Mark Carwardine

The broadcaster and campaigner airs his views on the world’s rarest marine mammal – the vaquita – and invites your thoughts on efforts to save it.

After the extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin – the first cetacean to have been driven over the edge by human greed and incompetence – I was naïve to think that we might learn a few lessons.

Admittedly, the Yangtze River in China has been an environmental disaster zone for decades, but the dolphin’s fate was ultimately sealed by an outrageous lack of funds, ineffective project management, and a lack of coordination and agreement between conservation groups, western scientists and Chinese authorities. There was so much faffing about that far too little was done, far too late.

This is one reason we’re barely holding against the tide of environmental decline – a lack of what I call ‘predictive conservation’. Time after time, we fail to take action until the extinction clock strikes five minutes to midnight. We stand by and watch endangered species slide down the slippery slope towards oblivion, and fail to act until their situation becomes so desperate that they’ve almost reached the point of no return.