The Book of Vanishing Species: Illustrated Lives

By Beatrice Forshall

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Our Earth is more beautiful and more diverse than we can possibly conceive of.

The Book of Vanishing Species is a stunning homage to the planet's most mysterious, bizarre and wondrous creatures and plants. Their stories are captivating, from the eyeless and tiny dragonlike olm to the hawksbill turtle, whose gender will be determined by the temperature of the sand it is born in. These species may have survived for hundreds of thousands of years by cleverly adapting to their environments, but their future remains far from certain.

The book brings to life red cranes as they dance and bow for the sheer joy of movement, trees that breathe out a haze of misty atmosphere for insects that only feast on one kind of flower, a deep-ocean snail quietly building its shell from iron... and each one of them is illuminated with an exquisite illustration. As you turn the pages, there emerges a network of life that stretches across and around the planet in a dazzling web of existence.

This is both a love letter to life on Earth, and an urgent summons to protect what is precious and lovely in this world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526623652

Beatrice Forshall

Beatrice Forshall is an artist whose work draws on the natural world. Her exquisite hand-coloured, drypoint engravings revolve around wildlife and themes central to conservation. In 2018 she was artist in residence at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), a pioneering collaboration between researchers, policymakers and practitioners focussed on transforming the global understanding and conservation of our natural world. The Book of Vanishing Species is her contribution to the cause.

Book preview

PLANET EARTH

The craft is noisy with the buzz of electrical equipment, the mechanical clink of metal on metal, the hiss of static on the radio. Sometimes there is laughter, often the calm, toneless exchange of technical information, the confirmation of levels checked, switches on or off. Out of the last seventy-five hours, they have had so little sleep. Thin metal sheets separate them from the darkness hundreds of degrees below freezing.

Hurtling through space at almost a mile a second, this was the fourth of the ten lunar orbits they would complete within twenty hours. Now leaving the far side of the moon, Borman began to roll the craft and there it was, a thin arc of shining blue, the Earth, edging over the distant horizon of the wax-grey moon. At first the crew did not see it.

The following exchanges took place on 24th December 1968 and began at 075 hours, 46 minutes, 47 seconds into the Apollo 8 mission:

Anders (photographing the lunar surface for possible landing spots): There is one dark hole, and I couldn’t get a quick enough look at it to see if it might be anything volcanic…

Anders: Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!

Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled. [Laughter.]

Anders: [Laughter.] You got a colour film, Jim?

Anders: Hand me that roll of colour, quick, will you…

Lovell: Oh man, that’s great!

Anders: …Hurry. Quick.

Borman: Gee.

Lovell: It’s down here?

Anders: Just grab me a colour. That colour exterior.

Anders: Hurry up!

Borman: Got one?

Anders: Yeah, I’m looking for one.

Lovell: C 368?

Anders: Anything, quick.

Lovell: Here.

Anders: Well, I think we missed it.

Lovell: Hey, I got it right here!

Anders: Let— let me get it out this window. It’s a lot clearer.

Lovell: Bill, I got it framed; it’s very clear right here.

The first of two colour images of the Earthrise was taken at 075:48:39.

Lovell: You got it?

Anders: Yep.

Borman: Well, take several of them.

Lovell: Take several of them! Here, give it to me.

Anders: Wait a minute, let’s get the right setting, here now; just calm down. Calm down, Lovell.

Lovell: Well, I got it ri— Oh, that’s a beautiful shot… 250 at f/ 11.

And that was the image they brought back. The Earth, bright with colour, glows beside the monochrome edge of the moon and hangs in the emptiness of space. In the photograph you can see the gleaming oceans and the swirling whorls of cloud. Through the gaps in these, you can just discern the browns and greens of Africa. Even from 376,000 km away, the planet looks as if it is dynamic, alive.

They had gone for the moon but returned with the Earth. The earliest photographs of our planet were blurry fragments of the whole; this was the first time anyone had taken a colour photograph of the Earth with the moon. It showed how beautiful the world was: how vulnerable, how alone, and how unlike anything else. It emerges from an infinite darkness, blacker than night.

By 1968 the journey of water molecules shown in the ice, oceans and clouds of the photograph was already understood. More recently discovered is how much oxygen is produced by those blue oceans and how much carbon dioxide they absorb. These cycles connect all living things. Fuelled by the light and heat of the sun, a continuous stream of energy, the planet’s biosphere is a self-renewing system of life which, for the last 300,000 years, and until very recently, has shown remarkable stability.

The day the Apollo 8 photograph was taken was Christmas Eve, and the crew read the verses of Genesis describing the beginning of the world, ending with, ‘ And God called the dry land Earth. And the gathering together of the waters called he seas. And God saw that it was good. And from the crew of the Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.’

In the eighteen months it has taken me to research this book, 107 species have been declared extinct.

Though extinction plays a role in evolution, it is thought the current rate of extinction is happening a thousand times faster than before humans existed. Death is a necessary part of every species’ cycle of life; extinction ends this cycle. We are destroying without knowing the value of what we destroy – or worse, knowing full well.

