Communicating Endangered Species

Extinction, News and Public Policy

Eric Freedman, Sara Shipley Hiles, David B. Sachsman, Eric Freedman, Sara Shipley Hiles, David B. Sachsman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000425680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Communicating Endangered Species: Extinction, News, and Public Policy is a multidisciplinary environmental communication book that takes a distinctive approach by connecting how media and culture depict and explain endangered species with how policymakers and natural resource managers can or do respond to these challenges in practical terms.

Extinction isn't new. However, the pace of extinction is accelerating globally. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies more than 26, 000 species as threatened. The causes are many, including climate change, overdevelopment, human exploitation, disease, overhunting, habitat destruction, and predators. The willingness and the ability of ordinary people, governments, scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses to slow this deeply disturbing acceleration are uncertain. Meanwhile, researchers around the world are laboring to better understand and communicate the possibility and implications of extinctions and to discover effective tools and public policies to combat the threats to species survival. This book presents a history of news coverage of endangered species around the world, examining how and why journalists and other communicators wrote what they did, how attitudes have changed, and why they have changed. It draws on the latest research by chapter authors who are a mix of social scientists, communication experts, and natural scientists. Each chapter includes a mass media and/or cultural aspect.

This book will be essential reading for students, natural resource managers, government officials, environmental activists, and academics interested in conservation and biodiversity, environmental communication and journalism, and public policy.

1 Exploring the terrain

Connecting communication, public policy, and the brink of extinction

Eric Freedman, David B. Sachsman and Sara Shipley Hiles

It is bone-chilling to know the precise date a species disappeared. It is even more ghastly to look upon the place where it happened and know that nobody knew or cared at the time what had transpired and why. There is little to memorialize the deliberate environmental disaster that occurred at the now-abandoned site of the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. The disaster that occurred there was not unprecedented, but it was a harbinger of a global future with less and less biodiverse animal and plant life.

For 14 years, the zoo had “introduced a wide range of exotic and native fauna to the curious and inquisitive people of Hobart,” including the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Australian newspapers, politicians, and farmers had long vilified the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), falsely blaming it as a predator that could wipe out flocks of sheep and encouraging bounty hunting of the continent’s largest carnivorous marsupial. As the online Thylacine Museum explains, “Sadly, out of ignorance, irrational fear, and largely just because it was perceived as an economic threat, a concerted war of extermination was waged against the species” (Campbell, n.d.).

The Beaumaris Zoo had been built at the location of a 19th-century sandstone quarry worked by prisoners transported as punishment from England to Australia. After the zoo closed in 1937, the site became rough, weed-covered ground, and its hourglass-shaped concrete duck pond was drained of water and layered with debris. Beyond a gray toilet block stood the cage where the world’s last known thylacine had died. Its name: Benjamin. The date: September 7, 1936, only months after the Tasmanian government bestowed much-belated legal protection on the species. It was too little by far, too late by far for Benjamin, which became what scientists call an endling, the last survivor of its species. Today, Benjamin merits only a few lines of type, an etching, and a childlike metal caricature on a small metal plaque at the zoo site for passersby to read. All that is left of this doomed endling itself are a few black-and-white photos and a brief film clip showing it pacing in its cage.

Endling. A word with finality.

Martha, the world’s last known passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was an endling whose final resting place is in Washington, DC. She had been a celebrity at the Cincinnati Zoo until September 1, 1914, when her death eliminated the last vestige of a seemingly boundless species so numerous that huge flocks sometimes darkened the skies. Along the Lake Michigan coast near Petoskey, Michigan, for instance, as many as 50,000 a day were reportedly shot in 1878, according to contemporary press reports. Writing about their declining numbers, Fuller (2014) said the passenger pigeon population had been dropping for years before Martha’s death as the public largely remained indifferent because millions of birds remained (see Figure 1.1).

After Martha’s death, her body was encased in a block of ice for shipping to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for scientific study. She was mounted and placed on a small branch, now fastened to a block of Styrofoam, and paired with a male passenger pigeon that had died in 1873 in Minnesota. The two birds had no connection with each other during life and were mated only for public display. They now spend virtually all their time in a nondescript storage locker next to one containing birds that US President Theodore Roosevelt had shot and studied as a boy.

On the opposite side of the globe is evidence of another extinction housed in a small, dingy museum in the bleak Central Asian city of Nukus, in the far west of the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. This endling is mounted in a drab display case: a Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata) felled by a hunter’s bullet in the 1950s, according to a plaque. Unlike Martha and Benjamin, the stuffed tiger had no name before its death. Many scientists disagree with the museum’s claim that this particular Caspian tiger was, indeed, the final survivor, another endling. Some assert that the last one had died in northern Iran, or northeastern Afghanistan, or perhaps elsewhere. But there’s no doubt the species is extinct today.

Figure 1.1 Martha, the last known passenger pigeon. She died in the Cincinnati (Ohio) Zoo on September 1, 1914.

Source: From the Smithsonian Institution.

To some people, such physical remnants of doomed species seem macabre, reflecting a weird fascination with avoidable-turned-inevitable large-scale deaths. But, like a cemetery visit to read ancient headstones, endlings can teach us lessons, such as how easily abundance can disappear into nothing and how quickly carelessness or callousness can wipe a species off the face of the Earth.

It is also important to emphasize that none of those three extinctions drew significant media attention, if any, when they occurred. Rather they vanished with little or no public notice, as did the dodo of Mauritius – last scientifically reported seen in the 1600s – and nine species of the New Zealand moa – last scientifically reported in the 1800s. As did thousands of other extinct species. As will thousands more.

