Who Am I and If So How Many? (20 page)

When Charles Darwin proved the origin of man in the animal kingdom, he still stopped short of characterizing man as an ‘intelligent animal’ for quite some time. Even in the twentieth century, the famous evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, a grandson of Darwin’s contemporary Thomas Henry Huxley, called man
Psychozoa
(‘mind-animal’) to highlight man’s uniquely
gifted grade of life. Neuroscience is now pulling us out of this noble enclave and back to our relatives, who are neither mindless creatures nor ‘lower’ beings and have a value that must be acknowledged. But where does this value begin, and is all of nature worth protecting and preserving?

They are intelligent, musical, and sensitive. Mothers nurse their babies for eight months and care for them for several years. At the age of thirteen, they reach sexual maturity. Few other animals have such social and varied lives. Their language is intricate and complex, and they take care of one another in an exemplary manner. Their playful nature is engaging and enchanting. They live a long life, to the age of seventy and beyond, because their only natural enemies are the Norwegians, Icelanders, and Japanese. Over the past twenty years, twenty-five thousand whales have been harpooned by whalers, bleeding to death with their internal organs shredded, or suffocating, half-butchered, on the decks of modern factory ships, with ruptured lungs or punctuated
diaphragms
. Twenty-five thousand dead whales – how can God, or a supposedly rational community of states, allow this to happen?

A 1986 resolution by the International Whaling Commission stipulates that no whales may be killed in the oceans unless they are hunted by indigenous peoples in the Arctic or will be used for research purposes. Since that time, many Japanese have been bent on researching whales, and they ‘study’ up to a thousand whales a year. Norwegians have been declared an indigenous people, which
allows them to skirt the resolution as well. In other words, anyone determined to kill whales can find a way to do so, while the International Whaling Commission sits back and watches or even casts a majority vote against the ban.

Whaling is a fairly unappetizing business – as the Japanese know full well, even though they insist that whaling is simply part of Nippon’s medieval tradition and cannot be abolished just because the number of whales is declining. Interestingly, the declining population is the only argument invoked by opponents of whaling who serve on the commission. Their motive for preserving the whales is their rarity – not their right to life. The United Nations has a Human Rights Council for people, but there is no corresponding Animal Rights Council, only a whaling
commission
. There is no international agency to protect animals or ensure their rights. All we have are trade commissions such as the whaling commission. The highest authority is the Convention on
International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

The first CITES conference convened in Washington, D.C., in 1973 and drew up an Endangered Species Act. But since 1973, people have nonetheless wiped out about half of all the species of animals and plants that existed then; that is a mass extinction of enormous magnitude. In the past few decades, people have inflicted greater damage on the earth than in all the preceding centuries, from the beginning of mankind until World War II. Each year, 5 percent of the land surface of the planet falls victim to flames. Only 6 percent of the planet’s land surface still contains tropical forests, the most species-diverse biotopes on earth; within fewer than thirty years, the forests have dwindled to less than half their original size. If the current deforestation trends continue at this rate, the last tropical tree will have been felled by the year 2045. Day by day, several hundred animal species die out, most of them nameless and never discovered by science.

No one knows today how many species still exist. The number may be the oft-cited 30 million; then again, it may be as high as
100 million, or as low as 6 million. In contrast to the Cretaceous period, which began with the end of the dinosaurs and the Age of Mammals, the current rate of extinction is about a million times higher than the rate at which new species emerge. One-fifth of all known bird species have already died out or are at the brink of extinction. With every species the complex genetic makeup of 1 to 10 billion base pairs dies out forever. The failure of the mass media and politicians to address this issue means that future generations will be faced with an enormous problem. Remarkably, there is only a single professorship allocated to environmental ethics in all of Germany, in contrast to about forty for eighteenth-century philosophy. The indifference on the part of the universities is dismaying. It is hard to find any philosophical discipline that is as neglected as environmental ethics. But from what other discipline might we expect satisfactory answers to the basic questions of how and why endangered species can be protected from extinction?

