We can only hope Mother Nature comes to save us from destruction

Sudan is dead. The last male northern white rhinoceros was euthanized in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta conservancy on Monday to relieve it from the incurable pain of a degenerative illness. It was 45 years old.

Now, only two northern white rhinos remain — Sudan’s daughter and granddaughter — through which conservationists hope to save the species from extinction by using in-vitro fertilization.

That the death of Sudan is a profound tragedy for conservationists, actually for humankind, is beyond doubt. But humans, obsessed as they are with power games and economic oneupmanship, seem to have little time for such “trivial” matters. The global trend, after all, is to look for opportunities in the face of challenges — call it collecting the spoils of “creative destruction”, if you will.

As Colin Butfield, campaigns director for the World Wide Fund for Nature, said, the death of Sudan highlights a wider crisis. “There is undoubtedly a huge extinction crisis going on of which this death is just a small part,” Butfield said.

Three years ago, research published in Science Advances warned that a sixth mass extinction could be well underway, and humans are squarely to blame for that. For the record, the disappearance of dinosaurs 65 million years ago is known as the fifth mass extinction.

The global trend, after all, is to look for opportunities in the face of challenges — call it collecting the spoils of “creative destruction”, if you will.