Silence After the Roar: Humanity's Lonely Planet
- Dhanada K. Mishra
- Jun 20
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Experts Sound Alarm for Lost Mammal Habitat, Populations
The conservation world went quiet on May 29 when Valmik Thapar—India’s "Tiger Warrior"—took his last breath. For 50 years, his raspy voice had thundered through bureaucratic halls, fighting for Bengal tigers when only 1,411 remained. There are 3,167 today.
In his obituary in The Hindu, Thapar’s family said he dedicated much of his life “in the searing heat or an icy cold winter morning” to establishing forest reserves and tiger corridors throughout the country. Days later, as World Environment Day passed, people received fresh news that they are not doing enough to save wildlife.
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The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed many kinds of lemurs, monkeys, langurs, macaques, and gibbons in its “Primates in Peril” report of the world’s 25 most endangered primates 2023-2025.
Consider the African elephant, not as a statistic, but as Hope—a 55-year-old matriarch in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. Satellite collars show her herd’s range has shrunk 40% since her birth. She’s witnessed poachers kill her sisters and Africa’s droughts starve her calves.
Currently, the African savanna elephant is considered “endangered” and the African forest elephant is “critically endangered,” according to the IUCN Red List.
In the last 53 years, “[f]orest elephant sites have declined on average by 90%, whereas savanna elephant sites have declined by 70%,” according to a 2024 PNAS study.
However, Hope’s life story mirrors the species’ struggles: In the last 53 years, “[f]orest elephant sites have declined on average by 90%, whereas savanna elephant sites have declined by 70%,” according to a 2024 PNAS study.
Researchers used data on elephant population surveys done at 475 sites in 37 countries from 1964 through 2016. Over the decades, poaching and habitat loss reduced the populations at the sites; however, conservation efforts helped savanna elephants rebuild their numbers, the PNAS study said.
Large, wild mammals like Hope are already scarce: Land mammals, large and small, constitute just 2% of Earth’s mammal biomass, while marine mammals make up another 2%, says a 2022 article in OurWorldinData.org.
The same study finds humans make up 34% of the mammal biomass. But the livestock humans raise—including cattle, pigs, buffalo, sheep, goats, horses, camels, and asses—is 62%. In one sense, it could be said that humanity has turned much of the Earth’s landmass into factory farms and ranches, with wildlife relegated to shrinking islands of land.
In Sumatra’s Batang Toru rainforest, a different tragedy may be unfolding. A male Tapanuli orangutan—one of only 800 left—is already the rarest great ape.
The species was only discovered in 2017, according to an article in Current Biology.
"There are no captive lifelines," geneticist Christian Roos of the German Primate Center warns. "This species could vanish before most people learn its name."
The average size of monitored wildlife populations has declined by 73% since 1970, according to World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2024.
The Tapanuli orangutan habitat, which is being fragmented by a hydroelectric dam, could be seen as a microcosm of the global onslaught. The average size of monitored wildlife populations has declined by 73% since 1970, according to World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2024.
WWF notes that the percentage change in the index “reflects the average proportional change in monitored animal population sizes at sites around the world, not the number of individual animals lost, nor the number of populations lost.”
The steepest drops in monitored wildlife populations are “recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean (95%),” the WWF report adds. This was followed by Africa (76%), Asia–Pacific (60%), North America (39%), and Europe and Central Asia (35%).
“When nature is compromised, it is more vulnerable to climate change and edges closer to dangerous and irreversible regional tipping points,” WWF Chief Scientist Rebecca Shaw said when the WWF report was released in October 2024.
Why Are Sanctuaries Failing?
Europe’s protected areas offer a grim answer. A June 2025 Guardian investigation revealed that—even in these guarded havens—"numbers of flying insects in 63 reserves [in Germany] fell by 75% in under 30 years.”
The authors of a 2022 study in Nature wrote that “Calls to conserve 30% of the Earth’s surface by 2030 are gathering pace, but we show that protection alone does not guarantee good biodiversity outcomes." Climate-related issues, such as drought and erosion, and even invasive species, ignore park boundaries. Poachers, pollutants, and other climate impacts are not stopped by fences.
"You cannot protect what you don’t value."
Thapar understood this. His genius wasn’t just creating tiger reserves—it was making them work. He armed rangers with military-grade gear, lobbied for life sentences for poachers, and convinced villages that living tigers brought more tourism revenue than dead ones could fetch on the black market. "You cannot protect what you don’t value," he often said. His model offers a blueprint, yet scaling it demands unprecedented global will.
Amboseli National Park has become a “symbol of hope” for the African elephant (Loxodonta africana), as well as the Maasai giraffe (Giraffa tippelskirchi). The park’s success in recovering elephant and giraffe populations depends on habitat protection and community-based conservation and anti-poaching efforts, including compensating herdsmen for cattle killed by elephants, thus lowering incidents of revenge killing.
“The fight is far from over,“ the park admits. “The privatization of migratory lands,” they add, remains a major threat to the “long-term survival of these species.”
The Unravelling Web
When mammals vanish, ecosystem imbalances multiply: In Yellowstone National Park, wolves keep elk from devouring young trees that lock away carbon. In the oceans, whale excrement fertilizes phytoplankton that absorb 40% of CO₂ emissions. Bats control mosquito populations that carry Zika and malaria. Losing them isn’t just an ecological tragedy—it’s societal suicide.
When insect populations crash in Europe’s reserves, pollination fails. As elephants disappear, seed dispersal stops, weakening forests that stabilize the climate. "The situation is dramatic. If we don't act now, we will lose some of these species forever," says Roos.
Pathways from the Precipice
On New Years Day 2025, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged nations to "exit this road to ruin." Evidence shows wildlife recovery is possible when people commit to:
Rewilding Agriculture: Costa Rica doubled its forest cover since the 1980s by paying farmers to conserve trees rather than clear them.
Genetic Rescue: Moving isolated Tapanuli orangutans to breed with other groups could prevent inbreeding and extinction.
Crushing Trafficking: INTERPOL estimates $21 billion/year in illegal wildlife trade. Freezing traffickers’ assets and treating networks like cartels could cripple them.
Climate Corridors: Creating wildlife highways linking lowland habitats to cooler highlands as temperatures rise.
"The Earth isn’t running out of time—we are.”
Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail, framed the crisis on World Environment Day 2025 with chilling clarity: "The Earth isn’t running out of time—we are.”
The IPBES’s 2019 global assessment report validates his warning, stating that “it is probable that at least a million animal and plant species—more than one in eight—already face global extinction." Over 40% of Insect species—foundational to food chains—are threatened with extinction.
In Sumatra, rangers plant fig trees—orangutan favorites—along forest edges. In India, Thapar’s disciples patrol tiger lands, using AI-poaching prediction algorithms. Their battle isn’t just about saving species. It’s about preserving wonder, stability, and humanity’s place in a living world.
As twilight deepens over Hope the elephant, her shadow stretches long across the savanna. It mirrors humanity’s choice: solidarity with life, or the deafening silence of a planet where the wild heart no longer beats.
*Dhanada K Mishra is a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan and is currently working as the Managing Director of a Hong Kong-based AI startup for building technology for the sustainability of built infrastructure (www.raspect.ai). He writes on environmental issues, sustainability, the climate crisis, and built infrastructure.
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