Editors’ Note

From the May/June 2007 Issue

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at the end of last year, the Goddess of the Yangtze, or Baiji—known to us in the West as the Yangtze River dolphin—was declared extinct. If you heard anything about it, what you probably learned was this: The Baiji was cute. It was one of only four river dolphins left in the world. It was the first large aquatic mammal species known to have gone extinct since the 1950s. During the Great Leap Forward, China outlawed veneration of the Baiji; thereafter, it was hunted for meat and sport, but what finally killed it off was the Three Gorges Dam.

That might seem to be a tale as unique as it is sad—specific to the Baiji, to the Yangtze, to China’s politics and its rush to develop. Just as we tend to see the plight of the Bengal tiger, the panda, the polar bear, as unique to particular pressures and cursed locales. No wonder, for that’s how we were taught conservation. As kids we rallied to the cause of an animal (Save the Whales) or a regional ecosystem (Save the Bay)—something close to home, emotionally at least. The fight was over one animal, one locale, one affected industry at a time.

And we had it all wrong. As Julia Whitty points out in “Gone,” biologists agree that humans have put into motion the sixth great extinction—the fifth being the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Darwin taught us that species go extinct and others evolve to fill the gaps. But the current rate of extinction is at least 100 times above normal, and Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson estimates it to be 1,000 to 10,000 times greater—meaning somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are wiped out every single day. Unless we dramatically change course, Wilson predicts half of all plants and animals will be extinct by 2100.

So what? Well, what we owe to biodiversity, writes Whitty, is “literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods and services that we can’t even imagine we’ll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify.” Seven in ten biologists believe the extinction juggernaut to be a colossal threat to humanity, one far more dire than even its contributor, global warming. Who knew?

Which leads to a theme of this issue: Denial. True, America was built on denial—on people convincing themselves that the journey was not that hard, the future not that uncertain, the chances of striking it rich not that slim. Denial loses any appeal, though, when self-deception mutates into plain old deception: when officials, corporations, and other dead-enders help us lie to ourselves about war, toxic threats, or planetary damage—that means you, Michael Crichton!

People deny reality because the truth is hard to face, because fixing the problem seems impossible. But it is not. The Industrial Age transformed the world in 100 years. So too could a Sustainable Age, in which humanity decides, for its own survival, that it is time to mitigate, halt, and then reverse the damage we’ve done. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, to say nothing of Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr., all revolutionized their times. Who’s next?

Throughout history, transformative ages have arisen from the interplay of scientific invention, philosophical insight, and popular demand—from refusing to accept the status quo, and being open to what could lie ahead. That’s denial of a different kind. Denial that change is impossible.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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