91ɫ��Ƭ

The millions of species humans share the world with are valuable in their own right. When one species is lost, it has a ripple effect throughout the ecosystems it existed within.

But there’s a hidden toll. Each loss takes something from humanity too. Extinction silences scientific insights, ends cultural traditions and snuffs out spiritual connections enriching human life.

For instance, when China’s vanished, local memory of it faded . When New Zealand’s giant flightless moa were , the words and body of knowledge associated with them .

In these ways, conservation is as much about safeguarding knowledge as it is about saving nature, as I suggest in .

We’re currently living through what scientists call the planet’s . Unlike earlier events triggered by natural catastrophes, today’s accelerating losses are overwhelmingly driven by , from habitat destruction to introduced species to climate change. Current extinction rates are tens to hundreds of times higher than natural levels. The United Nations up to 1 million species may disappear this century, many .

This extinction crisis isn’t just a loss to broader nature – it’s a loss for humans.

Lost to science

Extinction extinguishes the light of knowledge nowhere more clearly than in science.

Every species has a unique genetic code and ecological role. When it vanishes, the world loses an untapped reservoir of scientific knowledge – genetic blueprints, biochemical pathways, ecological relationships and even potential medical treatments.

The two species of gastric-brooding frog once lived in small patches of rainforest in Queensland. These extraordinary frogs could turn their stomachs into wombs, shutting down gastric acid production to safely brooding their young tadpoles internally. Both went extinct in the 1980s under pressure from human development and the introduced chytrid fungus. Their unique reproductive biology is gone forever. No other frog is known to do this.

Studying these biological marvels could have yielded insights into human conditions such as acid reflux and certain cancers. Ecologists Gerardo Ceballos and Paul Ehrlich called their extinctions a tragic loss for science, : “Now they are lost to us as experimental models”. Efforts at de-extinction have so far .

Biodiversity holds immense in medicine, agriculture, materials and even climate change. As , the library of life shrinks, and with it, the vault of future human discoveries.

Lost to culture

Nature is deeply woven through many human cultures. First Nations people living on traditional lands hold detailed knowledge of local species in language, story and ceremony. Many urban residents orient their lives around local birds, trees, rivers and parks.

When species decline or vanish, the songs, stories, experiences and everyday practices built around them can thin out or disappear.

Extinction erodes our sense of companionship with the natural world and diminishes the countless small interactions with other species which help root our lives in joy, wonder and reverence.

The bioacoustics researcher Christopher Clark has likened extinction to an :

everywhere there is life, there is song. The planet is singing – everywhere. But what’s happening is we’re killing the voices […] It’s like [plucking] the instruments out of the orchestra … and then it’s gone

One of a vanished voice comes from Hawaii. In 2023, a small black-and-yellow songbird, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, was declared extinct. All that’s left is a , where the last male sings for a female who will never come.

Disturbingly, birdsong is , diminishing the richness of our shared sensory world.

From an , each loss leaves the whole community of companion species poorer – humans included. Scientists call this the “”. As biologist David George Haskell , extinction is leaving the future:

an impoverished sensory world […] less vital, blander.

The loss of species is not only an ecological crisis but also a rupture in the communion of life – a deep injury to the bonds uniting beings.

Loss of spiritual knowledge

For , nature is imbued with . Often, particular species or ecosystems hold deep spiritual significance.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is , whose traditions describe it as part of a . As the reef’s biodiversity declines under climate stress, these spiritual connections are eroding, diminishing the sources of wonder, reverence and existential orientation which help define in the world – across and beyond faith traditions.

Some regard – a way to reveal divine truth alongside scripture. Nature holds deep significance for the varied communities and traditions viewing the land and its creatures as sentient, interconnected and sacred.

Extinction weakens nature’s capacity to embody transcendent meaning. The natural world dims and dulls, leaving us with fewer opportunities to experience awe, beauty and a sense of the sacred. In this sense, extinction is more than biological loss. It severs spiritual ties between human and other beings in ways .

How do we grieve extinction?

Extinctions often evoke grief, which is a way of knowing through feeling. Grieving a lost species points to the scale of the loss across scientific, cultural and spiritual dimensions.

For Indigenous communities, this grief can be profound, born of deep . and conservationists witness cascading losses and bear the . Their grief may trigger . But also makes the crisis tangible.

Grieving for extinct life isn’t pointless. It can compel us to look closely at what remains, to recognise the intrinsic value of a species and to resist reducing biodiversity to its instrumental uses. This kind of mourning carries the seeds of ecological responsibility, inviting us to not just for our purposes but because of its irreplaceable role in the communion of life.

, Adjunct Professor, ; ;

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .