It’s hard to visualize extinction.
When you make a video series, there’s a pretty good rule of thumb
that you should only ever make a video about something that you can show.
Otherwise, what are people going to look at?
But not everything can be shown.
And the stories of the annihilated absolutely deserve to be heard.
Just because they're invisible, doesn't mean they're not important.
In fact, them being invisible kind of makes them more important.
So for this episode, to start things off thematically, Francesco and I are going to show you...
nothing.
A time before roads.
Before houses.
Before boats.
Before Europeans.
Let’s play a game.
In the coming story I want you to guess
if I’m talking about the Great Auk, a penguin-like bird from the North Atlantic,
or the Beothuk, a peoples indigenous to Newfoundland.
I bet it’s harder than you think.
Ready?
Ok. Here we go.
For thousands of years they’d lived along these coasts,
fishing in the Arctic waters that they’d long since adapted to endure.
Their ancestors lived here, and their ancestors before that.
These were their lands, and although they knew of others like them further inland,
here they were the highest form of their existence.
The preeminent version of themselves.
But life here was hard.
These rocks provided little in the way of shelter, and although the ocean was bountiful,
survival meant enduring incredible hardship on the land.
Infant mortality rates meant that no matter how big their numbers got,
they’d be incredibly hard to rejuvenate.
But for a long time, things were good.
These were their waters.
Everything started to collapse with the Europeans.
It didn’t matter which nation they came across.
French, English, Irish, Basque.
None could be trusted.
The first of their type in the New World to encounter these invaders,
they were met with both early and devastating effect.
Raiding parties, looking for anything they could sell or eat tore through their communities.
Some of those captured would find themselves sent to Europe and locked in zoos,
while others were simply hunted for sport.
Trophies of their kills were common among the shacks of the early settlers.
Sometimes it was for pelts, sometimes they were just killed for fun.
The more their numbers dwindled in the face of the ongoing assault,
the more they attempted to flee to the most remote, harsh areas of the terrain.
Incapable of fighting back against the hunt, they resolved to live in the places the Europeans would never go.
But there was no place they could hide that the trappers wouldn’t find them.
Eventually, seeing that things had turned dire, the government of the region began to attempt
to institute policies to sustain the now-endangered group.
It had never been their true intention to completely destroy them.
If anything, most settlers liked having them around.
Laws were put in place to stop their wanton destruction,
while scientists and concerned citizens started a campaign of assistance.
But nobody listened.
The wheels of time had already spun too far,
and it was clear no Royal decree would be able to turn things around before the inevitable struck.
By the mid 1800’s, they were extinct.
We know who killed the last one.
We were there when they died.
My people, I mean.
Their death was studied, recorded, and sensationalized across European media.
From that day forward, they would live as a memento mori of our misdeeds on the continent.
An international symbol to our carelessness and our malice.
Of the immediate, irreparable damage that can be caused when we don’t police our own actions.
But it didn’t matter.
They were already extinct.
I’m sure you’ve realized by now that the story I just told works for both sides.
I could have just as easily been talking about a Beothuk child as a Great Auk egg.
The stories of their demise are incredibly close.
When we talk about treating people like animals, this is what we mean.
The Beothuk were killed like animals.
There should be no comparison.
The last egg ever laid by the now extinct Auk was stomped to pieces by Ketill Ketilson’s boot.
The final yolk of one of the most important birds of the Americas,
wasted across some Icelandic rock so recently we even know the guy’s name.
It died because its parents were worth more money dead than alive.
Because museums all over the world would pay top dollar for an extinct bird.
And that last egg was smashed to ensure that they got what they paid for.
The last Beothuk died of tuberculosis.
She was kidnapped from a community that was starving, hunted, and nearly destroyed.
Born Shanawdithit, it had long since become common convention
that captured women be named after the month of their abduction.
Hers was Nancy April.
One by one, she watched as the last remaining women of her tribe succumbed to European disease,
until eventually, it was her turn.
On Shanawdithit’s death bed died an entire people.
An entire way of life.
Some people will tell you that this is just how thing are, but they're wrong.
If this is how things were supposed to be, there would be no biodiversity.
Everything would be monoculture.
The natural state of our universe is diverse.
It's interactive.
And the decisions that were made here were made by real people.
And they were bad decisions.
Extinction isn’t fated, it's created.
These great losses to our natural and cultural diversity aren’t some distant thing our ancestors did once upon a time.
They happened just two lifetimes ago.
It’s possible that my great-grandmother met someone who’d eaten Auk.
Or killed a Beothuk.
And that’s the real message I want to convey.
We control this, and until we realize that we’re the ones behind the wheel,
we will not stop making these mistakes.
When Francesco and I were in Chile, we were invited down to the far Southern reaches of the Tierra del Fuego.
There, we were supposed to find a woman named Cristina Calderon, the last of the Yaghan people.
They have survived that harsh terrain for over 10,000 years, only to be snuffed out before our very eyes.
I'd say that maybe, maybe they have a decade left.
A modern Nancy April, mirrored across the equator.
But we never ended up going there to tell her story.
It was too hard, too expensive, and for too little return.
The same problem facing us all.
We are now entering the greatest die-off our species has ever seen.
Extinctions are happening at nearly 10,000 times the natural rate,
with almost a dozen species going extinct every single day.
It is so bad that scientists are starting to speak about it the same way
they speak about the great extinctions of antiquity.
We’re ending the dinosaurs, so to speak.
But it isn’t all doom and gloom.
Because we could stop it, or at the very least slow it.
It would take regulations, personal responsibility and deep incentivization to do so.
It would take education initiatives and an adjustment of the entire international economy.
It would be nearly impossible, but we could do it.
Humans have made larger changes to smaller threats.
The first step is remembering the invisible.
If we discount the extinctions that happened here, of the Great Auk, of the Beothuk, they’ll keep happening.
They are happening.
So let’s raise a glass to the Auk.
Let’s build memorials to the Beothuk.
Not because they ruled this world, but because this world destroyed them.
And that’s a far more valuable lesson than glory ever will be.
Too preachy? Too preachy.
This is Rare Earth.
Francesco, you seeing this? Are you scared? I see you being all scared. Whoo. Standing on the dangerous rock.