By Eric Washburn

When I was a kid growing up in Aurora in the late 1960s and early 1970s, one of my favorite things to do was to go to the Denver Museum of Natural History and spend countless hours wandering around looking at the dinosaurs. That experience challenged my imagination to envision these massive and strange-looking creatures roaming across a very different and primitive Colorado landscape, or swimming in ancient Colorado seas. And it made me wonder what caused such large and fierce-looking animals to disappear.

Throughout the past 500 million years, Earth has experienced five mass extinctions. In each case, more than 75% of species were wiped out, with dinosaurs disappearing during the last, Cretaceous-Paleogene, extinction 66 million years ago.

• Late Ordovician — 445–444 million years ago
  Global cooling caused the extinction of more than 85% of shallow marine species.
• Late Devonian — 372–359 million years ago
  Oxygen depletion in the oceans caused the extinction of reef-building organisms.
• Permian-Triassic — 252 million years ago
  Roughly 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates went extinct because of volcanic activity in Siberia, which led to intense global heating and ocean acidification. 
• Triassic-Jurassic — 201 million years ago
  Major volcanic eruptions led to a loss of about 80% of all species, paving the ways for dinosaurs to become dominant.
• Cretaceous-Paleogene — 66 million years ago
  A massive asteroid that crashed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula caused the extinction of most dinosaurs and more than 75% of other species.  

Today, the world is facing what scientists call the Sixth Great Extinction. One million species around the globe are at risk of dying off. And in Colorado, we have our own looming extinction crisis. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has listed 612 species of our state’s 1,408 species — birds, insects, mammals, amphibians, reptiles and plants, in its State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP). It’s a list of species that have declined to such an extent they now need special conservation help to recover, as well as species for which, ominously, we don’t even have enough information to know their status. 

Under current trends, children born today in Colorado likely will witness the extinction of dozens of species, including the Monarch butterfly, Greater sage grouse, Gunnison sage grouse, American Pika, Pinyon jay, Lark bunting (Colorado’s state bird), Mountain bluebirds, Burrowing owls, Least terns, Rio Grande chub and Rio Grande sucker, Bonytail and many more, as well as the collapse of our elk and deer herds from the growing epidemic of chronic wasting disease (CWD).

The difference is this modern extinction event is not caused by climate change, volcanic eruptions, or asteroids.

It is caused by us.

And we have the power to reverse it.

But to do so will require a revolutionary change in the way we think of, and manage, wildlife. 

We no longer have the luxury of viewing wildlife through the lens of our own immediate consumptive and recreational desires. Recovering our wildlife needs to be thought of as an urgent investment in our own long-term survival. 

Each species provides important functions in ecosystems — e.g., breaking down and recycling nutrients, as a food source for other species, regulating population levels and cleansing disease from populations of prey species, pollination). And each species is like the various parts of a car — e.g., piston, radiator, wheel, gas tank, steering wheel — that collectively enable the car to run. With both cars and ecosystems, when you lose enough parts, they tend to stop working. If too many species decline and/or go extinct, then entire ecosystems lose functionality and eventually collapse. And since all life on Earth — including human life — is based on ecosystems, then when they go, humanity will face an existential crisis.

The current system, in which CPW relies on hunting license and park fees to fund about 58% of the agency’s annual budget, is neither sufficient nor sustainable. Not only does this model fail to meet the basic funding needs of the agency, but it distorts wildlife management priorities, encouraging large, densely populated elk and deer herds that foster the spread of always-fatal CWD. Ironically, hunting license revenue will eventually evaporate as our deer, elk and moose herds start to collapse due to CWD. 

So, if we want to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, then the current system needs to be replaced by one in which CPW’s budget is appropriated by the state legislature, which should dramatically increase funding for CPW to underwrite a comprehensive program of biodiversity conservation and recovery.

CPW should also be statutorily responsible for the successful conservation, stewardship and recovery of all our fish, wildlife, plants, insects, fungi, amphibians and reptiles. Recovering our threatened and endangered species can no longer be considered a luxury, lagging far behind the administration of hunting and fishing programs on the agency’s priority list. 

To be successful, all the agency’s wildlife management decisions should be based on peer-reviewed, published science and reflect the precautionary principle. Hunting and fishing can be effective tools for wildlife management, but they should be permitted only to the extent the agency knows, through extensive research and data collection, they will not jeopardize the long-term health of our ecosystems. 

CPW staff should receive merit bonuses for successfully recovering threatened and endangered species.

And CPW should establish an ecosystem services program, starting with a minimum of $75 million to $100 million per year, to pay private landowners, especially ranchers and others who own and manage large, unfragmented tracts of land, to conserve, create, restore and enhance habitat to help recover CPW’s SWAP-listed species.  

And finally, CPW needs commissioners who take the challenge of biodiversity conservation seriously and will support a much greater investment of staff time, money and political capital to recover our rare, threatened and endangered species, rather than protect the current inadequate system of wildlife management from needed change.

Eric Washburn is a fifth-generation Coloradan and big game hunter.  He lives in Steamboat Springs.