claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.
—SITTING BULL, LEADER OF THE HUNKPAPA LAKOTA SIOUX1
Climate change is a social justice issue. With the climate crisis, as with the economic crisis, governments have prioritized the interests of those who caused the problem, despite the consequences for ordinary people. We are not “all in it together.” An increased understanding of this has led the climate movement to grow in size and to adopt more radical slogans.
—SUZANNE JEFFERY2
ON JUNE 24, 2012, IN THE GALÁPAGOS archipelago, birthplace of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lonesome George took his final breath. This giant Pinta Island tortoise, five feet long and over two hundred pounds, was the last surviving member of Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii. Giant tortoises can expect to live well into their second century. At roughly a hundred years old when he died, George was in the prime of his life.
A sad little note scrawled on a blackboard at the Darwin Research Station marked Lonesome George’s death: “We have witnessed extinction. Hopefully we will learn from it.”3 But what can we learn from these giant tortoises? What can we learn from this irrevocable loss? What is the cultural, scientific, and biological significance of these tortoises to humans?
When the Spanish first landed on the islands 600 miles off the coast of modern-day Ecuador in the sixteenth century, giant tortoises numbered around a quarter million. Because they were so abundant, the archipelago was named after the old Spanish word for tortoise, galápago. Three centuries later, in his diary entry of September 15, 1835, Darwin noted what “seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals,” which have “of course been greatly reduced.” Darwin went on: “It is said that formerly single vessels have taken away as many as 700,” though giant tortoises were still abundant when he made his visit.4 On October 8, Darwin describes himself and the ship’s crew as living “entirely on tortoise meat” and that “young tortoises make excellent soup,” but he nevertheless found “the meat to my taste is indifferent.”5
Almost inevitably, then, these giant tortoises formed part of Darwin’s earliest musings on natural selection:
When I recollect the fact that [from] the form of the body, shape of scales and general size, the Spaniards can at once pronounce from which island any tortoise may have been brought; when I see these islands in sight of each other and possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure and filling the same place in nature, I must suspect they are only varieties. The only fact of a similar kind of which I am aware, is the constant asserted difference between the wolf-like fox of East and West Falkland Islands. If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks, the zoology of archipelagoes will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of species.6
The phrase “such facts would undermine the stability of species,” written down for the first time in his notebooks documenting the five-year voyage of the HMS Beagle, point toward a theory that only emerged in print two decades later. Immediately recognized by the other revolutionary giant of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, the importance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, could not be overestimated. According to Marx, Darwin’s book, published in 1859, was an “epoch-making work” that formed “the basis in natural history for our view,” because it undermined the God-centered view of creation and gave life science a firm theoretical footing on solid materialist ground.7
Giant tortoises have existed on Earth for ten million years. In contrast, Homo sapiens have walked the Earth for approximately 200,000 years, a mere 2 percent of that time.* Yet in less than the life span of one individual giant tortoise, the subspecies has gone from numerous enough to fill the holds of ships to the extermination of all of C. nigra abingdonii by humans. In the world as it currently exists, the extinction of this giant tortoise leaves us not with the question “will we learn?” but with “which species will be threatened next?”
Perhaps it will be the leatherback turtle. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s oldest and largest nature conservation organization, which compiles the Red List of Threatened Species, has placed this primordial leviathan on the “critically endangered” list—one category away from “extinct in the wild.”
Relics of a distant past, leatherbacks have existed on Earth practically unchanged for 100 million years—ten times longer than the Galápagos tortoises. Next to the leatherback, Homo sapiens pales into temporal insignificance. Mature leatherbacks can be over six feet long, four feet wide, and weigh up to a ton. Able to swim to depths of 3,600 feet—over three times deeper than a nuclear submarine—leatherbacks change their body temperature to cope with the cold, their pliant shells allowing them to survive the immense pressure of the ocean depths.
To sit on a tropical beach in the middle of the night, close to an egg-laying mother, listening to the heaving power of her gargantuan lungs, gazing at a creature of such evolutionary perfection, is a deeply affecting moment. How much will humanity lose if these creatures are lost forever?
We don’t know exactly what the average leatherback life span is, but we do know that species placed on the critically endangered list are likely to be extinct within ten years. Leatherbacks have experienced a population decline of more than 90 percent since 1980.
The turtles are threatened by the full gamut of economic activities dictated by the profit motive. Industrialized fishing methods, such as gillnet, trawl, and long-line fishing, trap the turtles as unwanted “bycatch.” One study of Pacific Ocean turtles estimates that more than 200,000 loggerheads and 50,000 leatherbacks are killed each year solely through inadvertent entanglement in long-line fishing.8
Just as turtles have become rare, the system responds and sets in motion further declines. Local consumption of turtles and their eggs was once a sustainable practice, but with the growth in world trade, a highly profitable multinational black market in turtle eggs has developed. While a turtle egg might sell for $1 in Costa Rica (a not insignificant sum considering a single nest can hold more than fifty of the perfectly round, pearl-white eggs), international consumption and smuggling associated with the drug trade means the price can reach as high as $100 to $300 per egg in international markets.9
As turtles return to the same beach that they were born on, largely unchecked coastal economic growth for tourism or real estate development is a further threat. Electric lighting on previously dark beaches confuses the turtles’ navigation, resulting in fewer females making it onto land to lay their eggs.
Along with thousands of other species, leatherbacks are threatened with extinction by an economic and social system that is based on relentless, profit-driven expansion that promotes industrial fishing methods, chemical pollution, and egg harvesting for the black market. Which begs the question: How can we save these magnificent wild animals and, by extension, humans?
The current biodiversity crisis, whereby species are being driven to extinction at rates up to a thousand times greater than the geological statistical norm, is simply one aspect of a global ecological crisis. Whereas in the past such crises were local or regional, humans are now changing the whole biosphere in a multiplicity of ways: our actions are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere; acidifying the oceans; contaminating the soil, the water, the air, and organisms worldwide with toxic chemicals; altering the land through deforestation of vast areas
