Black Rhinoceros Extinction: Science, Culture, and the Last of the Race

Introduction: Imagining Extinction

This paper discusses the idea of extinction. Such discussion necessarily entails a certain amount of scientific discourse, but I would also like to enrich the scientific discussion with literary and cultural insights. The reason for this should be obvious. Extinction as a scientific concept is the end of a species: since species are scientifically defined by the ability to breed and create fertile offspring, the very concept of a species depends upon reproduction, perpetuation, and posterity. Extinction, therefore, entails the cessation of this reproduction, followed by the death of all representatives of the given species.

In discussing the idea of extinction, however, we face a standard philosophical problem. To the extent that we are discussing death, there is nothing to discuss. Disregarding the perpetual publishing frenzy purporting to describe "near death experience" (such as the book and film Heaven is for Real, based on the account given by a five-year-old child) and various well-known religious myths and testimonies, no one has a firsthand conception of the state of being dead. From the scientific perspective, it is a state about which no subjective evidence can be offered.

As regards extinction, however, this is also quite clearly a process: a period of time exists between the moment when a species ceases to reproduce and the moment when the last living representative of that species actually dies. It is this period that I wish to focus on, in part because it is the only space for a human imaginative response—or any other kind of response—to the very idea of extinction. In this paper, therefore, I will pursue three basic lines of inquiry: how science deals with this period of time, with particular attention paid to whether we are all living in such an imaginative space at the present moment (in what might be called the Anthropocene Extinction Event); how culture deals with the same period of time, in a consideration of what might be termed the mythology of the "last of the race"; and a specific examination of one case study—the critically endangered black rhinoceros, or Diceros bicornis.

The Last of Their Kind: Lonesome George, Martha, and the Anthropocene

To begin, let us consider some noteworthy examples—noteworthy, perhaps, because of the cultural meaning that has accrued onto what might otherwise seem unremarkable—and contemplate the cases of George and Martha. I am not referring to George and Martha Washington, the first President and First Lady of the United States of America. However, that historical duo is not entirely irrelevant, because in a country whose political system was founded in opposition to hereditary monarchy, it is worth noting that George and Martha Washington died without having children together. (Martha Washington had four children by her first marriage, but her marriage to George produced no offspring.) In some sense, then, the failure to reproduce might be understood as a larger statement about human social organization and the resistance to biological inheritance of culturally constructed status and meaning. In any case, the historical George and Martha Washington share this status with two other famous individuals: Lonesome George, the last surviving representative of the Pinta Island subspecies of Galápagos tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii), and Martha, the last surviving passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). Lonesome George died in 2012, in captivity, at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galápagos Islands. Martha, who was indeed named in honor of Martha Washington, died in 1914, in captivity, at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio (Greenberg 186).

Both of these animals have received significant media and cultural attention, perhaps because of the spectacle involved in considering each as the "last of their race." It is worth noting that species become critically endangered or exceptionally rare on a daily basis, yet human beings have not seen fit to come up with a nickname for the most recently discovered coelacanth. There is cultural meaning in the very fact that humans feel the need to refer to this deceased tortoise as "George" and the last passenger pigeon as "Martha"—it is, to a certain extent, anthropomorphism that perhaps betrays a significant sense of guilt.

Lonesome George received considerable attention because of conservationists' attempts to get him to breed before he perished. As a member of a subspecies, it was possible that George could have fertilized the egg of another Galápagos tortoise subspecies, but the attempts were unsuccessful. More to the point, George was from the Galápagos, famous for being the locus in which Charles Darwin observed and worked through his theory of natural selection. What was not often discussed was the way in which Darwinian science might complicate the notion of Lonesome George's death. After all, natural selection posits reproduction and extinction—considered as vastly long historical processes—as the very origin of species. This is emphasized by Barnosky et al. in a 2011 paper for Nature: "Of the four billion species estimated to have evolved on the Earth over the last 3.5 billion years, some 99% are gone. That shows how very common extinction is, but normally it is balanced by speciation" (51). Rockström et al., in their 2009 paper for Nature, wish to emphasize that current conditions definitely qualify as an extraordinary circumstance: "Species extinction is a natural process, and would occur without human actions. However, biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene has accelerated massively. Species are becoming extinct at a rate that has not been seen since the last global mass-extinction event" (472).