When I was a child, the fields around our house were full of life, thick with meadow clary, Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon, clover, buttercups, cuckooflowers, cowslips and dandelions, and busy with the hum of insects. The seasons were still defined. In the field of rye grass outside my window now, there are no flowers. At its edges, dock leaves are contorted from the effects of herbicides. There are few sounds except the motorway a couple of miles from here. Swallows no longer visit, nor do we hear the call of the cuckoo. Crows flap across the fields. At night, the stars are obscured.

We are depriving ourselves of the raw material of poetry. The vulnerability of the species we endanger, their inability to speak for themselves, is what first made me want to make engravings of them. As I did so, I was drawn into their lives, their mystery, their otherness and their similarity to us.

SOME OF THE SPECIES THAT WERE DECLARED EXTINCT DURING THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK

I wanted to tell their stories. As far as it is possible for someone without a scientific background to do so, I have tried to do them justice – and to convey something of our impact on the planet, and on the creatures with which we share it. I was lucky enough to be given an artist residency with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), a collaboration between Cambridge University and nine leading biodiversity conservation organisations, including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Here I encountered people with extraordinary knowledge and dedication who have devoted their careers to the conservation of particular habitats or species.

In 1946, under the leadership of biologist and naturalist Julian Huxley, the newly formed UNESCO was radical and energetic. Huxley and UNESCO sponsored the formation of IUCN, which was then called the International Union for the Protection of Nature. One of its first acts was to organise a conference at Lake Success, in August 1949. It drew up a list of thirteen birds and fourteen mammals considered to be in sufficient danger to bring to the attention of national governments.

Of these, the North African bubal and the Tasmanian tiger may already have been extinct. The Eskimo curlew had not been seen in its wintering grounds since 1939. Of the twenty-seven species on this proto list, five have since been declared extinct and two more may very well be. The numbers of eight continue to decline, and eight are recovering – though still classified as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered.

The secretary of the 1949 conference, Jean-Paul Harroy, observed that no matter how severe the laws to protect wildlife, they would be ineffective if there was a strong enough economic incentive to break them. So many species became endangered that the IUCN Red List was set up in 1964. By the end of 2020, some128,918 species had been assessed and of these, more than 37,000 were endangered, over 900 had become extinct and a further 80 were extinct in the wild.

The assessment of so many species is an extraordinary achievement, the work of thousands of researchers. Almost all of the creatures in this book are included on the IUCN Red List. Two of the exceptions are the pine hoverfly and the Tisza mayfly; this is because although invertebrates comprise one of the largest of life’s kingdoms, they are some of the least appreciated and studied organisms. Through conservation, some of the species in this book, despite having been in decline, are recovering; but many, like the kakapo, are now entirely dependent on human protection.

Writing about the 1949 conference later, Harroy observed: ‘All phenomena are actually one phenomenon’, and therefore ‘an abrupt change in any one of the factors in play can only have profound repercussions on the complex whole.’ A truth that perhaps we are only fully beginning to appreciate now, as the tundra melts and the Amazon rainforest becomes a net emitter of carbon.

We confront the greatest challenge that has ever faced humanity, a drama in which each of us can choose the part we play. We can halt the rate of extinction and begin to reverse the damage we have done to the planet. It has often been said that what makes humans different from other species is our ability to imagine the future and turn an idea into a reality. Imagine a world with clean air, clean water, oceans of fish, wilderness. Imagine a world in which we did not have to worry about these things. We are all part of this story; it is up to each of us how we write the next chapter.

Earthrise was photographed at the height of the Cold War. As a matter of prestige, both the USSR and the USA were in a race to the moon. The Apollo 8 mission was sent to find landing sites, not to photograph Earth. During the entire existence of our species, this unintended moment was the first in which we were able to see the Earth’s beauty in its wholeness.

Fifty years after the Earthrise photograph was taken, Frank Borman said, ‘What they should have sent was poets, because I don’t think we captured, in its entirety, the grandeur of what we had seen.’

Bill Anders, who pressed the shutter release, observed, ‘We were all awestruck at the beauty of the Earth in its colour against the blackness of space.’

And Jim Lovell, just after the Apollo 8 mission returned, said, ‘You really don’t understand what you have here, until you leave it.’

AIR

The locomotive races out of a distant view of trees, blurred by the misty light of a pale sun. Steam and smoke rise from the engine’s tall black stack to mingle with the clouds and rain. The firebox glows so hot that we can see it through the engine’s body in the miasma of coal smoke drifting over the sides of the bridge, smudging the wooded banks of the River Thames. It is as if the entire train and the bridge have become emanations of the smoke, and the clouds and sky, steam. In J.M.W. Turner’s painting we can see the future to which the locomotive races. It is held in place by the dark form of the bridge’s parapet and predicted by the rails on which it runs.

In the year of 1840, four years before Turner painted Rain, Steam and Speed, the world burned 356 terawatt hours of fossil fuels. This energy, ancient sunlight, was the foundation of the new industrial society. By 2019 the number had risen to 136,761 terawatt hours.

