Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.
When Otis Parrish was a kid in the 1940s, abalone were abundant. Each abalone grows in a single, beautiful opalescent shell, which can get as big as a dinner plate. Parrish’s father showed him how to pry the abalone off the rocky shoreline at low tide with an oak stick or the end of a sharpened leaf spring. Or, best of all, how to take the abalone unawares and grab them with his bare hands before they had time to fasten tight to the rocks. His mother’s village was called Dukašal, or “Abaloneville” in the Kashaya Pomo tribe’s language, notwithstanding its location five miles and two steep ridges inland from Stewarts Point on the California coast. The ocean gave the Kashaya people protein and ceremonial food. “We call [abalone] ‘Champion of the Sea,’” Parrish told me over coffee in nearby Windsor, California, one recent morning.
Newcomers to the state started eating abalone in far greater quantities in the mid-1800s. They went into deeper water with skiffs and long poles, and began free diving and subsequently diving from boats with air hoses to harvest the shellfish. Commercial capture passed 1 million pounds a year around 1920. Apart from a dip during World War II, abalone hauls totaled several million pounds a year for decades. When the pink-abalone population crashed in the early 1970s, people fished for more red abalone, whose decline, in turn, was compensated by increased pursuit of the green, white, and black species. They were all flatlining by the mid-1980s. In 1997, California banned commercial abalone fishing.
For years, red abalone was the only species sufficiently abundant to support even a limited recreational fishery. Tens of thousands of divers plucked nearly a quarter million abalone a year in Northern California. Then came 2017. Divers would pull abalone off the rocks only to find mostly empty shells. Scientists concluded that the abalone were starving because a record marine heat wave had weakened the kelp forest, and an epidemic, exacerbated by the hot water, killed more than 90 percent of sunflower sea stars from 2013 to 2017. Abalone and sunflower sea stars don’t have anything to do with each other directly, but the latter eat purple sea urchins, which eat kelp, which abalone also eat. When the sea-star population crashed, urchin numbers exploded, and a spiny purple horde clear-cut the remaining kelp. Biologists presumed that the abalone scooted around the rocks looking for their staple seaweed, found none, and perished. California’s last abalone fishery closed.
This story doesn’t involve extinction. Both abalone and sea stars still exist on this Earth. If we measure biodiversity as the number of species, nothing has changed. But red abalone, a species at least a few million years old that, during Otis Parrish’s youth and for at least eight millennia prior, required next to zero effort to gather, are now extraordinarily scarce. One California species, the pinto abalone, is “endangered,” according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The remaining six species in the state are “critically endangered.” Sunflower sea stars, kelp forests, and many other species that live in the rocky coves along the California coast are in similar straits. They’ve been displaced by hyperabundant purple urchins, which biologists are desperately trying to persuade humans, the predator of last resort, to eat.
Globally, 1.2 million species of organisms have been scientifically identified. Scientists have extrapolated from the number of species and higher-level taxonomic categories (genera, families, etc.) in extensively studied groups, such as birds, to estimate the diversity of under-researched groups, such as fungi. They put the global species total at about 8.7 million, of which roughly 7.7 million are animals. Some 157,000 species have been systematically evaluated by scientists to determine whether they are threatened with extinction; just more than 44,000 have qualified for the IUCN’s three most severe categories of peril. The registry shows only 2,354 confirmed or probable extinctions in modern times, though the actual number is surely far higher. That’s roughly 0.03 percent of species—an enormous number in a very short time, geologically speaking. But it dramatically understates the global crisis of crashing wild populations. That’s because what is happening more or less across the board isn’t extinction but collapse. On average, wild populations monitored by biologists over the past 50 years lost 69 percent of their members, according to the Living Planet Index. North American bird populations have declined by nearly one-third since 1970; in absolute numbers, that’s 3 billion fewer birds. The scientists who delivered that news said, “Population loss is not restricted to rare and threatened species, but includes many widespread and common species that may be disproportionately influential components of food webs and ecosystem function.” Particularly worrying for those food webs: In North America and Europe, terrestrial insects have been shedding about 10 percent of their populations every decade.
Our immediate biodiversity crisis isn’t one of species loss; it’s the lost abundance of wild things. The problem has become pervasive and systemic in recent decades because humans have added a new way of subtracting wildlife from our land and waters: pollution. Where once we were limited to hunting and clearing habitat, now we disorient night-traveling birds with light, starve manatees by smothering the sea grass they feed on with sewage and farm runoff, and continue to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The impacts cascade through the kelp forests and every other ecosystem on the planet, tipping some wild populations, like those of the 131 species of outrageously costumed harlequin toads, into free fall. Long before they’re entirely gone, these organisms are functionally omitted from their ecosystems and from the human experience.
I asked Parrish what the scarcity of abalone has meant for the Kashaya Pomo tribe. “Most families have forgotten the songs and the prayers that go with it,” he said, “and forgotten the taste.” Then, pointing at his head, he said, “It’s a loss of something up here.”