In the case of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, we face a very different cultural meaning. In his 2014 study of the bird's extinction, published for the centennial of Martha's death, Greenberg notes some extraordinary facts about the species:

"Nothing in the human record suggests that there was ever another bird like the passenger pigeon. At the time that Europeans first arrived in North America, passenger pigeons likely numbered anywhere from three to five billion. It was the most abundant bird on the continent, if not the planet, and may well have comprised 25 to 40% of North America's bird life. When the flocks moved for migration or foraging, the earth below would be darkened by shadows for hours: famed naturalist John James Audubon recorded a pigeon flight along the Ohio River that eclipsed the sun for three days" (1).

Unlike the Galápagos tortoise—a rare animal confined to an extremely small geographic region—the passenger pigeon was about as common a species as could be imagined. It was purely human activity that managed to wipe out these vast numbers in a relatively short space of time. Moreover, as Primack and Cafaro note in their 2014 editorial for Biological Conservation, the passenger pigeon's extinction has been wrongly used to suggest that such a vast change in the speciation of an entire continent need not be considered catastrophic, though they are keen to dispute this facile reasoning:

"Presumably these extinction events were indeed catastrophic for the species in question, and perhaps too for other species that preyed on or parasitized them, or depended on them in other ways. But such catastrophes do not appear to count morally for the authors—they are not real catastrophes—as long as the 'ecosystem functions' that benefit people remain intact. Regarding the near-extinction of the American chestnut and the demise of the passenger pigeon, among the most abundant tree and bird species in temperate eastern North American forests five hundred years ago, if they had no 'measurable effects,' we may assume that was because no one bothered to measure them at the time" (1).

This provides an indication of the current disconnect between scientific discourse concerning extinction, on the one hand, and the moral or cultural discourse on the other (Primack and Cafaro's editorial is entitled "Species Extinction is a Great Moral Wrong"). Science has no way of quantifying ethics. When it comes to species extinction, the approach of science is bound to seem remote from anyone trying to translate it into cultural terms. While the meaning may be fairly clear, it is not easily packaged into narratives—and while Lonesome George and Martha make for astonishing narratives, they occupy an equivocal place in the experimental and statistical methods of science.

Scientific Responses to Biodiversity Loss

A survey of scientific responses to extinction at the present moment is fairly unambiguous. Paleontologist James Kirchner calculated in 2002 that extinction rates could more or less be statistically inferred from the fossil record, and used this to quantify what he terms "evolutionary speed limits"—the rate at which the Darwinian process of natural selection can diversify and evolve—to note that, in the current moment, the extinction rate proceeds so rapidly that "diversification rates are unlikely to accelerate enough to keep pace with it. Thus, widespread depletion of biodiversity would probably be permanent on multimillion-year timescales" (67). This emphasis on biodiversity, which is of course readily quantifiable by science, is ambiguous, however, insofar as there is no ready way to predict the consequences of such a rapid decline. This is emphasized by Bradley et al. in a 2012 article for Nature, where the authors note that "functional traits of organisms have large impacts on the magnitude of ecosystem functions, which give rise to a wide range of plausible impacts of extinction on ecosystem function" (61). In other words, all of the different ecological roles played by the vast number of passenger pigeons in the North American ecosystem are impossible to quantify in full—to some extent, even a hundred years after their extinction, this remains a scientific experiment in progress whose upshot cannot yet be confidently summarized.

More to the point, as Naeem et al. indicate in a 2012 article for Science, the way in which the human imagination approaches these issues—by offering names to the last animals of their species, or focusing on the preservation of charismatic species rather than the more abstract goal of preserving biodiversity within whole ecosystems—may actually draw attention away from the more scientifically significant activity. Regarding the present scientific emphasis on biodiversity, Naeem et al. write:

"This focus is sometimes understandably seen as contrary to widespread and urgent conservation efforts to save species and ecosystems from extinction for non-utilitarian, cultural reasons. Indeed, species targeted for conservation, reserves, and protected areas represent a tiny fraction of the biosphere and are therefore not likely to strongly influence biogeochemically derived ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and food production. Yet the cultural values of biological diversity can themselves be construed as ecosystem services, and their preservation is fully coherent with non-utilitarian conservation efforts and arguably no less important. Nothing in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research should dissuade conservation from its efforts to bring our age of extinction to a halt" (1406).

