AP is report­ing that after a depress­ingly rapid decline, the Baiji, or White Dol­phin, of the Yangtze River has suc­cumbed to a com­bin­a­tion of over­fish­ing, hab­itat destruc­tion and heavy river traffic (which interfered with the animal’s sonar.)

The report is not unex­pec­ted (Baiji have been on the brink for years now,) but it is a sombre moment; this is a large mam­malian spe­cies (the first in my life­time) that has been driven to extinc­tion by human activ­ity. It’s hard to believe that an animal that had a viable breed­ing pop­u­la­tion in the 1980’s should have dis­ap­peared entirely. They were present recently enough that we have high res­ol­u­tion digital pho­tos of them, web­sites about them, the abil­ity to com­mu­nic­ate their demise (and unsuc­cess­fully attempt to fore­stall it) across the entire world in seconds, and yet, some­how, we let the creatures them­selves slip through our fin­gers. That speaks of dubi­ous pri­or­it­ies to me.

Let’s just hope that we, as a spe­cies, can learn from our mis­takes.

And, yes, I thought of the obvi­ous title, but John Lynch beat me to it.