If it's hurting other species, it's hurting us

One of the things I regret not posting more about is biodiversity and the crisis in the huge number of extinctions occurring on the planet. I think that is because one of the things I have been trying to do is get away from the environmentalists-care-more-about-animals that people stereotype.

Personally, I care a lot about the extinctions, not because of the utility of other species to humans but because I think they have their own value. But I consider my job not to be to write about just what I care about but to write about what other people care about. And one thing I think we can safely say is that we all care about human health and happiness, which is why I write a lot about the connections between our health, happiness and security and the health of our planetary habitat.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention is something that makes total sense to me--the fact that extinctions are occurring at an unprecedented rate is a direct harm to human health. The systems are complex, and I can't say that I understand how this manifests, but the blog Mongabay reports, as one example, that new cures for human ailments are under threat because of the global extinction crisis:

A new book Sustaining Life: How Human Life Depends on Biodiversity... is the largest text yet regarding the possible cures that have already been lost—and those that we are losing due to the globe's increasing loss of biodiversity...

... The gastric brooding frog of the Australian rainforest is just one example. Its unique style of parenting may have provided new cures for treating peptic ulcers in humans. The frog raised its young in its stomach; to survive the baby frogs produced a substance that halted acid and enzyme secretions, and stopped their mother from digesting the babies into her intestines. Unfortunately the two species of gastric brooding frog went extinct in the 1980s, and with them a possible cure.

I admittedly don't know much about this subject, so please, if you know more about how the extinction crisis harms human health and happiness, please leave behind a comment.

Photo by Rhett A. Butler courtesy of Mongabay.

Comments

[Mike]

We may seek utility in other species, but be careful about using it in your arguments. If other species are the means to the ends of broader "human health and happiness" then that value will be used as justification for other human-helping actions.

The best reason to not kill off species is because this planet does not belong to us.

[Andy]

I think what many people forget is that humans are just one part of this entire complex ecosystem on the planet. For some reason, we act as if we own everything, and as if plants, animals, bacteria and fungi are here to support us. We are all here to support each other, but unfortunately our species is more into taking than giving. I think your title should be more like, "If it's hurting anything, it's hurting everything."

When I traveled to Madagascar a few years ago, I saw an incredible amount of biodiversity. It's easy to see how the biodiversity on the 4th largest island is so important, because if one species there is affected, it can throw a whole region into trouble.

I also saw the very beginnings of the titanium dioxide mining in Madagascar. There were huge trucks getting ready to shred the forest, waiting on the south eastern coast. QMM, the company in charge of this operation, is going to spend the next 40 years (at least) ripping up and burning all the plant life on this coast, completely destroying the habitat for an incredible amount of species. And what does this get us? Titanium dioxide - which is used to whiten many products such as paint, toothpaste, and sunscreen. Do you think destroying the island with the greatest biodiversity is worth white toothpaste?! I'm sure there is another way to get white pigment that doesn't destroy the lives of millions of organisms.

But wait, this is news to many of you right? The reason we don't hear about many of these problems is because EUSCANZ generally don't care about Africa, especially when it's just an island, right? At the time I tried to find groups opposing this mining, and I couldn't find anything. It was hard enough just finding the material to read about this problem. Can you imagine how many other problems are affecting (or will soon affect) species on a large scale? It's pretty sickening. I wish toothpaste packaging gave a warning that by buying that product someone is acknowledging the destruction of Madagascar. And yes, Tom's of Maine does use titanium dioxide. I'm going to call them again today, and I urge you all to do the same.
-Andy

[Eric G.]

"...I have been trying to do is get away from the environmentalists-care-more-about-animals that people stereotype."

Good for you! This is one of my main sources of frustration with the environmentalist movement. As evidenced by Mike's comment, it is too often completely anti-human in its "rational" (I use scare quotes as I'm unsure how much reason factors into it) foundation.

"Personally, I care a lot about the extinctions, not because of the utility of other species to humans but because I think they have their own value."

There is no such thing as intrinsic value. In order for something to have value, it must have a valuer. Who values the frog in your photo? I'm sure the snakes in the jungle value them as a food source. But why are the snakes of value? Follow the chain and you end up with these animals (and biodiversity in general) being of value to humans. It is in our interests to protect them as valuable (or potentially valuable) resources to us.

Anyway, I hope you will continue posting about why protecting the environment is in an individual's rational self-interest. It's an approach more environmentalists should consider.

[Sharon]

It is a tough argument to navigate, I think - or at least I find it so. That is, if you argue that we need species for cures for our diseases, it implies that we have the right to use them for that purpose. On the other hand, some people don't care very much about wildlife, and the way to make them care is to emphasize the practical.

