If you've never seen a Yangtze River dolphin, you never will. They're gone. All of them. Forever. We humans have seen to that.
This special species of dolphins has inhabited our planet for some 20 million years - longer than the Andes Mountains have been around. Many, many times longer than humans. But they lived only in the freshwater Yangtze River of China, and that wasn't going to work.
Wherever they live, humans crowd in. They divide and subdivide and build and jam together for as much profit as can be had. They cut down the trees and name the streets after them. For the most part they have no clue about wildlife habitat or what they're doing to the world we all must live in. They dump anything they can get away with into the convenience of the waters of the world. And they regard the denizens of those waters as a source of food or a nuisance. Nothing more.
The fishermen of China didn't mean to wipe out the last of the Yangtze dolphins. But it's not as if they cared either way. Their numbers already decimated by a huge and sudden loss of habitat, and increasingly polluted water, there was no way the gentle river creatures could survive gill nets and rolling hooks and electrical stunning meant to kill as many fish as possible with the least effort. For the fishermen it was a matter of food and livelihood. Nothing personal, dolphin. Creation of the monumental environmental travesty known as the Three Gorges Dam didn't help matters.
Humankind has wiped out other species before. Alas, the poor dodo bird. We've never eliminated a great cetacean before. But, hey! Species go extinct all the time. Look at the dinosaurs. You can't pin that on fishermen or land developers or rapacious industrialists.
True enough. But, still and all, it's a shame that the Yangtze River dolphin has passed into the great eternal silence of extinction. It didn't have to be that way.
When it comes to preservation, we humans are a curious lot. We'll clear hillsides to build landscaped faux mansions. We'll build pools and fountains, and bury creeks in concrete tubes, oblivious to what creatures may depend on them for their existence. But we will also go to extraordinary (and laudable) lengths to save an old diner from a developer's wrecking crew. We'll tolerate 50 years of dumping some of the worst guck that humankind has to offer into a tidal wetland, then spend 30 years or so, and an untold fortune, turning the ghastly mountain of trash into a park.
What treasures have we allowed to slip through our fingers unnoticed? What have we lost, to selfish expedience and inattentiveness, over the years and decades and centuries? What has our behavior cost us? We'll never know.
An American astronaut once remarked on the profound change of perspective he experienced during a voyage to the moon. He looked back on the blue marble that is his home planet, and suddenly the wars and agendas and callous greed of humankind seemed not just petty but dangerous and foolhardy. Viewed from space, the planet and its resources were obviously fragile and painfully finite. He realized that if, in the vastness of the universe, there is a heaven, we inhabit it.
What that we could all see what he saw.