The ugly truth behind the plunder of nature
’Inconvenient Truth’ of wildlife films highlights consumption craze that could rip web of life apart
WHEN Shawn Heinrichs found himself surrounded by thousands and thousands of shark fins drying on the roof of a building, he wasn’t thinking about shark fin soup.
He was thinking of mass killings.
The man showing him around, however, was thinking of the fortune he makes off dead sea creatures and spoke proudly of his business as he thought Heinrichs was scouting for delicacies for his restaurant.
Instead, Heinrichs, a marine conservationist, was secretly gathering footage for Racing Extinction, the hard-hitting documentary by filmmaker Louie Psihoyos that has taken the world by storm since its debut on Discovery channel last week.
Sometimes by pretending, sometimes by wearing minuscule cameras attached to the buttons of their shirts, Psihoyos’s team collected imagery that is likely to remain imprinted on the mind of any viewer: stacks of baboon heads piled macabrely on top of one another; whale served up at a sushi bar; bags upon bags of dried-out turtles; and tigers’ heads stored en masse in a warehouse.
“Each year, about one in a million species should expire naturally,” explained Dr Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University in the US. “In the next decades, we’ll be driving species to extinction a thousand times faster than they should be.”
According to Dr Michael Novacek, head of palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History: “In 100 years or so, we could lose up to 50% of all the species on Earth.”
The fossilised remains of an oviraptor mother protecting its eggs highlights that mass extinction has happened before. In fact, it has happened five times before, but now, with the “sixth extinction” under way, it is the first time it is being caused by another species.
Without preaching, the filmmakers let the footage speak for itself — and perhaps the most effective are the moments that capture the no-man’s land between life and death. A shark tries to swim, but with both its fins severed, it cannot move forward. A huge manta ray, having been clobbered on the head in the shallow waters of a village in Indonesia, takes more than an hour to die.
“An estimated 250 000 sharks per day are being caught. They predate the dinosaurs and have survived so much, but just in our generation we have managed to cut down their numbers by 90%,” said Psihoyos.
There are 330 turtle species and half are under major threat.
Manta rays had their fate sealed about five decades ago when a businessman in China resurrected old folklore that their gills are good for blood circulation, bruises and other ailments.
Almost overnight, the mass killings began, and tons of bags of dried manta ray gills now find themselves side by side with the commercialised remains of dozens of other species in what Psihoyos calls “the Walmart of endangered species”.
But slaughter — called “the direct hand of man” in the movie — is just part of it. The other is the “indirect hand of man” — and that is climate change.
“Climate is controlled by the ocean. The ocean is ‘the big guy’,” explained Dr Charlie Veron, former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. “The oceans are now slowly changing and that is the danger we face: mass extinction caused by a change in environment precisely along the lines of what could trigger off one of these catastrophes.”
He said the five mass extinctions were caused by different events — but they had one common factor: “a massive increase in carbon dioxide, and we have never had a spike in carbon dioxide like the one we are having right now”.
According to Dr Boris Worm, an ecologist at Dalhousie University in Canada, the big culprits are “fishing, pollution, shipping, habitat change, climate change and acidification of the ocean”.
He said: “No part of the ocean is unaffected. We have lost 40% of plankton, which plays a vital role, in the past 50 years.
“But our lives depend on the ocean breathing. The whole web of life collapses if the ocean is unhealthy.” So where to from here? Psihoyos said we were at the point where it was either “the end” or “the beginning of a new movement to change things”, and that individuals could make a difference. “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,” he said.
In 100 years, we could lose up to 50% of all the species on earth