Front Burner - How humanity put one million species at risk of extinction

Episode Date: May 9, 2019

Canadian co-author of the new UN report on extinction, Kai Chan, on how the loss of one species can ripple out to affect an entire ecosystem in ways that we often "don't know until it's too late"

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Escaping NXIVM from CBC Podcasts Uncover. Subscribe now at cbc.ca slash uncover. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. A million species. One million species are at risk of dying out. Bees, whales, insects, coral, it goes on. The potential domino effects of this are devastating and irreversible. Around one million species now face extinction, many within decades, because of humans.

Those are the conclusions of 145 scientists spanning the globe. They published their findings this week. People are literally calling it the extinction report. It's not just about what happens to animals, plants, insects and fish species. It's about what's going to happen to us. Today on FrontBurner, what's at risk, who's to blame, and how can we stop it? I'm speaking today to Kai Chan. He's a Canadian co-author of the UN Global Assessment Report and a professor at the University of British Columbia.

Kai, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. So there's a lot going on in this report. It's incredibly comprehensive. But what I want to do with you today is start with just one species and work our way out from there. So can we talk about the orca whales? Maybe some of our listeners will have been lucky enough to see them off the coast of Vancouver. They're such beautiful, beautiful mammals. There's more over there. Look at that side. Look, on the other side of their traps.

And how have things changed for them over time? That's a great one to start with. The southern resident killer whales off the coast of Vancouver, also around there in the Georgia Strait, that's a top predator species. Orcas are one of the most powerful, one of the most dangerous creatures that's out there in the world. The ones that we're talking about here in the Salish Sea or the Georgia Strait are salmon predators, and they have been eating abundant runs of salmon for thousands of years, it seems. And so their environment has changed radically over the last couple

of hundred years, in particular with the industrialization of the area. Salmon have fundamentally shaped life on the coast. Yet quietly and without explanation, the numbers of salmon in BC are steadily dwindling. And why are they under threat of extinction now? Well, so it's hard to pinpoint any one particular cause. You know, it's the usual kind of environmental problem of a death by a thousand cuts where these populations get to the brink of extinction or go extinct. And we're left trying to figure out, you know, which of the various impacts and insults that we know about were the ones that had the biggest effects. What we do know is that the orca population was substantially decreased through the removal of orcas in the mid 20th century for like the aquarium trade.

Like SeaWorld or something like that. Exactly. This all-new killer whale spectacular immerses you in the energy and spirit of the ocean. So lots of orcas were taken out. I mean, approximately half of the population at least. And I remember this story from this summer of a mother orca carrying her dead baby for nearly three weeks. For hundreds of kilometers, still carrying her lifeless calf through the waters of the Pacific Northwest in a sad portrayal of the killer whale's struggle for survival.

That story was absolutely heartbreaking. You know, I mean, I just, for people who have children, and I'm one, I have two girls that I love very much, this idea of this animal being so attached to this newborn baby that she would not let it go, really just pulled at my heartstrings. And so back to your question, I mean, what are the factors that are causing this? Well, after that initial decline, then there were a few other things. And there's no longer any aquarium trade for orcas. So at the moment, it's much more about the combination between salmon and the load of pollutants that salmon contain and the acoustic environment, so the sounds that are drowning out the ability of these orcas to hunt for their prey. They do it through echolocation.

They send out these sound waves and those sound waves bounce off the salmon and come back to them. And when the orcas are not in an environment where they can receive those signals back, then they go away from those and elsewhere. And so what we see there is this kind of an interaction. You've got the fact that there are fewer salmon than there used to be. And then you've got the fact that it's a noisier environment, which makes hunting more difficult. And the fact that we know orcas are avoiding the noisier areas, and then the possibility that, you know, maybe the salmon are taking advantage of that.

Okay, and then you mentioned that there were pollutants in the salmon as well, right? Yeah, that's right. So some pollutants, persistent organic pollutants, we call them, accumulate in the bodies of various organisms, particularly in the fats. And they bioaccumulate, so they magnify through the food chain and accumulate most of all in top predators like orcas. So, you know, they might not be at dangerous levels within the salmon, but when they're concentrated through decades of eating that food source, then they become a danger.

