As Species Are Falling Off the Face of the Earth

Thank you to my friend Betsy Anjani Toll for this one. Heartbreaking. AND this is the news we need to be conscious of. We need to understand what the stakes are if we continue on the death spiral that we've been in on planet Earth for decades and beyond. We need to know, care, and act. Everything, absolutely everything that we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly

Many kudos to "Brain Pickings," from which this is snipped:

"In her bittersweet farewell to the world — [Rachel] Carson never lived to see her work inspire the creation of Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency — she beckoned posterity, beckoned us, to face our “grave and sobering responsibility [which] is also a shining opportunity”; to “go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.”

"We have failed to rise to her challenge. We have failed our origins and our very humanity. In the decades since Carson’s death, 3 billion birds have vanished*. Just vanished. And as species seem to be falling off the face of the Earth, their names are falling out of the dictionary, out of our consciousness, out of children’s imaginations. If “finding the words is another step in learning to see,” then losing the words is ceasing to see — a willful blindness to our own responsibility, which thrusts us blindfolded on the steep and winding path to redemption."

[note: The bird pictured below is a Kirtland's warbler, an endangered songbird in Michigan that is making a very tentative recovery. Photo by John Flesher.]

[*Today 279 species of birds in the Americas are listed as endangered or critically endangered; 209 of those due to habitat loss. Some large and dramatically beautiful, others tiny and easy to overlook. Those numbers include only the species that have qualified and been 'certified' for official listing – bt.]