Diane Reynolds, Jeff Corwin and Deb Ward (Provided photo — Naj Wikoff)

Jeff Corwin — creator, executive producer, and presenter of ABC’s “Wildlife Nation” series — attracted a large audience to the Lake Placid Institute’s open Adirondack Roundtable Saturday morning, July 13, to learn about challenges facing Earth’s wildlife, how it impacts human life and what we can do.

Corwin is a very engaging presenter who began by sharing how a common garter snake in his grandparents’ backyard changed his life trajectory. The session was co-presented by the Institute and the Lake Placid Center for the Arts; they are now in their second year of working together. It was held at the Cambria Hotel, and The Bookstore Plus arranged a book signing. The Roundtables, launched by the late John C. Bogle, begin with a breakfast at 8:30 and a lecture that starts at 9 and usually lasts 30 to 40 minutes, a time that Corwin blew past.

The Roundtable represented Corwin’s second visit to the Adirondacks. The first was while on assignment for “NBC Nightly News,” where he was an environmental correspondent covering the plight of the brown bat.

“Many people don’t know that the brown bat was the most abundant mammal species in North America just a few years ago, but now it is the most imperiled species,” said Corwin. “Why does that matter? One little brown bat can eat 1,200 to 1,400 mosquito-sized insects in one evening, and one colony of brown bats consumes about 40 dump trucks worth of insects every year, which carry many surface diseases.”

Corwin said they went into a small pastoral hamlet and visited a well-known bat cave that had housed 250,000 bats the year before.

John and Ellen McMillan and Scott McGraw (Provided photo — Naj Wikoff)

“Twenty-four had survived,” said Corwin. “We went in, and there was this carpet of pine needles, about 8 inches thick, that covered the floor of the whole cave. I wondered how pine needles got into this cave. It wasn’t pine needles; it was all the finger bones of all the dead bats. It’s a story that reflects where we are on our planet.”

“I share it as a connection to this place and the power of your backyard as it illustrates the importance of protecting this wild landscape,” said Corwin. “But even as we do, we are still faced with incredible pressures on a tiny little innocuous bat which we don’t think matters much. But then we realize that the little bat living link to managing disease, which in this case is white-nose syndrome, has changed the fabric of bats throughout North America. Why does that matter? If you go to the Sonoran Desert, 50% of all those cactuses are germinated and pollinated by bats.”

While trying to save a loon as a teenager had a big impact on Corwin’s early path to becoming a naturalist, it was the garter snake that set the hook deep into his heart and lit the passion that drives him to this day. At the time, his family lived in a tiny apartment in Quincy, Massachusetts. The only nature he experienced was when visiting his grandparents living in the country.

“I rolled over a log and saw this thing; it was scaley and legless,” said Corwin. “I started to shake. I was so excited. I thought I had discovered something no one had ever seen before.”

The snake scooted away. Corwin went after it, caught it and then wrapped the snake around his hand and it tried to bite him. He brought the snake inside and, after learning what it was, released it back into the wilds. So began a two-year relationship with Gladys, Corwin’s gateway snake to nature. Two years on, he was 8 and watched a neighbor kill the snake with a spade.

Bruce Berra, Lorraine Duvall and Art Lussi (Provided photo — Naj Wikoff)

“That was the day I realized that very good people make bad decisions when they lack information,” said Corwin. “Think about that today. People who are not armed with good information will make catastrophic decisions. The day I found that snake, I became a naturalist. The day Gladys was killed was the day I became a conservationist.”

Corwin said that we are in a terrifying and unprecedented time with nature as we are losing more species today on our planet than 60-plus million years ago. In the history of the planet, there have been five major extinctions caused by cataclysmic events, the last caused by an asteroid hitting Earth. We are now living in the sixth extinction, the difference being that it isn’t caused by an asteroid but by us, by our actions.

“The irony is that we are the most sentient being; we understand consequences, we understand the impact of our actions as a long-term ripple effect, but yet we find ourselves continuing this cycle of catastrophic impact on our planet,” said Corwin. “Why do we find ourselves in a place where every 20 to 25 minutes, a species disappears forever on our planet, a species that we may not even know about.”

Corwin said that species extinction is not new. For example, today, we have 400 species of sharks and tens of millions of years ago, there were 4,000 species of sharks. But today, we are a species that controls the destination of nearly all other life on Earth, yet we do not seem to understand that we cannot survive without a robust diversity of life. He feels we have created a perfect storm of interrelated acts that are leading to the death of life on Earth.

“What are those components?” said Corwin. “There are three to five of them, including climate change, habitat loss, pollution and environmental degradation and species exploitation. You can break that up and find plastics, black market wildlife trade and other bits and pieces of that articulation.”

Corwin pointed out that rainforests, home to the most incredible diversity on Earth and 70% of all life, take up only 5% of the Earth’s surface. Yet we are destroying them at a rate of 3,000 acres every hour, an area the size of West Virginia filled with plants and animals scraped off the Earth every year.

Corwin went through each sector, illustrating the alarming outcomes of collective actions and inactions. He illustrated how humans can make a radical difference, such as by rescuing the bald eagle from extinction. Doing so required people to set aside their political differences and mobilize for the common good.

“Think of a place where you wouldn’t want to live,” said Corwin. “What is the difference? Why in Lake Placid do you have this beautiful community, and why in some places in the world is society broken? Because of nature. Nature is what binds you here in Lake Placid (the Adirondacks) together. Nature is our salvation. We can look to the species we have salvaged and saved, like the bald eagle, as that carrot on the stick. Think of this natural resource as not something we’re leaving to our children but borrowing from them. How do we secure it for the next generation.”

“I was inspired, especially at the end when Jeff was talking about place-based education, falling in love with your backyard, expanding your love for what’s in your immediate environment into caring for the world,” said Kathleen Regan.

“He was spell binding, and an inspiration,” said Art Lussi. “He made all of us feel that we’re part of a conservation movement.”

“I was appalled by what’s happening. I learned so many facts. He was very specific with things I never had heard about,” said Diane Reynolds. “He shared an awareness that everybody has to have and what we have to do to change it, how lives, our planet depend on it.”

“My takeaway is that conservation is so critically important,” said Deb Ward.”

The next roundtable will be with nature photographer Julie Testwuide at 8:30 a.m. Aug. 10 at the Cambria Hotel.

(Naj Wikoff lives in Keene Valley. He has been covering events for the Lake Placid News for more than 15 years.)