Global
Extinction: Does It Matter?
By George Monbiot
Guardian
14 January, 2004
The
world, if the biologists' projections turn out to be correct, will soon
begin to revert to the Bible's fourth day of creation. There will be
grass and "herb-yielding seed" and "the fruit tree yielding
fruit". But "the moving creature that hath life", the
"fowl that may fly above the Earth", or the "great whales,
and every living creature that moveth" may one day be almost unknown
to us.
Last week, the journal
Nature published a report suggesting that, by 2050, around a quarter
of the world's animal and plant species could die out as a result of
global warming. To these we must add the millions threatened by farming,
logging, hunting, fishing and introduced species. The future is beginning
to look a little lonely.
Does it matter?
To most of those who govern us, plainly not. To most of the rest of
us, the answer seems to be yes, but we are not quite sure why. We have
little difficulty in recognizing the importance of other environmental
issues. Climate change causes droughts and floods, ozone depletion gives
us skin cancer, diesel pollution damages our lungs. But, while most
people feel that purging the world of its diversity of animals and plants
is somehow wrong, the feeling precedes a rational explanation. For the
past 30 years, the conservation movement has been trying to provide
one. Its efforts have, for the most part, failed.
The problem conservationists
face is this: that by comparison to almost all other global issues,
our concerns about biodiversity seem effete and self-indulgent. If we
are presented with a choice between growing food to avert starvation
and protecting an obscure forest frog, the frog loses every time. If
climate change is going to make life impossible for hundreds of millions
of human beings, who cares about what it might do to Boyd's forest dragon?
So they have sought
to confront utilitarianism with utilitarianism. If the rainforests are
destroyed, they argue, we may never find the cure for cancer. If the
wild relatives of our crop plants die out, we might lose the genes that
could be used to breed new pest-resistant strains. Many of the world's
indigenous people depend upon a wide range of species for their survival.
An impoverished environment is likely to be less stable, and so less
productive, than a diverse one.
All this may be
true, but it doesn't solve the problem of justification. Most of us
don't need biodiversity to survive. The farmers who produce our food
try to keep the ecosystem as impoverished as possible. A utilitarian
approach, long favored by communists as well as capitalists, would integrate
indigenous people into the mainstream economy, drag almost all the population
of the countryside out of its "rural idiocy", and turn every
productive acre of the Earth over to crops.
Utilitarianism also
suggests that the value of biodiversity is exhausted once it ceases
to be useful to us. When a rainforest has been screened for pharmaceutical
compounds, it offers, according to this doctrine, no further benefits.
We can grow the useful species in plantations, or produce the compounds
they contain in the lab, and junk the rest. By arguing for biodiversity
on the grounds of human need, in other words, conservationists play
into the hands of their enemies.
The lovers of fine
art or rare books don't feel the need to set this trap for themselves.
They never suggest that money and effort should be spent on restoring
old masters because one day someone might want to eat them. They can
defend the things they value, even while accepting that there may be
a conflict between their protection and other social needs. We could
solve London's housing crisis by leveling its historic buildings, grubbing
up the parks and building high-rise homes in their place. But the aesthetes
can confidently assert that the lives of its people would scarcely be
improved by those means.
The special problem
the conservationists of nature face is that in many parts of the world
their cause has been used as an excuse for the maintenance of a colonial
model of exclusion. Nothing has done more harm to conservation than
the work of people like Richard Leakey, Joy Adamson and Diane Fossey.
To white tourists, who now have more or less exclusive access to the
places they helped to protect, these people are heroes. To local people
they are villains, and the wildlife they protected is perceived as a
threat. If every time a public gallery was built, thousands of us were
kicked out of our homes to make way for it, then told we could enter
only by paying the equivalent of our annual income, we would feel the
same way about art.
This legacy of exclusion
makes conservation look harder to justify on the grounds of aesthetics.
But it seems to me that this is the only sensible argument that can
be made. It is surely sufficient to say that wildlife should be preserved
because it is wonderful.
But, somehow, most
conservationists can't quite bring themselves to do so. Even those who
admit that they want to protect it because they love it can't leave
it at that, but insist on seeking some higher justification. It used
to be God; now they claim to be acting for "the sake of the planet"
or "the ecosystem" or "the future".
As far as the planet
is concerned, it is not concerned. It is a lump of rock. It is inhabited
by clumps of self-replicating molecules we call lifeforms, whose purpose
is to reverse entropy for as long as possible, by capturing energy from
the sun or other lifeforms. The ecosystem is simply the flow of captured
energy between these lifeforms. It has no values, no wishes, no demands.
It neither offers nor recognizes cruelty and kindness.
Like other lifeforms,
we exist only to replicate ourselves. We have become so complex only
because that enables us to steal more energy. One day, natural selection
will shake us off the planet. Our works won't even be forgotten. There
will be nothing capable of remembering.
But a curious component
of our complexity is that, in common with other complex forms, we have
evolved a capacity for suffering. We suffer when the world becomes a
less pleasant and fascinating place. We suffer because we perceive the
suffering of others.
It appears to me
that the only higher purpose we could possibly possess is to seek to
relieve suffering: our own and that of other people and other animals.
This is surely sufficient cause for any project we might attempt. It
is sufficient cause for the protection of fine art or rare books. It
is sufficient cause for the protection of rare wildlife.
Biodiversity, in
other words, matters because it matters. If we are to protect wildlife,
we must do it for ourselves. We need not pretend that anything else
is bidding us to do so. We need not pretend that anyone depends upon
the king protea or the golden toad or the silky sifaka for their survival.
But we can say that, as far as we are concerned, the world would be
a poorer place without them.
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