Extinction crisis: Humans must stop making vast numbers of species as 'dead as a dodo' – Kenny MacAskill

When in primary school, I remember hearing the phrase “Dead as a dodo” and being told the tragic tale of the bird’s extinction.

Humans need to stop sending species to meet the same fate as the long-extinct dodo (Picture: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire)

The picture of the large forlorn bird haunted me. Seeing stuffed ones in the National Museum simply reinforced it.

Perhaps, that’s why I contribute to wildlife funds for several species that now stand on the brink. Orangutans, polar bears, rhinos, I’ve got them all and other species have been gifted to family members. But unless we change our ways as a species, there are going to be many more birds and animals that will go the way of the dodo.

The number under threat is increasing and it’s not just through trophy hunting on the Great Plains of Africa. Images of what climate change is doing to my sponsored polar bear are truly depressing.

Social media clips of orangutans trying to fight off deforestation bring tears to your eyes. Shooting the last dodo was crass enough but this is relentless extermination.

But it’s also here in Scotland where it’s reckoned that one in nine species is under threat.

There’s a plaque on the A9 in Caithness that marks the spot where the last wolf in Scotland was slain by some lord and landowner. I found that haunting, thinking of the lonely beast devoid of a mate or its pack. But it’s continuing and why we need to act.

For it’s more than just climate change that challenges us. The COP-26 climate summit in Glasgow next year has had renewed life breathed into it with Trump’s imminent removal from the Oval Office. But it’s not just what human actions are doing to the climate but what we’re doing to our natural environment. Habitats are under threat and species are on the point of extinction.

It may have been climate change in the form of an ice age that did for the dinosaurs but it’s humans that now threaten. Our natural habitat – whether peatlands, wetlands or woodlands – are likewise threatened. Preserving the planet therefore requires more than just tackling climate change.

If guilt doesn’t make us change, what led to coronavirus surely must. Our ecosystems all interlinked.

Kenny MacAskill is the SNP MP for East Lothian

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