Scott Leslie - 100 Under 100: The Race to Save the Worlds Rarest Living Things [Paperback]

T hey have such strange names. Wollemi pine. Gilberts potoroo. Greater bamboo lemur. Iranian Gorgan Mountain salamander. Nene. Bachmans warbler. And theyre so unfamiliar, too. These arent species most of us know. Is anything really at stake as they hang on to survival by only a thread?

The answer is an emphatic yes. Some of the species are intrinsically beautiful. All of them live in special places. Their declines shout out at our carelessness with our planet. And, some show that we can bring species back from the very edge, that we need not, indeed must not, accept extinction as an option.

I saw my first Iberian lynx after midnight at the Coto Doana in Spain, walking along the edge of a lake in the light of a full moon. The memory is still vivid. It looked at me just as cats do, with complete contempt, for it belonged there and I didnt. Cats appeal to us in deeply interesting ways. It was a lovely animal.

So, too, are Przewalskis horses, though Ive only seen them in zoos, where they are everyones favourites. Lemurs, too, are appealing. Most mammals are, but being cute isnt enough.

What unites the creatures, both large and small, in this book is where they live. The seven billion of us are destroying our forests and grasslandsalmost all terrestrial habitatsand making a mess of rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Habitat destruction is the major cause of species extinction. Not all habitats are equal. Some are very much more vulnerable to our actions than others. The species mentioned herein teach us that.

I saw my first nene at Slimbridge, a successful captive breeding facility in England, a world away from their homes in the Hawaiian Islands. The nene I remember most were wild onesa small flock that descended through the mist as I hiked across Haleakala on Maui. They landed in front of me as grey fog gave way to brilliant blue skies and revealed the surreal purples, yellows, and browns of the caldera. Wild, remote, beautifuland how can anything live in such a strange place? These birds and more than 100 others, 1,000 species of plants, and countless insects once thrived only in the Hawaiian Islands, adapted to those unique conditions. Note the past tense: so many Hawaiian species are now extinct.

I watched the movie Avatar and enjoyed its creativity but spent the next day watching pteropodssnails that literally fly with their feet through the ocean. Biological diversitybiodiversity for shortis far stranger than fiction!

Iran conjures up an image of deserts and, when I was there, the memory of days on rough, dusty roads. We crossed northward from the deserts of eastern Iran toward the Caspian Sea. In minutes, wet air replaced dry, and lush moist forests took over. In a cave nearby was the Gorgan Mountain salamander, living in a pool, in a sliver of wet forest south of the Caspian, in the middle of deserts and grasslands that stretch 16,000 kilometres from the Sahara to Mongolia.

Nature has amazing inventiveness and recognizes the places where these species live as being exceptional. Alas, this books species are rare because we do not. So many of them are on the edge because we have been careless. The Guam rail used to be common. Then a snake accidentally introduced to Guam ate itand all the other birds on Guamto extinction. Goats ate the vegetation off Floreana Island in the Galapagos, so the mockingbird that lived there survives only on small offshore islets. This mockingbird was one of four species, each living on a different island, that made Darwin first think about adaptation in the Theory of Evolution.

That so many aquatic species are included in this book testifies to the wretched state of the worlds rivers and lakes. Not even the worlds oceans are pristine.

Right whales were right because they were close to shore, easy to kill, and floated when harpooned. They almost disappeared because we lacked the wisdom to manage them sustainably. Or, for that matter, to anticipate that there is now a flourishing whaling industry where people shoot whales with digital cameras, not harpoons, and it generates more income than the first whaling industry ever did.

That the Amsterdam albatross, living on a remote island in the southern Indian Ocean, is in this book is further testimony to our human abilities to destroy nature in even the most lonely parts of the planet.

Above all, this book is about hope. Yes, there is bad news, for most endangered species dont even get a mention here. Many may be unknown. We may drive many species to extinction before ever giving them names. Yet there are successes. I have seen nene in the wild. With colleagues, I released the first captive-bred Guam rail back into the wild. With other ecotourists, Ive watched right whales and whooping cranes, been thrilled by the story of the crested ibis, inspired by the man who saved the cahow, and will get to see Przewalskis horse in the wild one day.

Extinctions at the present ratemy research shows them running at 100 to 1,000 times faster than expectedare unacceptable. This book also shows that they are not inevitable.

Stuart Pimm

Dr. Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University. For his work in conservation, he was awarded the 2006 Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 2010 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.