Conservation Comment: Our vanishing environment

Margie Beautrais

SCIENTISTS say the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction caused by human impacts on biodiversity, including habitat loss, hunting, environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change.

The sixth mass extinction sounds very dramatic and is hard for most of us to grasp. Are we really in the grip of a worldwide event of such magnitude? Perhaps scientists are exaggerating. After all, animals are always becoming extinct. Survival of the fittest is the way of the Earth, the climate has always changed from warm to cold and back again; that's just the reality of living on this planet.

Any time, you can walk into a museum, look at the fossils on display, and see the evidence for yourself. Whanganui Regional Museum has many examples in the collection, some of which can be seen in the current exhibition, Te Matapihi -- looking into the museum.

You will see fossilised palm tree nuts that grew in Northland during the Miocene period and a fossil tooth from a woolly mammoth that lived in Alaska during an ice age. You'll also see a massive Megalodon shark tooth uncovered at Pipiriki, dating back to the early Pliocene around five million years ago when that area was under the sea. And look out for the moa bones from the Holocene period, extracted from Whanganui swamps.

Extinction is a natural process. But look a bit closer at the statistics. The natural rate of extinction on Earth is estimated to be one to five species a year, based on analysing fossil records. Scientists predict that -- at current rates of extinction, with dozens of species disappearing every day -- we could lose half Earth's biodiversity by 2050.

Whanganui Regional Museum, like other museums worldwide with natural history collections, preserves the remains of species that have become extinct in more recent times as a result of human behaviour. They represent part of the "sixth mass extinction".

Extinct species in the collection from other countries include the great auk, Tasmanian wolf and American passenger pigeon. From New Zealand are the huia, laughing owl, little bittern, New Zealand quail, New Zealand goose, piopio, grayling, South Island kokako and wren.

Without constant protection, the tieke, hihi, tuatara, hectors dolphin, kakapo and others would soon follow them into the dark night of extinction. All of these threatened species and more are represented in the museum collection.

It will be a sad day when Whanganui children who are born this year have to visit their local museum to see any of these beautiful creatures.

Let's do all we possibly can to protect what we have left. If we don't act now to preserve and restore our planet, it is possible we humans may also disappear in the current mass extinction and exist only in the fossil record of the Earth.

You can visit the museum in its temporary off-site space at 62 Ridgway St, in the old Post Office building, from 10am to 4.30pm Monday to Saturday (except public holidays). Te Matapihi is an overview of the museum collection's history, and features a good array of birds, animals and insects. Free entry to all.

�Margie Beautrais is an educator at Whanganui Regional Museum