Racing Extinction Page #6

making the same mistakes,

because there will be nothing left.

Some of the world's rarest amphibians

are inside that trailer.

I've heard up to half

of all frog species

could be gone

in the next 20 years.

Yeah.

There are 7,000 species

of amphibian,

and they're all endangered.

PhotoArk's my 20-year attempt

to photograph

every captive species

on Earth.

One guy's desperate attempt

to get people to care. That's it.

There he is.

The very last

rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog.

Very last one.

Chytrid fungus wiped them all out

in Panama, so he's the last one.

That's it.

When he's gone,

they'll be extinct.

Can we lift his chin up a little

bit for me, please?

Perfect.

This is his big moment.

A lot of times,

these pictures I do

are the only national coverage

these animals will ever get

before they go extinct.

This is it.

This is their one chance.

I really hope the PhotoArk

isn't just some sort of

an archive of the things

we lost, but instead,

it's a chance to get

people interested,

look these animals in the eye,

and fall in love with them.

There's only 330,

340 species of turtles,

and half of them are under threat.

If the temperature rises on

the planet just a few degrees,

they're very susceptible

to extinction.

So, this is really

the last line of defense,

keeping animals

that are extinct in the wild

in a captive situation.

l think you could compare

something like this,

or nature in general,

to the finest works of art...

...on the planet,

and in my opinion more than,

you know, the best Picasso,

Matisse, Warhol.

Life wants to flourish.

DNA wants to go forward.

We need to be part of that.

Why would we

want to do anything to disrupt

something that took

billions of years to evolve?

See how the trees

are all falling into the lake?

And they're doing that

because the permafrost

in the ground is melting.

In the Arctic,

in these cold regions

around the planet,

underneath the lakes,

underneath the oceans,

there's vast, vast quantities

of frozen methane

that's been in there

for millions of years.

This lake has a lot of

methane bubbling out of it.

ln fact, we can light

those methane bubbles on fire.

School kids know

about the extinction event

that killed

all the big dinosaurs,

but paleontologists, you know,

the connoisseurs of this,

they look back at

the Permian extinction.

That's the biggest extinction

in the history of the planet.

Almost all life

on the planet disappeared.

It's called "The Great Dying."

You know,

the K-T is pretty obvious.

That was caused by a meteor,

but what the hell killed

all the animals on land and sea

back at the Permian?

And now they're coming around

to thinking,

"It was probably methane."

So, the Arctic's

getting gradually warmer,

and the methane

that's been locked away

for millions of years,

is starting to come out.

When all this gets going,

we will have, what we call,

a runaway effect.

That's runaway climate change,

and that's unstoppable.

Are you all right?

The only way to tackle

the methane problem,

is to reduce CO2 emissions,

because that's what's

warming the Arctic,

letting this methane bubble up.

You know, the great irony is,

like, the oil companies,

they see the melting of the ice

as an opportunity

to go up there

and drill more holes for oil.

And what we don't realize,

it's underneath that,

that's what people

have to worry about.

We do know from

the fossil record

that even pre-human climate

changes could happen fast.

l'm not talking

millions of years.

I'm talking three years

or four years.

Way less than a mortgage,

Less time than it takes for

your kid to go through college.

And what if

the world's temperature

goes up six degrees

in three years?

It will lead to

massive death in the oceans.

When the oceans start dying

like that,

the planet can't function

as it used to function.

And when that happens,

life everywhere fails.

That is a mass extinction.

There's this

remote island in Indonesia.

It's right at the tip,

where the sea comes sort of

crashing into this channel,

and through this quarter

are whales and dolphins

and all kinds of animals.

And at the tip of this island

is this village called Lamakera.

There's no place on Earth that

we know of where more manta rays

are being killed than

in that single village.

We realized if we were gonna

deal with the manta issue,

we had to go to ground zero.

These are manta rays.

They make, like,

sets of 20 or 40,

and they're about $20 a set,

and you get a couple of sets

off a manta, maximum.

And then you get about

$500 to $600 from the gills.

Those are gills.

You can see the end of it.

All the cartilage

will be sent to China

to be crushed down into pills

for glucosamine sulfate

for the sore joints

and stuff.

We sat down to meet with the

Kepala Desa, who's the chief.

Initially, they weren't

very welcoming.

They didn't want us to stay.

But ultimately, we managed

to talk our way onto

one of the fishing vessels.

Ask them how they caught it.

See it?

A couple of hours into

the fishing trip,

they saw this black figure

on the surface just cruising.

Paul, left.

Blood starts to color the water.

Over the course of an hour,

this thing struggles

for its life.

It's big.

And I'm looking at this,

and I'm going,

"God, I can't do this."

He just sticks in the brain

of this animal,

and it just freaks out.

And I actually watched its soul

just disappear in front of me,

and then it went limp.

Paul, hurry.

No, no. Don't panic,

don't panic.

As we're going towards

the village,

an armada of boats

start streaming past us.

And they're all triangulating

on this group of manta rays

that have come into

their waters.

And the first thing they do

is start hacking into the gills.

With the advent of traders

providing diesel-powered engines

and a supply chain

all the way out to China,

they transitioned very quickly

to a full-on commercial outfit.

And it's only a few years

before the manta rays

will be wiped out.

They realize

the numbers are dropping.

Even if we weren't here, they

realize something has to change.

What are their children

going to be doing?

They're gonna have nothing left.

It's just losing

a bit of magic, you know?

The world, without that species,

to me, it's empty, you know?

In 200 years,

people will look back

on this particular period

and say to themselves,

"How did those people

at that time just allow...

"...all these amazing creatures

to vanish?"

But it would be very little use

in me or anybody else

exerting all this energy

to save the wild places,

if people are not being educated

into being better stewards

than we've been.

If we all lose hope,

there is no hope.

Without hope,

people fall into apathy.

There's still a lot left

that's worth fighting for.

About two decades ago,

the Baiji dolphin

was extremely vulnerable.

There was hundreds of them left.

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