According to Wikipedia, which is the way you should start all pieces of writing, in 2009 the United States fish and Wildlife Service listed 1200 animals from insects to mammals as endangered. Don't worry, other sources confirmed Wikepedia's (usually accurate) facts. 1200 animals is a lot of animals, many of which I had never heard of, such as the Kangaroo rat and the Gila monster. Don't worry, it's just a large lizard. At the risk of sounding overly calloused, I am going to revive the argument we have been having all semester about whether or not it is our duty to keep the number of species at the same levels in the same places as they were before humans "came along". Is it really important that we "save" the Gila monster? While this conundrum has been at the core of everything that we have talked about this semester, it hasn't been properly argued yet.
It is a simple fact that endless numbers of species have come and gone from the planet over the course of the last several billion years. Our own time on the planet is only a small slice of the last square of the toilet paper roll of the earth's life. When we think of the history of these animals coming and going, is it really tragic? Is it sad? Not unless you have a weirdly intimate connection with a particular velociraptor. What happened happened, and we are so out of touch with it that it doesn't matter to us that many of the dinosaurs, incredibly creatures, died when a meteor hit the earth. It doesn't matter to us that the Dodo bird no longer exists. So then when do we start to really care?
I realized the other day that I don't feel particularly bad about the disappearance of wolves or declining cougar populations. I don't feel sorry that the Adirondacks are changing at all, or that any of those changes are necessarily bad. However, when I imagine the woods of northern Maine, the woods where I grew up canoeing and fishing changing, it makes my skin tingle. This makes it clear to me that in order to really care about an area, you have to have a real connection to it. The handful of times that I have been to the Adirondacks hasn't done it. This "connection is caring" attitude can also be seen on a larger scale, i.e. global climate change. "So what, the world is changing. Wait, it's going to affect the place I live?" is a self-centered attitude many of us have harbored, myself included. Really good conservation work is not done by those who have a connection to the land but by those who don't.
Sources:
"Total Number of Known Threatened Species: 16,938." Endangered Species International. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.
"List of Endangered Species in North America." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.
I see what you mean about protecting the things you love — I have dedicated a lot of time to protect and clean up my home, the Chesapeake Bay. However, I disagree with you in terms of having no obligation to save a changing world at the hands of humans just because it's a "natural" occurrence in the history of evolution. We have been discussing this heavily in Environmental Ethics. I believe that yes, while environmental change does force species to either adapt or die, humans should not be the main cause of that, and we should hold ourselves responsible for ending lives every time we turn on cars or leave the shower running.
ReplyDeleteDoes the same thing that we do to other organisms not happen to us? Whenever hurricanes come ashore, for instance, we try to buffer its effects, and when it kills humans we get angry. We think it is a tragedy that nature had to kill human beings. The only difference between nature and humans is people knowingly continue their murderous actions, where as nature is not sentient or partial towards species. Knowing this difference between right and wrong as we do, I think we do have an obligation to other species, because unlike nature, we know what our actions are doing to them.