Yes, extinction certainly isn’t new. However, the pace is accelerating globally. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies more than 30,000 species as threatened. The causes are many, as this book makes clear, including climate change, overdevelopment, human exploitation, disease, overhunting, habitat destruction, and predators. The willingness and the ability of ordinary people, governments, scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and business to slow this deeply disturbing acceleration are uncertain. Meanwhile, researchers around the world are laboring to better understand and communicate the possibility and implications of extinctions and to discover effective tools and public policies to combat the threats to species survival.

This multidisciplinary environmental communication book takes a distinctive approach by connecting how media and culture depict and explain endangered species with how policy makers and natural resource managers can or do respond to these challenges in practical terms. It draws on the latest research by authors who are a mix of social scientists, communication experts, and natural scientists from four continents. Each chapter includes mass media and policy aspects.

Threats loom large

Biodiversity and species survival confront a wide array of perils, from broad climate change to habitat destruction, to invasive intruders, to diseases. Hoping to improve the success of conservation projects such as land, water, and species management, researchers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Switzerland classified threats into 11 categories (Salafsky et al., 2008):

• residential and commercial development;
• agriculture and aquaculture;
• energy production and mining;
• transportation and service corridors;
• natural resource use, such as logging, hunting, and fishing;
• human intrusions and disturbance, including recreational activities;
• natural system modifications, such as dams and fire suppression;
• invasive and other problematic species;
• pollution;
• geological events, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, and landslides;
• climate change and severe weather.

Some threats, of course, are beyond human control, particularly geological events. However, most threats, including discharge of pollutants, logging and mining practices, and construction of dams and roads, can be mitigated.

Today, the mass media generally present two basic types of bad-news, parade-of-horribles extinction stories.

One set of stories from journalists, environmental communicators, and advocacy groups takes a global view as they cite the latest warnings from scientists that “civilization” could eliminate species after species. These startling, frightening numbers are mind-boggling in scope and, thus, deemed newsworthy. Here’s an example: A report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which works with the United Nations Environment Programme, cautions, “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely.” The report projects that about 1 million plant and animal species “are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history” (2019). The press picked up on the report, seizing on the sensational as reflected by a Washington Post headline using the phrase “face of an extinction crisis.” The article goes on to say:

The North Atlantic right whale is “one step from extinction,” an international group of governments and scientists declared Thursday, slightly more than a month after President [Donald] Trump lifted restrictions on commercial fishing in a key area of the whale’s habitat … More than 1 in 4 species around the world are threatened with extinction. Lemurs in Madagascar have plummeted from hunting. European hamsters have declined because of development. And “the world’s most expensive fungus,” the caterpillar fungus on the Tibetan Plateau, has been nearly wiped out by overharvesting for use in traditional Chinese medicine.

(Fears, 2020)

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains the authoritative and depressingly long Red List of Threatened Species, also presents such grim – and newsworthy – forecasts. On a macro level, IUCN (2020) says more than 30,000 of the 112,400-plus plant and animal species it has assessed are threatened. That dire prediction includes about a quarter of land mammal species, a third of marine mammal species, and a third of amphibian species that the organization says face extinction in the foreseeable future, meaning the next 10–100 years. Another study places 515 of 29,400 terrestrial vertebrate species with fewer than 1,000 remaining individuals on the edge of extinction (Ceballos, Ehrlich, & Raven, 2020). Those species include the Sumatran rhino, Clarion island wren, Española giant tortoise, and harlequin frog.

An IUCN study (2019a) titled “A Miniature World in Decline: European Red List of Mosses, Liverworts, and Hornworts” estimated that 22.5% of 1,817 bryophyte species native to Europe face extinction, largely from land modifications, climate change, fires, and conversion of forests to plantation woodland. That assessment said 2% of European medicinal plants, 8% of aquatic plants, 16% of crop-wild relatives, 20% of ferns and lycopods, and 42% of trees are threatened as well. A companion report on native European tree species found that 42% of the 454 species assessed are critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable due to invasive species, disease, deforestation, wood harvesting, urban development, and livestock farming, among other dangers (IUCN, 2019b). Few readers would recognize many of the species named in those reports.

In addition to global stories, many stories focus primarily on charismatic or familiar species, ones that resonate with the public at large or ones that can be individualized – even, ideally, given human names like Martha and Benjamin. In 2010, scientists bestowed the name Flex on a 13-year-old western gray whale tagged off Russia’s Pacific coast. Flex was among only about 136 remaining members of that critically endangered species. A northern bald ibis, the Middle East’s most critically endangered bird species, was named Julia when she was tagged after being shot while migrating across northern Saudi Arabia.

The New York Times ran an account of the death in a Hawaiian terrarium of a 14-year-old land snail named George, believed to be the last of its species. “Scientists estimate that dozens of species go extinct each day, but few receive this kind of news media attention on their way out,” the article accurately noted of this endling. The article quoted the founder of a local snail protection program, who said, “Naming George probably boosted his standing … You anthropomorphize it and people pay attention” ( Jacobs, 2019). Similarly, international media took notice when the last known female Yangtze giant softshell turtle died in China after a failed artificial insemination attempt. Only three others were confirmed to exist at the time: a male in a zoo and two of unknown gender in Vietnamese lakes (Mongabay.co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Editors and contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Exploring the terrain: connecting communication, public policy, and the brink of extinction
• Part I News coverage of endangered species around the world
• Part II Images of endangered species: communication and public opinion
• Part III Media emphasize the charismatic: ignoring the rest
• Part IV Environmental public policy
• Index