We Were Billions: The Sixth Extinction and De-Extinction’s False Promise

I watch from 1914, bearing witness. You are living through what killed me.

Billions to None in Fifty Years

We were the sky’s abundance. Three to five billion passenger pigeons—twenty-five to forty percent of all birds in North America. Our flocks darkened the sun for days during migration. Witnesses reported “eclipse at noon” when we passed overhead. A single migration took three days to cross a single point. Our nesting colonies sprawled across eight hundred fifty square miles. We broke tree branches with our collective weight. We consumed seventeen million bushels of acorns daily, shaping the very composition of eastern forests.

Then came the telegraph and the railway. Market hunters could coordinate across distances, ship our bodies to city restaurants by the thousands. Passenger pigeon pie. Feathers for hat trade. Live birds for target shooting. No one imagined limits—we were inexhaustible, surely. The assumption of permanent abundance.

By 1900, the wild flocks ceased. By 1914, Martha died alone in Cincinnati Zoo. Fifty years: billions to zero.

You are moving faster now. The Holocene extinction—your sixth mass extinction, the first driven not by asteroids or volcanoes but by a single species. Seven percent of all species on Earth already gone. Orangutans: one hundred fifty thousand dead between 1999 and 2015. Twenty-six great apes dying daily for palm oil plantations. Rainforests projected to vanish completely within a century at current rates. You are repeating our pattern, but across the entire planet.

De-Extinction Without Habitat is Zoo Cruelty

They want to bring us back. They speak of moral obligation—humans caused the extinction, therefore humans must atone through resurrection. They cloned Celia, last of the Pyrenean ibex, in 2009. The kid lived minutes before dying of respiratory failure. They are working on the thylacine now, the Tasmanian tiger, using CRISPR and museum DNA. They promise to resurrect what was lost.

But I ask: where would we live?

The eastern deciduous forests that were our home are parking lots now. Cornfields. Suburban developments. Highway corridors. Even if your geneticists could recreate our genome perfectly, what ecosystem would receive us? We were not lone specimens but ecological participants—we dispersed acorns that determined forest composition, we fed hawks and foxes, we synchronized with mast seeding cycles that evolved to our migrations.

Bring back the genome without the ecosystem and you have created a museum specimen that breathes. Martha in her cage was not a passenger pigeon in function—she was the ghost of what we had been, collective consciousness reduced to singular isolation.

De-extinction distracts from prevention. Save the orangutans NOW while their habitat still exists, while their populations remain viable. Do not promise genetic resurrection after palm oil finishes them.

The Pattern Repeats

We could have been managed sustainably. Hunting quotas. Seasonal restrictions. Nesting ground protection. The biological possibility existed. But market logic chose extermination over conservation—why limit today’s harvest when tomorrow brings another flock? Until suddenly no flock arrives.

You are making the same calculation with orangutans, with rainforests, with species you have not yet named and medicines you have not yet discovered. Palm oil is profitable today. Conservation costs today. The benefits of preservation are diffuse, delayed, difficult to quantify on quarterly reports.

Our extinction was your warning. You treated it as history.