Newfoundland and Labrador Opinion

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COMMENTARY: Darwin's reckoning: Why we must fight for evolution's castaways

Why do we insist on defying Darwin’s verdict, pulling species back from the brink when evolution has always been content to let them fall?

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Stand on the cliffs of Cape Breton, scanning the grey Atlantic for a spout that may never come. Walk the banks of dying rivers, where salmon once leaped so thickly you could nearly cross on their backs — and find only silence. The North Atlantic right whale numbers around 340. Three hundred and forty. That is not a population; it is a funeral procession.

The Atlantic salmon returns dwindle each year despite millions spent on restoration. The cod moratorium was declared in 1992, and still the stocks have not recovered. We pour our hearts, our dollars, our desperate science into saving these creatures, and the tide keeps rising against us. It can feel, at times, like trying to bail out the ocean with a thimble. And yet we persist.

The question lingers: why?

Darwin’s distorted mirror

Charles Darwin taught us that extinction is nature’s slow way of weeding out the less adaptable. “Survival of the fittest” conjures images of the strong triumphing, the weak fading. But Darwin never saw a whale entangled in rope so deeply it could not feed. He never watched a river run warm and toxic, choked by dams and runoff from our own fields.

The “survival of the fittest”........

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