Racing Extinction

I was reading The Financial Times,

and it was a little, tiny, two-paragraph story that said,

"Mankind may be causing a mass-extinction event."

It was, like, buried on like page six or seven.

And l thought,

"This is how humanity is dealing with the issue.

"They're not dealing with it."

Check your cellphone.

If you get anywhere near this place, he scrambles the signal.

Louie, man , how are you?

Just curious, how many cameras do you have on you right now?

You mean, like, on my table or--

No, no. On your body.

On my body?

Less than seven, but probably more than two.

Okay, so, we're doing an order here.

One hat cam, two buttonhole cameras,

sports bra, one bottle cam, 5. 1 1 tac shirt with the vibration .

-Whenever you're ready. -Oh , yeah .

So you're rolling right now, so you can get the entrance.

And make sure, of course, the straps are gone.

Okay.

Your reservation's in ten minutes.

All right.

So, we ate Codfish.

Kobe beef and also some sweet shrimp.

I was raised on it.

She brought me here.

Yeah .

We try to be adventurous, yeah.

I started eating it like ten years ago.

l've been having sashimi a lot at my grandpa's.

-Oh , yeah . -We would go out.

Thank you .

This is a special tamari soy sauce from the chef.

l don't know.

Yeah, three pieces. We got it.

It's a bingo.

The owners and chef of one of America's trendiest restaurants. . .

. . .are facing federal charges tonight,

all because of what they put on customers' plates.

An endangered species.

And behind the undercover sting,

some movie makers who went right back to work.

We're making our own road here.

Pretty big, the side of the skull here, yeah.

I did four stories about extinction for

National Geographic magazine.

You go to these beautiful landscapes.

There's dinosaurs from horizon to horizon.

And you think, "That was so far back then,

"what if it's going on right now and everybody's missing it?"

Each year, about one in a million species

should expire naturally.

In the next few decades,

we'll be driving species to extinction...

...a thousand times faster than they should be.

It's difficult to estimate

precisely how many species we're gonna lose.

In a hundred years or so,

we could lose up to 50% of all the species on Earth.

I remember thinking,

"This is the biggest story in the world."

It's like we're living in the age of dinosaurs,

but we can do something about it.

A friend of mine just reported up in that area.

Roger.

The blue whale is the biggest creature

that ever lived on the planet.

Bigger than any dinosaur ever.

Just like dinosaurs, they're going extinct.

It's coming in hot!

There it is!

Look at him.

Back in the days of whaling,

they were hunted to near-extinction,

down to about two percent of their population.

Now they're getting decimated by shipping traffic.

Go for it.

He's coming up to the right.

To the right.

My hope is that if you can show people

the beauty of these animals,

there's a chance to save these things.

One of the cool things about a blue whale

is that it has the loudest song in the animal kingdom,

but you can't hear it,

because it's below our threshold for hearing.

We look out at the world through these eyes and these ears,

and you think, "Oh, that's it.

"That's everything that there is to see."

But there's this hidden world on almost every level.

What I want to do is get people to see it.

We get off the boat,

and this fisherman comes up to our interpreter

and says, "Can you give me $500?

"I found this buoy. There's a $500 reward.

"lt needs to be returned up to America."

And I said, "Just a minute.

"Let me take a look at this buoy."

And I look at it, and it says,

"Return to Chris Clark, Cornell Bioacoustic laboratory."

I said, "I know this guy."

Chris had been pioneering new ways to record whales

for 30 years.

He basically proved that these animals

could hear themselves across oceans.

And so, to me, finding that buoy

was like finding a message in a bottle.

We built these recording systems.

We dropped them in the ocean, and they record continuously.

Whales and dolphins and anything that's out there...

we try and record.

So, the first time,

I knew there was a blue whale singing nearby.

l could see it on the display, but I couldn't hear it.

So what do you have to do? You have to speed it up.

And still, the hair goes up on the back of my neck,

and it just, like-- It's like,

"Damn! That's fabulous."

As we listen more and more

around different parts of the planet,

whether it's frozen Arctic ocean

or the deepest jungles of Central Africa,

the whole world is singing.

Clicking and grinding and whistling and thumping.

But we've stopped listening.

The Cornell Bioacoustical Laboratory

has the largest repository of animal sounds on the planet.

They've been collecting them since the 1 930s.

You can think of it as a museum,

just like there could be bird skins or, you know,

beetles tacked up on a wall.

So there's this range of sounds

from the largest animal ever to live on this planet

to the tiniest, little insects.

This is a song recording

of a male 'o'o singing on Kaua'i.

These birds mate for life,

so he would be singing a duet with his mate,

where he sings, and then she sings back and forth.

Here comes the male's song.

There's no response.

Here's the male's song again.

That's the last male of a species,

singing for a female

who will never come.

He is totally alone.

And now his voice is gone.

In the brief lifetime of this collection,

70 years or so,

many of the species that were recorded are now extinct.

So the repository is a living example

of the massive rate of extinction that's happening.

There's been five major extinctions in the history of the planet.

There's the Ordovician,

the Devonian,

the Permian...

...there was the triassic-jurassic,

...and then the K-t extinction,

...the one that killed the dinosaurs.

It's very difficult to comprehend deep time.

You know, 4.6 billion years of Earth's history.

But if you take, say, the history of the Earth

and try to squeeze it into a 24-hour clock,

where does man fit on that clock?

A few seconds before midnight. That's it.

We're the new kid on the block.

What we're seeing now...

...is called the anthropocene, the new epoch.

Anthropocene means the time of humans.

It's when the impact of humans is leaving itself as a mark

in the fossil record of the future.

65 million years ago,

there was an asteroid that struck

and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.

When it comes to the sixth extinction event,

we have no problem identifying the cause.

Humanity has become the asteroid.

We're on that tipping point now,

where it's either...

too late or just the beginning of a movement.

So, there's two pieces of whale and one piece of horse.

At the Hump restaurant,

we knew that they were selling whale meat.

But there's also something bigger going on.

We heard that the Obama administration

was in closed-doors negotiations with the Japanese

to go do commercial whaling again.

And I thought, "Well, if we could prove

"that endangered whales are being served right here,

"on the shores of America,

"we would stop that conversation."

Stop the murder! Stop the death!

Hump restaurant is to blame!

The animal-rights community took it up,

but the restaurant didn't close down.

There's this one guy I'd never heard of before,

his name is Ady Gil.

He took some gear and put it out in front of the Hump restaurant,