The answer to why they should be protected might appear simple. Protecting nature means protecting ourselves. People say that once trees die, man is sure to follow. Maybe so. But the matter is not that straightforward. James Lovelock, a famous British chemist, doctor, and geophysiologist with many scientific
publications
and numerous patents, believes that all living things need to be respected, but his view of what constitutes a living creature is quite peculiar. Lovelock counts not only plants and animals, but also substances that are typically considered dead, such as crude oil, humus, lime rock, and oxygen. All of these arose from the interaction of dynamic biochemical processes. In the 1980s and 1990s, environmental philosophers used similar arguments (though less flowery language) to contend that the time had come to extend reverence, responsibility, respect, and dignity to all of nature.

Those who, like Lovelock, declare everything in nature of value can easily draw a host of strange, or even antihuman, conclusions, in which man figures as a dangerous interloper in a wonderful world of equilibrium and harmony. Lovelock, who turned ninety in 2009, has managed to see a positive side to the nuclear reactor
catastrophe in Chernobyl: because people no longer venture into the contaminated areas, many trees and bushes now grow in the deserted region. Plants are generally more immune to radioactivity than humans. To Lovelock’s utter delight, the new habitat is untouched by human hands. Clearly, this pleasure would not be shared by anyone who has been affected personally by the catastrophe. It would be impossible to imagine the mother of a cancer-stricken Chernobyl baby welcoming this development.

Beauty in nature cannot be equated with goodness, and once you have experienced the vicious side, it is hard to regard it as beautiful. Cliffs, canyons, deserts, and gorges, which today we view as magnificent, are the remains of enormous catastrophes. Cosmic explosions, meteorite collisions, devastating volcanic eruptions, and other geological disasters chronicle the history of a planet that began with a tremendous diversity of life forms and has retained only a single percent of that bio diversity. The rest dwindled away forever, buried in volcanic ash, frozen under the gray layer of dirt in the atmosphere, ensnared in insidious traps, jagged jaws, and vicious claws, losers in the cold battle for reproductive success. It takes quite a bit of romantic ignorance to reconcile the cruelties and dissonances of life with an image of a Garden of Paradise created in peaceful harmony. Nature is neither good nor bad per se; these categories simply do not come into play.

It is no easy matter to determine the inherent value of nature. If millions of animal species have died out without human
intervention
– and philosophers in the West even see this as a ‘harmonious process’ – how can we decry man’s eradication of the animal kingdom? Man is also an animal, and the fact that man displaces or wipes out other animal species is a ‘natural process’ that occurs in nature on its own, albeit on a lesser scale. In this light,
Homo
sapiens
, which in the past millennia has taken possession of the entire planet and multiplied into billions, is one natural
catastrophe
among many others. As a biological selection factor, humans even decide the direction evolution takes: who gets to survive, and who dies out.

Those who are uneasy with the idea of an intrinsic value in nature tend to argue instead that if nature has a value, that value is surely
for
man
, and that it is in our ecological self-interest to retain the diversity of species. We need the rainforest for our atmosphere, we need clean oceans for our climate and our supply of drinking water. Everything on our planet, we’re told, is interrelated; the world is one big ecosystem in which every species has an important place.

But is that really the case? The question of the ecological significance of the diversity of species has yet to be resolved. Ecologists are essentially split between two conflicting views. Let us picture the world as an airplane to help us visualize the two possible roles of the many plant and animal species. One group of ecologists believes that every species is a rivet needed to hold the plane together; the demise of any species compromises the airworthiness of the plane, and it eventually crashes. Other ecologists see the matter quite differently; for them, many species are simply superfluous passengers in a plane that could also fly quite nicely with a small crew.

