AP released a story yesterday declaring that researchers have officially declared the baiji, a rare, white dolphin whose habitat was largely the Yangtze River in China, effectively extinct. An international expedition underwent a fruitless six week search for any sign of the fresh-water dolphins. (The Wall Street Journal also had been following the story. Much of their coverage was reprinted here)

"The baiji is functionally extinct. We might have missed one or two animals but it won't survive in the wild," said August Pfluger, a Swiss economist turned naturalist who helped put together the expedition. "We are all incredibly sad."

A shy, nearly blind freshwater mammal known for centuries in Chinese legend as the Goddess of the Yangtze, the baiji were a beautiful, charismatic species that had survived for 20 million years. The first mention of the baiji dates back 2,000 years to Guo Po, a Jin dynasty scholar who described it in the Erya, China's oldest dictionary. Later, the strange creature found its way into a love story, where it turned into a beautiful woman like a mermaid. That's why fishermen called the baiji the Goddess of the Yangtze and said the animal could foretell bad weather.

The primary cause for the baiji's rapid decline was a degraded habitat - busy ship traffic, which confounds the sonar the dolphin uses to find food, and overfishing and pollution in the Yangtze waters of eastern China.

Randall Reeves, chairman of the Swiss-based World Conservation Union's Cetacean Specialist Group, who took part in the Yangtze mission, said expedition participants were surprised at how quickly the dolphins disappeared.

"Some of us didn't want to believe that this would really happen, especially so quickly," he said. "This particular species is the only living representative of a whole family of mammals. This is the end of a whole branch of evolution."

This is sad and disturbing news, particularly on the heels of a recent New York Times article that reports that the amount of money it would take to curb carbon dioxide emissions over the next 50 years (enough to have a meaningful effect on global warming and its consequences) is about equal to the Bush administration's tax cuts in 2001 and is also roughly equivalent the amount spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It is more than a little disheartening that big business, energy companies and irresponsible governments have been allowed to run rampant through the resources and the wildlife on our Mother Earth. In the case of the Goddess of the Yangtze, it's too late to save her. Perhaps beginning at Yule, as we celebrate the return of the Sun to Earth, and in the following months as we celebrate his return to a robust vitality, we make an effort to direct some energy toward saving our planet and those for whom she is home, and also direct some powerful discouragement to those who would continue to destroy her.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 9:51 AM