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137  Most Wildlife Species Appear to Be Doomed 
     By Growth in Population and by Pollution
     The Washington Post, February 15, 1969

     The importance of wildlife as an aesthetic resource that enhances
the quality of our own lives is universally understood.  It is also
an indispensable reminder of our own place in the natural world.

     We are, however, as careless with the protection of endangered
animal species as we are with our own.  Wild species are disappearing
under our very eyes as we complete the exploitation of the planet,
destroy specialized habitats, dump our wastes into air and sea and
recklessly harvest the whales, the big cats, the seals, the alligators
and what have you for the most frivolous or replaceable human
purposes.
 
     Most wild species are probably doomed, in the long run, in the
face of the growth of human population.  And we may not be far behind
them.  But this is hardly good reason to rush that doom.

     In fact, if we can postpone it for a century or so, we might
even find ways to avert it.

     For that reason, any plausible help ought to be mobilized.  But
legislation was stalled in the Senate last year, for example, that
would have broadened the protection of endangered species against
commercial depredation by regulating their shipment into and within
the U.S.  The only opposition to such laws came from an irresponsible
part of the fur trade, whose natural supplies will soon evaporate if
they are not promptly protected.

     The best advertized arguments for wildlife protection are the
aesthetic and moral ones.  These reach the passions more easily than
the votes and dollars of the electorate.  In fact, however, a
diversified wildlife is a perishable resource of vast but
but unpredictable economic value.

     The variety of species is a great library of information,
literally encoded in the specific DNA molecules that characterize each
type.  It is paradoxical that, in this era of most rapid elimination
of natural variety, we have begun to learn the keys to that code and
to appreciate the subtleties of the evolutionary mechanism that it
drives.  Each different species is a unique adaption to its own way
of life, a lesson in "How to Live" that we can never properly
understand after we extinguish it.

     At a more practical level, we have only begun to domesticate the
range of plant and animal species that we might exploit for highly
specialized uses.  The very wide use of rhesus monkey tissues for
growing virus vaccines is an example that would have been beyond
imagination 50 years ago; the rhesus may not last another 20 years.
A rare species of hamster is now very important in cancer research;
this could not have been predicted 20 years ago.

     The orangutan is disappearing in the forests of Borneo.  This
one among man's closest relatives might be the key to understanding
how the brain works, or to the farming of hearts for transplant
or, most likely of all, to answering questions we do not yet know
how to ask.  A few isolated specimens in the zoos are all we have to
count on for breeding stock, and these are already so few that much
of the potential variety within that species is irretrievably lost,
even if close-bred orangutans will survive at all.

     What we need most of all is a clear policy to respond to the
accelerating loss of all wildlife where we do not make careful plans
to prevent it.

     We cannot save every species, and we should not be shifting our
attention from one to another with every shrill outcry about the
Hawaiian Nukupuu or the Mongolian wild ass.  We ought to frame a
policy that we know how to pursue and enforce for the effective
preservation of the species that can be saved.

     When we see clearly which ones we might abandon, we can also
reckon the balance of merits and costs in adopting them too.  If
we muddle along as we have been doing, they will all go.

     During this process, our museums of natural history must be
transformed into more effective depositories of what can be saved
from the dying remains.  Here, modern biology may offer unexpected
contributions to a museum's responsibility: the preservation in
cold storage of tissue samples of representative animals, a technique
already widely used in laboratory studies.  At the very least, our
descendants will be able to reconstruct some important detail from
the study of DNA molecules retrieved from such a library.
Furthermore, a whooping crane might be hatched in future from another
bird's egg that has been renucleated from frozen, dormant tissue.
This backstop ought not be accepted as a substitute for nurturing
the wild birds, however, any more than freezing some human cells
would take the place of saving mankind.
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