Book Review: Witness to Extinction - How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin by Samuel Turvey

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the dolphins disappear suddenly from the earth leaving only a cryptic message: "So long, and thanks for all of the fish." Should Qi Qi, one of the last ever Yangtze river dolphins, have been able to leave a message before his sad death after decades of life in a sterile, small concrete tank, it might well have been a variant of that: "So long, and thanks for nothing."

This dolphin species, indeed this whole mammalian family, the Lipotidae, which had existed for around 21.5 million years, is now extinct. The story of how that was allowed to happen is told by the conservation biologist Samuel Turvey, in Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin.

It is a story from which almost no one, except Turvey himself and a handful of other individuals, emerges well. No one knows, and no one probably will ever now know, exactly what killed the baiji (its Chinese name). It might have been the hideous pollution of the river; it might have been the illegal and vicious fishing methods in regular use; it might have been the river's use as a major transport highway that made it a cacophonous obstacle course of deadly propellers. Probably it was a combination of all of these things.

The Chinese government was culpable, certainly. It never made any serious effort to address these issues (which clearly would be a mammoth undertaking), and it also failed to develop a safe refuge area in which the species might have been preserved. Yet this, as Turvey shows, is a developing world government in a country with no tradition at all of conservation, so that is perhaps understandable, if not excusable.

But clearly on this account even greater opprobrium should be laid at the feet of the international conservation organisations and prominent experts, who might have been expected to throw every conceivable resource at preserving this beautiful, charismatic, important species. Instead, Turvey finds, they are handicapped by a fear of failure, by an impractical ideology, and by a simple failure to face the facts.

Article Author: Natalie Bennett

Natalie is the editor of My London Your London, an independent cultural guide featuring theatre, gallery and museum reviews, and also blogs at Philobiblon, on history, culture, Green politics and all things feminist. …

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