And the American crocodile has made a peculiar recovery near Key Largo, thriving in the 150 miles of canals built to cool effluent from Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point power station. Yes, the peregrine falcon has bounced back, now that large concentrations of DDT in the environment no longer thin the birds’ eggshells.

That hope is seductive: Environmentalists long to believe we’ve arrived at the moment of reckoning - the moment, as Barack Obama put it during the 2008 presidential campaign, “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.” But Goodall offers little evidence for such optimism. “Whilst we become despairing or angered as we see how our own prolific and self-centered species continues to destroy,” she writes, “there is yet a feeling of hope.” With the climate in carbon-induced chaotic flux, “we are experiencing the Sixth Great Extinction event on Earth,” writes primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall in “Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued From the Brink.” And yet Goodall, who has watched the Gombe chimpanzees she has tried to save continue to lose habitat and die of disease, refuses to grieve. Hundreds of island birds are already gone more are artificially maintained in captive breeding programs. Panda and polar bears, falcons and vultures - along with certain species of lynx, turtles, fish, deer and rodents - could disappear within the next decade or two. In a decade, half of the 6,000 known species of amphibians may be gone.Īnd it’s not just frogs.

Creatures with 100 million-year histories have begun disappearing so fast biologists can hardly keep pace. From Canada to Panama, swamps have gone still and rivers silent insects the amphibians would have devoured proliferate.

Dawn Light by Diane Ackerman