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By Root 1190 0

be exploited until it's gone. This story is oft-repeated and oft-ignored. Take the great auk, also called the spearbill in tribute to its massive bill, and called by the Spanish and Portuguese pinguin, which means the fat one, in reference to the soft jumpsuit of blubber that enveloped it. This flightless bird was common throughout Europe, existing side-by-side with humans as far south as the Mediterranean coast of France. By the year 900, the great auk was no longer perceived as a neighbor; it had become a commodity. It was slaughtered commercially for the oil derived from its fat, and for its soft elastic feathers. By the mid-seventeenth century, hyperexploitation had killed all but one of the great auk nesting sites in Europe, and that was destroyed before 1800.

In North America, too, humans coexisted with great auks for thousands of years, perhaps thousands of human generations. But they didn't develop an economics requiring the objectification of all others, and so the relationship continued. Humans smoked auk meat to eat through winter; they ate their eggs; they rendered fat into oil which they stored in sacks made from the birds' inflated gullets; they dried the contents of eggs, then ground them into flour from which they made winter pudding. Humans did all this, season after season, generation after generation, causing no appreciable harm to the birds. I do not know what these humans gave to great auks in return, but I would stake any hope I have for continued human existence on the belief that the humans gave something back to these stately black birds, with their powerful lungs and wings made for diving and undersea propulsion. Perhaps all they gave back was the right for them to be.

The earliest description we have of a North American encounter between Europeans and great auks ends, as these encounters always do, in tragedy for the natives: "Our two barcques were sent off to the island to procure some of the birds, whose numbers were so great as to be incredible. ... In less than half-an-hour our two barcques were laden with them as if laden with stones." The next year another chronicler noted, "This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been removed." Having been noticed by members of our culture, the fate of the great auk was sealed.

They were slaughtered for their meat, which was sold. They were slaughtered for their oil, which was sold. They were slaughtered for their feathers, which were sold. Their eggs were taken for markets in Boston and New York. Wrote an Englishman: "These Penguins are as big as geese and . . . they multiply so infinitely upon certain flat islands that men drive them from hence upon a board into their boats by the hundreds at a time, as if God had made the innocency of so poor a creature to become such an abundant instrument in the sustenation of man."

At last, around the turn of the nineteenth century, bans were placed upon the killing of remnant auk populations. The bans, being as nominal as environmental restrictions are today, were of course ignored, and the last known rookery was destroyed in 1802. But one colony, a tiny one of perhaps 100 individuals, remained, near Iceland. Word of this colony finally reached Europe, and collectors quickly offered a local merchant high prices for eggs. By 1843, most of the birds were gone, and on June 3, 1844, three fishermen killed the last two auks, and smashed the last auk egg.

It would be easy for me to hate that local merchant and his three hirelings for what they did to the world in general, and to me in particular, when they eradicated these creatures. But as with Chivington, Hitler, Descartes, Bacon, the authors of the Bible, "free market" economist Milton Friedman, and so on ad nauseum, these men were not alone. They had, and continue to have, an entire culture for company. A bureaucrat with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and the Ocean stated the matter perfectly. His honesty is frightening: "No matter how many there may have