Over the last 300,000 years the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen and fallen, peaking at about 300 parts per million (ppm) of air, until recently. In 2020 it reached 415 ppm, an increase of nearly 40 per cent. This carbon dioxide traps the heat in the atmosphere, warming the oceans and causing climate change.

Over millions of years the carbon from buried plants has built up in the Earth’s crust, and it is this that we dig up and burn. We are not just burning the forests of today – of the Congo and the Amazon, of Australia and Indonesia – we are burning forests of millions of years ago and projecting their carbon into the atmosphere of our children’s future.

Vanishing species that produce oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide

or have been directly affected by climate change.

PLANKTON

GIANT SEQUOIA

CHACOAN PECCARY

NORTHERN ROCKHOPPER PENGUIN

PACIFIC WALRUS

SINAI BATON BLUE

KOALA

PUERTO RICAN AMAZON

NORTH ATLANTIC RIGHT WHALE

BRAZIL NUT TREE

WANDERING ALBATROSS

MOSS

CARIBOU

MANGROVES

PLANKTON

Take a deep breath.

Half of the oxygen that just entered your lungs was made by plankton.

Look in your fridge – if you find seafood, it comes from plankton.

Now get in your car. The petrol that fuels your engine was made by plankton.

If you were to take a teaspoon of water from the ocean and look at it under a microscope, you would see many shapes – possibly millions, mostly translucent – of varying sizes and colours. Little spheres, tubular bodies with drooping tendrils, circles within squares, squares within circles; triangles, rectangles; spiralling helixes, some bristly, some hooked, some frilled; oval wreaths, concertinas, braided zigzags; antennae emerging from cone-shaped bodies; umbrellas, crossbows, sickles, bells, fans; barrels trailing thin, wispy veils behind them; hexagonal prisms like jewels; darting arrows and little suns. You could be forgiven for thinking that instead of a microscope, you were looking through a telescope, and instead of water, you were gazing into the sky – at galaxies, spaceships and planets with alien creatures – yet plankton are very much a part of this world. We depend on them.

Their ancestors were here when life on Earth began 3.5 billion years ago. The early atmosphere was mostly methane, ammonia, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Early plankton were able to survive this oxygen-deprived environment. They were the first photosynthesisers, and over billions of years they absorbed and converted carbon dioxide into oxygen, making it possible for other creatures to exist.

In the water, plankton flutter, whirl, hover ghost-like, glide, shimmer and pulse with glowing light along their glassy bodies – flashing pink, purple, blue and orange. They are water wanderers, carried by ocean currents – planktos, from the ancient Greek, ‘drifter’. Until they are able to swim, the larvae of fish, starfish, squid, shrimp, sea urchin, cockle, oyster, crab and barnacle are also plankton. Together they make up 98 per cent of the Earth’s living aquatic biomass.

There are two main groups of plankton. Phytoplankton are plants. Most are microscopic, but under certain conditions they multiply in such numbers that, collectively, they can be seen from space. Around a quarter of the carbon dioxide we produce is absorbed by the ocean, and most of it is photosynthesised by phytoplankton. The oceans produce 50 to 80 per cent of the oxygen on Earth, as much as all the land-based plants and forests combined, and Prochlorococcus, a picoplankton, is instrumental in this process.

Zooplankton are animals: sea butterflies, paddle worms, sea gooseberries, sea angels, mysid shrimps, arrow worms, water fleas, comb jellies, krill, ribbon worms and giant lion’s mane jellyfish. They feed on phytoplankton and other zooplankton, which in turn are eaten by whales and fish. Every night, in the largest synchronised migration on the planet, zooplankton rise from the deep to feed at the surface of the ocean, returning to the depths at dawn. They vary greatly in size, from a fraction of a hair’s breadth to 50 m in length. Siphonophores, some longer than blue whales, are the longest animals in the world.

The calcium carbonate in the shells and skeletons of zooplankton form limestone. Millions of years ago, the Earth’s crust shifted and these rocks were brought to the surface. Without plankton there would be no pyramids, no Pantheon and no St Paul’s Cathedral. Their waste and decaying bodies fall to the seabed, with the carbon they contain, and over millions of years this forms gas, coal and oil, which we burn. Until recently, living plankton were able to absorb the carbon dioxide this produced, but now we are burning their ancestors so quickly that their ability to photosynthesise has been outpaced. The excess carbon dioxide causes global warming and makes the seas more acidic. The increased acidity is corroding the shells of plankton.

Plankton helped to create the world that brought us into existence, and even their remains help to maintain the biosphere in which we are able to survive. In North Africa, deposits of plankton, now dust, fertilise Amazonia. Once a lake, but now one of the driest parts of the world, the Bodélé Depression, on the southern edge of the Sahara, holds the remnants of plankton that once lived there. Every year the trade winds blow over the desert, lifting this dust high into the sky and carrying it for days until it settles on the Amazon basin. The phosphorus contained