Wildlife Australia Magazine

THREE-and-a-half decades ago, Douglas Adams wrote the hilarious Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series of novels and radio plays. Then he realised his premise, that aliens were about to destroy planet Earth (to make way for a hyperspace bypass) had a not-so-funny parallel.
Humans were constantly destroying crucial habitat—for similar bypass roads—tipping animal and plant species towards extinction.
Adams sounded the alarm. He wrote a book and a 1989 radio series called Last Chance to See, with zoologist Mark Carwardine, and they scoured the world to see just-about-extinct animals. Although the episodes were light hearted, they left viewers with pangs of uneasiness.
Adams died suddenly of heart failure at age 49, but his broadcaster friend Stephen Fry joined Mark Carwardine to follow up with BBC Television’s documentary series of Last Chance to See in 2009.
Adams believed comedy and irony were effective methods of helping others to comprehend a crisis. He realised our endangered species problem was no laughing matter: “For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.”
Since Douglas Adams said that, flora and fauna extinctions have accelerated to ‘worse’—much worse.
Proof of that is in this edition of Wildlife Australia. Read the endangered species reports from the Biodiversity Council of Australia, the IUCN Red List, the Australian Conservation Foundation and, of course, Wildlife Queensland.
However, the heartening thing today, compared with Douglas Adams’ time, is that so many more Australians are organised and mobilised to challenge those problems.
In Australia’s unique case, environmental science melding with First Nations’ habitat management techniques is both a revelation and a revolution.
Take heed—and take heart. Or, as Douglas Adams would recommend: Don’t Panic.