The idea I have found most compelling is EO Wilson's claim that most species enable or carry over 100 other species - that is, there are at least 100 other species on which the survival of one depends. But we've never considered which species we truly depend on. Is it honey bees? Frogs? Bacteria? Are we killing them? We simply don't know our world well enough to know what we're costing ourselves.

I really recommend Wilson's latest, the title of which escapes me.

Sharon

[Susan Och]

I recommend Tim Flannery's book The Weather Makers.

Flannery introduced me to the term "committed to exrinction". Because carbon dioxide lasts about 50 years in the atmosphere, we are stuck with a frightening level of future climate change already, a level at which many species will be wiped out due to habitat loss.

[Greenpa]

The concept of the "food web" or "web of life" is really quite accurate, and relatively easy to grasp if you give it a little thought.

Each critter in the web is connected to others. They eat each other, basically, or change the environment for each other.

Reality is a lot more than the 4 connections that are usual in a spider web; but the concept still works, and it's a lot easier to visualize the spider web than the reality of critical ties to 40 other organisms...

So, get out your scissors, and snip out- not a connection, but a node. You now have 4 loose threads. (or 40, in the real world) The web is not greatly disturbed. Yet.

Keep snipping. The web gets weaker, and weaker, and eventually, just a slight breeze may rip the whole thing down.

This is totally, exactly, true. The more connections are intact- the stronger the whole web is, the more difficult it is to disturb.

Modern agriculture is basically a "web" simplified down to 2 nodes- the crop, and the human. Really simple. All the silk in the web goes into the one thread, so it's nice and fat. But it's very easy for disaster to hit. So we coat the silk with- say- hairspray, to strengthen it. Pesticides, fertilizer. Sometimes, we get away with it; but it's insanely unstable, compared to any natural web.

Simple webs are precarious- complex ones very strong.

[Diane Gandee Sorbi]

All species matter. Even when we don't understand how, nature is interconnected. One plant or species depends on another, right up the chain.

Sad news, Andy. I had no idea what was happening in Madagascar. We certainly don't need titanium dioxide for our survival. I just don't get how anyone would being willing to destroy beauty and habitat for money. Greed is sickening.

[Karin]

please check www.planet-diversity.org

[Will Wright]

@Greenpa: That's one of the best uses of the web analogy I've seen.

I'd like to add the ideas of "causality flow" (my term) or domino effect and indirect consecquences. Basically, when one thing happens (for example, wolves disappearing from Yellowstone) it causes other things to happen (a surge in elk population), which in turn cause other things to happen (Over-browsing along river corridors), which lead to even more things (greater erosion due to the lack of vegetation and root mass, bigger floods, less green leafy plant matter to sequester CO2.) In our example, the loss of one species led to a massive change in the ecosystem and the loss of ecosystem services upon which we as humans depend (in our example some of the ecosystem services compromised/lost were flood control, water filtration, and CO2 sequestration.) Another part of the example is the fact that an overabundance of elk leads to greater competition for the cattle on which many people in the area depend (ranchers are the obvious dependents but there are others).

This is just one example of the loss (or addition) of a species causing problems for humans. To be fair, there are also countless examples of the loss or addition of a species not really affecting the rest of the system (namely because the system still had enough nodes intact and wasn't unduly stressed already), but the more species we lose, the greater the chances of one of those species being critical. And it's nearly impossible to predict all of the indirect consequences.

Basically, we've put a lot of stress on our support system, and we don't really know what we're doing, so we could easily put stress on the weak link and break things pretty royally. The best action we can take now is to limit the stress we put on the system. And maintaining biodiversity is one way to limit that stress.

[Melanie]

My family took a trip to the Phoenix Zoo last weekend, and while on the tram tour we were told that it is now being estimated that all the frogs in the world will be extinct within 10 years due to climate change. All frogs. Everywhere. What other species are we not hearing about? It isn't just the polar bears anymore.
-Melanie

[lori]

The real key at looking at the importance of biodiversity is it is “nature’s” safeguard against unpredictable variability. Natural systems are chaotic and interconnected, predicting outcomes is perhaps close to impossible, hence our reductionist single problem/single solution scientific and greater social framework often fails when we attempt to understand/control our environment (though it seems for the past few centuries, if not longer, we have continued to try). Diversity ensures that “life” has multiple routes and opportunities to adapt and survive to changing conditions. Also, the interconnectedness of various species/systems lends itself to the idea behind holistic thinking, that there is more value in each individual part when looking at the whole.

We are often unaware of these linkages in our daily lives, so when an important species in as system is removed, the entire system collapses. These “keystone” species are often not the animals that most often come to the forefront of our minds when we think of conservation and endanger species, they are often not the charismatic megafauna that school children draw pictures of and we sell T-shirts, stamps and a whole list of other raise awareness items. Don’t get me wrong, I would hate to live in a world where my future children will only know of polar bears as being a grand and mighty animal that once lived in the wilds of the frozen arctic, but now only exists in zoos.

