‘We can’t be killing everything off but feel OK about it because there’s a park in the western part of the state where I can go.’
Originally published by ecoRI News, a nonprofit newsroom covering environmental news in Rhode Island. Read more at ecoRI.org
SOUTH KINGSTOWN — The animals and insects that make southern New England interesting and special are being squeezed out of existence by the very species that needs them to survive.
David Gregg, executive director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, calls this problem “the unsustainable human use of the globe.”
Humans aren’t giving the natural world the space it needs and deserves. We’re crowding out non-human life, which, in turn, makes nature less productive and us less healthy. The natural world is too often viewed only through the lens of what it can give us or how it can entertain us.
Animals and plants are going extinct faster than any period in human history — a million species threatened with extinction, and extinctions now occurring some 1,000 times more frequently than before humans. The planet’s sixth mass extinction is being driven by human activity though the burning of fossil fuels and our unsustainable use of land and water.
Humanity’s disregard for wildlife began in earnest during the Roman Empire, when thousands upon thousands of lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, cheetahs, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and bears were killed in bloody spectacles to entertain the masses, according to the 2023 book Eight Bears.
Our disrespect of animals continued after the collapse of the Roman Empire, as Christian scripture came to dominate European ideology in the Middle Ages. “The church promoted the belief that humans were created superior to all other creatures — a belief that persists to this day — and it was therefore important to distinguish themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom,” author Gloria Dickie wrote.
Today, humans mostly preserve and protect wildlife habitats for ourselves — hiking trails, boardwalks, boat ramps, hunting, fishing, swimming, mountain biking. These human-centric endeavors do little to preserve biodiversity. We effortlessly shrug off the extinction of species after species, without realizing how we are all connected.
Our conservation efforts are largely about maintaining the economy of resources. They are seldom about protecting ecosystem services. We undervalue the contributions to our existence by so many species, from dung beetles to bats. We praise nonnative honeybees, brought here by our ancestors from Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia, because we take their honey, but we largely ignore the plight of native bees.
We don’t respect the importance the role biodiversity plays in keeping us healthy, mostly because it doesn’t generate a profit. Humans have been able to evolve and advance because the natural world provides the conditions and resources that make our lives possible.
We take, and rarely give. This selfishness comes with a largely ignored cost.
The loss of biodiversity, along with climate change, are “widely recognized as the foremost environmental challenges of our time,” according to a 2019 study authored by three southern New England researchers. They wrote that “proforestation provides the most effective solution to dual global crises — climate change and biodiversity loss.”
The distribution of forest cover and intact ‘wildland’ forest across the six New England states. A large portion of forest managed currently as intact is designated solely by administrative regulations that can be altered at any time. Nationwide, the percentage of intact forest in the contiguous 48 states is an estimated 7% of total forest area.
Southern New England’s appetite for open space, woodlands, and wild areas is going to leave Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut largely populated with deer, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, rats, mice, pigeons, lice, bedbugs, and cockroaches — synanthropic species that can thrive in human environments.
The region’s diversity of life is being paved over. The three states have a combined 367 animals and insects listed as species of concern (170), threatened (78), or endangered (119). Some of the species listed in each state overlap, and how often the lists are updated varies — the Rhode Island list was last updated in March 2006, Massachusetts last August, and Connecticut in January 2023. (For species listed as state historical — essentially extirpated — in Rhode Island, they were included in the endangered category.)
Massachusetts and Connecticut manage their natural heritage programs. The Bay State program has regulatory authority. In Rhode Island, however, the program, in 2007, became a victim of budget cuts.
An agreement between the state Department of Environmental Management, The Nature Conservancy, and the Rhode Island Natural History Survey left the management of the program’s species database to the latter, a small Kingston-based nonprofit with a handful of full-time staffers and a budget far less than that of DEM.
The Survey doesn’t have the power to add or remove species from the list, nor does it have regulatory authority. The staff has the knowledge to manage the database and the experience to help track and map species in need of protection, but promised funding has never materialized.
The program’s database, according to Gregg, is maintained on an Excel spreadsheet that is 42 columns wide, has 4,500 lines of observations, and is made up of 191,000 cells. It’s a difficult system to navigate, and much of the data it holds is outdated.
Gregg told ecoRI News in 2022 that the number of animals and plants identified, mapped, and tracked needs to expand, from the 500-plus currently listed to about a thousand. He said better understanding the role species play within an ecosystem is important, especially so during a climate crisis.
“We can’t be killing everything off but feel OK about it because there’s a park in the western part of the state where I can go,” he said. “Biodiversity poverty needs to be avoided … a rich, interesting, and diverse environment is better.”
In Rhode Island alone, about 40 species of turtles, snakes, frogs, toads, and salamanders can be found. Unfortunately, all face threats from habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, road mortality, and disease — most of these risks brought upon them by humans. Some are on the verge of disappearing from the Ocean State.
The same threats and consequences exist in both Massachusetts and Connecticut.
For the next 24 weeks, an ecoRI News series called Wild New England will examine the species who find themselves at risk living here.
Publication dates and stories:
Feb. 11: Freshwater mussels
Feb. 18: Snails
Feb. 25: Freshwater crustaceans
March 4: Worms
March 11: Insects (bees)
March 18: Insects (butterflies and moths)
March 25: Insects (beetles)
April 1: Insects (dragonflies and damselflies)
April 8: Birds
April 15: Birds (ducks, geese, and swans)
April 22: Birds (herons)
April 29: Birds (eagles and hawks)
May 6: Birds (owls)
May 13: Birds (sparrows)
May 20: Birds (warblers)
May 27: Amphibians
June 3: Reptiles (turtles)
June 10: Reptiles (snakes)
June 17: Reptiles (lizards)
June 24: Reptiles (sea turtles)
July 1: Fish
July 15: Mammals
July 22: Mammals (bats)
July 29: Mammals (whales)
Editor’s note: A similar look at the region’s at-risk plants is planned for later this year.
