I wish I had saved a screenshot of an insane The Atlantic headline from yesterday, as that article was quickly taken down, and this seems very similar. Perhaps they toned down the Doom?
Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
The other night, as I began the expansive and continually growing routine of putting my 11-month-old son to bed, we sat together on the rocking chair in his room and read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, by Judith Kerr, and met a tiger who just would not stop eating. My son wasn’t yet ready for sleep and made that clear, so we read Chicken Soup With Rice, by Maurice Sendak. We encountered an elephant and a whale, and traveled through all the months of the year, braving the sliding ice of January and the gusty gales of November. Then we turned, as we always do, to Goodnight Moon, and met more bears, rabbits, a little mouse, a cow, some fresh air, and the stars.
As I slid the books back onto the shelf, they rejoined the long parade of animals around his bedroom: the moose and his muffin, Peter Rabbit, Elmer the patchwork elephant, Lars the polar bear, Lyle the crocodile, stuffed kangaroos and octopi and lions and turtles. Every night, I sing “Baby Beluga” to him as a lullaby: “Goodnight, little whale, goodnight.” (snip)
But lately, I have started to worry that I am populating my son’s imagination with species that could go extinct before he has a chance to understand that they’re real. We read about Physty the same way we do about Custard the dragon. To him, they are equally delightful and fantastical, neither real nor unreal. He sees fossils of dinosaurs, and I tell him that they disappeared millions of years ago. Even if whales or tigers don’t vanish entirely in the next several decades, in our age of accelerated environmental damage—climate change and what some scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction—I’m concerned that many of these books about the incredible, unlikely diversity of animal life on this planet will feel like fairy tales too.
Is it any wonder that kids are emotional wrecks these days, neurotic over the coming climate apocalypse, when people, such as this “climate reporter”, fill their mushy little heads with this doomsday cult crap?
Scientists predict that as many as 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of going extinct, “many within decades,” according to the United Nations. This era of “biological annihilation” is already under way: In ecosystems spanning the globe, the average amount of plant and animal life has fallen by about a fifth—mostly since the beginning of the last century. Climate change is driving these dynamics by limiting or shifting species’ geographical ranges, which alters and removes the food, water, and habitat that they require.
Is this like the prognostications of the Arctic being ice free? Or the Maldives underwater by 2018 and NYC’s west side by 2019? Remember Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb? They’re pretty much never right, but, they’ll keep preaching the doom.
Maybe we could preserve those animals for the future by collecting a few of each of them in central locations so that children can go see them. We can even pay the Chinese to contribute some of the rare animals they haven’t eaten yet as aphrodisiacs. If only someone would do that then everyone’s children could visit those animals and know they are real. But who am I kidding. No one would ever do such a wastefully extravagant thing.