clear where the authors sympathies lie as they chart different courses that can reduce the human contribution to extinction. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.