Whatever the case, one thing seems certain: not every animal or plant species is ecologically indispensable. This is particularly true of many of the most beautiful of nature’s assets. Siberian tigers, okapis, pandas, orangutans, and certain species of dolphins are threatened with extinction. But the fate of the taiga of the Sikhote-Alin mountain range does not rest on the remaining three hundred tigers there. The same is true of the okapis in the Ituri rainforest, the pandas in China, and the last orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo. And friends of dolphins can rest assured that it won’t be the end of the ocean just because whales disappear from it. Although the long-term consequences of human intervention are hard to predict, the extinction of particular species appears not to affect the big picture too drastically. It may well be that only a few tree species are needed to keep the carbon cycle in the tropical forests going. The pollution of drinking water and the destruction of the protective ozone layer wreak enormous damage on the biological cycles of nature, but the extinction of tigers, okapis,
pandas, orangutans, or whales does not. We seem to want to prevent many animals from becoming extinct even when they are nonessential for their respective ecosystems. Indeed, humans sometimes raise much more money and devote more energy to saving animals that are relatively unimportant ecologically than to some extremely important insects, microbes, and bacteria. Ecology is certainly not the only motivation for aiding endangered species, and that is just as it should be, because if we were to judge the value of life only according to its function for the biological cycle, we would wind up with horrible results. Certain bacteria serve a more important and beneficial role in ecology than do humans, so should we favor them over man if required to choose? And surely it is not cause for celebration that the 7 million people who die of starvation on our planet every year will not consume our natural resources and thus conceivably prolong the longevity of the tropical forests.

A strictly defined ecology does not incorporate moral
considerations
. No sane person regards other people as mere biocatalysts or metabolic units – even a sociopath like Phineas Gage probably wouldn’t think in those terms. If we acknowledge that people have a value that differs from that of rubber trees, it is because humans are capable of complex feelings. But a dog, a cat, a pig, a tiger, or an elephant can also experience pain or pleasure. The difference between the right to life of a human being and that of the other animals is thus gradualistic at best, measured by the complexity of what we perceive to be their ability to feel. Wildlife conservation that disregards the right to life of highly complex forms of life makes no sense from this perspective – this right to life is the only ethical argument, so the CITES discussion about hunting quotas for whales is not just about whether the gray and minke whales prized in Norway and Japan are actually endangered, nor can the question of whether it is permissible to shoot African elephants ignore this issue. Those who deem it legitimate to kill what are said to be excess numbers of animals in the national parks need to consider the defensibility of their solution in a clear case of human overpopulation.

The question of the point of species protection, now and in the future, cannot be resolved solely on the basis of ecological practicality. And rarity is not necessarily an ethical factor, because rarity of a species says nothing about its capacity for suffering. Without a doubt, okapis, tigers, and orangutans have an interest in living. But if we establish that this is true of a single individual within a species, does that make it apply to the species as a whole? Here, it would seem, the crucial difference is whether we argue in the name of morality or in the name of the creatures in question. How important is it to establish that an animal would know and suffer from the knowledge that it would be the final member of its species? Should the Siberian tiger someday vanish forever from the Manchurian birch forests, the extinction of this species would likely interest the tiger less than it would us. We save the tiger not in the interest of the tiger, but in the interest of humans who find tigers fascinating and do not want to stand by and watch poachers finish off the last of this beautiful animal for a handful of dollars. But do aesthetic criteria matter when it comes to protecting endangered animal and plant species from extinction? Why do there need to be tigers in the boreal forests of the Sikhote-Alin when they are procreating quite nicely in the zoos of the world? Maybe our aesthetic need to recognize ‘values’ that we did not create ourselves would die out along with the species.

No philosopher or ecologist can provide unequivocally valid reasons for the existence of all the millions of animal species on this planet. For that matter, it would take quite a bit of philosophical rationalization to explain why there need to be humans. The most compelling argument for the value of humans is their complex capability for suffering and happiness. But if the same is also true of whales and elephants, they should be protected from being killed and from losing their means of subsistence, too, not because they are rare or beautiful, but because they have an interest in living that we cannot ignore. And we should also proceed cautiously in dealing with creatures about whose emotional lives we have even less evidence, such as frogs, birds, plants, or jellyfish. People still pit
their allegedly ‘anthropocentric’ interests against those of other creatures in rationalizing actions that contaminate the oceans, pollute the air, and ruthlessly plunder natural resources, even though it’s clear that man loses out in the process.