Human colonization of land, rivers, and sea, and use of the sky as storage space for soot, methane, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, and other excess gases, have corresponded, on paper, to a golden age for the naked ape. More than twice as many people exist now than in 1970, and our average income has more than doubled in inflation-adjusted terms. Many experts and policy makers accept the collateral damage as a cost of doing business on this planet. That’s because their economic scorecards count what’s measurably good for human beings. Something that’s good for two people is twice as good as something that’s good for one person. From this point of view, a world drained of wildlife with a lot of people making increasing amounts of money is heading in the right direction. The losses of joy, wonder, and ethical interspecific relations are real, but, in contrast to our material gains, resist measurement.
Economics is nicknamed the “dismal science,” but many of its practitioners are far more optimistic than biologists about our species’ future. They propose that economic growth can continue forever on a planet that is staying the same size, because scarcity isn’t the sad opposite of abundance; it’s the mother of invention. When goods—such as abalone, wood, water, oil, or bison—become scarce, substitutes become valuable. So people produce canned tuna, plastic, flushless urinals, solar power, and beef. If ready substitutes aren’t available, people innovate and tame scarcity. Over and over.
Substitution is seen as a remedy both for the shortage of production’s inputs and, nowadays, for the menacing excess of its emissions. But substitution won’t save us indefinitely, and typically leads to another round of unforeseen damage. When fossil fuels supplanted firewood, temperate forests recovered, and we embarked on our global-warming journey. Now green tech is driving a mining boom, including in the Congo rainforest, which is a crucial carbon sink. We’ll face countless other challenges ahead that we can’t now foresee. Events such as forest die-off, drought, deluge, record heat waves, and glacier melt, which have massive ecological and economic costs, are becoming common while remaining unpredictable.
It’s not too late for an abundant Earth. Recovery starts with making wild abundance an explicit objective and letting our economic and social lives coalesce around it. Buried in that paper on bird loss, for instance, is a story of spectacular recovery that made few headlines. Waterfowl populations have risen by 56 percent over the past 50 years, despite including the birds most routinely shot by people. Hunters joined other environmentalists to lobby for wetlands conservation. They recruited farmers to preserve migration pathways with “pop-up” wetlands made by flooding rice fields in California’s Central Valley. This success exemplifies the most important thing people can do for wild populations: Give them space, starting with the spaces that aren’t yet fragmented. Twenty percent of Earth’s forests, for instance, are still big and unfragmented, “intact forest landscapes” (IFLs). According to Peter Potapov, who leads research on IFLs at the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab, only 16 percent of those unfragmented forests is strictly protected. Another 20 percent is within more permissive protected areas, such as our national forests, that allow resource extraction. The remaining 64 percent has no protection at all. Securing these forests now is a bargain compared with the cost of removing roads and industry to regrow them later.
The United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity is the global agreement to protect wild species. In late 2022, its parties ratcheted up the ambition for conserved space to 30 percent of the planet by 2030, which represents a rough doubling for terrestrial protection and more than triple for the oceans. Nearly every country on the planet signed on (or, in the case of the U.S., made its own 30-by-30 commitment). Brazil has already hit its terrestrial target and set aside nearly half of its Amazon lands in parks, reserves, and Indigenous territories. Chile has protected more than 40 percent of its ocean and more than 50 percent of its Patagonian territory, and has kept all of that southern region’s rivers free-flowing. In Canada, cultures are peacefully reoccupying tens of millions of acres of their ancestral lands in Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, fusing traditional law and “modern” conservation practice.
Protected spaces will change as the climate does. That doesn’t make them futile. They are “stages” on which an evolutionary drama unfolds. This has been the case as long as there’s been life, as new species have emerged over incomprehensibly lengthy time spans, thousands of human forevers. Now life forms are being challenged to adapt far too fast. The more we slow climate change, the more evolutionary storylines can reach into the future. In other words, climate policy is biodiversity policy.
The current U.S. administration promotes its “all-of-government” approach to biodiversity (and climate) action. These executive-branch programs are encouragingly holistic but can revert quickly to an all-of-government approach to destruction under a future president. The Endangered Species Act, the landmark 1973 law that has succeeded in preventing extinctions, wasn’t built for today’s biggest biodiversity challenge, the loss of abundance. Those hunters who restored abundant game birds took little comfort from a law that guaranteed habitat bubbles in which a few fowl might persist; they wanted enough to catch and eat. They wanted to see the sky darkened by birds. We need laws that go beyond sustaining scarcity and regrow biological plenty—call it an Abundant Life Act. Rather than attempting to codify abundance on a species-by-species basis, as the ESA does for extinction risk, such a law must consider life at the ecosystem level and reduce the causes of wildlife depletion without knowing precisely how much natural abundance will return. Rather than keeping a few abalone in an ESA lifeboat, let’s bring back enough to feed a venerable culture and draw awestruck divers once again into the filtered sunlight of a restored kelp forest. Let’s nurture enough of the Earth so that people once again can know they are part of a wild world disposed—and able—to host abundant life.