This could be taken as a scientific way of noting the relative unimportance of, say, the Galápagos in the vast scheme of things. When Lonesome George becomes the public face of biodiversity depletion, this draws movements toward a small archipelago that is, to employ the words of Butchart et al., a "tiny fraction of the biosphere." The attempt to maintain and breed Galápagos tortoises is thus, arguably, a distraction from the more urgent trend of halting the overall depletion of biodiversity, for the simple reason that the results of the larger trend are far more unpredictable.

This is emphasized by Barnosky et al. in their 2012 article "Approaching a State Shift in the Earth's Biosphere," which notes a fundamental unpredictability about biological processes until they reach an obvious tipping point:

"It is now well documented that biological systems on many scales can shift rapidly from an existing state to a radically different state. Biological 'states' are neither steady nor in equilibrium; rather, they are characterized by a defined range of deviations from a mean condition over a prescribed period of time. The shift from one state to another can be caused by either a 'threshold' or 'sledgehammer' effect. State shifts resulting from threshold effects can be difficult to anticipate, because the critical threshold is reached as incremental changes accumulate and the threshold value generally is not known in advance" (52).

In other words, if we are indeed living through the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event—as many scientists are willing to argue—then to some extent the full consequences of the event will only be quantifiable at the precise moment that it is too late to do anything useful to forestall it. This is consistent with the point made by Butchart et al. in their 2010 survey for Science, in which they consider what has actually been done to halt the loss of biodiversity and conclude that only extremely large-scale policy approaches offer any real solution:

"Our results show that, despite a few encouraging achievements, efforts to address the loss of biodiversity need to be substantially strengthened by reversing detrimental policies, fully integrating biodiversity into broad-scale land-use planning, incorporating its economic value adequately into decision making, and sufficiently targeting, funding and implementing policies that tackle biodiversity loss, among other measures…[including]…sustained investment in coherent global biodiversity monitoring" (1168).

However, this would require an alteration of the cultural landscape potentially as vast as the alteration humans are currently permitting to occur on the planet's ecosystems. The real difficulty is the gap between what culture is capable of imagining—Lonesome George and Martha—and what science suggests might be required to halt the troubling present trends.

Conclusion: Imagination, Science, and the Stakes of Extinction

As we can see from the various approaches surveyed toward the concept of extinction, there are different ways of considering the critical threat to the black rhinoceros. The scientific standpoint holds that efforts to maintain a charismatic megafauna species are something of a distraction from the overall issues of biodiversity: restricted in geographic area, and with no natural predators besides man, saving the black rhino would not stem the tide of the overall extinction event. Indeed, some scientists might argue that dedicating resources to saving the black rhino is problematic when large-scale policies that are much more difficult to implement are what is urgently needed.

Yet the black rhino's problem is, in a sense, the human imagination itself. The motivation for the poaching—the irrationally high prices placed on rhino horns—is, in some sense, religious. After all, science has shown there is no medicinal benefit to the horns: what is being peddled is a kind of faith-based solution to health problems. Obviously it is a truism that mental attitude can affect people combating a disease. But in some sense, what we face is the human imagination confronting death. For every Asian businessman who contracts cancer and pays money that essentially funds the death of a black rhinoceros, we are witnessing the fundamental circulation of irrational ideas. Death and extinction are alike unimaginable to humans. The survival of the black rhino as a species will depend on whether its charisma—its ability to be anthropomorphized like Lonesome George or Martha—will outweigh the irrational demand for its horns.

From a scientific standpoint, both of these competing motives are essentially imaginary. The difficulty is that it is only through such imaginary ideas that humans can be motivated to act at all—and this may ultimately determine whether humans can indeed save themselves from being included in the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event.

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