What Does a Small Bird’s Survival Matter?

(This is a guest post by Michael Noble, the executive director of Fresh Energy, an organization promoting clean energy solutions for the environment and the economy. Read his full bio below. This was originally posted on the Fresh Energy blog. Last winter, he made a trip to New Zealand, came home, and wrote about some of what he experienced.)

Last week, I blogged about New Zealand’s birds. I had visited an island sanctuary where several near-extinct birds had been introduced. Today, I went to a museum in Auckland, and saw stuffed birds in glass cases–one I saw in the wild yesterday that seems to have made it and escaped extinction, one that hovers at the precipice, and one that is gone.

Tonight we met with our touring students in our classroom setting in a crowded Auckland hotel room. “Why does it matter,”asked Professor Hoffman, “if a Saddleback bird goes extinct? Is your life richer now knowing of its recovery, since its reintroduction to island refuges off the coast of Auckland? Three days ago you had never heard of a Saddleback.”

Yesterday, a nurse who guided our hike through the bush said that when she was the students’ age, no one she knew had ever seen a Saddleback, they were so rare. Now they were above our heads, flitting and hopping across the low tree canopy, almost within reach, as common as sparrows in St. Paul, it seemed.

Today, I saw a stuffed Saddleback in the museum. Presumably it was once so rare that it was a museum piece. Along side it in the glass case was a Huia bird, pictured to the right. It was one of the few birds where male and females have dramatically different beaks. But Huia were prized not for beaks, but for feathers. The last was seen in the wild in 1907.

The odd flightless Takahe, pictured to the right, is poised between the world of survival and extinction. About 220 exist. Efforts are constant to mix the gene pool, and move members from south to north to try to hatch a new chick. Crummy at parenting, when a Takahe does hatch an egg, it keeps the conservationists on edge for weeks working for the chick’s survival. Large, heavy, colorful and flightless, and a very slow breeder to boot, who knows if the Takahe will survive.

After pressing the students on this question–Professor Steve Hoffman and I listened to their careful logic– we need to prevent extinctions because we can; it’s important to the web and fabric of life, because species fill niches we don’t even understand; because these birds are iconic and represent the culture of New Zealand. Steve offered another choice as well–a simple and daring reason that not everyone would embrace. We must protect species from extinction because they have a right to exist and we have no right to take existence away from them. The students mulled that.

Of all the pending impact of a rapidly warming world, many are tragic and potentially economically calamitous: sea level rise; drying of soils and loss of arable lands; severe storms and killer heat spells; shortage of water and food. Surely the human impacts are our top concern, but the risks of cascading extinctions stands apart.

In January 2004, Nature Magazine reported that 19 ecologists had conducted modeling of 6 ecosystems that represent 20 percent of the Earth’s land area. If greenhouse gases are not dramatically reduced soon, they found that between 15 and 37 percent of all life would be extinct by 2050, or on its way to extinction.

An interesting lens to view the new prospering of a Saddleback bird, pictured to the right, on a small island off New Zealand.

(Michael Noble is the executive director of Fresh Energy, an organization promoting clean energy solutions for the environment and the economy. Fresh Energy works to create fair laws that level the playing field for clean energy and remove barriers to renewable energy sources. Its goal is a clean energy economy that protects the health and the wallets of consumers now and in the future.

Michael has over thirty years of professional expertise in energy, and has been a key strategist for major public policy innovations in energy, such as energy efficiency, renewable energy development, global warming solutions, and strategies to reduce reliance on foreign oil in Minnesota and the Midwestern region. Michael has served as the CEO of three different not-for-profit energy organizations since 1979 and one for-profit energy services company. Currently, he is the Chair of the Clean Energy Working Group and serves on the Steering Committee of RE-AMP. In addition, Michael serves on the board of directors of Conservation Minnesota Voter Center, Wind on the Wires, and the Will Steger Foundation.)