And some of these chemicals are estrogen mimics and estrogen blockers that interfere with the fertility of various vertebrates, including humans, I should say. And you also mentioned this noise issue, and I just wanted to clarify, where is this noise coming from? Is it coming from boats? Is it coming from people? So it's definitely coming from boats. It's also coming from coastal developments,

and those are probably the major ones. So if we continue in this direction and we start to see fewer and fewer orcas, and they eventually, I suppose, become extinct, what effect does this have on the surrounding ecosystem? What are the ripple effects of this? Yeah, the worst about this is that we usually don't know until it's too late, right? Ecosystems are so complex that the particular effects of any one loss are really hard to predict in advance. And so one of my mentors, Paul Ehrlich, he has this metaphor that you can think about

species like rivets on an airplane. You don't know what any one rivet does until you accidentally take out one too many, and then the whole airplane might go down. Orcas are top predators, meaning that they are the ones that, in a sense, regulate the ecosystem in ways that we have begun to understand a lot better in the last few decades. Through the removal of wolves, for example, which were then reintroduced to Yellowstone, and then also through the loss of sea otters and then their reintroduction. And so it's through the combined loss and then the reintroduction that we really learn about what happens to systems. And so what often happens is that some species become a lot more abundant and many other species are depressed. So their populations get much lower or in some cases are lost from the system as a result. So what happened with wolves, for example? Yeah. So, you know, with wolves, this is a pretty

good example of humans being our own worst enemy, because the notion was that removing wolves would improve the system from the perspective of hunters who wanted to have more elk. In the past, wolves were seen as a risk to people and livestock, and they were exterminated from the Yellowstone area in the 1920s. In a sense, it did work. Elk were more abundant, but then they were overabundant. And not only that, but they had a different perception of the landscape. Without wolves, they hung out in parts of the landscape where they didn't used to hang out before because it was too dangerous in the presence of wolves. And so they decimated riparian vegetation in those areas, which had important effects on not only the biodiversity in those areas and around the streams,

but also even on the water quality. It seems like almost every other species in that system benefits from the presence of wolves. It is incredible to think how interrelated all these species are, just how these domino effects can be created. Absolutely. And so essentially what you're saying here is we don't know what would happen with orcas, but looking at other predator species, the impact could be enormous. Yeah. I mean, when you look across the various top predators that have been lost from ecosystems, we're hardressed to find any examples where the system hasn't been thrown out of whack in some significant way as a result. So today we're talking about orcas as one species, but this report addresses a lot of

different kinds of species. And how many more species are we talking about in Canada that are under threat? And how many more species are we talking about in Canada that are under threat? Hundreds. Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you count it, but certainly hundreds of species are at risk of extinction in Canada. And what about this continent? Then we're getting into the thousands. And can you paint a global picture for me? So when I'm talking about hundreds and thousands, I'm talking about species for which we have good enough information that they can make it through these various processes.

So it's a pretty stringent process. You have to have a documented decline of the species. You have to have some sense of its population size in relation to historic population sizes. But we don't know nearly enough about the vast majority of species. And so if you do the best kind of job that you could to estimate how many species there are on the planet and how many of those that we don't know very much about are likely to be threatened with extinction, then you get a staggering number of half a million to a million. And so that's what the Global Assessment reported, that this expectation that this many species are threatened with extinction, many of them are insects.

And some people think, oh, insects, who cares, right? But insects are crucial. They're at the foundation of food chains. But some of them are also at the top of their much smaller scale food chains. And so also could have really important ripple effects. And so just to reiterate what you said, that we're talking about potentially one million species around the globe at risk of extinction. It's a staggering number. I mean, when you think about, I think of myself as being a little bit of a naturalist, but right now, if I tried, I probably couldn't name more than a hundred species.

And of course, we're talking about mammals like the orcas, insects. Birds, amphibians, reptiles, coral reef species, freshwater fish and other kinds of fish. Yeah, you name it. Yeah, threatened species in all of those groups and different proportions. I read in the report that these species are disappearing at a rate, quote, tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years due to human activity. Can we go through the kind of activity the report is talking about here? My read is that this is connected to climate change, but there are also other things going on here.

Yes, that's right. The first most important cause that the report identifies is land use change and sea use change. So the clearing of habitat. And this happens for a wide variety of reasons, especially agriculture, forestry, but also mining. And then in marine and coastal environments, the dredging or trawls on the bottoms, which pull up that habitat. And then the second is the direct removal. So the overexploitation of species. And of course, this is a really important one in marine environments as well, but also affected a large number of species on land, including, for example, the passenger pigeon, which famously went extinct after having millions

and millions of them, you know, black in the skies across North America, just right up until the final decade when they just disappeared. Every single albatross that you see across this landscape has been fed plastic. So as you open it up, you can see all that plastic that's inside this bird. And what about pollution? Yeah, so climate change comes third, which is in a sense driven by pollution, and then other sources of pollution are fourth. If things continue as they are, which actually given the inertia in the climate system,

it's almost certain that they will, then climate change is going to overtake many of the other factors and get up there to be number two or number one. So yeah, there are lots of different ways that species can be threatened by climate change. Higher temperatures from global warming are causing dramatic declines in the sea ice across the Arctic. This means less and less time to hunt. And as a result, the polar bears are suffering.

