The Real Lost World

It's quite an irony that we make films about the dangers of bringing dinosaurs back from extinction while we threaten the existence of their avian descendants.

Jurassic Park and its four sequels like The Lost World: Jurassic Park have hit home the consequences of wielding genetic power to resurrect the dinosaurs. One of the themes from the films challenges humans to think about the damage they may inflict before mindlessly plowing ahead with a harmful action.

We aren't bringing dinosaurs back at any point in the near future though, so it might be best to first examine how we already impact existing species. If we don't want to stray too far from dinosaurs, let's check out what we are doing to birds, the dinosaurs' living legacy.

A rufous hummingbird, one of the species
most at risk of extinction from global warming.

In a new report, Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink, the Audubon Society shows how global warming threatens two-thirds of all bird species in North American with extinction. Half of the species in Washington state alone face extinction from a temperature increase of three degrees Celsius. Instead of the power to create addressed by Jurassic Park, we are wielding the power to destroy, and we are doing it just as recklessly as John Hammond and the host of other characters who tried to cash in on dinosaurs.

The report from the Audubon Society does a great job of helping us visualize the possible consequences of our actions. We should take it as an opportunity to consider where we go from here.

No horror from any of the Jurassic Park stories could match the awfulness of wiping out the animals most closely related to dinosaurs.