Steller was a naturalist, but he accidentally encountered the animals while on an expedition that had become lost and ravaged by scurvy. They'd run aground and assumed they could walk to Siberia (if you're ever longing for the comfort and safety of Siberia, something has gone horribly wrong), but Steller soon realized they were on an island that had likely been untouched by humans. Then he spotted the sea cows.

Steller had two reactions to discovering the behemoths. The first was that they were majestic wonders of nature, and the second was that they were stupid and delicious. One of the 10-ton beasts could feed the crew for a month, and apparently they made for some damn fine eating. Their reaction to being harpooned was to sort of float there and take it, with other sea cows ineptly trying to mount a defense, and even making themselves vulnerable by returning to visit the corpses of their mates.

The explorers were eating to survive, but Steller envisioned a future in which hunters could come to the island and live off the cows, while harvesting both their fat and valuable pelts from the island's countless otters. And that's pretty much exactly what happened, with fur hunters driving the sea cows to extinction. They were already in rough shape, with only an estimated 1,500 still alive at the time of their discovery. The nonstop harpoonings of the poor placid bozos didn't exactly help, but the real problem might have been the mass otter hunting, which lowered the number of sea urchins being eaten, which let the urchins consume more kelp, which starved the cows of their main food source.

This annihilation wasn't callous indifference. Steller and most of his contemporaries believed that nature was inexhaustible, and would keep spitting otters and sea cows at them no matter how many were slaughtered. So if there's an upside to this story, it's that this case made everyone re-examine that belief in a real hurry. The concept of extinction became a part of natural science, and the sea cows have also contributed to an understanding of how over-hunting can affect species. So could someone go ahead and Jurassic Park these pitiful bastards back into existence, please?

Related: 6 Natural Disasters That Were Caused By Human Stupidity

Only a handful of islands suited the auks' mating needs, and by the late 1700s, those islands were being decimated. Going to the ill-named Funk Island and plucking birds all summer to fuel the ceaseless demands of the feather industry was the 18th-century equivalent of working at the local water park. In 1718, Funk Island was described as so overrun by auks that you couldn't put your foot between them. By 1810, the place was barren.

There were efforts to save the auk. A petition led to a 1775 law that made taking an auk's eggs or killing it for its feathers punishable by, uh, being beaten in public (certainly puts ideas like a carbon tax in perspective). But it was still legal to kill them for their meat, and in a dark irony, their growing rarity made rich collectors willing to pay as much for a specimen as a skilled worker would make in a year. Who wouldn't risk a public flogging if you could cover 12 months of bills in a few days' work?

But there are two incidents that truly stand out in the annals of stupidity. In 1840, sailors snagged an auk from an island off Scotland, only to superstitiously stone it to death four days later amid a terrible storm, no doubt prompting a sailor to drunkenly slur "More like the not so great auk!" before offering up high-fives. It was the last auk seen in Great Britain, and by 1844, the auks were down to one lonely colony off the coast of Iceland.

One day, three men rowed out there, captured and strangled a pair of auks, left their cracked egg behind, and sold the bodies to a dealer. And that was the last time anyone ever saw a living great auk. Their demise inspired stronger conservation efforts for other endangered species -- which feels like a sentence that 22nd-century Cracked is going to write about whatever animal goes extinct over the next five years.

Related: 6 Horrible Historical Disasters (We Actually Saw Coming)

But all Soviet fishermen saw were rewards for meeting their quotas and punishments for missing them. Exceed Moscow's targets and you'd be paid a bonus, praised in the press, and have parades thrown in your honor. Turn up short and you'd be demoted or fired. In one infamous incident, a whaling industry pioneer was lauded with the Order of Lenin one year, then thrown in jail and accused of being a Japanese agent the next.

It was better to risk being an international criminal than to run afoul of the party at home, so whalers met their quotas while rarely putting more than 30% of the whales they hunted to use (Japanese whalers use about 90%). Then those quotas increased, because to the planners, it looked like whalers were doing so great that they might as well aim higher and make the economy even stronger. Because what is an economy but a series of numbers forever spiraling upwards?

Everyone involved either didn't realize anything was amiss or didn't want to face the risks of asking questions outside of their purview. The details of this nonsense are known today because some whalers kept secret diaries and hid records they'd been ordered to burn. The Soviets killed about 180,000 more whales then they'd claimed, driving multiple species to the brink of extinction. They only stopped when international conservation efforts became more intense, and by that point they'd essentially run out of whales to kill anyway.

Related: 6 Apocalypse Scenarios That Science Says We're Overdue For

May 2019 saw the Amazon lose 739 square km, the largest monthly loss since satellite tracking began. One month's data can look worse than the big picture, but Bolsonaro has overseen an overall 40% increase in rainforest loss. And no, the Ents aren't fighting a Civil War. The Bolsonaro administration is ignoring, if not openly encouraging, ostensibly illegal farming, mining, and logging by not issuing warnings and fines. They're also cutting regulations, weakening the Ministry of the Environment and all their evil "numbers" and "warnings that the Amazon is kind of important to the entire planet," as well as harassing the ministry's workers for trying to do their jobs.

But that's regular old self-interested corruption. Where Bolsonaro really crossed over into cartoonish supervillainy was when he announced plans to open up the reserves of indigenous people for mining. Those reserves have historically been some of the Amazon's most carefully protected land. When asked to justify this decision, Bolsonaro said that he was actually protecting indigenous human rights by ensuring that they can work in modern society. Indigenous leaders disagree, and are worried their land is under threat, with one saying, "We will go through another colonization process." But it's probably just a coincidence that Bolsonaro is calling on them to live like he wants them to after cutting their healthcare funding.

The Amazon does contain valuable resources, and it's not impossible to balance extraction and preservation. But this is a government that transferred the regulation of reserves to a ministry dominated by the agribusiness lobby, which is like letting McDonald's and Coca-Cola plan the USDA's food guidelines. No one's going to bother compromising when they only have to disguise the blatant favoritism by promising to not rub their hands together and cackle.

Reforestation is one of the easier and relatively undemanding ways to combat climate change. But gutting the huge carbon sink that is the Amazon sends the planet in the exact opposite direction, and Bolsonaro dismissing all criticism by saying that he's "fulfilling a mission from God" doesn't suggest that there will be much sober self-reflection. God couldn't be reached for comment, but His book seems to have a lot to say about stewardship of the Earth. In the meantime, Bolsonaro's terrestrial approval ratings have plummeted to 29.4%.

Mark is on Twitter and wrote a book.

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