However, these very general and abstract concepts fail to show a direct link to how/why biodiversity is important to OUR survival and happiness, except of course in the sadness that comes from our knowing our children and grandchildren will not live in a world that is lacking in its biological richness, and species like polar bears are no longer wild. Biodiversity and the exponential extinction crisis do have a much more direct impact on us. From a really broad view it again returns to the idea of a complexity versus simplicity. We see again and again in the effort to control nature, that as we work to simplify a system (i.e. monoculture crop production), we create a system that is fraught with inefficiencies and more prone to breaking down.

A complex system is more resilient, to climate change, disease, whatever. As we continue to alter and simplify our environment we introduce new routes for its eventual collapse, because ultimately, no matter how much we think we control nature, we really do rely on the environment for our survival, even if we fail to see the linkages there.

One concrete example would be honey bees. Bee colonies across the country are collapsing at a phenomenal rate for unknown reasons. We do not know if it is biological (i.e. virus or fungus) or environmental (pesticides, cell phone/radio waves) or a combination of factors (again we like to try to reduce things to a one problem one cause one solution framework), but the implications of this one possible extinction is our ENTIRE agricultural system, our ability to feed ourselves, for all of our technology, still in many fields and orchards across the country rely on this little insect to pollinate their crops.

Unfortunately, often the most important example of how natural systems benefit human society directly seem invisible, because our society has masked the linkages between our world and the “natural world”, failing to show how they are actually one. The concept of “ecosystem services” offers a way for us to commodify and assign a value to the environment that is not solely based on its intrinsic value. Examples of these types of “services” are how a multiplicity of organisms are required to create soils and maintain fertility through complex cycles and interactions.

The idea of diversity is better is mirrored in our theories of economics too, where one often hears that diversification is the better route for long-term stability. THIS is the very argument for why we have a vested interest in protecting/encouraging diversity in biological systems, because it is our best bet for the future. The following (which comes from my coursework in wildlife ecology) offers more concrete reasons for this point of view:
• At least 90% of all our current foodstuffs were domesticated and cross-bred from wild stock found by trial and error.
• Aside from honey bees, many other insects are very important ecologically not only as pollinators of important plants and as bases of the food webs, but as predators of destructive pests and for maintaining soil fertility.
• At least 40% of the drugs and other pharmaceuticals on which our modern medicine relies were developed in some way from the genetic resources of wild plants and animals (often from weeds or things that are poisonous to us) - including the top 20 best selling prescription drugs in the US today (Raven et al p353) e.g. aspirin.
• The fastest growing sectors of modern agriculture and modern medicine are those involving genetic engineering – without a sufficient gene pool (genetic diversity), there will be inadequate raw materials to work from.

[Kent Ragen]

I subscribe to the "self-interest" approach because it's the most compelling to those who would otherwise oppose environmental action. What's becoming more and more clear with each passing day is that the scale of our environmental challenges has yet to be fully understood, and the solutions to the challenges are far too few. In order to overcome the challenges we will need to *discover* new ways, new materials, new processes...to the extent that we make anything extinct we are limiting our ability to discover.
Kent
www.ecounit.com

[emmer]

the rosy periwinkle is, or was, native to madagascar. it turned out to be a very useful chemotherapeutic agent. luckily we found that use for it and learned to synthesize it before it became extinct. many thousands of people are alive because it was used and synthesized.
while i believe that life has a right to live, many do not. if those will respect an environment because it's utility is unknown, then that is a step in the right direction. perhaps it will buy some time to spread the periwinkle story to those who care for themselves before all else.

[Leslie]

All good stuff to think about on your drive home from work. Who needs diversity when you can encase your body in a stinky hunk of metal and and cruise down the interstate dead zone. Humans come up with such great ideas!

[Mike]

Here's a question: if you had to name one characteristic of the mindset/worldview/culture that drove us to this point, what would that characteristic be?

I ask this because my answer is "self-interest" and it seems strange to read about people who expect a different outcome from the same cultural engine.

I understand that self-interest is a powerful motivator, but self interest is different for every single person depending on their values.

Somebody above called me anti-human and I disagree - I think humans have a place on this earth as long as we can follow the rules. It's not our planet, we can't just ruin it without consequence.

[Leslie]

Mike,

Maybe ignorance, in addition to self-interest.

[Lobo]

I think it would be more fruitful to denounce the environmental damage caused by factory farming from where most meat comes from. It is time for environmentalists to take onboard the vegetarian message. Why the resistance? Of all things we can do for the environment, not eating meat is the easiest - surely a lot easier than not transporting yourself to work.
We also must get rid of this 'self-interest' approach. Although compelling, it perpetuates the very philosophy that is ruining the planet - that everything belongs to us. If we stick to it, the 'fight' against climate change will be a futile, self-delusional enterprise.