I think the last one, which I'm not sure we touched on, was the movement of species from one continent to another. Can you help me understand that one? In our infinite wisdom, we have been doing this intentionally for centuries, like European settlers bringing their favorite forms of livestock as well as their favorite plants. And then unintentionally bringing some species too, like rats and mice. That was a bit of an accident, but those accidents have had profound effects on many island ecosystems. And then, of course, we do crazy things like introducing some species to try to control some other species without a control, and some of those have gone wrong as well, where both of them then become problems. You get the sense that we really mess things up here.

Yeah, you know, this would be the point in a person's life where, you know, if humanity was a person, they would be reaching middle age and they would be thinking, wow, you know. What have I been up to? This is a huge mistake. A little humility, too much hubris. So the question I have, which I think is kind of an obvious one, probably, is it too late here? Are we too far gone? Are these effects a foregone conclusion? So I think the answer there is no.

It's not a foregone conclusion. So many of these systems can be brought back. And maybe I can tell you a little story about sea otters. Please. So sea otters were decimated by the Russian fur trade when First Nations people started to sell these pelts to the Russians. And those populations of sea otters, although they were lost from the coast of BC, there were some remnant populations up in Alaska. And back in 1969, 1970, the US

government was trying to test some nuclear warheads in those Aleutian Islands where the last remaining populations of sea otters were. And they put out a call to see whether the B.C. government and others were willing to accept some relocated sea otters. Alaska had long hoped to transplant hard-pressed Amchitka sea otters to selected new homes where they could thrive and multiply. And so the BC government did accept that, and they reintroduced 50 and then 39 other animals into the northwest coast of Vancouver Island. And those sea otters took off in an amazing way. They grew at rates of 15% per year, which is really rapid, and they expanded up and down the coast. 15% per year, which is really rapid. And they expanded up and down the coast. And in that process, they had a profound effect of bringing back the kelp forests at major extents, right? So kelp had not been lost from the system. They were just much less abundant. And these kelps are

three-dimensional habitats for so many finfish and for shellfish that are also among the most productive plants and systems in the world, basically spreading their nutrients both out to the ocean and then up on shore and in that coastal ecosystem as well. And so sea otters have enabled that to come back. Unfortunately, people adapt to systems in their degraded states, and sometimes they take advantage of those ecosystem actors, the species that become really abundant artificially in a sense, right? So sea urchins and abalone and crabs and clams likely became quite a bit more abundant in the absence of sea otters preying upon them. And so then humans develop these fisheries and a taste for these organisms. And now that the sea otters are coming back, unfortunately, there's poaching or killing of sea otters in anger as kind of a protest for this competition.

Are you optimistic then that we can do this, that we're up for this challenge? You know, I mean, picking up on the anecdote that you just said, that people are now killing these sea otters. I am optimistic because I think we can absolutely learn from our mistakes in the past. We need strong governments that involve individuals in an inclusive and appropriate way. And then also we need businesses to really take responsibility and to work with governments in order to elevate the standard of how we do things across the whole economy, the whole global economy. Kai, thank you so much.

Thank you. OK, so before we go today, an update on a story that we covered earlier this week. On Tuesday, we talked with my colleague Murray Brewster about how the Mark Norman trial could be this political circus that could really hurt the Liberal government. The allegations in the Norman case for the rule of law are much more severe than they were in SNC-Lavalin. That is, if those allegations can be proven. Just to recap, Vice Admiral Norman was charged with breach of trust for allegedly leaking Cabinet secrets, about a $668 million shipbuilding deal.

Well, on Wednesday morning, the Crown decided to stay those charges. After the defense presented new evidence, they said they had no reasonable prospect of conviction. The federal government also announced it would be paying Norman's legal fees, which is something that they had refused to do prior. Vice Admiral Norman held a press conference Wednesday with his lawyer, Marie Hennin. I am confident that at all times I acted with integrity, I acted ethically, and I acted in the best interest of the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian forces, and ultimately the people of Canada. Hennin also spoke at this press conference, and she took what sounded like a pot shot at the Prime Minister. And just before we begin, I do want to introduce again the all-female team that represented

Vice Admiral Mark Norman. Fortunately, Vice Admiral Norman didn't fire the females that he hired. We don't know what was in the new evidence presented by Norman's defense, but we do know that Mark Norman wants to keep talking. I have an important story to tell that Canadians will want and need to hear. It is my intention in the coming days to tell that story, not to lay blame, but to ensure that we all learn from this experience. So that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus.

Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.